Allegations of multi-perpetrator and multi-victim sexual abuse emerged to public awareness in the early 1980s contemporaneously with the denials of the accused and their supporters. Multi-perpetrator sexual offenses are typically more sadistic than solo offenses and organized sexual abuse is no exception. Adults and children with histories of organized abuse have described lives marked by torturous and sometimes ritualistic sexual abuse arranged by family members and other caregivers and authority figures. It is widely acknowledged, at least in theory, that sexual abuse can take severe forms, but when disclosures of such abuse occur, they are routinely subject to contestation and challenge. People accused of organized, sadistic or ritualistic abuse have protested that their accusers are liars and fantasists, or else innocents led astray by overly zealous investigators. This was an argument that many journalists and academics have found more convincing than the testimony of alleged victims.

— Michael Salter

As mandatory reporting laws and community awareness drove an increase its child protection investigations throughout the 1980s, some children began to disclose premeditated, sadistic and organized abuse by their parents, relatives and other caregivers such as priests and teachers (Heckler 1988). Adults in psychotherapy described similar experiences. The dichotomies that had previously associated organized abuse with the dangerous, external ‘Other’ had been breached, and the incendiary debate that followed is an illustration of the depth of the collective desire to see them restored. Campbell (1988) noted the paradox that, whilst journalists and politicians often demand that the authorities respond more decisively in response to a ‘crisis’ of sexual abuse, the action that is taken is then subsequently construed as a ‘crisis’. There has been a particularly pronounced tendency of the public reception to allegations of organized abuse. The removal of children from their parents due to disclosures of organized abuse, the provision of mental health care to survivors of organized abuse, police investigations of allegations of organized abuse and the prosecution of alleged perpetrators of organized abuse have all generated their own controversies. These were disagreements that were cloaked in the vocabulary of science and objectivity but nonetheless were played out in sensationalized fashion on prime-time television, glossy news magazines and populist books, drawing textual analysis. The role of therapy and social work in the construction of testimony of abuse and trauma. In particular, has come under sustained postmodern attack. Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organized abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Show alter 1997) and the colonization of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organized abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualization or explanation.

— Michael Salter

Bailey insisted that no cult existed, but the jury found him guilty of 35 offenses including 11 rapes. Three indecent assaults, causing prostitution for personal gain, causing a child to have sex and inciting a child to have sex. The three women, who got Egyptian Eye of Horus tattoos apparently to show their allegiance to their organization, were found guilty of sex-related charges. Young boys and girls were procured by cult members to take part in sex sessions, the trial heard. The group preyed on vulnerable youngsters, impelling them to join with veiled death threats. Bailey was accused of forcing a number of his victims into prostitution. (Morris 2011) There are, after all, no pedophile rings; there is no ritual abuse; recovered memories cannot be trusted; not all victimization claims are legitimate. (Pratt 2009: 70)

— Michael Salter

Blaming therapy, social work and other caring professions for the confabulation of testimony of 'satanic ritual abuse' legitimated a program of political and social action designed to contest the gains made by the women's movement and the child protection movement. In efforts to characterize social workers and therapists as hysterical zealots, 'satanic ritual abuse' was, quite literally, 'made fun of': it became the subject of scorn and ridicule as interest groups sought to discredit testimony of sexual abuse as a whole. The groundswell of support that such efforts gained amongst journalists, academics and the public suggests that the pleasures of disbelief found resonance far beyond the confines of social movements for people accused of sexual abuse. These pleasures were legitimized by a pseudo-scientific vocabulary of 'false memories' and 'moral panic' but as Day (1999:219-20) points out 'the ultimate goal of ideology is to present itself in neutral, value-free terms as the very horizon of objectivity and to dismiss challenges to its order as the "merely ideological"'. The media spotlight has moved on and social movements for people accused of sexual abuse have lost considerable momentum. However, their rhetoric continues to reverberate throughout the echo chamber of online and 'old' media. Intimations of collusion between feminists and Christians in the concoction of 'satanic ritual abuse' continue to mobilize 'progressive' as well as 'conservative' sympathies for men accused of serious sexual offenses and against the needs of victimized women and children. This chapter argues that, underlying the invocation of often contradictory rationalizing tropes (ranging from calls for more scientific 'objectivity' in sexual abuse investigations to emotional descriptions of 'happy families' rent asunder by false allegations) is a collective and largely unarticulated pleasure; the cathartic release of sentiments and views about children and women that had otherwise become shameful in the aftermath of second wave feminism. It seems that, behind the veneer of public concern about child sexual abuse, traditional views about the incredibility of women's and children's testimony persist. 'Satanic ritual abuse has served as a lens through which these views have been rearticulated and reasserted at the very time that evidence of widespread and serious child sexual abuse has been consolidating. p60

— Michael Salter

Chapter 4,‘Organized abuse and the pleasures of disbelief’, uses Size’s (1991) insights into cite political role of enjoyment to analyze the hyperbole and scorn that has characterized the skeptical account of organized and ritualistic abuse. The central argument of this chapter is that organized abuse has come to public attention primarily as a subject of ridicule within the highly partisan writings of journalists, academics and activists aligned with advocacy groups for people accused of sexual abuse. Whilst highlighting the pervasive misrepresentations that characterize these accounts, the chapter also implicates media consumers in the production of ignorance and disdain in relation to organized abuse and women’s and children’s accounts of sexual abuse more generally.

— Michael Salter

During a period in which women and children’s testimony of incest and sexual abuse were gaining an increasingly sympathetic hearing, lobby groups of people accused of child abuse construed and positioned “ritual abuse” as the new frontier of disbelief. The term “ritual abuse” arose from child protection and psychotherapy practice with adults and children disclosing organized abuse, only to be discursively encircled by backlash groups with the rhetoric of “recovered memories”, “false allegations” and “moral panic”. Salter, M. (2011), Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief.

— Michael Salter

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organized abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Show alter 1997) and the colonization of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organized abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualization or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘pedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organized abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organized abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.

— Michael Salter

In 2011 in Swansea, Wales, Colin Bailey was found guilty of 35 charges relating to his role as the leader of a 'satanic cult' that sexually abused children and women, manufactured child abuse images and forced children and women into prostitution (de Belles 2011). His partner and two other women were also convicted on related charges, with one man convicted of paying to abuse a victim of the group. The groups' ritualistic activities were based on the doctrine of Aleister Crowley, an occult figure whose writing includes references to ritual sex with children. Crowley's literature has been widely linked to the practice of ritualistic abuse by survivors and their advocates, who in turn have been accused by occult groups of religious persecution. During Bailey's trial, the prosecution claimed that Crowley's writings formed the basis of Bailey's organization, and he read from a copy of it during sexually abusive incidents. It seems that alternative as well as mainstream religious traditions can be misused by sexually abusive groups. p38

— Michael Salter

In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly confabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘Nazis’ shows the depth of feeling evident amongst many skeptics. However, this raises an important question: Why did academics and journalists feel so strongly about allegations of ritualistic abuse, to the point of pervasively misrepresenting the available evidence and treating women disclosing ritualistic abuse, and those workers who support them, with barely concealed contempt? It is of course true that there are fringe practitioners in the field of organized abuse, just as there are fringe practitioners in many other health-related fields. However, the contrast between the measured tone of the majority of therapists and social workers writing on ritualistic abuse, and the over-blown sensationalism of their critics, could not be starker. Indeed, Scott (2001) notes with irony that the writings of those who claimed that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is a ‘moral panic’ had many of the features of a moral panic: scapegoating therapists, social workers and sexual abuse victims whilst warning of an impending social catastrophe brought on by an epidemic of false allegations of sexual abuse. It is perhaps unsurprising that social movements for people accused of sexual abuse would engage in such hyperbole, but why did this rhetoric find so many champions in academia and the media?

— Michael Salter

Like the psychological model outlined above, the psychiatric understanding of ’organized pedophilia’ is a framework that is focused primarily on individual psychological factors and overlooks the role of violence in criminal groups and the contexts in which such groups emerge. The underlying assumption of literature on ‘organized pedophilia’ is that members of sexually abusive groups are motivated by a pathological sexual interest in children, but this does not accord with evidence that suggests that abusive groups can simultaneously abuse children and women. It is increasingly recognized that sexual offenders may not specialize in one particular victim category, and a significant proportion of child sexual abusers have also offended against adults (Can net al. 2007, Hal et al. 2003). Furthermore, many of the behaviors of abusive groups appear to be designed to elicit fear and pain from the victim rather than to generate sexual pleasure for the perpetrator per se., are not mutually exclusive, but there is a sadistic dimension to organized abuse that is not explicable as ‘pedophilia’. A survivor of organized abuse from Belgium, Regina Lough, made this point clearly when she said: I find the expression ‘pedophile network’ misleading. For me pedophiles are those men who go to playgrounds or swimming pools, priests… I certainly don't want to exonerate them, but I would rather have pedophiles than the types we were involved with. There were men who never touched the children. Whether you were five, ten, or fifteen didn’t matter. What mattered to them was sex, power, experience. To do things they would never have tried with their own wives. Among them were some real sadists. (Lough quoted in Bulge and de Conic 1998) A credible theoretical account of organized abuse must necessarily (a) account for the available empirical evidence of organized abuse, (b) address the complex patterns of abuse and violence evident in sexually abusive groups, and (c) explain the ways in which sexually abusive groups form in a range of contexts, including families and institutions.

— Michael Salter