My view is that the false memory campaign is a spent force. It failed to realize its key goals, failed to renew itself and has largely faded away. Of course, the false memory campaign has left behind the sedimentation of doubt and disbelief that we will have to keep chipping away at. However, it is important to recognize that we are witnessing an increasing, not decreasing, number of investigations and prosecutions for cases of organized and ritual abuse. Adults and children who disclose sexual abuse are more likely to be believed now than they were ten or twenty years ago, and that includes victims who describe organized and ritual abuse. Source: Interview with Lynn Schism

— Michael Salter

Research on organized abuse emphases the diversity of organized abuse cases, and the ways in which serious forms of child maltreatment cluster in the lives of children subject to organized victimization (e.g. Bobby 1996b, ITII 1997, Kelly and Regan 2000). Most attempts to examine organized abuse have been undertaken by therapists and social workers who have focused primarily on the role of psychological processes in the organized victimization of children and adults. Dissociation, amnesia and attachment, in particular, have been identified as important factors that compel victims to obey their abusers whilst inhibiting them from disclosing their abuse or seeking help (see Epstein et al. 2011, Sachs and Dalton 2008). Therapists and social workers have surmised that these psychological effects are purposively induced by perpetrators of organized abuse through the use of sadistic and ritualistic abuse. In this literature, perpetrators are characterized either as dissociated automatons mindlessly perpetuating the abuse that they, too, were subjected to as children, or else as cruel and manipulative criminals with expert foreknowledge of the psychological consequences of their abuses. The therapist is positioned in this discourse at the very heart of the solution to organized abuse, wielding their expertise in a struggle against the coercive strategies of the perpetrators. Whilst it cannot be denied that abusive groups undertake calculated strategies designed to terrorize children into silence and obedience, the emphasis of this literature on psychological factors in explaining organized abuse has overlooked the social contexts of such abuse and the significance of abuse and violence as social practices.

— Michael Salter

Smoke and mirrors’ is a useful metaphor for the ways in which organized abuse has chided conceptualization and understanding. The chapter provides an overview of cite often incendiary debates over organized abuse before going on to suggest that critical theories on gender, crime and intersubjectivity may offer new insights into the phenomenon.

— Michael Salter

Some mental healthcare workers are aware of clients with high needs, such as dissociative disorders and personality disorders, who have histories of sexual abuse (contact offenses), usually from early childhood, involving two or more adults acting together and multiple child victims (Gold et al., 1996; McClellan et al., 1995; Middleton & Butler, 1998). This has been defined as “organized abuse” (Bobby, 1996; La Fontaine, 1993). Excluded from this definition arcades where a child is sexually abused by multiple perpetrators who are unaware of one another, such as survival sex amongst homeless youths, or where abuse is limited to a single household or family and there are no extra-familial victims (La Fontaine, 1

— Michael Salter

Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavor to craft a criminological model of organized abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasize in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. There is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Now et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organized abuse seriously.

— Michael Salter

The data on organized abuse has been simplified or distorted in an attempt force it to conform to mechanical psychological models of dissociative obedience or else to the psychiatric framework of ‘pedophilia’. Psychopathology alone is an inadequate explanation for environments in which sexual abuse has a social and symbolic function for groups of adults. Abusive groups do not emerge in a vacuum but rather they are formed within pre-existing social arrangements such as families, churches and schools.

— Michael Salter

The fact that most perpetrators of organized abuse are men, and that their most intensive and sadistic abuses are visited upon girls and women, has gone largely unnoticed, as have the patterns of gendered inequity that characterize the families and institutional settings in which organized abuse takes place. Organized abuse survivors share a number of challenges in common with other survivors of abuse and trauma, including health and justice systems that have been slow to recognize and respond to violence against children and women. However, this connection is rarely made in the literature on organized abuse, with some authors hinting darkly at the nefarious influence of abusive groups. Fraser (1997: xiv) provides a note of caution here, explaining that whilst it is relatively easy to ‘comment on the naïveté of those grappling with this issue ... it is very difficult to actually face a new and urgent phenomenon and deal with it, but not fully understand it, while managing distressed and confused patients and their families’.

— Michael Salter

The literature on ritualistic abuse suggests that ritualistic sexual practices with young children are a characteristic of particularly abusive groups, and that such practices typically occur alongside a diverse range of other abusive practices, such as child prostitution and the manufacture of child abuse images. One of the shortcomings of the available literature, however, is the general presumption (implicit or explicit) that abusive groups are motivated by a religious or spiritual conviction. In clinical and research literature, abusive groups are generally referred to as 'cults', and 'cult abuse' is a term that has been used interchangeably with 'ritual abuse'." p38

— Michael Salter

There are a range of useful and illuminating analyses of the media construction of organized abuse as it became front-page news in the 1980s and 1990s (Kit zinger 2004, At more 1997, Kelly 1998), but this book is focused on organized abuse as a criminal practice; as well as a discursive object of study, debate and disagreement. These two dimensions of this topic are inextricably linked because precisely where and how organized abuse is reported to take place is an important determinant of how it is understood. Prior to the 1980s, the predominant view of the police, psychiatrists and other authoritative professionals was that organized abuse occurred primarily outside the family where it was committed by extra-familial ‘pedophiles’. This conceptualization; of organized abuse has received enduring community support to the present day, where concerns over children’s safety is often framed in terms of their vulnerability to manipulation by ‘pedophiles’ and ‘sex rings’. This view dovetails more generally with the medico-legal and media construction of the ‘pedophile as an external threat to the sanctity of the family and community (Cow burn and Nominally 2001) but it is confounded by evidence that organized abuse and other forms of serious sexual abuse often originates in the home or in institutions, such as schools and churches, where adults have socially legitimate authority over children.

— Michael Salter

This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organized abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organized abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defenses available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organized abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimization and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organized abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organized abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (e.g. Sachs and Dalton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).

— Michael Salter