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Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Organised Sexual Abuse offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary investiga-

tion of the phenomenon of multi-perpetrator, multi-victim sexual abuse.
Since the early 1980s, social workers and mental health professionals around
the globe have encountered clients reporting sexual abuse by organised groups
or networks. These allegations have been amongst the most controversial in
debates over child sexual abuse, raising many unanswered questions. Are
reports of organised abuse factual or the product of moral panic and false
memories? If these reports are true, what is the appropriate response? The
ﬁelds of child protection and psychotherapy have been polarised over the issue.
And, although cases of organised abuse continue to be uncovered, a reasoned
and evidence-based analysis of the subject is long overdue. Examining the
existing evidence, and supplementing it with further qualitative research, in
this book Michael Salter addresses: the relationship between sexual abuse and
organised abuse; the different varieties of organised abuse cases; the historical
and cultural context to organised abuse; questions over the veracity of testi-
mony; the contexts in which sexually abusive groups develop and operate; the
role of religion and ritual in subcultures of multi-perpetrator sexual abuse; as
well as the experience of adults and children with histories of organised abuse
in the criminal justice system and health system. Organised Sexual Abuse thus
provides a deﬁnitive analysis that will be of immense value to those with
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

professional and academic interests in this area.

Michael Salter is lecturer in Criminology at the University of Western

Sydney. His work is focused on the intersections of gendered violence, health
and culture, and the signiﬁcance of violence in the formation of culture and
identity.

Michael Salter
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Salter, Michael. Organised Sexual Abuse, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Created from uunl on 2022-09-18 18:53:47.
First published 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
A GlassHouse Book
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 Michael Salter
The right of Michael Salter to be identiﬁed as author of this work, has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identiﬁcation and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salter, Michael, 1957–
Organised child sexual abuse / Michael Salter.
p. cm.
“Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada.”
1. Child sexual abuse. 2. Child abuse—Law and legislation.
3. Sexually abused children—Legal status, laws, etc. I. Title.
K5189.S25 2013
362.76—dc23 2012018406

ISBN - 978-0-415-68977-9 (hbk)

ISBN - 978-0-203-08218-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Garamond
by Cenveo Publisher Services
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction 1
Terminology 6

1 A subject of smoke and mirrors: understanding

organised abuse 9
Conﬂicting approaches to organised abuse 12
Criminality and violence as a gendered practice 16
Masculinity and sexual offending 18
Abuse, domination and intersubjectivity 20
Organised abuse as a collective masculine performance 22
Conclusion 24

2 Organised abuse cases: network, institutional,

familial and ritual 26
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

The limitations of data on organised abuse 26

Research into organised abuse 27
Network abuse 29
Institutional organised abuse 31
Familial organised abuse 33
Ritualistic abuse 36
Gender, age and power in organised abuse 39
Conclusion 42

3 The historical context: liberalism, libertinism and

ideologies of masculine sexuality 44
Ideologies of masculine sadism 45
Liberalism, gender and sexual violence 46
From liberalism to libertinism 50
The Marquis de Sade and libertine excess 51
Sadean abuses in contemporary society 54
Conclusion 57

4 Organised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief 59

The rise of the ‘false memory’ movement 60
The construction of ‘satanic ritual abuse’ 62
The pleasures of disbelief 67
The consequences of the pleasures of disbelief 70
Conclusion 72

5 Down the rabbit hole: my story 74

Being a friend 76
Being a carer 79
Being an advocate and academic 85
Conclusion 87

6 The experiences of survivors: extraordinary

crimes in everyday life 88
Renee’s story 89
Power and abuse in the home 92
Abuse in schools, churches and residential care 96
The continuum of abuse and powerlessness 98
Conclusion 102
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

7 Living in two worlds: familial organised abuse 104

Private abuse, public facade: dissociation and the public-private divide 105
Paternal domination 109
Maternal complicity 110
When one parent doesn’t know: the complexities of deceit and denial 114
The colonisation of family relations by organised abuse 116
‘It’s all a bad dream’: parental facilitation of abusive incidents 122
Conclusion 125

8 Sadistic abuse: control, violence and pleasure

in organised abuse 127
Grooming and processes of control 128
Sadism and internal colonisation 132
Conclusion 137

9 Ritual and torture in organised abuse 139

Ritualistic abuse and deviant scripturalism 140
From object to abject: dehumanisation in ritualistic abuse 144
Rationalising ritual abuse: coercing victim consent for their own abuse 148
The use of torture to inscribe and trigger obedience 151
Conclusion 155

10 Sexual murder and reproductive harm: the outer

limits of organised sexual abuse 157
Sexual murder 160
Reproductive harm and infanticide 163
Conclusion 170

Conclusion 171
Appendix: Research methodology 177
Bibliography 181
Index 199
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

This book was written for ‘Sarah’ and for the other brave survivors who came
forward and trusted me with their stories. Thanks are also due to the many
people who have provided valuable feedback on the material presented here,
including: Jan Breckenridge, Juliet Richters, Anne Cossins, Stephen Tomsen,
Sanja Milivejovic, Walter DeKeseredy, Molly Dragiewicz, Fran Gale, Mary
Hawkins and Charles Barbour. The research upon which this book is based
was made possible by an Australian Postgraduate Award and the support of
the School of Public Health and Community Medicine and the School of Law
at the University of New South Wales. I am also appreciative for the support
shown by the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at the University of
Western Sydney. Most of all I would like to thank Paul Brace whose support
has meant so much throughout the research and writing process.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Batley insisted that no cult existed but the jury found him guilty of 35
offences 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 the organisation, 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. Batley was accused of
forcing a number of his victims into prostitution.
(Morris 2011)

There are, after all, no paedophile rings; there is no ritual abuse; recovered
memories cannot be trusted; not all victimization claims are legitimate.
(Pratt 2009: 70)

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 offences are typi-
cally more sadistic than solo offences and organised sexual abuse is no excep-
tion. Adults and children with histories of organised abuse have described
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

lives marked by torturous and sometimes ritualistic sexual abuse arranged by

family members and other care-givers 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 contesta-
tion and challenge. People accused of organised, 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 jour-
nalists and academics have found more convincing than the testimony of
alleged victims. Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child
sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and
women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false

allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection
investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual
abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral
panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit
the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are cir-
culated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, character-
ising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists.
However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persist-
ently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led
to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in
a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions
for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers
and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of
fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded
over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory
procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting
attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the
contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable
ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a
discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.
This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised
abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic
kernel at the heart of allegations of organised 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 defences available
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse high-

lights 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, minimisation and
scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse.
Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in
organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008,
Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012). It is clear that cases of organised abuse con-
tinue to surface in a range of contexts, such as mental health services and child

protection agencies. However, the representations put forth of organised abuse

continue to be marked by the traces of disavowal, even amongst those who
take allegations of organised abuse seriously. Herman (1992) has observed the
‘dual imperative’ that shapes the disclosures of sexual abuse survivors, whose
desire to disclose and seek help can be thwarted by the impulse to remain
silent and thus maintain the comforting fiction that their abuse did not take
place. This dual imperative can result in a destabilised and fragmented narra-
tive that is, through its incoherent or ‘hysterical’ presentation, effectively self-
invalidating. A similar dynamic can be detected within some overwrought
representations of organised abuse that effectively communicate the distress of
victims and their supporters (and the management of vicarious trauma is a
serious challenge for professionals in this area) but in a manner that infects
their claims with an irrational edge that provokes scepticism and disbelief.
Internal to such claims is the tension between the acceptance that organised
abuse has occurred and the struggle to explain how or why.
This book aims to address these tensions by providing a critical overview
of debates over organised abuse before going on to examine the lives of 21
adults who described organised abuse in childhood. It draws on a range of
perspectives from sociology, criminology and psychoanalysis in order to situ-
ate organised abuse within the study of gendered violence more broadly, and
to explore the ways in which organised abuse intensifies but also transgresses
against normative modes of masculine power. The book will consider a range
of theorists who have argued that the social construction of gender is replete
with fantasies of masculine control and transcendence that can be embodied
through eroticised violence. In such acts, the perpetrator claims his position
as masculine ‘subject’ by forcing the victim to occupy the position of the sub-
ordinate ‘other’ or ‘object’, whether the victim is a woman, child or another
man. The book’s title ‘Organised sexual abuse’ refers to the sexual abuse of
adults as well as children since, for some victims, organised abuse does not end
in childhood and may persist into adulthood. The secretive nature of these
practices is maintained not only by the collusion of perpetrators but also by
the socially legitimised power that perpetrators of organised abuse enjoy over
their victims as parents, teachers and other authority figures. Whilst organ-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

ised abuse refers to a relatively uncommon and extreme form of child abuse, it
nonetheless raises larger questions about gender, age and power.
The majority of the available literature on organised abuse is concerned
with the psychotherapeutic treatment of survivors but the focus of this book
is not on the survivor as client but rather on the survivor as witness. The book
draws on the life histories and experiences of survivors to develop a crimino-
logical model of organised abuse. This model may enrich the understanding
of the clinician or therapist and thus provide useful background information
for treatment, and it may also serve as a validating resource for survivors who
feel ready to examine their background from a sociological or criminological
perspective. However, it should be recognised that this book does not provide

guidelines for treatment or recovery from organised abuse. Furthermore, the

material presented here is often disturbing and all readers should be mindful
of the potential for vicarious traumatisation. Readers who have survived sexual
abuse and organised abuse are respectfully requested to remain vigilant regard-
ing their emotional wellbeing.
Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a
criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors.
One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may
lie or fantasise 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, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may strug-
gle 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 organised abuse seriously.
The book begins with an examination of the challenges involved in devel-
oping a coherent explanatory framework for organised abuse. The chapter ‘A
subject of smoke and mirrors: Understanding organised abuse’ takes its title
from a description of ritualistic and sadistic abuse proffered by Professor
Roland Summit (Summit 1994: 5), a pioneer in this field. ‘Smoke and mir-
rors’ is a useful metaphor for the ways in which organised abuse has eluded
conceptualisation and understanding. The chapter provides an overview of the
often incendiary debates over organised abuse before going on to suggest that
critical theories of gender, crime and intersubjectivity may offer new insights
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

into the phenomenon.

The second chapter draws together the available literature on organised
abuse and develops a simple typology of cases based on the context in which
they arise: network (or extra-familial), familial and institutional. Ritual abuse
is discussed as an abusive behaviour that demarcates a particularly challeng-
ing form of organised abuse. By synthesising clinical and case review data
with case studies and survivor accounts this chapter suggests that organised
abuse can sensibly be understood in terms of the intersections of gender, age
and power in a range of contexts.
The themes of gender, age and power is examined further in Chapter 3
from an historical perspective. This chapter argues that the construction of

masculine sexuality by the 18th-century libertines as a ‘natural’ and predatory

instinct has important parallels in modern society, including organised abuse.
The work of the Marquis de Sade is used to illustrate the ways in which organ-
ised, sadistic and even ritualistic abuse can be understood as symbolic enact-
ments of a pervasive ideology of masculine sexual aggression.
Chapter 4, ‘Organised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief’, uses Žižek’s
(1991) insights into the political role of enjoyment to analyse the hyperbole
and scorn that has characterised the sceptical account of organised and ritual-
istic abuse. The central argument of this chapter is that organised 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 characterise these accounts, the chapter also impli-
cates media consumers in the production of ignorance and disdain in relation
to organised abuse and women’s and children’s accounts of sexual abuse more
generally.
The ﬁfth chapter is autobiographical and describes the circumstances that led
to the research upon which this book is based. It is called ‘Down the rabbit hole:
my story’ because it describes my inadvertent ‘tumble’ into the world of organ-
ised abuse through my friendship with a young woman, ‘Sarah’. This chapter
provides an account of this friendship and how it endured through a period of
intense stress, as the men who had subjected Sarah to organised abuse in child-
hood attempted to draw her back into the cycle of abuse and violence as an
adult. This account is provided with the intention of highlighting the diversity
of experiences with organised abuse and the ways in which men’s experiences as
witnesses to gendered violence can serve as the basis for resistance to it.
The following ﬁve chapters report on the results of life history research
with adults with histories of organised abuse. Chapter 6 provides an overview
of the common themes that characterised survivors’ experiences of abuse,
neglect and invalidation in childhood, and in particular how their accounts of
life at home and school foreground the powerlessness of children. The seventh
chapter is based on the accounts of participants whose organised abuse was
arranged by their parents and other family members. It describes the ‘two
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

worlds’ of severe sexual abuse at home and the charade of normalcy at school
and in the community.
Chapter 8 focuses on the ways in which sexually abusive groups are charac-
terised by processes of control, exchange and sadism. These themes are illus-
trated by the accounts of participants who were subject to network or
institutional abuse; that is, organised abuse outside the family. The chapter
combines sociological and psychoanalytic theory to describe the ways in which
children are objectiﬁed, and their inner life denied, as they become entrapped
within the dynamics of power and control that structure sexually abusive
groups. This process is explored in more detail in Chapter 9, ‘Ritual and tor-
ture in organised abuse’, which argues that ritualistic abuse and torture are

practices through which perpetrators of organised abuse attempt to intensify

relations of domination and subordination.
The ﬁnal chapter examines the controversial reports of murder and atrocity
that have surfaced in accounts of organised abuse. Rather than dismiss them
out of hand, this chapter suggests that these accounts can be considered cred-
ible in light of the sadistic, narcissistic fantasies that are manifest within sex-
ually abusive groups. The book concludes by considering the challenges that
organised abuse continues to pose to contemporary policy and practice in rela-
tion to sexual abuse and understandings of gendered violence.

Terminology
At present, there is no commonly accepted definition or description of com-
plex cases of sexual abuse involving multiple abusers and multiple children.
Generic terms such as ‘sex ring’, ‘paedophile ring’ or ‘sexual exploitation’ are
unclear, since they tend to imply the abuse of children by predatory strangers
when the relations between victims and abusers are often more complex than
this. Cases are often categorised according to the forms of sexual abuse engaged
in by perpetrators (eg a ‘ritual abuse’ case or a ‘child pornography’ case) but
abusive groups tend to engage in multiple forms of abuse (eg both ritual
abuse and the manufacture of child abuse images). Hence these distinctions
are somewhat artificial and are often drawn according to the interests and
priorities of the investigator/researcher rather than on the characteristics of
the case. The simultaneous abuse of children and women, and the abuse of
children into adulthood, adds an additional layer of complexity to the study
of multi-perpetrator sexual offences by challenging taken-for-granted distinc-
tions between rape and child sexual abuse.
This book employs the terms ‘organised sexual abuse’ and ‘organised abuse’
as relatively simple and inclusive descriptors for any occurrence of sexual
abuse in which multiple victims have been exploited by multiple perpetrators
acting in concert, in which some of the victims are children. This definition
of organised abuse is drawn from La Fontaine (1993) and is consonant with
the use of the term by other researchers (Bibby 1996a, Gallagher et al. 1996),
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

however it acknowledges the co-abuse of children and women by some abu-

sive groups. In this book, where a case of sexual abuse involves multiple vic-
tims (children or children and adults), multiple perpetrators, multiple
incidents of abuse and evidence of premeditation and coordination between
perpetrators, then it is categorised as a case of ‘organised abuse’. The exclusion
of any case of sexual abuse or exploitation from this deﬁnition of organised
abuse is not a statement about the seriousness of the harm inﬂicted on the
victim/s’ or the gravity of the crimes committed by the abusers. This project
is not based on a hierarchy of victimisation with ‘organised abuse’ at the top,
but rather on a ‘connective model’ (Kelly 1998) that explores the commonali-
ties that emerge from diverse experiences of organised abuse.

The book refers regularly to ‘victims’, ‘survivors’ and ‘perpetrators’. These

are contested terms in the literature and are often associated with simple
dichotomies and absolutes, eg good victim/bad perpetrator, broken victim/
recovered survivor. As the book will discuss, the lines of demarcation here are
not fixed, since a ‘survivor’ may still be periodically ‘victimised’ by abusive
groups despite their efforts to prevent such victimisation, ‘victimisation’ may
include forced perpetration, and a ‘perpetrator’ may have an extensive history
of ‘victimisation’. Whilst acknowledging their ambiguities, the terms are
used in this book as a kind of shorthand to situate social actors in terms of
prior or ongoing victimisation and/or perpetration in organised abuse. ‘Victim’
refers to children or adults currently being victimised (which may include
forced perpetration, which is understood as an important dimension of vic-
timisation) and ‘survivor’ refers to children or adults who are no longer being
victimised, or who are taking decisive steps to bring ongoing victimisation to
an end. In general, the term ‘perpetrator’ is used to refer specifically to adults
who are active in the planning and commission of sexual abuse and organised
abuse. It should be acknowledged that, from the perspective of a survivor, an
adult may be meaningfully and accurately described as a ‘perpetrator’ although
an observer might be more circumspect in light of the ‘perpetrator’s’ life his-
tory and circumstances. It is a testament to the empathy and compassion
displayed by the survivors interviewed for this book that they often reflected
on these ambiguities themselves, even when describing people in their past
who had subjected them to extensive harm and violence.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

A subject of smoke and

mirrors
Understanding organised abuse

The ﬁgure of the child at risk is a potent one in Western culture, and the
sexual abuse and exploitation of children has long been a focal point of social
anxiety. Child sexual exploitation is often invoked in public discourse to
advance a range of agendas, only some of which are related to the wellbeing
and security of victimised and vulnerable children. Reports of child prostitu-
tion and exploitation in the ‘third world’ have become an important part of
the rationalisation of Western border control and national security policies
(O’Connell Davidson 2005). In the United States, accusations of mass child
molestation have been a feature of homophobic slander since the Cold War, in
which nationalist propaganda conﬂated socialism, child sex crimes and homo-
sexuality as a combined threat to social order (eg Fejes 2000). In Australia,
allegations of ‘paedophile rings’ have been used to justify a range of punitive
interventions into Indigenous families and communities (Brown and Brown
2007). In Britain, reports of Muslim ‘sex rings’ that prey on white teenage
girls have stirred up a predictable response from racist and right-wing groups
(Taylor 2012). What emerges clearly from these heated discussions is the way
in which organised abuse can be invoked for maximum political gain and
impact.
The rhetorical power of organised abuse comes from its unthinkable hei-
nousness. When it is referred to in Western media and commentary, it is
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

pervasively attributed to the ‘Other’ in the psychoanalytic sense: that which

is considered radically different and outside the ‘self’. Hence organised abuse
is frequently associated by Westerners with ethnic communities and deve-
loping countries, with the implication that they are more dangerous and less
civilised, or it is alleged to be committed by groups considered perverted and
pathological, whether paedophiles, homosexuals or some conﬂation of the
two. The invocation of organised abuse is a blunt but often effective way of
polarising debate in order to raise suspicions about a particular social group
or else to recast complex debates in black-and-white terms. State authorities
and social movements have played a sometimes conﬂicting but combined role
in shaping this debate. Sociologists and historians have made useful contribu-
tions by pointing to the political and cultural dynamics that shape overblown

discourses about child endangerment and protection (Kincaid 1998, Jenkins

1998). However, they have sometimes reduced the subject of organised abuse
to the moral panics that surround it, without considering the possibility that
representations of organised abuse, however sensationalised, may have their
origins in lived experience.
There are a range of useful and illuminating analyses of the media con-
struction of organised abuse as it became front-page news in the 1980s and
1990s (Kitzinger 2004, Atmore 1997, Kelly 1998), but this book is focused
on organised abuse as a criminal practice as well as a discursive object of study,
debate and disagreement. These two dimensions of the topic are inextricably
linked because precisely where and how organised 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 organised abuse occurred primarily outside the family
where it was committed by extra-familial ‘paedophiles’. This conceptualisa-
tion of organised 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 ‘paedophiles’ and ‘sex rings’. This view
dovetails more generally with the medico-legal and media construction of the
‘paedophile’ as an external threat to the sanctity of the family and community
(Cowburn and Dominelli 2001) but it is confounded by evidence that organ-
ised 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.
As mandatory reporting laws and community awareness drove an increase
in child protection investigations throughout the 1980s, some children began
to disclose premeditated, sadistic and organised abuse by their parents, rela-
tives and other caregivers such as priests and teachers (Hechler 1988). Adults
in psychotherapy described similar experiences. The dichotomies that had
previously associated organised 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
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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’. This has
been a particularly pronounced tendency of the public reception to allegations
of organised abuse. The removal of children from their parents due to disclo-
sures of organised abuse, the provision of mental health care to survivors of
organised abuse, police investigations of allegations of organised abuse and
the prosecution of alleged perpetrators of organised 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 sensationalised fashion
on primetime television, glossy news magazines and populist books, drawing

on ‘common sense’ notions about what constitutes a credible allegation of

sexual abuse and what does not. Whilst these controversies have mostly faded
away, the uncertainties and anxieties that they raised about the existence
of sexually abusive groups and the reliability of victim testimony remains.
This has had serious consequences for the children and adults who are describ-
ing histories of organised abuse and require support from health and welfare
services and access to the legal system. They constitute a group of sexual abuse
victims and survivors whose experiences are, literally, unspeakable. Their
histories, memories and testimony have been placed beyond belief and, for
many, beyond hope. As Campbell (1988: 71) observed:

Detection is always contingent. It depends on a co-operation and a

consensus about what matters, what is wrong, what hurts, what is visible
and what is knowable. Detection is above all about what is evident and
what is evidence. But all this is dependent on political consciousness.
Seeing is believing, we’re told, and yet evidence, like beauty, is in the
eye of the beholder. If you don’t believe it is possible for children to be
sexually abused en masse by the men in their lives, then you don’t see the
signs, even when they are staring you in the face.

Mollon (2008: 108) suggests that some forms of child sexual abuse are
outside of the ‘dominant symbolic structure’ that determines ‘what we nor-
mally believe to be true, possible and within the nature of reality’. Such abuse
cannot by represented or acknowledged without threatening the integrity of
prevailing systems of meaning, and the furore over organised abuse suggests
that it represents just such a disruption. In allegations of organised abuse,
customary images of parents, homes, schools and childhood are dissociated
from their idyllic connotations and placed in relation to taboo acts and
substances. Narratives of organised abuse are replete with the most perturb-
ing of symbolic inversions and transgressions and as such have been treated
as a contaminant or ‘matter out of place’, as Douglas (1966) deﬁnes impurity.
The repeated attempt to discredit disclosures of organised abuse by claim-
ing they are caused by watching horror ﬁlms (La Fontaine 1998), or compa-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

rable in credibility to accounts of alien abduction (Bader 2003) and past

life memories (Spanos et al. 1994), can be understood as a strategy of defence
and trivialisation that wards off the threat that organised abuse poses to the
symbolic order. Fairy tales, movies, books, talk shows and newspaper articles
have all been blamed for inciting confabulated recollections amongst the
suggestible.
The possibility that the representations that children and women have
made of organised abuse may be grounded in lived experience has simply
been unimaginable for some commentators. This has been compounded by
the ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities and cultural studies, where narratives
of organised abuse have proved a popular subject for deconstruction and

textual analysis. The role of therapy and social work in the construction of
testimony of abuse and trauma, in particular, has come under sustained post-
modern 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 organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and
women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter
1997) and the colonisation 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 organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke
and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently deﬁed conceptu-
alisation or explanation. The aim of this chapter is to review the ways in
which organised abuse has been conceptualised by those researchers and clini-
cians concerned about it (the views of those authors who do not take organised
abuse seriously will be considered in Chapter 4), and to introduce the socio-
logically-informed account of sexual abuse and organised abuse that is the
foundation of this book. In doing so, a secondary aim of this chapter is to
reveal the challenge that organised abuse poses to common understandings
of child sexual abuse. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offend-
ing have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ 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 organised
abuse takes place. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised
abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological
explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emer-
gence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi-perpetrator sexual abuse in
a range of contexts around the world. This chapter proposes an alternative
approach that integrates sociological, criminological and psychoanalytic
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theory.

C onflicting approaches t o organised abuse

Over the last 30 years, survivors of organised abuse and the range of
professionals who support them have been working in coalition to bring
to light the seriousness of organised forms of child sexual abuse. Emerging
from this partnership has been a body of literature on organised abuse that
includes autobiographies, case descriptions, clinic-based research studies
and treatment recommendations. A signiﬁcant proportion of this literature
has been concerned with ritual abuse, a form of organised abuse in which

perpetrators engage in sexual abuse in a ritualistic or ceremonial way

(McFadyen et al. 1993). Sceptical claims that allegations of organised abuse
are the product of therapeutic and social work malpractice is contested by the
range of professionals reporting contact with victims and survivors, including
domestic violence and rape crisis workers (Scott 1998, Cooper 2004), general
practitioners (Jonker and Jonker-Bakker 1991), paediatricians (Buck 2008),
police ofﬁcers (Healey 2008) and school teachers (Hayden 1991). One of the
key challenges that has faced workers is how to make sense out of lives in
which multiple forms, contexts and perpetrators of abuse cluster and intersect
in bewildering ways. Such extreme forms of child abuse have deleterious
mental health consequences, and the coherence of eyewitness testimony of
organised abuse appears to decline according to the seriousness of the violence
disclosed by the victim. Politicising such narratives has necessarily required
considerable intervention and interlocution by workers, in the form of high-
lighting particular commonalities and advancing particular explanations
(Clapton 1993).
Ritual abuse has proven particularly challenging for workers to under-
stand and explain. The task of developing a reasonable explanatory framework
for these disclosures has been complicated by the enthusiastic promulgation
of conspiratorial and religious theories by evangelical churches and workers
on one hand, and the bellicose scepticism of advocacy groups, journalists
and academics on the other. The role of religious and occult ideologies in
sexually abusive groups will be examined in more detail in Chapter 9, how-
ever it is useful to note here the shortcomings of drawing a ﬁrm distinction
between ‘organised abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Qualitative and quantitative
research with adults and children reporting ritual abuse has found that it
occurs alongside other forms of organised abuse, particularly the manufacture
of child abuse images (Scott 2001, Snow and Sorenson 1990, Waterman et al.
1993), and hence subsuming such non-ritualistic experiences under the
moniker ‘ritual abuse’ is misleading at best and incendiary at worst. Moreover,
it is unclear why an abusive group that invokes a religious or metaphysical
mandate to abuse children should be considered as largely distinct from an
abusive group that invokes a non-religious rationale to do so. The presump-
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tion evident amongst some authors writing on ritual abuse that a professed
spiritual motivation for abusing children necessarily reﬂects the offenders
actual motivation seems naïve at best, and at worst it risks colluding with the
ways in which abusive groups obfuscate responsibility for their actions.
Research on organised abuse emphasises the diversity of organised abuse
cases, and the ways in which serious forms of child maltreatment cluster in
the lives of children subject to organised victimisation (eg Bibby 1996b,
Itzin 1997, Kelly and Regan 2000). Most attempts to examine organised
abuse have been undertaken by therapists and social workers who have focused
primarily on the role of psychological processes in the organised victimisation
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 Galton 2008). Therapists and social work-
ers have surmised that these psychological effects are purposively induced by
perpetrators of organised abuse through the use of sadistic and ritualistic
abuse. In this literature, perpetrators are characterised 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 fore-
knowledge of the psychological consequences of their abuses. The therapist is
positioned in this discourse at the very heart of the solution to organised
abuse, wielding their expertise in a struggle against the coercive strategies
of the perpetrators.
Whilst it cannot be denied that abusive groups undertake calculated strat-
egies designed to terrorise children into silence and obedience, the emphasis
of this literature on psychological factors in explaining organised abuse has
overlooked the social contexts of such abuse and the significance of abuse and
violence as social practices. The fact that most perpetrators of organised 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 characterise the families and institutional settings in which
organised abuse takes place. Organised 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 recognise and respond to
violence against children and women. However, this connection is rarely made
in the literature on organised 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’.
Nonetheless, it remains the case that the psychological literature on organised
abuse has not provided a coherent explanation for the emergence of sexually
abusive groups in a range of contexts, or for the difficulties that victims expe-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

rience in disclosing their abuse and accessing care and support. The psycho-
logical model of organised abuse emphasises individual rather than social
factors and so it tends to characterise organised abuse as a drama of psycho-
logical energies.
Similar deﬁciencies can be found in attempts to theorise organised abuse
that draw from psychiatric understandings of ‘paedophilia’ (eg Wyre 1996).
This is a perspective that has proved particularly inﬂuential in public inquir-
ies into allegations of organised abuse (for examples from Australia, see
NCA Joint Committee Report 1995, Wood Report 1997, for examples from
Britain, see Corby et al. 2001). These public inquiries have integrated the
psychiatric notion of ‘paedophilia’ with existing stereotypes of organised

crime to generate a model of ‘organised paedophilia’ or the ‘paedophile ring’,

in which otherwise solitary sexual offenders with deviant sexual interests
conspire to sexually abuse children for pleasure and/or proﬁt. This psychiat-
ric model may accurately describe some abusive men and groups but it has
proven problematic as a catch-all explanation for organised abuse. Attempts
to establish the existence of ‘paedophile rings’ often founders on semantic
debates over whether alleged perpetrators meet the diagnostic criteria of a
‘paedophile’, sometimes leading to the confused and misleading conclusion
that no ‘paedophile ring’ existed even where there is strong evidence that
multiple perpetrators have colluded in the sexual abuse of multiple children.
Like the psychological model outlined above, the psychiatric understanding
of ‘organised paedophilia’ is a framework that is focused primarily on indi-
vidual 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 ‘organised paedophilia’ 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
recognised that sexual offenders may not specialise in one particular victim
category, and a signiﬁcant proportion of child sexual abusers have also offended
against adults (Cann et al. 2007, Heil et al. 2003). Furthermore, many of the
behaviours 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. The
two, of course, are not mutually exclusive, but there is a sadistic dimension to
organised abuse that is not explicable as ‘paedophilic’. A survivor of organised
abuse from Belgium, Regina Louf, made this point clearly when she said:

I ﬁnd the expression ‘paedophile network’ misleading. For me paedo-

philes are those men who go to playgrounds or swimming pools, priests
… I certainly don’t want to exonerate them, but I would rather have paedo-
philes 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
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would never have tried with their own wives. Among them were some
real sadists.
(Louf quoted in Bulte and de Conick 1998)

A credible theoretical account of organised abuse must necessarily (a)

account for the available empirical evidence of organised 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. The data on organised abuse
has been simpliﬁed or distorted in an attempt to force it to conform to
mechanical psychological models of dissociative obedience or else to the

psychiatric framework of ‘paedophilia’. Psychopathology alone is an inade-

quate 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. The following section will introduce
existing theories that link men’s violent or criminal behaviours to structures
of gender and power, and consider how these theories can provide a way
of identifying the underlying factors and social processes that prompt the
development of sexually abusive groups.

Criminality and violence as a gendered practice

A number of theorists have drawn attention to the pervasive ways in which
the masculinity of sex offenders has been elided in medical and psychiatric
literature. They have suggested that sex offending is, for some men and boys,
a way of constituting and embodying a masculine sense of self (Glaser and
Frosh 1993, Messerschmidt 1999, Cossins 2000). This work has been part of
a broader shift in sociological and criminological thought away from essen-
tialist explanations for crime towards a symbolic interactionist view of gender
as a situated accomplishment (West and Zimmerman 1987) and performance
(Butler 1990) achieved through social interaction. Gendered behaviour is
not innate to men and women but rather ‘[w]hen persons “do gender”, they
engage in on-going interactional processes in which they invoke, construct
and enact dichotomous images of two genders’ (Gilgun and McLeod 1999:
170–1). An understanding of sexual violence as gendered performance is
grounded in the work of feminist theorists from the 1960s and 1970s who
argued that rape, incest and domestic violence are not symptoms of psycho-
pathology but rather strategies used by some men to feel powerful and in
control, and thus to feel ‘like a man’ (eg Summers 1975, Millett 1971,
Brownmiller 1975). Feminist-informed research with rapists and wife batter-
ers has documented the ways in which perpetrators’ justiﬁcations for rape and
violence overlapped with social idealisations of physical and sexual aggression
as the natural and proper expression of authentic masculinity (Dobash and
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Dobash 1979, Scully 1988).

Disputing the medico-legal construction of sexual violence as a rare
pathological aberration, feminist theorists have situated rape and abuse within
the context of a society that has institutionalised male privilege and female
subordination. Some radical feminists went further and characterised male
violence as a purposive strategy undertaken by men in the perpetuation of
this social order. Whilst the identiﬁcation of the role of violence in the
patterning of gender relations is an important insight, Connell (1987: 215)
suggests that it is ‘too easy’ and too simplistic to explain a collective project
of oppression as a conspiracy. In an earlier article, Carrigan, Connell and
Lee (1985) argued that the link established by radical feminists between

men’s practices of violence and the social structures of masculine domina-

tion presumed an improbable degree of intentionality and awareness on
the part of individual men, who were characterised as ‘agents of patriarchy’.
‘The overall relation between men and women’, they stated, ‘is not a con-
frontation between homogenous, undifferentiated blocs’ (Carrigan, Connell
and Lee 1985: 590). In this way, they contested the essentialism that has
often undermined radical feminist theorising whilst keeping intact the
focus of radical feminism upon practices of gendered subordination and
control.
Carrigan, Connell and Lee (1985) proposed that male domination repre-
sents a historically contingent, but enduring, patterning of gender relations.
Whilst this patterning is institutionalised through the collective practices
of the state, the workplace, schools and the family, it is embodied by men in
their everyday lives, and experienced as a constitutive force in their interper-
sonal and sexual relations. This model was subsequently expanded by Connell
(1995) and others into a body of work called critical masculinity theory or
‘critical studies of men’ (Kimmel et al. 2005). This literature rejects the argu-
ment that there is one particular ‘sex role’ for men in society and instead
examines the multiple constructions of masculinity that form within institu-
tions, communities and cultures. Some forms of masculinity are considered
more socially honourable than others, and Connell (1995) labelled the
construction of masculinity that achieves cultural dominance as ‘hegemonic
masculinity’. This construction has the function of legitimising masculine
domination by associating socially valued characteristics with men and boys,
whilst less valued or despised characteristics are associated with femininity
or with the masculinities of subordinate groups such as gay men or ethnic
minorities. The ways in which the privileging of hegemonic masculinity is
institutionalised and perpetuated at a social level is called the ‘gender order’,
shaped by the divisions and distributions of labour, authority and sexual desire
(Connell 1987).
In most Western societies, the hegemonic mode of masculinity empha-
sises aggression, dominance and sexual performance as key domains within
which boys and men are expected to establish their masculine identities
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(Donaldson 1993). This mode delivers considerable benefits to men and boys
by assigning them a superior cultural status in comparison to girls and women,
which in turn is reflected by the superior financial and social capital accrued
by men. Nonetheless, the price of male privilege is a considerable burden of
anxiety and vulnerability since few, if any, boys or men meet the standards
of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995). In response some may reject
hegemonic masculinity outright and identify with alternative understandings
of masculinity, whilst others seek to reinterpret hegemonic masculine ideals
in a manner more suited to their circumstances. The ways in which working
class or marginalised boys and men engage in hyper-masculine displays of
transgression and thrill-seeking, for example, has been identified as a form

of ‘protest masculinity’ that reworks hegemonic masculine principles in the

context of socioeconomic disadvantage (Connell 1995). However there is
considerable ambiguity in relations between ‘hegemonic’ and ‘protest’ mascu-
linities, since the violence and criminality associated with the anti-hero
is celebrated in ‘hegemonic’ as well as ‘protest’ masculinity as an authentic
expression of masculinity (Tomsen 2008). Hence criminality occupies
an ambivalent and contradictory position in contemporary constructions of
masculinity, maintaining a surreptitious attraction and fascination for many
men and boys.

Masculinity and sexual offending

Messerschmidt (1993) has called attention to the gendered nature of crime,
and proposed that the disproportionate participation of men in a range
of violent and criminal practices can be explained in terms of men’s efforts
to embody and reproduce hegemonic ideals of masculinity. He argues that
criminal activity, as a form of ‘doing gender’, is a situated performance shaped
by the access of men and boys to social and financial resources (Messerschmidt
1993: 93). Transgression and risk-taking maintains an appeal for a range
of young men as a way of accruing masculine prestige amongst their
peers, but Messerschmidt notes that white and middle-class teenagers, whilst
engaging in ‘pranks’ and minor displays of rebellion, avoid committing
offences that would disrupt their pathways towards a respectable professional
position (Messerschmidt 1993). In contrast, working-class youth, for instance,
and marginalised black youth, are more likely to resort to major acts of vio-
lence and theft as a way of asserting masculinity in contexts of structural
powerlessness.
Whilst much of his work maintains a strong focus on the role of socioeco-
nomic disadvantage and racial subordination in the genesis of male offend-
ing, Messerschmidt (1993) develops a more psychodynamic explanation for
sexual offending. He suggests that sexual violence is a strategy through
which men humiliate and devalue women, ‘thereby strengthening the fiction
of masculine power’ (p 114), whilst also affirming the social construction of
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a man’s ‘essential nature’ through the ‘violent control of women’ (p 152).

In subsequent research with juvenile offenders, Messerschmidt (1999, 2000)
emphasises boys’ experiences of powerlessness and inadequacy within the
gender patterning of hegemonic masculinities, and he analyses sexual assault
as a resource that some boys draw on to overcome their subjective sense
of disempowerment. In one case study, Messerschmidt (2000: 293) identiﬁes
how the boys’ experience of risk, pleasure and dominance in the commission
of sexually abusive acts formed the basis of what he describes as a compensa-
tory ‘supermasculine’ identity. The participant Sam stated: ‘Like, well, I’m
a guy. I’m supposed to have sex. I’m supposed to be like every other guy.
And so I’m like them, but I’m even better than them [the popular boys]

because I can manipulate. They don’t get the power and the excitement [that
comes with sexual abuse]’ (Messerschmidt 2000: 292).
This work provides intriguing insights into the role of anxiety, identi-
fication and self-construction in the practice of sexual abuse, although
Messerschmidt does not elucidate further on the link between masculinity,
abuse and subjectivity. Jefferson (2002) suggests that the theoretical appara-
tus of critical masculinity theory has generally underplayed the ‘inner dimen-
sion’ in men’s maintenance and reproduction of power relations. However, this
‘inner dimension’ would appear to be a crucial factor in men’s engagement
in sexual abuse, which is inflected with fantasies of domination and control.
Liddle (1993: 103) points to the perpetual instability of men’s attempts
to perform, obtain and incorporate the impossible ideals of masculinity.
This results in numerous anxieties over dependency, adequacy, power, success
and competency, all of which are culturally associated with sexual conquest
and release. If a compulsory, aggressive heterosexuality is the ‘first propensity’
of male sexuality incited by the contemporary gender order, then Liddle
(1993) suggests that child sexual abuse is the ‘second propensity’. In his
view, it is the ‘disturbing rendezvous’ of desire, vulnerability and powerless-
ness in child sexual abuse that marks it as the practice through which some
men, in particular circumstances, attempt to resolve emotional conflicts over
dependency through the satisfaction of desire.
Cossins (2000: 124) also emphasises the ways in which child sexual abuse
accords with hegemonic ideals of masculinity, since ‘the accomplishment
of masculinity and experiences of potency are more likely to occur with those
who are perceived to have less social power than the individual man in ques-
tion’. Her ‘power/powerlessness’ theory contextualises sexual abuse in terms
of the vulnerabilities and powerlessness that men can experience within a
social order characterized by male competition and aggression. She suggests
that ‘different masculinities contain normative sexual elements that some
men reproduce and affirm through child sex offending in cultural environ-
ments where the lives of men are characterised by varying degrees of power
and powerlessness’ (2000: 147). In formal and informal hierarchies in which
males are subject to the control of those superior in status to them, and
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the ‘jostling’ and bullying of other males who seek to accrue status by subor-
dinating others, sexual abuse is a practice through which men and boys
can dominate another without risking retaliation or humiliation. The desire
for control over a vulnerable ‘other’ may be explicitly recognised by offenders,
however Keenan (2012: 238) notes that experiences of disempowerment
may lead some men to sympathise with minors as ‘friends’ or ‘equals’, leading
to a disingenuous ‘blindness to power in the sexual and emotional sphere’.
The degree to which sexual abusers acknowledge their power over children
may vary but it seems that the attractions of child sexual abuse are linked
to the sexual anxieties that some men experience in their efforts to
defend and afﬁx masculine selfhood. Cossins (2000) suggests that a minority

of men eroticise the power imbalance inherent in adult-child relations,

since these relations serve as a relatively unthreatening space for the accrual
of experiences of (illicit, secretive) masculine pleasure, control and self-
validation.

Abuse , domination and intersubjectivity

For Cossins (2000), the appeal of child sexual abuse for some men and
boys emerges from the interaction between victim and perpetrator within
a shifting field of interpersonal relations structured by gender and age. Whilst
significant benefit accrues to men through these structures, men’s experience
of the relational field is beset with the anxiety that attends potential humilia-
tion or shaming by peers or by girls and women. Hence sexual abuse is a
practice through which boys and men can seek affirmation of their dominant
status without the vulnerabilities that attend consensual, mutual sexual rela-
tions. This resonates in many regards with Benjamin’s (1995, 1990) psycho-
analytic theories of gender and subordination. Her work is based on the
insights of Winnicott (1960: 586), whose suggestion that ‘there is no such
thing as an infant’, only the infant-mother dyad, since ‘without maternal care
there would be no infant’, recognised the importance of relationality in devel-
opmental processes. However, Benjamin (1990) enriched this perspective
with the insights of Hegel and feminist philosophy to explain how processes
of recognition and interaction give rise to inequality and coercion in gender
relations. This section will examine the relevance of Benjamin’s work, and the
intersubjective psychoanalytic tradition more generally, to the study of sexual
abuse.
Benjamin (1990) describes infancy as a state of profound dependence in
which the child experiences fear and rage in its efforts to control its primary
caretaker, usually the mother. Ideally, the child learns to regulate these
destructive impulses over time by recognising that its mother is not simply
an object that serves the impulses of the child. This recognition is crucial to
healthy psychological development since the infantile desire for control and
domination only leads to frustration. Every individual is psychologically,
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

emotionally and materially dependent on others. Even ‘independence’ itself

is a state that is only achieved when a person is recognised as independent.
Hence ‘independence’ is paradoxically a state of dependency and the ‘autono-
mous’ subject must continually reconcile their desire for self-assertion and
control with a recognition of the identity and needs of others. This is a tension
that Benjamin (1990) suggests can be experienced as intolerable, fuelling the
impulse for domination.

When the conﬂict between dependence and independence becomes too

intense, the psyche gives up the paradox in favour of an opposition.
Polarity, the conﬂict of opposites, replaces the balance within the self.

This polarity sets the stage for deﬁning the self in terms of a movement
away from dependence. It also sets the stage for domination.
(Benjamin 1990: 50)

In a society structured by sexual difference, the collapse of mutuality into

polarity, Benjamin (1990) argues, is a gendered process that differentially
effects male socialisation and development. The male child establishes a sense
of self through differentiating himself from his mother and, in a culture where
men feature symbolically as subjects and women as objects (or as lesser or ines-
sential subjects), this can involve a repudiation of ‘Otherness’ as a whole. ‘An
objectifying attitude comes to replace the earlier interactions of infancy in
which mutual recognition and proud assertion could co-exist … He is, of
course, able cognitively to accept the principle that the other is separate, but
without the experience of empathy and shared feeling that can unite separate
subjectivities’ (Benjamin 1990: 76). From the perspective of polarity rather
than empathy, the ‘other’ is related to as an object rather than subject, and
rationality and calculation rather than emotion and sympathy becomes the
basis for interaction and engagement. Benjamin (1990) explains violation as a
further elaboration of the process of psychic polarisation. Through an act of
violence or domination, the ‘master’ gains by force the recognition of the other
without entering into a relation of equals that would require him to recognise
her subjectivity in turn. In this fashion he gains the recognition he needs to
afﬁrm his dominant status whilst maintaining his rigid internal boundaries
and averting an inchoate fear of vulnerability and dissolution into the other.
Intersubjective theory provides a crucial link between the psychology
of offender motivation and the socio-structural antecedents that shape and
inform that motivation. The encoding of sexual difference itself in terms of
a complimentary binary of masculinity/femininity represents, for Benjamin
(1990), a defensive splitting of the subject in an effort to ward off the intoler-
able tensions that are produced in the intersubjective process. Research on
empathy deﬁcits amongst sex offenders is ambiguous, however it seems that
violent or abusive men are not incapable of empathising with others but that,
in particular situations and for particular reasons, they draw on their capacity
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to view, experience and treat others as objects rather than subjects (Walker
and Brown 2011). This strategic ‘objectiﬁcation’ of others enables men to
resolve conﬂicts over dependency through acts of domination and violation.
Where infantile fantasies of omnipotence and control become enmeshed
within the maintenance of masculine selfhood, then the self is predicated on
grounds that are continually falling away and the individual is confronted
with masculine prerogatives that are unstable and anxiety-producing. Child
sexual abuse becomes a way of assuaging or diminishing this anxiety for some
men (Socarides 2004). As a ‘container’ for vulnerability, the powerlessness of
a child demarcates them as particularly suitable objects of domination within
this process.

Jefferson (2002) warns against reductive interpretations of gendered

violence as performances or embodiments of masculinity, noting that
such offences are socially despised precisely because they are considered
un-masculine. However, it is at this point that a more subjective or phenom-
enological perspective is useful. The secrecy and illegality of child sexual
abuse can maximise, rather than undermine, the offender’s experience of
excitement and control (Messerschmidt 2000). It is relevant here to note the
work of Lyng (1990) on ‘edgework’ and the ways in which deliberate strate-
gies of risk-taking and transgression can be used by boys and men to establish
a sense of excitement, belonging and superiority. The more illicit and risky
a criminal activity the greater the ‘adrenalin rush’, leading to intense embod-
ied experiences that are integral to the attractions of some crimes (Ferrell
1997). This effect is particularly acute in group contexts, and the following
section will consider this in more detail.

Organised abuse as a collective masculine

performance
Group or ‘gang’ related crime has been researched extensively, and studies
suggest that crime and violence is often used by groups of boys and men to
delineate the boundaries and structure of their peer group, and to generate
and perpetuate a sense of masculine solidarity (Messerschmidt 1993, Matza
and Sykes 1961, Franklin 2004). In male peer group contexts, sexual violence
can have a similar function. In his study of drug dealers in Harlem, Bourgois
(1996) documented the initiatory dimensions of gang rape amongst youth
gangs, and the ways in which sexual violence was used to create misogynist
bonds between perpetrators. Philadelphoff-Puren (2004) has observed the
ways in which relations between men have been enacted in the traditions
of the ‘gang bang’ in Australian sporting teams and ‘team bonding’ rituals
involving urinating and defecating on women. In her analysis of group sexual
assault and homophobic violence in a high school setting, Franklin (2004)
describes how gang rape can be understood as a ‘participatory theatre’ of
masculinity, in which the victim is treated as an object upon whom perpetrat-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

ing men and/or boys enact a performance of sexual aggression and domina-
tion. In doing so, she argued that they attest to and affirm the masculine
performance of one another through sexually abusive acts, thus generating a
sense of belonging through a shared understanding of the victim as degraded
and subordinate and themselves, in contrast, as powerful and domineering.
Messerschmidt’s (1993) analyses of gang rape in the ‘Central Park Jogger
Rape’ case, which involved five black youths prosecuted (although later found
innocent) of the rape and battery of a woman, suggests that groups of men
may utilise collective sexual violence to ‘strengthen the fiction of male power’
in the context of disempowerment and subordination. This analysis of gang
rape as a compensatory masculine practice is contested by evidence of the

prevalence of gang rape amongst high-prestige and exclusive groups of

boys and men. Drawing on her experience as a judge who has presided
over numerous cases of multi-perpetrator rape, Judge Forer (in Sanday 2007:
23) describes as ‘facile’ the view of gang rape ‘as a phenomenon of the under-
class’. The only difference that she observed between the white, middle-class
men and the impoverished black youth charged with multi-perpetrator
rape that she encountered in the courtroom was that the former have far
greater resources available to them to avoid prosecution. In her research
on university gang rape cases, O’Sullivan (1998) has identiﬁed the prestige,
secrecy and sense of unaccountability associated with fraternity membership
as a crucial factor in the development of a culture of gang rape. Other con-
tributing factors include a view of femininity as ‘other’ and a threat to mascu-
linity identity and solidarity, resulting in the diminution in affective
recognition and empathy described by Benjamin (1990) in her account of
sexualised domination.
In literature on gang rape, sexual violence takes on initiatory, sadistic and
ritualistic dimensions as it serves to construct and regulate relations between
men that are premised on the subordination of feminised ‘others’. In her study
of multiple perpetrator rapes by university fraternities, Sanday (2007: 7–8)
provides a detailed account of the homosociality of sexual violence:

The woman involved is a tool, an object, the centrefold around

which boys both test and demonstrate their power and heterosexual desire
by performing for one another. They prove their manhood on a wounded
girl who is unable to protest … The event operates to glue the male
group as a uniﬁed entity, and helps boys to make the transition to their
vision of a powerful manhood – in unity against women, one against the
world.

Like gang rape and other instances of collective sexual violence, organised
abuse can be conceptualised as a collective masculine performance. Through
the exchange and mutual abuse of victims, perpetrators of organised abuse
generate a shared sense of power, control and masculinity. The experience
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

of dominance that arises through the power differential that is inherent

in child sexual abuse may be ampliﬁed by the involvement of other like-
minded men, and indeed the role of the child may be little more than an
object within the perpetrator’s collective performance of masculinity. Kelly
and colleagues (1995) observed that organised abuse is not limited to the
exchange of children for sexual pleasure or proﬁt, but may also generate power
and status within groups of men who accrue subcultural capital in the process
of providing children for abuse with other men. They identify that such
systems of exchange are not unique to organised abuse, and that privileged
access to the bodies of women and children is a common marker of masculine
prestige in a number of different cultures and societies. In organised abuse,

children may be reduced to objects of domination through whom perpetrators

sustain and regulate their relations with one another, and develop a sense of
masculine identity and belonging.
Conceptualising organised abuse as a collective strategy of masculinity
provides new insights into the sadistic and ritualistic practices that have been
observed in organised abuse cases. Collective sexual violence can produce a
sense of transcendental control and mastery over the victim that perpetrators
have described as ‘godlike’ (Kelly 2000, Caputi 1988) and can become
enmeshed within pseudo-religious ideologies. This was in evidence in Sanday’s
(2007) study of gang rape by American fraternity members. The fraternity
‘initiations’ described to Sanday included animal sacrifice, being forced
to drink animal blood, being smeared in vomit, being bound and gagged,
being locked in coffins and other methods of torture. Once they were frater-
nity ‘brothers’, members frequently physically victimised one another, and
collectively sexually abuse women, in a constant reaffirmation of the mascu-
linist ideology of the fraternity. In one fraternity, this ideology was codified
within an idiosyncratic religious framework that attributed the ‘secrets of
the brotherhood’ to a Greek goddess. The physical and sexual violence of
the fraternity was thus an expression of a gendered regime of power that had
come to take on extraordinary metaphysical significance for the brothers,
giving rise to seemingly bizarre rituals and occult beliefs. Given the wide-
spread incredulity that has greeted accounts of ritualistic child sexual abuse,
this account of the enmeshment of sadism and ritualism within an ethos of
masculine fraternite is revealing and important.

Conclusion
Child sexual exploitation is a heavily politicised phenomenon that features
in a range of competing debates and discourses. Empirical data on the
contexts and harms of organised abuse has often been overshadowed by the
claims of moral entrepreneurs and sceptics alike. Their disagreements
have been fuelled by the challenges that organised abuse poses to prevailing
understandings of child sexual abuse. In order to understand the crimes
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

of groups of sexual offenders, a socially informed perspective is necessary,

however practitioners and researchers have been constrained by their focus
on individual victims and offenders. The prevailing view of sexual offenders
as mentally ill has obscured the gendered dynamics of organised abuse, as has
the focus of clinicians on explaining organised abuse in terms of psychologi-
cal factors such as dissociation, trauma and attachment. Their efforts to artic-
ulate a comprehensive theory of organised abuse have also been challenged
by the fact that the most serious of allegations of child abuse have been emerg-
ing from within contexts in which it is widely believed that children are
loved and protected, such as families, churches and schools. This has given
rise to a form of cognitive dissonance that has fed a groundswell of disbelief

and outrage whenever authorities have sought to act upon allegations of

organised abuse.
This chapter shows that organised abuse becomes less inscrutable through
a multi-disciplinary theoretical lens. Critical theories of masculinity and
psychoanalysis offer new tools to make explicable what has otherwise been
considered unthinkable: the sexual abuse of children, and women, by groups
of adults acting in concert. For some men, group contexts provide the oppor-
tunity for the formation of illicit sexualities and the expression of violent
masculinities, giving rise, in turn, to florid subcultures of masculine suprem-
acy. Organised abuse involves the collision of risk, transgression and sexuality
in the company of like-minded others, constituting a collective ‘edgework’
experience that is linked to ideologies of masculine sexual domination and
superiority. Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) have emphasised the impor-
tance of recognising the constitution of hegemonic masculinities in localised
contexts, and the interaction of local gender configurations with regional or
even global models of masculinity. In the case of organised abuse, particular
cultural configurations of aggressive masculine sexuality are intensified
and reworked within local abusive contexts to produce forms of masculine
identification and relations that reproduce but also transgress against domi-
nant norms of masculine power. However, through ‘edgework’ the subjective
experience of transgression can be reconfigured into a gendered one that
reconfirms, rather than contests, the masculine identification of the perpetra-
tors. This theoretical approach foregrounds the ways in which groups of men
can use violence and coercion in order to generate a shared sense of masculine
identity and belonging through the subordination of children and women.
As will be discussed in the following chapter, it is therefore necessary to
consider the power differentials between men, women and children in the
contexts in which sexually abusive groups emerge.
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Organised abuse cases

Network, institutional, familial
and ritual

Context is crucial to understanding multi-perpetrator sexual offending. The

bonds between the offenders, the relationship between offenders and victims
and the place or institution in which the offence takes place are all factors that
shape the severity of the crime and the motivations behind it. Whilst some
sexual offenders are highly motivated to abuse children, men and sometimes
women who might otherwise have found such behaviour abhorrent can be
drawn into collusion or perpetration due to peer influence and other environ-
mental factors (Harkins and Dixon 2010). This chapter will examine three
contexts in which organised abuse has been repeatedly identified: (a) in extra-
familial networks of offenders, (b) in children’s institutions, and (c) in nuclear
and extended families. It will also discuss ritual abuse, which is a common
characteristic of familial cases of organised abuse although it has been docu-
mented in extra-familial contexts. These four categories – network, institu-
tional, familial and ritual – emerge from two key studies undertaken in Britain
by Creighton (1993) and Gallagher and colleagues (1996) and provide a logi-
cal basis to arrange and analyse the diverse literature on organised abuse. Any
literature review of organised abuse is necessarily constrained by the inade-
quacies of the available data and the complexity and fluidity of cases of organ-
ised abuse. Indeed, some cases of organised abuse defy simple categorisation
or explanation but, as this chapter shows, there is a clustering of common
characteristics in particular contexts that can assist us in understanding how
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relations of gender, age and power enable sexually abusive groups to form in
some circumstances.

The limitations of data on organised abuse

Whilst allegations of organised abuse have generated a wealth of controversy
and commentary, empirical research and data on the subject are scarce.
Epidemiological and clinical research studies suggest that a significant
minority of sexually abused adults and children report multiple perpetrators
and other indicators of organised abuse, however sexual abuse surveys rarely
ask questions that would provide firm figures on the extent of organised abuse

in the community (Salter and Richters forthcoming). Attempts to gather

information on the extent of organised abuse in developed countries have been
stymied by the failure of governments to collect data, and by their unwilling-
ness to publish the data available to them (Renold and Creighton 2003, Kelly
and Regan 2000). There is no standard, commonly accepted terminology to
describe cases of sexual abuse involving multiple victims and multiple perpe-
trators and so workers may categorise cases of organised abuse in different
ways (Gallagher et al. 1996). Organised abuse may also be a difficult form
of abuse for authorities to respond to and record appropriately. Clinicians
and protective parents have documented the systemic obstacles they have
faced when attempting to report a child’s disclosure of organised abuse to the
police or child protection authorities (Brooks 2001, Coleman 2008, Kinscherff
and Barnum 1992).
There are numerous practical obstacles to identifying the numbers of
children and young people abused by groups and networks. Organised
abuse is a secretive enterprise that is rarely the subject of specialist or targeted
policing and investigation practices (Kelly 1998). When organised abuse is
detected by the authorities, most cases are detected accidentally (Gallagher
1998) or due to the perseverance of victims in spite of the inaction and inat-
tention of authorities (e.g. Davies 1998, Fowley 2010, Owen 2010). However,
the capacity of victims to report organised abuse is constrained. The factors
that inhibit disclosure such as threats of death or harm during abuse and a
relation of dependence with a perpetrator (Briere and Conte 1993, Loewenstein
1996, Schultz et al. 2003) are common features of organised abuse (Creighton
1993, Gallagher et al. 1996). Specific perpetrator strategies, such as drugging
children (to reduce resistance and interfere with recall) or forcing children
into sexual contact with other children (to engender a sense of guilt and com-
plicity) also inhibit disclosure (Burgess and Lindeqvist Clark 1984, Gough
1996). For all these reasons, organised abuse may be a particularly difficult
form of sexual abuse to detect (Gallagher 1998).

Research into organised abuse

In the early 1990s, two key studies of organised abuse by Creighton (1993)
and Gallagher et al. (1996) in Britain gathered data sets of cases reported to
the authorities and examined relationships between abuse types, perpetrators
and victims. Previously, research on the subject had been ‘siloed’ according
to abuse type and context, with relevant research taking place in relation
to child pornography (Schoettle 1980, Pierce 1984, Tyler and Stone 1985)
and/or child prostitution (Gitta 1984, Weisberg 1985, Janus and Heid Bracey
1986), ‘sex rings’ (Burgess and Lindeqvist Clark 1984, Wild and Wynne
1986, Wild 1989), multi-perpetrator sexual abuse in child care settings
(Finkelhor and Williams 1988, Faller 1988, Kelley 1989) and ritual abuse
(Cozolino 1989, Gould 1987, Kluft 1989). Whilst this research highlighted

overlapping patterns of multi-perpetrator, multi-victim abuse, it was only

with the coining of the term ‘organised abuse’ that an inclusive framework
was provided through which these similarities could be examined in more
depth (La Fontaine 1993).
Creighton (1993) surveyed 71 child protection teams of the National
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Britain regarding their
experiences of child protection cases involving reports of organised abuse in
the period December 1989 to April 1991. She found that 41 per cent of the
agencies were aware of a case of organised abuse in their area in the period
December 1989 to April 1991, and 20 per cent of teams reported working
with children who were suspected of having being victimised in organised
abuse during this period. These teams were then interviewed in order to gain
more information about the cases, and they reported 19 cases of suspected
organised abuse involving 61 children from 43 families. The child protection
teams were asked to categorise these cases according to three non-defined
categories of abuse: ‘network’, ‘ritual’ and ‘child pornography’. The usefulness
of her findings are limited by the small sample and a lack of standardised
definitions but there was a striking consistency to the ways in which workers
categorised the cases they had worked on.
Respondents reported 10 cases of ‘network abuse’, which they indicated
referred primarily to extra-familial cases characterised by networks of men
who abused post-pubescent children and who exhibited a clear gender pre-
ference. These abusive groups targeted either boys or girls but rarely both at
once, and they were more likely to target boys. The majority of perpetrators
were strangers to the children’s families and the children in these cases
often had fractured or difficult relationships with their parents. Some of the
victims were in out-of-home care at the time of the abuse. Workers reported
that the victims in network abuse cases were initially encouraged to contact
perpetrators by other children, and they were provided various rewards
to keep them quiet about the abuse. In this study, the three reported ‘pornog-
raphy’ cases were similar to the ‘network’ cases although they involved a
preponderance of female rather than male victims.
There was a significant difference between these 13 cases and the six
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reported ‘ritual’ cases. In the ‘ritual’ cases, victims were signiﬁcantly younger
and predominantly girls (83 per cent), with immediate and extended family
members constituting 57 per cent of perpetrators and friends of the family
another 31 per cent. Whilst mostly abusing girl children, these familial
abusive groups were considerably less gender exclusive than in the ‘network’
cases, with some boys abused at the same time as girls. They abused fewer
victims than the ‘network’ or ‘pornography’ groups but the abuse was of
greater intensity, involving sadistic and ritualistic abuse.
These key distinctions between extra-familial ‘network’ abuse and famil-
ial ‘ritual’ abuse were also present in the more rigorous and comprehensive
study undertaken by Gallagher and colleagues (1996), which involved a

multi-method approach to develop a data set of child protection cases involv-

ing allegations of organised abuse. The researchers first sent a survey to all
police, social and welfare agencies requesting data on cases of organised abuse
for the period 1988 to 1991. Respondents identified 211 separate cases,
and ‘ritual abuse’ was the predominant form of abuse reported (29 per cent),
followed by ‘paedophile ring’ (20 per cent) and organised abuse at a ‘non-
residential institution’ (14 per cent). The authors then undertook a compre-
hensive review of child protection cases within eight local authority areas,
encompassing 20,000 files across 32 sites. In the sample of 78 child sex rings
drawn from case review, 33 were constituted only of male perpetrators,
and these groups primarily abused children of one gender or another (boys
in 17 rings, girls in 13, both in 3). The victims of these groups were usually
in their teens and they reported organised abuse such as the manufacture
of child abuse images, but not ritualistic abuse. A higher number of rings (41)
were comprised of both male and female perpetrators, and these groups
predominantly abused only girls (19 rings) or both boys and girls (15 rings).
The victims of these groups were younger and were more likely to report
sadistic and ritualistic abuse.
The similarities between the findings of these two studies are clear. On
the one hand, there are examples of extra-familial organised abuse in which
groups of men act on a shared sexual preference for one gender, targeting
vulnerable teenagers from unstable families or those in out-of-home care. On
the other hand, the studies found patterns of family-based organised abuse
with perpetrators of both genders, in which young children, predominantly
but not exclusively girls, are subject to sadistic abuse, sometimes in ceremo-
nial or ritualistic ways. Gallagher and colleagues (1996) also emphasised
institutional settings of organised abuse, in which children were subject
to organised abuse through a school or other institution. These three settings
for organised abuse – extra-familial, familial and institutional – resonate
in important ways with the literature on organised abuse that was published
following these studies, whilst the role of ritualistic practices in organised
abuse has been the subject of sustained debate and controversy. The following
sections will examine these four categories in more detail.
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Network abuse
Network abuse describes the kinds of abuses that has previously been docu-
mented in research on ‘sex rings’ or ‘paedophile rings’: networks of mostly
extra-familial male abusers acting on a shared sexual interest in children
(Burgess and Lindeqvist Clark 1984, Wild 1989, Hunt and Baird 1990).
These groups commonly display a preference for one gender or another, rarely
abusing boys and girls at once, and they usually target post-pubescent victims
(Creighton 1993, Gallagher et al. 1996). Reports of network abuse are typi-
ﬁed by high numbers of victims but short periods of abuse, with relatively

limited progression of abuse, as multiple victims are inducted into and then
quickly exit/escape from the abusive group. Since perpetrators of network
abuse are mostly extra-familial they have limited inﬂuence over their victims
in comparison to familial offenders, and they must employ a combination
of inducements, threats and emotional manipulation to coerce the child into
sexual activity. This may be effective for a period but since the initiation of
network abuse typically begins in the early teens it seems that victims have
greater psychological capacity to resist these strategies and exit from network
abuse.
In their study of extra-familial ‘sex rings’, Burgess and colleagues (Burgess
et al. 1984, Burgess and Lindeqvist Clark 1984) documented how perpetra-
tors identify potential victims in a range of ways, including through work
or leisure activities, and then engage in ‘grooming’ behaviour to entice the
victim into sexual abuse. The victim may then be introduced to other perpe-
trators, at which point the victim may be subject to prostitution, the manu-
facture of child abuse images and other forms of exploitation. There is limited
research into the experiences of children within network abuse, but the
available literature emphasises how perpetrators encourage the development
of a group subculture and peer dynamic between abused children which
engenders a sense of guilt and complicity in the abuse (Svedin and Back 1996,
Burgess and Lindeqvist Clark 1984).
Recent cases of network abuse have emphasised how the development
of online technologies has facilitated the formation of sexually abusive groups.
They have also provided examples of the ways in which women as well as
men can become involved in network abuse. In a recent British case, a child-
care worker, Vanessa George, took sexually abusive photographs of dozens
of the children she worked with at the behest of Colin Blanchard, whom she
had met online through a dating website. Blanchard had also recruited three
other women online who were subsequently jailed for sexually abusing chil-
dren at his request. In one email between George and Blanchard, George
states ‘I’ll do what you want if you put a ring on my ﬁnger’ (S. Morris 2009).
During sentencing, the presiding judge described Blanchard’s ‘pernicious
grooming’ of the four women. The police spokesperson subsequently empha-
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sised that, although the convicted women may never have abused children of
their own initiative, nonetheless ‘[n]o one should be under the misapprehen-
sion that they were somehow forced into abusing children – they willingly
took part’ (Morris 2011).
The network abuse of older children in their early-to-mid teens may involve
grooming by men posing as ‘boyfriends’ who then emotionally manipulate
the child into participating in prostitution and other acts (Swann 1999).
Children victimised in this way are often vulnerable or homeless teenagers
with disrupted family backgrounds (Elaine and June 2005) but they may
include middle-class teenagers (eg Reid 2010). Flattered by attention
and impressed with displays of money and status, the victim’s attachment to

his/her ‘boyfriend’ may preclude acknowledgement or reporting of their

exploitation and inhibit cooperation with the police. In many respects, this
form of abuse corresponds with forms of ‘pimping’ experienced by vulnerable
women as well as minors. Research with street-based sex workers in the 1980s
found that the majority had been prostituted prior to the age of 16, often
by ‘boyfriends’, and hence this form of network abuse is a well-established
entre into adult sex work (Silbert and Pines 1985, Weisberg 1985, Gitta
1984). Such perpetrators may operate as part of an organised network of per-
petrators who foster and exploit the emotional dependency of their victims,
whom they offer to other men in order to accrue money, status and access to
other sexually exploited children. In Britain, recent allegations of such abuse
by men of ‘Middle Eastern’ background has been the subject of sustained
controversy, however it has highlighted the vulnerability of some teenaged
girls, particularly those in care, to the emotional and ﬁnancial manipulation
of network abusers (Norfolk 2012).

Institutional organised abuse

Institutional abuse refers to the sexual abuse of children by people who work
with them in an institutional setting, in which one or more staff members
engage in or arrange the sexual abuse of children in their care (Gallagher
2000a). Reports of institutional organised abuse are diverse, describing
organised abuse in residential care, special schools, boarding schools, primary
and high schools, day-care centres and preschools, and voluntary organisa-
tions. Some of the earliest reports of institutional organised abuse involved
day-care centres and preschools. In their sample of 270 substantiated cases
of sexual abuse in child care arrangements throughout America, Finkelhor
and Williams (1988) found that 17 per cent involved allegations of multiple
perpetrators. The authors observed that ‘[i]t is very clear that the multiperpe-
trator cases have dynamics which set them apart’ (Finkelhor and Williams
1988: 38), with the largest average number of victims, the most extended and
serious forms of abuse (including the production of child abuse images and
ritualistic practices) and an over-representation of female perpetrators in com-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

parison to other child care cases or in research on sexual abuse in general. They
reported that 25 per cent of cases in their sample involved the perpetration
of abuse by the owner or director of the child care business, raising the
possibility that ‘abuse was the reason for which the day-care operation was
established’ (Finkelhor and Williams 1988: 28).
The childcare abuse scandals of the 1980s and 1990s led to increased
oversight of childcare arrangements and screening of childcare workers, and
although sexual abuse and organised abuse cases continue to be uncovered
in childcare and day-care centres, there appear to be considerably fewer cases
than 20 years ago. Today the most common reports of institutional organised
abuse involve historical complaints of abuse in religious institutions and

residential children’s institutions. In Australia, a recent public inquiry into

the abuse of children in care in South Australia collected testimony from
the former wards of a range of residential schools and homes that painted
a disturbing picture of open cultures of institutionalised sexual abuse
(Commission of Inquiry 2004). Former residents of one school described how
staff colluded with other men, including police officers and social workers,
in the sexual abuse of child wards, often incorporating former wards into
the abusive activity. The abuse was allegedly kept secret by the collusion
of the abusers, some of whom reportedly included bureaucrats in the child
welfare system, and the general social disinterest in the welfare of state wards
that was widespread at the time.
The paradigm of institutional care in Western countries has historically
been marked by neglect and depersonalised and punitive responses by care-
givers (Goffman 1961, Foucault 1967). A trend away from residential chil-
dren’s homes has occurred over the last 30 years as the poor life outcomes
of children placed in residential care have become evident. Nonetheless, stud-
ies of the prevalence of the sexual abuse of children in residential care suggest
that rates of sexual victimisation are disproportionately high, although a
significant proportion of perpetrators are other children rather than staff
(Gallagher 1999, Hobbs et al. 1999). Research has identified a convergence
of factors that have contributed to the high rates of abuse and violence at
residential children’s institutions, including the closed and self-regulatory
nature of the facilities, the absence of substantive oversight, the powerlessness
of children in care and their emotional vulnerability (Doran and Brannan
1996). However, the gendered nature of authority in institutional settings,
and the gender dynamics of institutions more generally, has often gone unex-
amined. Green (2001: 20) emphasises the ways in which masculine power
structures in children’s institutions have condoned or minimised the effects
of ‘aggressive and misogynistic male sexual behaviour’. In children’s institu-
tions, male authority can be expressed through institutionalised regimes of
discipline, surveillance and control that facilitate and even condone sexual
abuse (Parkin and Green 1997). In some instances, this has given rise to what
Stein (2006) has called ‘organised systematic abuse’ in children’s institutions,
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

deﬁned as ‘the abuse over time of children and young people by different
members of staff working within the same home, or other adults from outside
the home’ (p 16).
Where staff have been found to be sexually abusing children in care, the
majority have acted alone (Gallagher 2000a). An overlap between institu-
tional abuse and organised abuse has been widely reported although cases
of organised abuse represent a small proportion of cases of institutional abuse
referred to the police for investigation (Gallagher 2000a). Nonetheless,
institutional organised abuse is likely be underreported since it involves the
deliberate targeting of very vulnerable children who are unlikely to report
abuse or be believed when they do (Hawkins and Briggs 1997). Sexually abu-
sive men may seek to obtain inﬂuential positions in the child-care system

with the intention of sexually abusing children and enabling other men to do
so (Hawkins and Briggs 1997, Stein 2006). Abusers may then utilise the
knowledge gained through their legitimate employment as the children’s
caretakers to identify vulnerable children and entrap them in abuse (Colton
and Vanstone 1996, Gallagher 1999). Colton, Roberts and Vanstone’s (2010)
research on sexual abuse by men who work with children has emphasised
the premeditated manner in which such men seek out employment that
provides access to children, and the strategic manner in which they assess
and minimise the risk of detection through grooming and other practices.
These men may also be embedded within larger networks of abusers and this
adds an additional layer of complexity to their abuse, since they may then
provide the child for abuse to other men. Sexually abusive staff may also
manipulate other staff into overlooking, colluding with or even participating
in the sexual abuse of children (Jones 1995).
It has been common for institutional authorities to silence complaining
children whilst protecting abusive staff, and some critics have described this
pattern of institutional cover-ups as evidence of ‘organised paedophilia’ (eg
Hawkins and Briggs 1997). The line between complicity and conspiracy in
such instances is often uncertain, since there is considerable crossover between
organised institutional abuse and what Kelly and Scott (1993) have called
‘disorganised’ sexual abuse, where a child is vulnerable to sexual abuse by
multiple people due to a lack of organisation by child protection services. The
severe sexual abuse of a child in care may not be evidence of collusion between
abusers but rather it may indicate the absence of basic safeguards and protec-
tions. Nonetheless, the capacity of large church-run or state-run institutions
to evade scrutiny and the zeal with which sexually abusive groups may attempt
to hide their offences should not be underestimated. In 2002, it emerged that
the state-run orphanage Pia Casa in Portugal had been targeted by a sexually
abusive group that included diplomats, doctors, lawyers and journalists
for over two decades (Tremlett 2010). Evidence of the abusive network
was ﬁrst provided to the police and politicians in the early 1980s, however
key dossiers disappeared, other evidence was subsequently destroyed and
witnesses reporting being threatened and intimidated (Taylor 2010).
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Familial organised abuse

Familial organised abuse involves cultures of sexual abuse within families,
in which multiple adults abuse children within the family (and often
outside it) while enabling perpetrators from outside the home to sexually
abuse their children.1 Authorities have been slow to recognise familial organ-
ised abuse and, even where familial perpetrators are involved in organised

1 Where extra-familial perpetrators are absent, such abuse is better described as ‘polyincest’
(see Faller 1991), however it is common for polyincestuous families to be in contact with

abuse, investigators tend to focus on the extra-familial perpetrators (Gallagher

et al. 1996). However, familial perpetrators have been documented since ‘sex
rings’ and ‘child pornography’ first began to be investigated in the 1970s and
1980s (see Pierce 1984, Incardi 1984, Tate 1990). Research in the 1980s
highlighted the participation of family members, particularly incestuous
fathers, in facilitating the sexual exploitation of children (Wild 1989, Wild
and Wynne 1986, Schoettle 1980). It is now well recognised that incest can
include the facilitation of sexual abuse by perpetrators outside the victim’s
immediate or nuclear family (International Society for the Study of Trauma
and Dissociation 2011).
Familial organised abuse is distinguished from network abuse cases,
such as those examined by Burgess and colleagues (1984), by what could be
called its polymorphous perversity. Whereas groups involved in network
abuse tend to target specific gender and age categories, familial organised
abuse commonly involves the abuse of female and male children, the abuse
of children and women, and the abuse of familial and extra-familial victims
(Cleaver and Freeman 1996, Gallagher et al. 1996, Creighton 1993). These
studies find that, in familial cases of organised abuse, abuse tends to begin
at a younger age, with a predominance of female victims, involving compa-
ratively low numbers of victims compared to network abuse but a high inten-
sity and prolonged duration of victimisation. Sexually abusive families may
overlap with one another and provide one another with access to their children
leading to a complex web of relations between victims and perpetrators
that can be difficult to untangle. Victims may not know that other children
from other families are also being abused, and if they do, they may not know
enough information about other victims for them to be identified. Investigating
such cases is, as Gallagher (1998) described, like ‘grappling with smoke’.
Cleaver and Freeman (1996) provide a case study of familial organised
abuse of rare detail. Through their research with parents suspected of child
abuse, they developed close relationships with research participants that
enabled them to identify an ‘abuse network’ across eight families. Through
their analysis, they illustrated the ‘cross-configuration’ of patterns of organ-
ised abuse within families, in that the abuse ‘extended vertically through the
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inter-generational family structure and laterally through the involvement

of wider kin and family friends’ (Cleaver and Freeman 1996: 232). In these
families, sexual abuse was routine. Children were engaged in sexual activi-
ties from a young age with various members of the family, with the abuse
quickly progressing to include penetrative assaults. The authors noted that
sexual abuse was characterised by male perpetration, however women in the
family had important roles within the culture of abuse. Women, usually

abusers who are not related by blood to victims or familial perpetrators (Crowley and Seery
2001).

mothers or grandmothers, were involved in abusive activities which ‘ranged

from recruitment or tacit acceptance to restraining children or concealing its
effects to being perpetrators themselves’ (Cleaver and Freeman 1996: 237).
Relationships between men and women within this family network were
based on a system of exchange ‘in which the male perpetrator’s offer of love
and ﬁnancial assistance was traded for sexual access to the woman’s children’
(Cleaver and Freedman 1996: 239). The families involved in the organised
abuse all adopted and promoted an ‘abuse culture’ that fostered secrecy and
interdependence.
Such an intergenerational familial abuse of sexual abuse was evident in
the French sexual abuse prosecutions of 2005, in which 63 people across
21 families in the town of Angers were convicted of raping, abusing or pros-
tituting 45 victims (Walt 2005). The victims included 19 boys and 26 girls
aged between six months and 12 years at the time of abuse. The couples
traded their children between them for petty amounts of cash or groceries.
Intergenerational abuse was evident in some families. One victim, nine-
year-old ‘Marine V’, who reported being raped by about 30 men, including
uncles, her father and grandfather as well as neighbours. The men abused
and prostituted their children and grandchildren, and whilst their spouses
were less active in the abuse of the children they facilitated the abuse in other
ways, such as acting as the ‘treasurer’ of the abusive group. In their defence,
many of the women testiﬁed that they were also victims of incest and sexual
abuse. Like other cases of familial organised abuse, the sexually abusive group
only came to light when a victim approached the police to complain, despite
the fact that the majority of the families involved were either known to social
services or under their direct supervision.
Whilst the men and women prosecuted in this case were predomi-
nantly poor and welfare-dependent, the victimised children described a group
of perpetrators who wore suits and ties and hid their faces behind masks when
they abused them. A lawyer for one of those convicted in the case reported
that these men were part of a sophisticated and wealthy network of sexual
abusers who paid considerably more to abuse the children than other clients:
up to E456 in one instance (Walt 2005). Such intimations of middle- or
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upper-class sexually abusive networks have been a feature of European inves-

tigations into organised abuse (Kelly 1998). However, Sinason (2002: 16)
observes that ‘[i]t is far easier to pick up the signs of abuse in working class or
‘underclass’ children than in intact and outwardly functional middle-class
families’. In her autobiography, Fowley (2010: 17–18), a survivor of familial
organised abuse in England, reﬂected on the invisibility of her abuse in a well-
to-do family that showed no outward signs of dysfunction:

Apart from the abuse my life felt pretty normal. We were well looked
after, well fed, clean, well dressed, and we got on OK. Mum and
Billy [step-father] were not drinkers and they rarely went out, so there

was no shortage of money. No teacher would have singled me out as a

child from a problem family, no social workers ever came knocking at our
door, and we never had cause for a policeman to arrive on our doorstep.

Fowley’s (2010) case attracted widespread attention in the United Kingdom

due to the successful prosecution of some of her abusers, including her
mother, and Fowley’s resilience in waving her right to anonymity and
speaking publicly about her abuse. Her story is similar in many respects to
other less-publicised accounts of familial organised abuse that also describe
sexual abuse by parents, grandparents, relatives and family ‘friends’. However,
these accounts have often included descriptions of sadistic abuses that have
deﬁed belief to the point of drastically polarising media coverage. This is
particularly the case where ritualistic abuse is reported, as will be discussed
in Chapter 4. Although ritual abuse has been reported in extra-familial and
institutional contexts, this form of abuse is most commonly associated with
familial organised abuse, and the controversy associated with it has had the
effect of undermining the legitimacy of many reports of familial organised
abuse. Ritual abuse is a complex issue that will be considered in more detail
in the following section.

Ritualistic abuse
Ritualistic abuse refers to organised abuse that is structured in a ceremo-
nial fashion, often incorporating religious or mythological iconography
(McFadyen et al. 1993). The ritualistic activity is typically structured by
‘deviant scriptualism’, in which abusive groups parody traditional religious
symbols and ritual practices (Kent 1993a, 1993b). The majority of cases of
ritualistic abuse involve female victims and facilitation by parents (Creighton
1993, Gallagher et al. 1996), although early research on sexual abuse in
child-care arrangements emphasised the presence of ritualistic abuse in
some cases (Finkelhor and Williams 1988, Waterman et al. 1993). Studies
of sexually abused children in day-care centres have provided compelling
evidence that children reporting ritualistic abuse report more serious forms
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

of sexual abuse than non-ritualistically abused children (including those

subject to other forms of organised abuse), and they have more severe
symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (Finkelhor and Williams 1988,
Waterman et al. 1993).
Gallagher (2000b: 321) described allegations of ritualistic abuse as ‘one
of the most contentious issues in child protection’ throughout the 1990s.
Whilst ritualistic abuse is not a ubiquitous aspect of disclosures of organised
abuse, it is associated with the extremes of child maltreatment, including
murder, bestiality and the torture of children (Smith 1993, Hudson 1991,
Driscoll and Wright 1991). Clinical psychologist Youngson (1994) argues
that cases involving ritualistic abuse are qualitatively different from other

forms of child abuse, however severe. Children and adults subject to ritualistic
forms of abuse are profoundly traumatised, phobic of doctors and the
police, and often convinced that the abusive group has supernatural powers
(Mollon 1996). Cases involving ritualistic abuse are distinguished from
other forms of organised abuse by the young age at which victimisation starts,
the involvement of parents as primary abusers, the extremity and diversity
of abusive practices, and the prolonged period of abuse (Creighton 1993,
Gallagher et al. 1996).
Studies of children’s and adult’s disclosures of ritual abuse have identified
a common catalogue of abuses: forced ingestion of human waste, Satanic
iconography and occult paraphernalia, animal mutilation or killing, and the
use of drugs (Smith 1993, Driscoll and Wright 1991, Young et al. 1991).
Victims and survivors have described ritually abusive groups engaging in
elaborately structured phases of torture designed to induce dissociative and
traumatic psychopathology, with the apparent intention of maintaining abso-
lute control over the victim and reducing the likelihood of detection (Sachs
and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011). As will be discussed in Chapter 4, a
substantial group of commentators have argued that such descriptions align
so closely with the content of myth, novels and films that they are most likely
confabulations drawn from the same. However, this view is challenged by the
recent substantiation of organised, sadistic and ritualistic abuse during the
prosecution of child sex cases in Europe and North America.
In 2005, seven members of a fundamentalist Christian church in the
American town of Ponchatoula, Louisiana were indicted on charges of sexu-
ally abusing three children, all of whom were related to some of the accused.
The eyewitness statements of the children described child abuse in ‘satanic’
rituals, animal sacrifices and group sexual abuse, and this was corroborated
by the diary entries of some of the accused. An FBI agent testified that physi-
cal evidence of such ritualistic activities had been uncovered during the police
investigation (Ellzey 2007). The former pastor of the church was sentenced
to four concurrent life terms, another church member was sentenced to three
life sentences and a third pleaded guilty and received a 10-year sentence
(Hastings 2009). Child sex charges against one of the accused who had ini-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

tially notiﬁed the authorities of the abuse, and subsequently agreed to testify
against other church members, were dropped.
The Ponchatoula case is illuminating for a range of reasons. It highlights
the ways in which familial organised abuse and institutional organised abuse
often overlap where ritualistic abuse is alleged. In this instance, it seems that
sexually abusive men developed connections with one another through their
participation in a church, and then, in their practice of organised abuse, they
adopted and inverted the ritualistic tradition of the church. This accords
with the descriptions of ritualistic abuse that will be analysed in Chapter 9.
Other survivors have reported that priests, pastors and church members
were actively involved in their organised abuse, and they have described ways

in which Christian iconography and ritual traditions have been parodied

by sexually abusive groups. Commentators have often been at a loss as to
what to make of such reports, but as Goodwin (1994a) points out they are not
without historical precedent. The organisation of illicit sexual activities
in ways that mock religious sensibilities has been a long-standing feature of
libertine philosophy, and in the ﬁction of the Marquis de Sade, priests and
other men ecstatically engaged in the ‘satanic’ rape of children. This historical
connection between child sexual abuse and irreligiousity will be considered in
more detail in the following chapter.
Perpetrators of ritualistic abuse draw on a range of religious traditions
to legitimise their abuse of children, and this includes occult and pagan
mythology. In 2011 in Swansea, Wales, Colin Batley 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 Bruxelles 2011). His partner and
two other women were also convicted on related charges, with one man con-
victed of paying to abuse a victim of the group. The groups’ ritualistic activi-
ties 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 perse-
cution. During Batley’s trial, the prosecution claimed that Crowley’s writings
formed the basis of Batley’s organisation 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.
The literature on ritualistic abuse suggests that ritualistic sexual prac-
tices with young children are a characteristic of particularly abusive groups,
and that such practices typically occur alongside a diverse range of other abu-
sive 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, abu-
sive groups are generally referred to as ‘cults’, and ‘cult abuse’ is a term that
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

has been used interchangeably with ‘ritual abuse’. It is questionable whether

‘cult’ is an accurate or useful descriptor for these abusive groups, who are usu-
ally constituted of multiple abusive families and family ‘friends’ and contacts
who are collectively engaged in multiple forms of sexual violence. In her cri-
tique of ritual abuse literature, Goodwin (1994b: 486) argues that the focus
on ‘ritual’ and ‘religion’ is fundamentally misplaced:

In many ways it is unfortunate that this element [ritualistic abuse] became

so prominent in many of the early investigations that the phenomenon
was named ‘ritual abuse’ rather than severe or sadistic abuse. This has led
to the misconception that this was some sort of new phenomenon, that

religious rather than sexual, monetary or power motivations were central

to it, that its roots could be found in the history of religion rather than
the history of crime, and that to perceive or study the phenomenon con-
stituted some sort of fundamentalist witchhunting.

Goodwin suggests that ritualistic abuse is one expression of an historical

continuum of sadistic sexual practices that she traces back to the Marquis
de Sade and his libertine contemporaries in the 18th century. She highlights
the historical continuity between de Sade’s libertinism and ritualistic abuse,
but she does not elucidate upon its implications for the study of organised
abuse beyond advocating for a shift in focus towards the issues of sexual
violence and power. The next chapter explores this potential link between
libertinism and ritualistic abuse in more detail. However, the position
that ritualistic abuse is best understood in terms of sexuality and power was
examined by Scott (2001), whose qualitative research with adult survivors
of ritualistic abuse synthesises research on ritualistic abuse and organised
abuse with social theory on violence against women and children. Using a
grounded theory approach, Scott (2001) explored how her participants’
accounts of ritualistic abuse were enmeshed within histories of family vio-
lence, abuse and neglect, as well as networks of perpetrators engaged in sadis-
tic practices with children, child prostitution and the manufacture of child
abuse images. Her ﬁndings challenge many of the assumptions of the ritual
abuse literature, as well as those of its detractors. She suggests that the harm-
ful and traumatic experiences of ritually abused children are driven by routine
power-and-control relationships, such as those between a parent and a child,
and that their ritualistic abuse experiences should be seen in relation to a
wider picture of severe family dysfunction, psychopathology and isolation.

Gender, age and power in organised abuse

With few exceptions (see Kelly 1998; Scott 2001), gender is a neglected factor
in the literature on organised abuse. This is surprising, since research has
highlighted speciﬁc dynamics of gender and age in sexually abusive groups.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Speaking generally, the limited prevalence data available suggests that girls
are the primary targets of abusive groups (Wild and Wynne 1986, Wild
1989). In their study Gallagher and colleagues (1996) found that 45 per cent
of cases involved only the abuse of girls, and 24 per cent of cases involved
the abuse of boys and girls. Less than a third of cases involved the groups that
only targeted boys. In mental health settings, the overwhelming majority
of clients reporting histories of organised and ritualistic abuse are women
and girls (Coleman 1994, Scott 1993, Driscoll and Wright 1991, Shaffer
and Cozolino 1992, Creighton 1993). Some surveys of adults and children
reporting ritualistic abuse, or samples of cases of ritualistic abuse, do not
report on the gender of victims (Cook 1991, Snow and Sorenson 1990, Hudson

1990) which highlights the lack of priority afforded to gender in early inquir-
ies into ritual abuse.
Simple prevalence measures hint at, but do not provide, the full picture of
gender dynamics within organised abuse. Whilst higher numbers of victims
are often reported in cases of organised abuse in which boys are targeted, the
frequency, severity and period of abuse of each male victim is limited in com-
parison to circumstances in which girls are targeted, or where boys and girls
are targeted (Creighton 1993, Gallagher et al. 1996). In contrast, whilst fewer
victims are reported in cases of organised abuse involving the abuse of girls, or
girls and boys, the abuse is often more severe and prolonged (often involving
ritualistic abuse) (Gallagher et al. 1996, Creighton 1993). This pattern accords
with the different contexts in which boys and girls are vulnerable to organised
abuse, with boys primarily abused in extra-familial contexts and girls in intra-
familial contexts. Research on sexual abuse finds that familial abusers target
fewer victims, but subject them to more intensive and prolonged abuse, whilst
extra-familial abusers may abuse each victim only briefly but abuse higher
numbers of victims (Abel et al. 1987). It seems that this gendered pattern is
also present in relation to organised abuse.
Gallagher and colleagues’ (1996) research highlighted significant pat-
terns of bias in the identification and reporting of organised abuse cases that
has important gendered implications. When they compared survey responses
on organised abuse cases from police and social services to their case review
findings, they found that police and social workers under-reported familial
perpetrators and familial cases of organised abuse and over-reported cases of
organised abuse involving male victims. This accords with sexual abuse
research which finds that cases of incest and familial abuse (which predomi-
nantly involve girl victims) are under-represented in the criminal justice
system, which indicates that they are less likely to be detected and prosecuted
(Bagley and Pritchard 2000). Kelly (1996) suggests that extra-familial cases
of organised abuse are better recognised than familial organised abuse since
they conform to pre-existing assumptions about ‘paedophiles’ and ‘sex rings’.
It seems that the particular contexts in which girls are likely to be subject to
organised abuse, such as families, are under-recognised by the authorities and
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

less likely to be recorded appropriately even when investigated.

The duration of victimisation is an important distinguishing factor between
male and female victims of organised abuse. Whilst the organised abuse of
boys tends to cease in their early-to-mid teens, the organised abuse of girls
may be very prolonged and persist into adulthood. This is particularly the
case where ritual abuse is reported. Scott (1993) reported that, amongst the
191 who contacted a ritual abuse hotline in a 24-hour period,2 20 said that

2 Scott (1993) states that the helpline, available for 24 hours after a BBC programme on ritual
abuse was screened in Britain in 1992, was unable to cope with demand, registering 4,500
attempted calls in the ﬁrst hour of operation.

they were subject to ongoing abuse. Only three of these 20 callers were male,
and female callers reporting a history of ritualistic abuse outnumbered men
by a ratio of 2:1. The number of victims in cases of organised abuse is there-
fore only one measure of the severity of the abusive activity and may provide
a misleading picture of the gendered dynamics of organised abuse. Other
relevant indices include the age of abuse initiation, the diversity, severity and
frequency of the abusive acts, and the period of time that a victim was subject
to organised abuse. The evidence suggests that, whilst abusive groups that
preferentially target male victims may abuse higher numbers of children,
those groups that victimise girls or boys and girls subject children to more
intensive, frequent and prolonged victimisation, including the victimisation
of some girl children into adulthood.
There is one gendered issue that has been widely remarked upon in relation
to organised abuse, and that is the disproportionate participation of women
as perpetrators in organised contexts. This phenomenon was first noted in
day-care cases of organised abuse in the United States (Finkelhor and Williams
1988, Waterman et al. 1993) and it has also been reported in surveys of
adult survivors (Smith 1993, Driscoll and Wright 1991) and in reports
from clinicians working with adults and children with histories of organised
abuse (Robinson et al. 1994, Motz 2008). Cases of organised abuse constitute,
in fact, a significant proportion of all detected cases of female sexual offending
against children. In Vandiver’s (2006) review of all female offenders identified
in the national FBI sexual abuse incident database in 2001, 46 per cent had
at least one co-offender. Of these women, 48 per cent had more than one
co-offender, and 7 per cent had ten or more co-offenders.
Faller (1987, 1995) documented the high level of mental illness, sub-
stance abuse and cognitive deficits amongst female sexual offenders, and
suggested that many of the women in her studies had been coerced into
sexually abusive behaviour by co-offending men. Her position that women’s
sexually abusive behaviour in organised contexts was frequently a product
of ‘male dominance’ (Faller 1987, 1995) is an atypically political account
of women’s involvement in organised abuse. Simplistic readings of reports
of women as perpetrators of organised abuse has prompted the claim that
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

gender is irrelevant to the perpetration of organised abuse (eg Tomison 1995),

and some survivors have insisted that women were ‘as bad’ or worse than
male perpetrators (Scott 2001). This insistence may come, in part, from
the ways in women’s complicity or active participation in sexual abuse is
understood to breach hegemonic norms of femininity and motherhood (Peter
2006). The literature on ritual abuse, in particular, suggests that both
men and women who abuse in such contexts have also been abused in child-
hood, just as they offend in adulthood – the archetype of the ‘predisposed’ or
‘intergenerational perpetrator’ described by Peter (2006).
The unspoken assumption in much of the relevant literature is that
women’s participation is organised abuse is produced under the same circum-
stances as men’s. At the very least, it seems that many therapists feel that

the difference between men’s and women’s involvement in organised abuse

is unimportant when conceptualising organised abuse as a whole. Scott’s
(2001) research challenges these assumptions. She noted that, whilst abusive
incidents may be orchestrated in a manner that ‘rendered women and men
equal in the pursuit of power and pleasure’ (Scott 2001: 130), the lives of
women in abusive groups described by her participants were characterised
by submission to the demands of husbands, fathers and other men. This sub-
mission was frequently achieved through violence and abuse. It seems that,
whilst abusive groups can involve both men and women, their roles and expe-
riences are not equivalent. The evidence suggests that organised abuse is a
form of abuse in which women’s reasons for abusing children may be very dif-
ferent from those of their male co-offenders.

Conclusion
The emergence of cases of organised abuse in the 1980s posed several chal-
lenges to the accepted wisdom of psychiatrists, police officers and other
authoritative voices on sexual abuse. The diverse configurations of victims,
perpetrators, contexts and abuses in organised abuse cases defied easy cate-
gorisation and explanation. Some child and adult survivors described experi-
ences of florid and excessive violence, such as ritual abuse, that appeared
inexplicable and unimaginable. The most rigorous efforts to explain organ-
ised abuse to date have involved comparison between statistical or descriptive
‘snapshots’ of cases in a search for discrete patterns, which has yielded pro-
vocative similarities between the contexts in which cases of organised abuse
emerge and the patterns of abuses reported by survivors. This chapter has
grouped the available data on organised abuse under four key categories –
network, institutional, familial and ritual – that have emerged from these
statistical studies in order to clarify the available evidence base and highlight
important similarities between cases.
These categories highlight the diversity of contexts in which organised
abuse emerges and the ways that common arrangements within families,
institutions and communities can be co-opted for sexual abuse. They provide
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

a useful way of conceptualising and grouping cases of organised abuse

although it is important to note that experiences of victimisation or perpe-
tration can elude categorisation according to particular kinds or settings of
abuse.
A victim may be exposed to multiple sexually abusive groups who are
interconnected through a web of relations between perpetrators, who may be
relatives, friends, associates, procurers and clients, between whom children
are circulated as a form of capital in the generation of proﬁt, pleasure or
status depending on the context (Itzin 2001). Relations between perpetrators
may form due to a shared interest in sexually abusing children, as appears to
be the case in ‘network’ abuse, but in familial and institutional settings the

organised abuse of children can develop as part of a culture of power, violence

and fear.
There is considerable variation between cases of organised abuse, however
underlying their differences are a set of linkages between gender, power
and abuse that have often been neglected in the literature. The following
chapter aims to examine the cultural and historical context to these linkages
by highlighting how violence and transgression have come to play an impor-
tant role in modern understandings of male sexuality. The association of
masculinity with sexual aggression is often taken for granted in discussions
of sexual offences but it will be argued that this association is an histori-
cally contingent one with important consequences for our understanding of
organised abuse.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

The historical context

Liberalism, libertinism and ideologies
of masculine sexuality

In his experience as a sex researcher, Plummer (2010: 167) wonders at the

‘strange subterranean worlds’ and sexual subcultures that are nestled within
‘everyday community life’. He suggests that sexual subcultures often provide
novel alternative readings of the dominant culture, parodying social roles
and symbols and imbuing the hypocrisies or excesses of the social order with
an erotic charge. Similarly, this chapter takes an historical and cultural view
on organised abuse and examines the ways in which organised abuse elabo-
rates upon normative power differentials between men, women and children.
In particular, the chapter is concerned with the sexual underpinnings of lib-
eral democracies and the ways in which traditional liberal theory relegated
women and children to the status of lesser subjects or even objects that fall
under the ‘natural’ dominion on men. Liberal theory has furnished modern
democracies and the civil rights movement with the crucial theoretical frame-
works of rights, consent and equality but it is marked by a set of contradic-
tions in relation to the subordinate status of children and women. These
contradictions have served as the focal point around which fantasies of
domination, control and even destruction have converged, and these fantasies
over time have come to inform the widespread conceptualisation of masculine
sexuality as a predatory and sadistic instinct.
By examining the continuity of ideologies of masculine sexual sadism
from the 18th century to the present day, this chapter seeks to identify the
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

social conditions for the emergence of organised abuse and to consider the
cultural resources that perpetrators draw on to construct a sense of self through
their conduct. That liberalism emerged from within, and was reﬂective of,
a misogynist cultural tradition is well-recognised by feminist historians and
political philosophers (Pateman 1988, Thornton 1990), however the manner
in which the gendered underpinnings of liberalism were reworked within
libertinism is less acknowledged. This chapter will focus on the work of
the Marquis de Sade because it is in his literature the eroticisation of modern
masculine privilege is formally enshrined within a philosophy of sexual
cruelty. His work describes the practices of sadistic and ritualistic abuse,
the simultaneous abuse of women as well as children and sometimes men,

the wearing of uniforms during abuse and other features commonly reported
by survivors of organised abuse (Goodwin 1994b). Clear linkages are evident
in the work of Sade between liberal notions of freedom, individuality and
choice and the sexual exploitation of children and women. Through an analy-
sis of his work, this chapter aims to illuminate the role of sadistic sexualised
violence in the context of historical and contemporary masculinities. Whilst
much has changed since the time of Sade, many of the same social and
economic structures that perpetuate gender inequality persist, and hence the
libertine eroticisation of such inequities continue to resonate for some men in
contemporary society.

Ideologies of masculine sadism

A recent Australian online newspaper article (Sheehan 2011) questioning
the routine quality of men’s sexually coercive behaviour prompted an online
comment that illustrates the investment that many men have in claiming a
prerogative for physical and sexual predation:

Men are hunters. We are predators. We are excited by the thrill of con-
quest and victory. It’s how we are wired. Sexual conquest means a greater
chance of passing on your genes.
There’s nothing wrong with this unless it’s criminal. The only people
that have a problem with it are those who don’t have game (and are intim-
idated) and those that would seek to repress men.

In this comment, the reader suggests that sexual activity represents men’s
‘conquest’ of women and a ‘victory’ in a battle between the sexes. The posses-
sive plural ‘we’ positions the author and other men as sexual ‘hunters’ fuelled
by a genetic compulsion. By implication, women are either passive objects to
be acted upon by men or else they are ‘prey’ whose sexual engagement with
men is limited to ﬂight or submission. The author suggests that the only
people who would disagree with the logic of his sexual Darwinism are lesser-
status men ‘who don’t have game’ and are intimidated by him, or ‘those that
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

would seek to repress men’, ie feminists or women out of step with the natural
order he describes.
This enmeshment of masculine self-aggrandisement with fantasies of
sexual domination reflects the underlying sentiments of numerous television
shows, films and other cultural productions. The modern media consumer
is continually exposed to atavistic representations of male heterosexuality in
which violence or criminality are framed as primordially masculine accom-
plishments (Salter and Tomsen 2012). In both the academic and ‘pop’ variants
of psychology and criminology, violent men have been understood to suffer
from an ‘overflow’ or surplus of masculinity or testosterone, a substance that
has come to take on mythical gendered properties in the social imagination.

Hence violent men are reviled as uncontrolled deviants in some circumstances

(particularly, as the comment above suggests, when their violence breaks
the law) and admired as paragons of masculine irrepressibility in others such
as during war and sport, when violence is legally sanctioned, or in other
circumstances where coercion is considered socially legitimate and indeed
inevitable, eg the sexual ‘hunt’ of women.
This link between masculinity and sadism is so ubiquitous in Western
cultures that it often goes unnoticed, insinuating itself into common reason-
ing by virtue of its taken-for-granted status. Various provocation defences
in the criminal justice system accept the logic that men are burdened with
an instinct for physical and sexual aggression and their capacity for restraint
rests on a hair trigger that is activated by, for example, a short skirt in the
case of rape, a sexual insult in the case of domestic violence and homicide,
or a come-on in the case of anti-homosexual assault and murder. However,
the ideology of masculine sadism does not describe a ‘natural’ fact but
rather a historically contingent construction of masculine sexuality inti-
mately bound up with the social and economic order ushered in by urbanisa-
tion, industrialisation and modernisation. Sadism, as Foucault (1964: 210)
observed, ‘is not a name ﬁnally given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive
cultural fact which appeared at the end of the eighteenth century’. As the
following sections will show, it is in this historical shift that the roots of con-
temporary organised abuse can be found, alongside other forms of gendered
violence that are enabled and even encouraged by the social conditions of
modernity.

Liberalism, gender and sexual violence

Organised abuse, like all forms of child sexual abuse, occurs most often in the
spaces of childhood that are designated in liberal democracies as ‘private’
spaces such as the home, or in sites such as schools and residential institutions
that are neither wholly ‘private’ nor fully ‘public’. The ‘private’ sphere has
been idealised in liberal thought as a space apart from the regimes of law
that regulate life in the polis and the world of business and politics. In this
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

space, men have been empowered in liberal democracies to pursue personal

fulﬁlment, whether spiritual, emotional or sexual, with limited state interfer-
ence (although with notable exceptions, eg homosexuality). Founding liberal
philosophers such as Rousseau assumed that men enjoyed a natural dominion
over women, who were considered constitutionally unsuited to the rigors
of ‘public’ life whilst perfectly formed for domestic labour and childrearing
(Pateman 1988). The maximisation of the happiness of men, according to
liberal theory, has involved providing men with the greatest freedom to
arrange their familial and intimate relations in whatever manner they wish,
and the wellbeing of children and women within such arrangements have
been a secondary consideration.

Feminist critics have argued that, since liberal thought was formulated in
the 18th century, the figure of the liberal ‘citizen’ has been gender-neutral
in principle but masculine in practice, and many of the ‘rights’ and protec-
tions accorded to him have not been extended to children and women
(MacKinnon 1989, Pateman 1988, Smart 1991). Pateman (1988) has argued
that liberalism legitimised a social and legal regime whereby men were
compensated for their subjection to the demands of state authority in ‘public’
life with the crafting of a zone of impunity around homes populated by women
and children over whom they exercised virtually untrammelled control. It is
nonetheless true that liberalism has provided a vocabulary of equality and
rights that would prove integral to subsequent women’s movements and other
civil rights movements. The liberal notion of an individual moral and agentic
subject (even an implicitly masculine one) created the foundation upon which
notions of sexual consent and other critical feminist concepts could be
advanced. However, the high rhetoric and abstractions of liberal theory have
legitimised the subordination of women to men through the operations of
institutions, such as the criminal justice system, whose legitimacy is founded
on liberal notions of justice and equality (MacKinnon 1989). Men’s crimes
against women and children have been persistently veiled as a mostly ‘private’
matter that is not a legitimate focus of the attention of ‘public’ agencies such
as the police or justice system.
Liberal thought was being formulated in the 18th century in the advent
of unprecedented urbanisation and industrialisation in Europe and North
America. This was an era of social and economic change that would profoundly
impact on gender relations. As relations of production were restructured to
form the nascent capitalist economy, established forms of artistocratic mascu-
linity based on lineage and honour gave way to constructions of masculinity
that reflected the new distribution of money and power: in particular, ‘bour-
geoise’ masculinities with a focus on professional expertise, and working-class
masculinities that emphasised masculine solidarity and homosociality (Cohen
1999, Liddle 1996). During this period, the gendering of work became less
flexible and more culturally prescribed, and women and children were increas-
ingly excluded from economic participation. Female idleness became a bour-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

geois ideal and the capacity to maintain a wife and children in the home the
mark of a successful and wealthy man. The notion that the lives of women and
children should be restricted to the ‘private’ sphere was simply untenable for
many of the poor and working class who were dependent on the income of all
family members, but it was an ideal that symbolised the increasingly gen-
dered nature of labour and income. Literature throughout the 18th and the
19th centuries extolled the ‘natural’ complementarity of men’s and women’s
roles within the spheres of public and private life, although such claims
prompted ﬁerce contestation from women’s advocates (Rendall 1999).
The gender-polarised social order legitimised by liberalism was inextrica-
bly bound up with a reconﬁguration of sexuality in ways that expressed and

reinforced women’s devaluation within the social order. As a family income

increasingly became understood as a male income, the work available for girls
and women was seasonal and piecemeal at best, or else involved domestic
service where physical abuse and sexual exploitation were commonplace
(Simpson 1987). Throughout the 18th century, there was a noticeable trend
towards marriage, and early marriage, since women had few prospects other
than unemployment and poverty without the economic support of a husband
(McKeon 1995). Wives and children had few protections against men who
chose to exercise their patriarchal prerogative through physical or sexual
abuse, or who squandered the family income on gambling and alcohol. Far
from signifying a ‘separate but equal’ division of social power, the ‘public-
private’ divide instead represents the mutually enforcing economic and emo-
tional complexities of masculine domination in the new capitalist order.
Within the prevailing liberal ethos, the economic marginalisation of women
was justiﬁed by an ideology of feminine gentility and incompetence and
the rise of a ‘cult of womanhood’ that valorised the obedient wife who was
virtuous by dint of her subordinate disposition (LeGates 1976).
The ethos of feminine domesticity in the 18th century, Cohen (1999)
suggests, coexisted alongside an emphasis on rough homosociality as a way
of establishing masculinity. The ‘obedient’ wife was just one manifestation
of masculine privilege. So too were the increasing numbers of prostitutes
and the pornography and erotica that circulated throughout the coffee
houses and men’s clubs of the era. The male sociability of the new ‘public’
sphere incorporated carnivalesque displays of heterosexual aggression in
a period in which understandings of consensual and coercive sex were
virtually indistinguishable from one another. In contrast to the more diffuse
modes of sexuality that preceded it, the sexual culture of the 18th century
celebrated penetrative heterosex as the sexual act par excellence and the
most basic expression of masculine attainment (Hitchcock 1996). In the
North American context, Sanday (1996) has documented increased reports
of urban gang rape during this period. Pornographic literature featured
women as passive objects who, through penetration, could be ‘taken’ or
‘possessed’ by men (Harvey 2004). Detectable in the pornography of the
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18th century was a theme of sadism and cruelty that had been largely
absent from the erotica of the preceding century (Simpson 1987). In the
18th century, the power differentials between men and women that had
become embedded within the division of labour within the capitalist econ-
omy, and the structures of power within the liberal state, were also intrinsic to
the prevailing structure of sexualisation in which masculine power and female
powerlessness was eroticised.
Children were not exempt from the processes of objectiﬁcation that had
become a normative element of masculine sexuality. The rape of a young
child was abhorred by the 18th-century public but there was considera-
ble ambiguity over the line of delineation between child and adult, and an

entrenched suspicion that behind the resistance of a girl or woman to sexual

coercion was concealed consent. Voltaire could decry the ‘deflowering of a
girl of 8’ in 1764 whilst maintaining that older girls and women were
culpable for their rape even when they violently fought with an attacker
(Vigarello 2001: 65). The value of ‘childhood’ in the 18th century was depend-
ent on its conformity to bourgeois ideals of ‘innocence’; that is to say, a lack
of worldly experience. Involvement in delinquency or work disqualified
many of the children of the poor and the working class from this definition
of ‘childhood’ and hence they could be considered fair game in the sexual
economy. In 18th-century France, sexually abused children as young as six or
seven were accused by judges of solicitation and active involvement in their
own abuse (Vigarello 2001: 85). The available historical literature suggests
that the prostitution of 12 or 13-year-old girls was common in 18th-century
England (Brewer and Bullough 2005) and specialised brothels were estab-
lished for clients with an interest in children below the age of 10 (Simpson
1987). A significant proportion of reports of rape involved victims younger
that 12 (Simpson 1987). The rape of a child was rationalised by perpetrators
as well as by the media and the courts according to a prevailing myth that sex
with a virgin could cure venereal disease, but Wolff (2005) argues that the
prevailing image of the ‘innocent’, vulnerable child may have encouraged
child sexual abuse in a culture that eroticised ‘deflowering’ the young and
vulnerable.
In the gender order of the 18th century, masculinity was associated with a
position of privilege in a sexual economy characterised by the objectification
and exchange of women’s bodies. With their entry into the labour market
vitiated by deep inequalities, women’s social and economic status was
determined primarily by the mode of exchange of her sexual labour: through
marriage for ‘respectable’ women, and through prostitution for the impover-
ished or the unlucky. Whilst virtuous femininity was defined by the restric-
tion and exclusivity of sexual relations, the performance of authentic
masculinity could straddle both sides of the sexual economy: ‘respectable’
dominion over house and home alongside transgressive forays into prostitu-
tion, pornography and other sexual manifestations of women’s and children’s
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

powerlessness. Sexual appetite and aggression had become integral to the

maintenance of masculine identity and status, whilst the vulnerabilities
of children and women marked them as suitably disempowered objects for
the performance of masculinity. As the next section will discuss, these
performances took on structured and symbolic forms through the masculine
fraternities and clubs that proliferated during the 18th and 19th centuries.
In these clubs the philosophy of libertinism was born, in which the high-
minded ideals of rationality and liberty were bound to a predatory masculine
sexuality. It was in the context of libertinism that the symbolism of ritualistic
and sadistic sexual abuse was ﬁrst theorised as the righteous celebration of
masculine entitlement.

From liberalism to libertinism

The European and North American societies of the 18th century were not
sexually permissive by any means, however the diversity of human sexuality
was a topic of enduring interest and a key point of resistance to the authority
of church and state. Intellectual circles pointed to the sexual practices of ancient
paganism and ‘exotic’ foreign cultures to construct a new history of sexuality.
They argued that European sexual prohibitions were the arbitrary impositions
of a corrupt priesthood and that sexual expression, rather than sinful or amoral,
was conducive to wellbeing and social harmony. This linkage between irreli-
gion, sensual pleasure and self-realisation formed the basis of the writing and
philosophy of the libertines, whose advocacy of hedonism was designed to both
shock and liberate (Turner 1987). Libertinism drew on the hedonist tendencies
of Enlightenment philosophy which proposed that pleasure and happiness
were the ultimate grounds of morality and the ends that human beings natu-
rally pursue. However, as Rousseau and Porter (1987: 3) observed, ‘the more
sexual desire was installed as the hub and premium mobile of the “moral
order”, the more that order became amoral and immoral’. By the 18th century,
the broad church of libertinism came to harbour extremes of sexual nihilism in
which masculine erotic sadism was writ large as a universal, metaphysical prin-
ciple. The prerogative of masculine dominion over women and children, as
imagined in liberal philosophy, was mythologised by the libertines as a right
of sexual access to women and children, upon whose bodies could be written
the ﬁction of transcendental selfhood (Cameron and Frazer 1987).
Developing a historical genealogy of libertine discourse and behaviour
is complicated by a number of factors, including (a) the secrecy of libertine
groups and fraternities and hence the scarcity of reliable historical records
of libertine activities, (b) the intertwining of fact, ﬁction and exaggeration in
moralistic attacks on libertinism, and (c) the ways in which libertine princi-
ples and convictions are presented through parodies and satires of prevailing
hypocrisies over sex and gender. Turner (1987) points to the varieties of uses
of the term ‘libertinism’ since the 18th century and emphasises that libertin-
ism does not describe a coherent ideological programme or canon. However,
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common to the various postures and attitudes associated with libertinism is

the simultaneous glorification of sexuality and the mocking of established
conventions, including religion, in the pursuit of masculine self-realisation.
Whilst trading in abstractions such as fraternity, liberty and happiness, liber-
tine philosophy was realised and embodied in the sexual objectification and
dehumanisation of women and girls, through whom sensual pleasure was
generated and religious morality was flouted. Whilst their anti-clericism
and republican spirit were genuine, it also served to rationalise acts of sexual
domination and to mythologise the masculine solidarity that was generated
through the subordination of women and girls, intertwining misogyny and
sexual coercion with lofty ideals of rationality and liberty.

This was an ethos embedded within many of the private men’s clubs
and orders that proliferated throughout 18th-century Europe and North
America (Lord 2008). They have been celebrated by Habermas (1989) for
their pursuit of reason and free thinking, but some of these clubs were
fervently libertine in ﬂavour, engaging prostitutes, other women and one
another in sexual rituals. Koselleck’s (1988) view of these clubs and orders
is that they were the hypocritical construct of an emerging social class of
bourgeoisie that obscured their shared class interests by laying claim simulta-
neously to Enlightenment ‘reason’ and occult ‘mystery’. Such an argument
can be extended to the gender politics of these fraternities, in which sexual
performance and the objectiﬁcation of women served as a practice of solidarity
between ‘brothers’. Deneys (1991) suggests that the sexual economy of liber-
tinism had many parallels with the emerging capitalist economy in which
women featured as a form of capital to be exchanged between men, producing
value in the process through sexual ‘conquest’ and other badges of masculine
honour. The fraternal orders and clubs provided important forums in which
free discussion of atheism and resistance to Church control and state hypocrisy
could take place but this privileged anti-authoritarianism harboured an ethos
in which masculine self-identity could be found through coercive sex and
transgression.

The Marquis de Sade and libertine excess

The nihilistic overtones of libertine sexuality would ﬁnd their greatest
advocate and systematiser in the Marquis de Sade, the French nobleman
and philosopher whose surname was adopted by Krafft-Ebing a century after
his death to label the eroticisation of violence as ‘sadism’. Since Kraft-Ebbing,
psychiatrists and sexologists have argued that sadistic behaviour is evidence
of a sexual pathology. However, Sade’s philosophy of sexual cruelty describes
the social and cultural rather than biological origins of transgressive and
violent masculine sexuality. In novels such as Justine, or the Misfortunes of
Virtue, Juliette and The 120 Days of Sodom, Sade described a ‘private’ sphere
replete with the coercion and violence otherwise understood as characteristics
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of ‘public’ conﬂict. His work is a searing expose of a gendered hierarchy

characterised by masculinist aristocratic and ecclesiastic privilege on one hand
and the inequities of the developing capitalist order on the other (Carter
1979). According to Sade, women and girls in such conditions are faced
with two main choices: resist their subordinate position in the natural order
and endure the abuse and violence which is their lot, or ally themselves with
their abusers in an effort to gain some status and ameliorate the harm inflicted
upon them.
Whilst his libertine contemporaries opposed conventional religious
morality, Sade wrote fiction and philosophy that flouted and inverted
religious doctrine in accordance with a nihilistic teleology in which violence

and murder are intrinsic to the ‘natural’ cycle of creation and destruction
(Airaksinen 1995). He proposed that there should be no inhibitions to sensual
pleasure nor should there be any discrimination between sexual impulses.
Sexual violence was celebrated by Sade as a human manifestation of natural
forces, and hence it is the prerogative of the Sadeian hero to cultivate a prin-
cipled indifference to the suffering of the victims of his pursuit of sensual
pleasure. It is in the pornographic philosophical treatises of Sade that the
deﬁning elements of organised child sexual abuse ﬁrst appear in the historical
record. His works frequently describe groups of men who enslave children and
women and subject them to organised, sadistic and ritualistic abuse with dis-
turbing parallels to contemporary reports. For Goodwin (1994a: 483–4), Sade
describes ordeals that are not just similar to those described by children and
adults with histories of ritualistic abuse, but rather they are virtually identical
in structure and detail:

To mention a few: locking in cages, threatening with death, burying

in cofﬁns, holding under water, threatening with weapons, drugging
and bleeding, tipping upside down and burning, wearing of robes
and costumes, staging of mock marriages, defecating and urinating on
victims, killing of animals, having victims witness torture, having them
witness homicides, pouring or drinking of blood, and taking victims to
churches and cemeteries.

The only contemporary element missing in Sade’s account of organised

and ritualistic abuse, Goodwin (1994a: 484) notes, is the manufacture of child
pornography, however, ‘its place is taken by use of peepholes and uses of stages
at the orgies, where each libertine could be seen to perform with his entourage
of victims’. She suggests that contemporary reports of ritualistic abuse are
neither unprecedented nor inexplainable, as sceptics suggest, nor are they
evidence of underground ‘cults’ or a trans-historical ‘Satanic’ tradition. Instead,
it seems that cases of ritualistic abuse may be evidence of the persistence of
the libertine notion of the male sexual prerogative which is derived from the
historical patterning of gender relations and the associated practices of group
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

sexual violence and ritualistic abuse.

Goodwin (1994b) is not the only contemporary commentator to highlight
the similarities between the philosophy of sexual cruelty espoused by Sade’s
heroes and modern reports of sexual violence. Cameron and Frazer (1987)
argue that the Sadean construction of masculine sexuality in terms of violent
transcendence over others has come to permeate the cultural order, informing
the conduct of serial killers who have found power and pleasure in the murder
of the weak and the vulnerable. In serial killer Ian Brady’s (2001) published
account of his crimes and motivations, he articulates a philosophy of sexual
murder that draws explicitly on the work of Sade. Caputi (1988) gathered

reports from soldiers and murderers recounting the ‘godlike’ experience of

power and control they experienced in the conduct of sexual atrocities that
have many similarities to the pretensions of Sade’s characters. In Sanday’s
(2007) study of gang rapes by university fraternities, she documented how
the bond shared by initiated ‘brothers’, and perpetuated by the tradition of
the ‘train’ or gang rape of vulnerable women, was encoded through secretive
ritual practices and esoteric religious mysteries. In a riposte that could have
been torn directly from the pages of Sade, one fraternity ‘brother’ reflected
how, through initiation into the fraternity, members came to feel they were
the ‘masters of life’ because they knew its ‘tiny, black, hollow core’ (Sanday
2007: 163).
The contemporary ‘management’ of sexual offences is beset with distinc-
tions between sex offences on the basis of age, gender and particular forms of
sexual behaviour. Sade presents an entirely different configuration of sexual
crime and one that more closely mirrors cases of organised abuse. Sade did
not distinguish between the abuse of a girl or the abuse of a woman, nor
did he delineate between ritual, sadistic and sexual forms of abuse. Instead,
these practices interconnect with one another according to context and the
particular interests of the abuser; what they have in common is their utility
in the production of power and pleasure. The role of women in the perpetra-
tion of organised abuse has often been observed and, similarly, in Sade’s
books the positions of abused and abuser are not fixed by gender. Nonetheless,
the context of abuse remains ruled by the association of masculinity with
power and violence. Even where a woman can affect some respite from abuse
through establishing an alliance with her abusers, she only does so on the
terms set out by her abusers and her subordinate position within the gendered
hierarchy remains unchanged.
In contrast to the individualising and clinical accounts of sex offences
that dominate the modern scientific literature on sexual offences, Sade offers
a thoroughly sociological perspective. He contextualised the acts of organised
abuse that he described within a ‘black market’ of exploitation, abuse and
pain that is produced by, and inextricably bound up within, the gendered
structures of the free market, in which the economic and social privileging
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

of men ﬁnds expression through the debasement and enslavement of women

and children. The excesses of free market forces may be kept in check in
the ‘public’ sphere by the force of law and custom, but Sade reveals that,
behind the veil of ‘privacy’ lies a sexual marketplace red in tooth and claw.
He suggests that beneath the formal symbolic order of liberal theory and
its high-minded ideals are the profoundly unequal relations of power they
legitimate, and the sadistic drives and urges they produce. These tendencies
are evident not only in organised abuse but in a range of sexual atrocities
committed mostly by men against women and children in a hapless search for
the transcendental masculine identity celebrated by liberalism.

Sadean abuses in contemporary society

Ideologies can produce their own excesses as their explicit and implicit logics
are reworked, reinterpreted and deployed for reasons that appear, at first
glance, far removed from the rationalising tropes through which ideologies
legitimise themselves. This was well recognised by Marx and Engels, for
whom the contradictions of capitalism gave rise to unintended emotional and
psychological responses in the working classes that could be incorporated into
alternative visions of social and political life. Similarly, the patterns of affect
and sexuality that formed within early liberal democracies found articulation
within ideologies of libertinism and masculine sadism. Whilst libertine excess
appears, within a liberal framework of rights and justice, as a crime or aberra-
tion, it can be also understood as the eroticisation of the liberal presentation
of the ‘public-private’ divide and the gendered inequities therein.
Masculine privilege has come to be symbolised or signalled by a range of
libertine practices that, in contemporary society, continue to be deployed in
degrading ceremonies that reinforce gendered relations of domination and
subordination. The role of sacrilege and ritualistic abuse in the work of Sade
is comparable to its contemporary application in Abu Ghraib, where Muslim
captives in Iraq were terrorised by American soldiers who desecrated Islamic
scripture, forced them into proximity with taboo substances, raped and forced
them to engage in sexual acts with one another. In this process, the frame-
works of meaning and interpretation supported by religious ideology were
systematically destroyed and replaced by the basic principle of the supremacy
of power and the domination of the weak by the strong. This is the ideological
truth asserted by Sade, who describes sex on coffins in crypts, the penetration
of orifices with crucifixes and a range of other blasphemies also reported in
cases of organised abuse. In these acts, the worldview of the victim is decon-
structed and remade according to the view of the torturer, who integrates
culturally potent symbols into the production of pain and horror to inscribe a
visceral sense of degradation and shame upon the victim.
In Sade’s world, this shame is emancipatory in that it reveals the ‘natural’
state of human affairs and thus enables the victim to eschew the false con-
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structs of virtue that had previously consigned them to subordination. In

many regards, Sade’s depiction accords with the fantasies of perpetrators of
torture and abuse who, by coercing their victims into compliance and
even perpetration, come to believe that their victims ‘want’, ‘deserve’ or ‘need’
their abuse and are all the stronger for it. In organised abuse, just as in
Abu Ghraib, this process is associated with masculinist hierarchies in which
women may be co-opted into performances of degradation and humiliation,
but nonetheless their ritualistic and sadistic practices signify the designation
of the ‘weak’ and feminine from the masculine and masterful.
The similarities between military torture and organised abuse have been
noted elsewhere (Golston 1993a, Golston 1993b, Kelly 2000), however the

notion that the ‘private’ sphere might harbour torture of a degree comparable
to those inflicted in the context of ‘public’ war and conflict is frequently dis-
missed out of hand. Abu Ghraib has gone down in infamy despite the best
efforts of the American military and government to keep it secret because the
‘public’ contexts of such abuses are amenable to documentation and investiga-
tion in ways that the ‘private’ spaces of organised abuse are not. Importantly,
Abu Ghraib occurred in the ‘East’ rather than the ‘West’, the global ‘South’
rather than the ‘North’; in short, in an area of the world designated as a ‘zone
of fear’ by Western governments and media agencies. Colonialist ideologies of
racial barbarism and primitivism facilitate (and even encourage) the identifi-
cation of violence and sadism in developing countries, which are constructed
by Western media and authorities as lawless and risky in contrast to the ‘zones
of safety’ within the ‘civilised’ West (Ignatieff 1998). Žižek (1994) describes
how, during the Balkan conflict, Western journalists competed with one
another to provide images of ‘lacerated child bodies, raped women’ as ‘fodder
for hungry Western eyes’. Implicitly, these images delineated the savage
Balkan ‘other’ from the normal Western citizen. The unbearable fact, he
suggests, is that ‘there is no difference’, and that the efforts of citizens of Sarajevo
to ‘maintain the appearance of normal life’ in the midst of war have many
parallels with our own efforts to ‘live in the fiction of peace’ (p 2).
Within the ‘discourse of disbelief’ (Scott 2001) that has developed around
organised abuse and ritualistic abuse, there is an assumption that such exces-
sive abuses are alien to the ‘civilised’ Western world. In many regards this
mirrors the hegemonic view of ‘global difference’, defined by Connell (2007)
as the ‘difference between the civilisation of the metropole and other cultures
whose main feature was their primitiveness’. However, the rape, torture and
evisceration of women and children are not ‘primitive’ practices foreign to
‘first world’ nations. Child abuse images categorised on the COPINE scale1
as ‘category 10’, meaning that they depict the sexual torture of children (eg
the child is subject to sadistic abuse or forced into sexual contact with an
animal) circulate on the internet (Taylor et al. 2001). There is a group of child
sex offenders who fantasise about torturing and murdering children, with one
pornographic magazine intercepted in the 1980s stating that ‘All the great
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extremes – genital torture, forced unlubricated rape, butchering – reach

their pinnacle when the victim is a small child’ (quoted in Tate 1990). The
author of this magazine, Peter Sotos, was convicted of child pornography

1 The COPINE scale is a rating system, developed by staff at the Combating Paedophile
Information Networks in Europe (COPINE) project, that categorises the severity of child
abuse images. The COPINE scale rates child abuse images from 1–10, which 10 being the
most extreme category. A simpliﬁed scale from 1–5, based on the COPINE scale, was devel-
oped by the UK Sentencing Panel and is widely used in the Australian criminal justice
system (see Grifﬁth and Simon 2008).

offences but his subsequent writings on child torture and murder have
attracted a cult following led by novelist Dennis Cooper who has bemoaned
the failure to recognise Sotos’ work as ‘significant contemporary literature’.2
Throughout the 20th century, the depiction of illicit sadistic sexuality
in ‘high’ as well as ‘low’ culture has been viewed as a courageous ‘unveiling’
of a fundamental truth about human life (Kramer 1997). Caputi (1988: 30)
notes that sexual violence is frequently mythologised as ‘some mysterious
force of nature, the expression of deeply repressed “human” urges, a fact of
life, a supernatural evil, a monstrous aberration – anything but the logical
and eminently functional product of the system of male domination’. However,
in the reification of male sexual violence into a universal, ahistorical ‘truth’
the line between representation and enactment is unclear. In an interview
in which Sotos described his interest in ‘extreme sexual violence and sadism’,
he assured the interviewer he had found ways to ‘enjoy their pleasures
without getting my hands ostentatiously dirty’ (Tate 1990: 170). In the recent
British investigation into child sexual abuser Roger Took, the police uncov-
ered internet chat logs in which Took described his participation in the gang
rape and murder of a child in Cambodia with such frequency and consistency
that the authorities treated the incident as a potential fact (Metcalf 2008).
However, police were unable to ascertain whether the murder described by
Took had taken place and instead he was prosecuted for child pornography
offences and sexual offences against his stepdaughters.
The similarities between high-minded representations of sexual violence
and the actual practices of some perpetrators suggests that brutality and
sadism, far from being an exotic characteristic of developing countries,
are instead symptomatic of entrenched associations between power, masculin-
ity and violence in Western culture (Kramer 1997). However, when such
violence is reported to have occurred in developed countries this linkage
is denied and instead the crime is framed as an aberration and explained
according to the particular psychological or developmental characteristics
of the offender. Kelly (2000) contests the de-politicisation of serious physical
and sexual violence against women and children in Western countries.
Drawing on a gendered lens, she has highlighted the political significance
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

of the commonalities between reports of sadistic sexual violence in armed

conﬂict and those alleged to occur in organised abuse:

What is being enacted in most of these settings are reinforcements of

the primacy of relationships between men, and the accompanying
subordination of women which underpins male supremacy. Men afﬁrm
one another as men through the exclusion, humiliation and objectiﬁca-
tion of women. What we need to explore in more depth is whether any

2 see http://denniscooper.blogspot.com/2006/07/peter-sotos-day.html.

hierarchical grouping of men, organised as men, creates conditions in

which coercive heterosexuality is promoted and enacted. These groupings
would include sports teams, private clubs, gangs, secret societies as well
as the military.
(Kelly 2000: 57)

The fact that women and children frequently present in mental health
settings in developed countries with trauma-related psychological problems
of a dimension comparable to survivors of ethnic cleansing or prisoners-of-war
challenges the taken-for-granted assumption that atrocity and torture are
activities restricted to ‘public’ political conﬂict overseas (Herman 1992).
It would seem that the politics of gender produces its own atrocities and
torturers. However, hegemonic liberal idealisations of the ‘private’ sphere
as an idyll free from the troubles of ‘public’ life, and ‘West’ as free from the
barbarism of developing countries, obscures the politics of gender, and the
intensiﬁcation of the powerlessness of women and children by acts of abject
and terrifying violence.
Abusive groups are not foolish. They do not operate in ‘public’ spaces where
they will be subject to the panopticon of legal surveillance and regulation.
Instead, they have colonised the ‘private’ spaces in which men have long
enjoyed legal impunity for the physical and sexual abuse of children and
women. Cooper et al. (2006) argue that the ‘private’ spaces of the home and
family serve in effect as a ‘parallel state’ operating within the nation state in
which sexually abusive men can construct their own regimes of abuse, control
and terror with little risk of detection. Despite the reforms of recent decades,
signs of the persistence of children’s and women’s powerlessness can be read in
the continuing prevalence of sexual abuse, sexual assault and domestic vio-
lence, and the obstacles that children and women experience in trying to make
these ‘private’ crimes ‘public’. The eroticisation of this powerlessness is what
creates the impetus for organised abuse and, indeed, the other manifestations
of the libertine ‘tradition’ in which sexual coercion and aggression serves as the
foundation of claims to masculine status. Behind the latticework of analytic
binaries that demarcate ‘public’ from ‘private’, ‘civilised’ from ‘barbaric’ and
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

so forth is a cultural continuum of eroticised sadism. This continuum persists,

in no small way, due to a collective investment in prereﬂexive norms and
values that simultaneously denies the seriousness of gendered violence in
developed countries whilst crafting ‘private’ spaces in which women and
children can by battered, raped and even murdered by men upholding the
masculine entitlement they have come to understand as their right.

Conclusion
By identifying its historical antecedents, this chapter argues that organised
abuse is a product of a pervasive ideology of masculine sadism through which

men ﬁnd solidarity with one another through acts of collective sexual vio-
lence. In the examination of libertinism, it is clear that historical continuity
is important in understanding coercive as well as consensual sexualities
and sexual cultures. The forms of domination, control and violence on display
in organised abuse are a particular arrangement of cultural material and sym-
bols with an established historical association with violent endorsements
of masculine privilege. This is not to say that the conﬁguration of these
associations has not changed in 300 years, or that they are employed in the
same way today by all the men who seek to embody them. Acknowledging
the impact of feminism on gender relations, Frosh (2002) provocatively asks
whether gendered violence in contemporary society should be understood as
both an expression of male power and as a ‘retreat’ by men faced by the decen-
tring of once taken-for-granted privilege. The practices of organised abuse
today may therefore have a range of different connotations today than they
had in the past. Nonetheless, the emergence of new cases of organised abuse,
and their similarities to abuses described 300 years ago suggest that the prac-
tice of sadism still retains its potent associations with masculine power and
privilege, even as the political economy of masculine power shifts and
changes.
If the liberalism and libertinism of the 18th century serves as a useful blue-
print for contemporary misogyny and its excessive violence against children
and women, then it may also offer tools for challenging and undermining
this violence. Sociological research has revealed the interactions of multiple
competing masculinities including anti-hegemonic masculinities that explic-
itly reject dominant narratives of male sexual aggression (see Connell 1995).
Power and resistance are intimately linked according to Foucault (1979),
and efforts to ‘naturalise’ male sexual aggression have prompted their own
counter-formations and alternatives. Furthermore, it is clear from the prac-
tices of consensual sadomasochists that the eroticisation of power differentials
can be ‘read’ against the grain of the gendered status quo in ways that are
experienced as subversive, emancipatory and liberating, playing with rather
than reinforcing gender roles and tropes. So just as liberalism has institution-
alised gendered inequities whilst providing succor and inspiration to women’s
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movements, libertinism can both intensify and subvert relations of domina-

tion and subordination. The question of how we can re-imagine these poten-
tials is beyond the scope of this book, but it is an important one. By locating
the historical origins of organised abuse, we can move beyond the limitations
of contemporary understandings of sexual abuse to identify the broader cul-
tural linkages between organised child abuse, violence against women and
structures of gender and power. However, as the following chapter will show,
these linkages give rise to processes of invalidation, denial and disbelief that
camouﬂage the very abuses that they enable.

Organised abuse and the

pleasures of disbelief

In the 1980s and 1990s, the most proliﬁc and widely read literature on
organised abuse was written by sceptical journalists and academics who
referred to the phenomenon, almost uniformly, as ‘satanic ritual abuse’.
Clinical and therapeutic literature preferred terms such as ‘organised abuse’,
‘sadistic abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’ but sceptics insisted that these terms were
just euphemisms for ‘satanic ritual abuse’ and outrageous allegations of satanic
rituals, cannibalism and human sacriﬁce. This argument has been repeated
with such enthusiasm in the press that it is no exaggeration to suggest that
scepticism is the dominant mode through which allegations of organised
abuse came to public attention. The public has been repeatedly warned
that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ has been the obsession of ‘witch hunters’ since the
Middle Ages, and that this melodrama is being repeated today by a coalition
of social actors driven by a puritanical desire to impose their conservative,
authoritarian agenda upon society. This chapter seeks not only to question the
accuracy of this representation but also to highlight its ideological formation
within social movements for people accused of sexual abuse.
The previous chapter explored an undercurrent in the social construction
of masculine sexuality, in which the free expression of sexuality was under-
stood as a social good linked to notions of freedom, liberty and the natural
order. However, in the 1980s revelations about the frequency of child sexual
abuse have brought to light previously unacknowledged dimensions of mas-
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culine sexual coerciveness, which in turn destabilised common presumptions

about the benevolence of masculine sexuality and power. This chapter will
focus on the efforts of social movements to close over this breach by constru-
ing women and children disclosing sexual abuse, and the professionals who
supported them, as a threat to the social order. Allegations of ‘satanic ritual
abuse’ were presented as evidence that feminist and/or Christian ‘zealots’ had
inﬁltrated the child protection sector and mental health services and, moti-
vated by a hysterical antipathy to ‘male sexuality’, were coercing children and
women concocting outrageous allegations against innocent men. This was
presented as an unprecedented crisis in which all men were vulnerable to vili-
ﬁcation or prosecution on the basis of a false accusation of sexual abuse.

This chapter will draw on Žižek’s (1991) insights into enjoyment as a

political factor to untangle the enmeshment of ideology and emotion within
the sceptical account of ‘satanic ritual abuse’. Blaming therapy, social work
and other caring professions for the confabulation of testimony of ‘satanic
ritual abuse’ legitimated a programme of political and social action designed
to contest the gains made by the women’s movement and the child protection
movement. In efforts to characterise 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 legitimised by a pseudo-
scientific vocabulary of ‘false memories’ and ‘moral panic’ but as Daly (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 mobilise ‘progressive’
as well as ‘conservative’ sympathies for men accused of serious sexual offences
and against the needs of victimised women and children. This chapter
argues that, underlying the invocation of often contradictory rationalising
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 cathar-
tic release of sentiments and views about children and women that had other-
wise 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
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rearticulated and reasserted at the very time that evidence of widespread and
serious child sexual abuse has been consolidating.

The rise of the ‘false memory’ movement

Since the 1960s, health and welfare workers and feminists have successfully
challenged the view of medical and legal authorities that sexual abuse was
a rare and not necessarily harmful act in which children share responsibil-
ity with adults. The implications of this new paradigm were considerable,
involving a shift away from the discursive power of the traditionally mascu-
line disciplines of medicine and law and towards the standpoint of the

primary objects of sexual victimisation; that is to say, women and children.

Disclosures of sexual abuse began to be considered authentic representations
of lived experience in therapeutic contexts, the media and the criminal justice
system. Prior to this period, the communicative contexts in which women
and children could disclose sexual abuse were few and heavily constrained. In
interpersonal as well as institutional settings (eg court rooms or psychiatric
clinics), the denials of the accused were afforded considerably more weight
than the allegations of victimised children or women, which reﬂected the
broader social context in which the legal and political rights of women and
children were limited, and poorly protected, in comparison to men. Even
where the victim was believed, community disgust at sex offences often stig-
matised the victim as well as the offender. However, the opening up of new
and more sympathetic therapeutic spaces, and increasing media coverage
of sexual abuse, created alternative testimonial opportunities for victimised
children and women away from the medico-legal traditions that had trivial-
ised their accounts. This was a challenge not only to established expertise but
to the project of governmentality itself and the gender order that it legiti-
mises. Foucault (1964) had much to say about the ways in which psychiatric
categories have served the interests of governmental authorities but little to
say about the profoundly unequal distribution of power to men within such
arrangements. The privileging of women’s voices and expertise in public
debate on child sexual abuse was a direct challenge to this distribution of
power, and it was met by an extraordinary backlash that focused, to a signiﬁ-
cant degree, on allegations of organised abuse.
In the early 1990s, a group of people accused of sexual abuse formed
the ‘False Memory Syndrome Foundation’ (FMSF). The FMSF’s primary
goal was to advocate on behalf of parents accused of child sexual abuse by
their adult children, but the Foundation also became an important resource
centre for people accused of sexual abuse by minors. Importantly, the
Foundation attracted academics from a range of disciplines whose expertise
had been contested or challenged by the legitimisation of children’s and
women’s testimony of sexual abuse. A number of psychiatrists, psychologists
and other researchers aligned themselves with the Foundation, claiming that
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only the careful ‘scientiﬁc’ scrutiny afforded by their respective professions

could delineate ‘true’ from ‘false’ memories of sexual abuse. This was an argu-
ment that many took to the courtrooms as paid defence experts for people
accused of sexual abuse and other offences against children and women
(Whitﬁeld 2001), giving rise to an unusual body of academic literature that
presented the arguments of sexual abuse defence teams as scientiﬁc fact (Salter
2008).
With the support of these academics and clinicians, the Foundation
claimed to have discovered a new psychiatric condition called ‘False Memory
Syndrome’ at ‘epidemic proportions’ (Pope 1996: 957). This ‘syndrome’ pur-
ported to describe an illness created by false memory induction either through

active therapeutic malpractice or due to a widespread ‘moral panic’ or ‘sexual

hysteria’ about child abuse. This heady mix of psychological and sociological
theory gave signiﬁcant credibility to the ‘false memory’ societies that other
advocacy groups for people accused of sexual abuse had lacked. By the mid-
1990s, ‘false memory’ societies had been established throughout North
America, Europe, Australia and other Western countries. As a social move-
ment, the ‘false memory’ societies formed an aggressive and effective advocacy
coalition that provided the media with compelling narratives of families dev-
astated by accusations of child sexual abuse (Kitzinger 1998). These narratives
proved inﬂuential in academic and media debates over allegations of child
sexual abuse. Journalists and researchers sympathetic to the ‘false memory’
position warned that any man could be subject to a false allegation, risking
prosecution and imprisonment in a criminal justice system that was charac-
terised as riddled with injustices. During this period, the sympathy that
had been evident in media coverage of sexual abuse victims since the late
1970s began to evaporate (Beckett 1996).

The construction of ‘satanic ritual abuse’

The ‘false memory’ movement lacked the empirical evidence to prove that,
as they claimed, many allegations of sexual abuse were the product of cog-
nitive errors and widespread psychotherapeutic malpractice. Instead, they
fed media controversies over allegations of ritualistic abuse in an attempt to
suggest the existence of an ‘epidemic’ of suggestibility and unprofessional
conduct in the mental health and child protection sectors. Kluft (1997: 33)
provides a summary of this strategy:

Groups purporting to speak for those who claim to have been falsely
accused of child abuse have found it useful to exploit the skepticism
surrounding alleged ritualized abuse as a starting point for their efforts to
demolish the credibility of those making more mundane accusations.
Their strategy has seemed geared to ﬁnding a straw-man target and then
initiating a domino effect that serves their agenda.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

In the 1980s, some (although not all) early attempts to prosecute allegations
of ritualistic abuse had foundered on investigative failures, and the plight of
child witnesses forced to testify under the same conditions to adults (Hechler
1988). This was a period in which there were no protocols or training on
complexities of investigating multi-perpetrator, multi-victim sexual abuse
cases, which could snowball from an initial report or suspicion of abuse into
an unanticipated explosion in referrals, complaints and media attention
(Gaspar 1996). The struggles of police and child protection services to manage
these cases were recast by the ‘false memory’ movement as evidence of
the unprofessionalism of any investigator who could take an allegation of

organised abuse seriously.1 The efforts of clinicians and therapists to develop

effective treatment for clients with histories of ritualistic abuse, who presented
with acute and complex problems previously unrecognised in mental health
training or literature, were attacked as the iatrogenic cause of the very disclo-
sures they were a response to. As media interest began to coalesce around the
claims of the ‘false memory’ movement, substantiated cases of organised and
ritualistic abuse were ignored or sidelined and important evidence was over-
looked (Kitzinger 2004).
Academics associated with the ‘false memory’ cause developed a range of
sceptical explanations for allegations of ritual abuse. The corollaries drawn in
this literature between therapy/social work and fraud, deceit and quackery are
not established through research but rather assumed from the very outset. This
work shared a common intellectual strategy, in which academics transposed
their preferred theoretical frameworks to allegations of ritual abuse rather than
developing their explanations according to the available evidence. For exam-
ple, Ofshe’s research had previously focused on the dangers of cults. To support
his claim that ritual abuse disclosures were iatrogenic he drew a parallel
between cults and therapy, which he and journalist Watters characterised as
‘high pressure’ environments pervaded by cult-like New Age techniques (Ofshe
and Watters 1996). Other sociologists more sympathetic to ‘New Religious
Movements’ argued that allegations of ritual abuse were an attack on alterna-
tive spiritualities rather than an outgrowth of them (Richardson et al. 1991).
Folklorists argued that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ was an urban legend (Victor 1993),
‘false memory’ researchers argued that it was a product of ‘false memories’
(Loftus and Ketcham 1994), religious historians drew parallels with historical
examples of scapegoating and witch hunting (Frankfurter 2001), and so on.
Within the broad umbrella of the ‘false memory’ movement, competing
and often contradictory explanations of ritualistic abuse proliferated. These
explanations had in common the conviction that allegations of ritualistic
abuse had no basis in fact despite little agreement amongst sceptics regarding
the actual origins of such allegations. This literature advanced a simplistic
portrayal of social work and therapy as ﬁelds characterised by fad, gossip and
coercive inﬂuence that resonated strongly with the ‘false memory’ societies
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that authors had aligned themselves with. Despite their claims to be writing
in the name of ‘objectivity’, ‘reason’ and ‘justice’, ‘false memory’ academics

1 In fact, these cases included strong medical evidence of sexual assault. The allegations of
organised abuse that arose in Jordan, Minnesota in 1983 are frequently referred to in scepti-
cal literature as an example of ‘false allegations’, however of the 29 children reporting sexual
abuse in the case, ten showed medical signs of sexual assault, with one nine-year-old girl
incontinent of urine and faeces (Tamarkin 1994b). The McMartin preschool case is perhaps
the most infamous failure to prosecute organised abuse in the United States in the 1980s,
but the strength of the medical evidence of sexual assault in the case is rarely acknowledged
(Rust 1985–1986).

promulgated pejorative and unfounded characterisations of professional prac-

tice by constructing caricatures of ritual abuse allegations which, they claimed,
established the frequently of malpractice amongst social workers and thera-
pists. In this literature, ritual abuse is almost invariably referred to as ‘satanic
ritual abuse’ and attended by a list of atrocities (eg murder, cannibalism,
human sacrifice), followed by warnings that ‘if therapists believe these type of
claims, it seems likely that they would be even more likely to believe the less
aggravated claims involving ordinary child sexual abuse’ (Loftus 1993: 524).
The rhetorical importance of ‘satanic ritual abuse’ for the ‘false memory’
movement is illustrated by the fact that, of the 144 newsletters released by the
FMSF between 1992 and 2011, 140 of them used the term. Scott (2001)
argues that the deployment of the term ‘satanic ritual abuse’ was a deliberate
strategy undertaken by ‘false memory’ activists and journalists sympathetic to
the ‘false memory’ movement in an attempt to portray cases of ritualistic
abuse in a salacious light. In doing so, they were able to shift the debate about
sexual abuse allegations from the terrain of child welfare, reframing the issue
in terms of the susceptibility of women and children to coercive influence.
The emphasis on satanic ritual abuse was a particularly important part of this
strategy, characterising child protection workers and therapists as ‘anti-
satanists’ on a ‘witch hunt’. This was a rhetorical strategy that substantively
broadened the field of people evincing scepticism over women and children’s
testimony of organised abuse from the core of the ‘false memory’ movement to
include a range of progressive and relatively liberal commentators.
Academics in literature (Showalter 1997), folklore (Victor 1993), reli-
gious history (Frankfurter 1994), philosophy (Hacking 1995) and anthro-
pology (La Fontaine 1998) weighed in to condemn those social workers
and therapists who ‘believed’ disclosures of ritualistic abuse without ‘real’
cause. Frankfurter’s (2001: 354) characterisation of the ‘abuse expert’ who
incredulously accepts the accounts of their client is typical of this literature:

For abuse experts untrained in the dynamics of memory and unread in any
but the most credulous accounts of historical ‘devil-worship,’ there was no
reason to be critical of patients’ testimony and every reason, they believed,
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

to reverse ‘centuries of silence’ and put full trust in their patients’ accounts

In this passage, as in other sceptical accounts of ‘satanic ritual abuse’, it is

invariably the perspectives of other more ‘scientiﬁc’ and ‘objective’ disciplines
that are privileged over the supposedly partial and subjective professions of
social work and therapy. The term ‘expert’ is used ironically here; the ‘abuse
expert’ is not credited with basic training, competence or critical faculties.
This perhaps reﬂects the ways in which the ‘caring’ professions are often deval-
ued in comparison to other professions. However, as a characterisation of
workers with clients disclosing ritual abuse, it is contested by even the briefest
purview of the literature written by practitioners who took disclosures of

ritualistic abuse seriously. Encounters with organised abuse cases in the 1980s
had prompted considerable shock and alarm in therapeutic circles but by
the 1990s therapists and social workers were cautioning against unfounded
speculation on the subject. They were often agnostic about disclosures of
ritual abuse, and repeatedly emphasised the importance of prudence and care
when working with these clients.

The reports of my patients appear genuine and I am treating them very

seriously. I do not, however, have any direct evidence that the stories are
true. I am a therapist and my job is to treat whether or not the memories
are in fact as recalled.
(Fraser 1990: 57)

To understand this area we must maintain scientiﬁc skepticism and clini-

cal empathy. We need to avoid the hysteria of overreaction and the denial
mechanisms triggered when one is confronted with horrible material.
(Sakheim and Devine 1992: xii)

I feel that the psychotherapist has to maintain an open mind about what
is real and what is phantasy – holding reconstructive pictures in mind only
as tentative hypothesis, ever ready to be revised as further material
emerges. In this respect, my attitude to accounts of ritual abuse is no dif-
ferent to that towards any other childhood experience.
(Mollon 1994: 146)

The reasonable tone of such literature did not accord with widespread
efforts to characterise these workers as ‘conspiracy theorists’ and neurotic
zealots. Hence it was simply ignored by the ‘false memory’ movement and
those sympathetic to them, or else the public was warned that the ‘abuse
experts’ were attempting to conceal their true agenda behind a thin patina
of respectability. The presentation of workers in the ﬁeld of sexual abuse as
devious and untrustworthy served as an ideological foil against which ‘false
memory’ authors and those sympathetic to them established their own claims
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to objectivity and expertise. The fact that many of these authors had little
or no understanding of the fields of child protection or therapy that they
were criticising did not appear to blunt the vigour with which they pursued
their critique. Their ‘expertise’ was derived from their distance from the prac-
ticalities of investigating or treating sexual abuse; a field of work that, after
all, was portrayed as a hotbed of hysteria and neurosis.
The case made by the ‘false memory’ societies that allegations of organised
and ritualistic abuse are wholly fabricated is based, to a significant extent, on
a report prepared by FBI agent Kenneth Lanning (1992). Lanning’s report
details his concerns about the potential impact of hyperbole and sensational-
ism on investigations into ritual abuse. However, the report does not contain

any empirical review or analysis of cases of ritual abuse, with Lanning acknow-
ledging that he had never investigated a case of ritual abuse or interviewed a
child or adult alleging ritual abuse (Bennetts 1993). Nonetheless, Lanning’s
report is pervasively mis-cited throughout ‘false memory’ literature as a ‘case
review’ that conclusively discredits all reports of ritual abuse to American
authorities. References to this report often involve fictitious details designed
to lend it an air of definitive authority. For example, Ofshe and Watters (1993)
claim that Lanning’s report was based on a review of ‘three hundred cases’
of ritualistic abuse. Lief and Fetkewicz (1997: 303) announce ‘When SRA is
involved, we know ipso facto that the accusations are untrue’ due to ‘a decade
of study by the FBI’. Wright (2006: 121) calls the report ‘a comprehensive,
eight-year study by the FBI on occult crime’. Lanning’s report has taken on
an almost scriptural or mythical significance amongst sceptics who continue
to assert that the FBI has disavowed ritual abuse investigations, despite the
fact that FBI agents have been involved in the investigation and prosecution
of ritual child sex abuse cases (eg Ellzey 2007).
Other examples of ‘false memory’ research show serious methodological
and ethical flaws. In Australia, a police investigator undertook qualitative
research with women reporting ritualistic abuse, only to diagnose them with
‘false memory syndrome’ when most refused to consent to an unrequested
physical examination for evidence of physical and sexual assault (Ogden 1993).
He describes ‘extensively investigating’ the body of one woman after she
disclosed internal scarring from sexual torture (Ogden 1993: 32). His research
methods were not only egregiously unethical, but his conclusions that his
participants were suffering from a factitious disorder because they would
not provide him with medical evidence of sexual assault was spurious. It is
common for sexual abuse and sexual assault victims to express reluctance to
undergo a physical exam, and even where they do consent physical signs
of sexual assault may be ambiguous or nonexistent. Despite these serious
shortcomings, Ogden’s work was reported in the Australian press as evidence
of an epidemic of ‘false memories’ (Guilliat 1995), and he was appointed to
the board of the Australian False Memory Association.
In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly con-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

fabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘nazis’ shows

the depth of feeling evident amongst many sceptics. However, this raises
an important question: Why did academics and journalists feel so strongly
about allegations of ritualistic abuse, to the point of pervasively misrepresent-
ing 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 organised 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 sensation-
alism 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 thera-
pists, 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? The following section will
examine in more detail the linkages between emotion and ideology in debates
over ‘satanic ritual abuse’.

The pleasures of disbelief

One of the enduring characteristics of the sceptical literature on ‘satanic
ritual abuse’ is the tone of scorn and contempt. Social workers and therapists
whose clients disclose ritual abuse have been described as vectors of memory
contagion motivated by ideology, hysteria and professional self-interest.
Women and children disclosing ritualistic abuse were characterised as ‘blank
canvasses’ vulnerable to coercive inﬂuence, or confabulators who fantasise
about rape and torture and project these fantasies onto innocent men. The
gender dynamics of these characterisations were unmistakable. Not only were
workers and survivors associated with the pejorative ‘feminine’ attributes
of hysteria and neurosis, but advocates of the ‘false memory’ position were
clear that they considered ‘feminism’ to be responsible for the social ills
of which they claimed ‘satanic ritual abuse’ as a symptom. As much was
acknowledged by a member of the advisory board for the British False Memory
Society who expressed his concern about the ‘feminist agenda’ to Kitzinger
(1998: 192):

I think we are very sensitive, males … not just me, all of us, I think
we’re all very sensitive now … about the feminist agenda. I can’t believe
that this assembly of ﬁgures [the BFMS advisory board] of ﬁgures of
approximately twenty men and one woman isn’t something to do with
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men if you like rushing in to protect their image … I think it’s a defen-
sive operation.

It was explicit in ‘false memory’ literature that masculinity and masculine

sexuality was under attack by social forces driven by feminine neurosis
and hysteria. Wakeﬁeld and Underwager (1994: 43) argued that the ‘Furies’
of ‘radical feminism’ were inciting a panic about ritual abuse for political
reasons, entrapping ‘many, many citizens’ within experiences of ‘conspiracy
theory, victimization, and a “paranoid style of thinking”’. In his book on
Australian allegations of ritual abuse, Guilliat (1996: 263) claimed that ritu-
alistic abuse allegations are the product of a widespread hysteria about child

sexual abuse driven by feminism and a deep-seated ‘fear of male sexuality’.

Victor (1998) characterised feminists as ‘demonologists’ susceptible to wild
rumours and panics made by Christian fundamentalists and social conserva-
tives. La Fontaine (1998) also characterised ‘feminists’ as the unwitting dupes
of Christian conspiracy theories.
Warnings about clandestine conspiracies between Christians and femi-
nists are a mainstay of sceptical literature on ritualistic abuse. Stranger
bedfellows could not be imagined but such unfounded imputations of con-
spiracies and hidden agendas are a mainstay of ideological antagonism
(Žižek 1996). Žižek (1993: 202–3) shows that what is at stake in such antag-
onism is a ‘theft of enjoyment’: ‘we always impute to the “other” an excessive
enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life)
and/or he has access to some secret perverse enjoyment’. Emanating from the
‘false memory’ movement was the notion that therapists and social workers
were taking a perverse pleasure in their work as they probed into ‘private’
places – bodies, minds, homes, families. As a result, it was claimed that men
could no longer teach, touch, hug, bathe or play with children for fear of a
false allegation of sexual abuse. Articles on false memories described how the
sanctity of family life was at risk from baseless ‘recovered memories’ of sexual
abuse. The inference was that feminism had destabilised, if it had not actually
destroyed, the simple day-to-day pleasures that men found in their contact
with children as fathers, teachers and community members. These were pleas-
ures that feminism had supposedly ‘stolen’ from men that must be stolen
back, and in this process the pleasurable excesses of revenge and retaliation
were considered justiﬁable
This retaliation was not limited to hyperbole and invective. False memory
societies supported malpractice lawsuits against therapists well-known for
specialising in the intervention and treatment of organised and ritual abuse.
Therapists who wrote and spoke publicly about organised and ritual abuse
reported being stalked, picketed and threatened by ‘false memory’ activists
(Calof 1998, Salter 1998). Where organised abuse had been investigated
and prosecuted, the ‘false memory’ movement mobilised pro bono legal support
for those convicted. With their support, some convictions were overturned
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

but where appeals failed the case was canonised as an ‘injustice’ enacted by
a legal system that, advocates claimed, was conspiring against men charged
with sexual abuse (Olio and Cornell 1998). A range of high-proﬁle, highly
partisan books and documentaries on organised abuse cases emerged in which
critical evidence was minimised, distorted or simply ignored, resulting in
groundswells of public support for men convicted of organised and ritualistic
sexual offences. These efforts were front-and-centre within a broader cam-
paign designed to delimit the capacity of child protection services to inter-
vene in child abuse, to undermine the credibility of testimony of sexual abuse,
and to narrow the access of victimised women and children to mental health
care and the legal system.

Underlying these efforts was an enduring nostalgia for an earlier social

order of male right and sexual expression undisturbed by the supposed
(over)empowerment of children and women. The ‘false memory’ movement
described not only how allegations of sexual abuse had disrupted family life
and severed family relations but a more general sense of social disintegra-
tion and anomie precipitated by the cultural prominence given to children’s
and women’s testimony of sexual abuse. One letter to the FMSF compared
disclosures of sexual abuse to ‘lynching’:

Let it be known especially to mental health professionals that the

character assassinations of a father and mother constitute moral patricide
and matricide and are hate crimes not any less horrendous than lynchings.
The advantage of lynchings was and is their relatively short duration,
culminating in the termination of all pain.
(FMSF newsletter 1999, vol 8 no 4)

In response to these concerns, the ‘false memory’ movement imputed a terrify-

ing new force that was ‘pulling the strings’ behind the scenes and creating
this misfortune: a secretive alliance between Christians and feminists, united
in their shared antipathy to the ‘natural’ expression of male sexuality. However
what ‘we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the trau-
matic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us’ (Žižek
1993: 203). The therapist/social worker ‘Other’ attacked by the ‘false memory’
movement did not designate an actual threat but rather functioned as the foil
for an ideological conception of masculine sexuality as basically harmless and
benevolent. It was claimed that the presence of this ‘Other’ had disrupted the
cordiality of family life and prevented men from being ‘really themselves’
around children. However, it was precisely the construction of the therapist/
social worker ‘Other’ that enabled the reassertion of an idyllic view of mascu-
line sexuality as harmless and safe, even as evidence of widespread male sexual
maltreatment of children was coming to the fore.
The cultural idyll of childhood as a protected and peaceful phase of devel-
opment not only disavows the ambiguities and vulnerabilities of children’s
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

lives in the ‘gerontocracy’ (James et al. 1998) but it precludes recognition

of the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children. Disclosures of
such violence are a potential rupture in the legitimacy of hegemonic ideals.
They reveal the discrepancies between cultural ideals and social realities and,
in doing so, threaten to disrupt and subvert broader systems of representation
and meaning. Descriptions of organised, sadistic and ritualistic abuse brought
to the fore the implicit threat that all disclosures of sexual abuse pose to pre-
vailing systems of representation, by emphasising the vulnerability of
children to sexual violence in the very spaces, such as the home and families,
that are legitimised as benevolent and protective. By challenging these legiti-
mations, the women’s movement and the child protection movement was

challenging the gender order upon which they are based, in which male
control of families and other important social institutions was presented
as appropriate, natural and beneﬁcial. The caricature of ‘satanic ritual abuse’
provided a point of mobilisation around which a diverse coalition of interest
groups and individuals could contest the gains made by abused women
and children by attacking those agents, such as therapists and social workers,
who were working on their behalf. The zest with which their agenda was
adopted and enacted within the community, and by a range of state authori-
ties, suggests that they had tapped into a hidden reservoir of anti-feminist
and misogynist sentiment that would have a serious impact on the wellbeing
of victimised children and women.

The consequences of the pleasures of disbelief

In the sceptical literature on ‘satanic ritual abuse’, references to the severe
and chronic mental and physical health problems of adults and children
with histories of organised abuse are notable only for their absence. Whilst
sceptics scornfully characterised allegations of organised abuse in terms of
murder, cannibalism and ritual sacriﬁces, they ignored the mundane evi-
dence of physical and sexual abuse that had led to the very child protection
interventions and criminal prosecutions they claimed had no basis in fact. The
majority of sceptics had little direct experience of adults or children with
histories of organised or ritualistic abuse, and nor did they employ research
methodologies that would familiarise them with the perspectives and needs
of this population. On the contrary, through the ‘false memory’ movement,
many sceptical academics and journalists developed close personal and profes-
sional relationships with adults accused of organised and ritualistic abuse.
Throughout the 1990s, this sceptical coalition brought tremendous politi-
cal and media pressure to bear on particular investigations into organised
abuse on behalf of those accused. Their social and political agenda was sympa-
thetically received by state authorities, inﬂuencing child protection decisions
(Nelson 2008), custody cases (Brooks 2001) and public inquiries (Rogers
1999) in relation to organised and ritual abuse. As cases of organised abuse
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

gained increasingly high-proﬁle (and often global) media coverage, the claims
of those accused were accepted at face value whilst social workers and thera-
pists involved in the cases were restricted from challenging these claims by
professional codes of conﬁdentiality (Kitzinger 2004, Goddard 1994, Summit
1994).
The ensuing backlash resulted in multiple failures to protect children and
vulnerable adults. In the United Kingdom, children who had disclosed organ-
ised and ritualistic abuse were returned to their parents despite continuing to
disclose sexual abuse and engaging in disturbed and traumatised behaviour
(Nelson 2008). In a Scottish case, eight children were returned home to their
parents despite their testimony of organised abuse and medical evidence of

child torture (Rafferty 1997). In Australia, a pregnant woman approached

child protection services disclosing a history of ritual abuse but her concerns
about her capacity to protect her child from sexual abuse were dismissed,
since the department did not accept that ritual abuse occurs (South Australian
Ombudsman 2004). In 2005, a report by Scotland’s social work inspection
agency found that, throughout the 1990s, social workers failed to remove
three children from their parents despite clear evidence of physical, sexual
and emotional abuse. The children had been in contact with over 100 health
professionals throughout the 1990s, and they frequently disclosed organised
abuse by their parents. Despite clear evidence of abuse, it seems that these
disclosures of organised abuse were the primary reason why child protection
authorities failed to intervene. Commenting on the case, the local social work
director stated that case workers were operating in the wake of controversies
over ritualistic abuse and they were therefore ‘reluctant to make similar mis-
takes’ (Seenan 2005).
The wholesale whitewashing of evidence of harm in cases of organised
abuse not only compromised child protection efforts, but resulted in the
denial of health care to survivors. Ofshe and Watters (1996) and a range of
‘false memory’ activists have lobbied against the provision of mental health
treatment to people with histories of organised abuse and associated diag-
noses, such as dissociative identity disorder (DID).2 There is ample evidence
that people with histories of organised abuse and/or a diagnosis of DID con-
stitute a population of mental health patients with acute and complex needs
(Ross 1995, Noblitt and Perskin 2000, Sachs and Galton 2008). Adults with
undiagnosed or untreated DID have extremely high suicide rates several thou-
sand times the American national average (Kluft 1995). However, Ross (1997)
observes that, in his clinical experience, the suicide risk for this population
reduces dramatically once they have established a working rapport with a
mental health professional. Moreover, people with DID are at heightened risk
of physical and sexual victimisation, and may require mental health care in
order to bring ongoing abuse to an end (Middleton 2005). The ‘false memory’
campaign to restrict mental health care to this population not only contrib-
uted to their risk of suicide and self-harm, but complicated their efforts to
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

protect themselves from ongoing abuse and violence.

2 Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly known as multiple personality disorder)

is a complex, chronic mental illness characterised by the presence of multiple, alternating
self-states, personalities or identities (known as ‘alters’ in much of the psychological lit-
erature) as well as recurrent amnesia for current and/or past events (International Society for
the Study of Trauma and Dissociation 2011). DID develops as a response to chronic and
overwhelming trauma exposure in childhood, including organised abuse (Middleton and
Butler 1998).

Conclusion
The final newsletter of the FMSF was released in 2011, and in the closing
paragraph of her editorial, the FMSF founder Pamela Freyd stated ‘But we
must also thank, in a bizarre way, all those whose practices have given us
laughs’. She goes on to refer to a woman who was diagnosed with DID by
Dr Valerie Sinason, a well-known British specialist in the treatment of
organised and ritualistic abuse. It is perhaps fitting that Freyd’s final editorial
closes with a reference to the pleasure that the FMSF has found in parody-
ing the treatment of severe sexual abuse. The history of the ‘false memory’
movement has been characterised by a pervasive attitude of scorn and con-
tempt towards those disclosing particularly traumatic sexual abuse and the
workers who have offered them care and support. This was a tone that was
uncritically adopted by many across the academic and popular media and
seemed to resonate strongly within the general community.
This chapter has argued that factor of enjoyment is crucial in explaining
the success of the FMSF in advancing their agenda, and the degree of con-
tempt that continues to characterise references to cases of organised abuse.
In online as well as ‘old’ media, ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is invoked whenever
a journalist or commentator seeks to rationalise their derision for the testi-
mony of sexually victimised women and children or those professionals and
agencies who would accept their testimony as true. Behind these assertions
is a view that masculine sexuality is essentially harmless whilst it is claimed
that the minds of women, children, feminists and ‘Others’ harbour socially
destructive forces that can easily turn against men. It is by disbelieving the
testimony of women and children that such forces are kept at bay and men
are protected. The construct of ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is now an endlessly elastic
one that can rationalise virtually any claim of male victimisation by ‘false
allegations’ of sexual abuse. When Jerry Sandusky, former Pennsylvania State
University assistant coach, was charged with 40 counts of child sexual abuse
against eight complainants, his lawyer compared the allegations against him
to the ‘moral panic’ over ‘satanic ritual abuse’ (Sax 2011). The suggestion is
that credible allegations of sexual abuse involve one victim and minor forms
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

of abuse. An allegation more complex and serious than this, it is suggested, is

likely to be the product of confabulation and hysteria.
Whilst many of the arguments of the ‘false memory’ advocates were based
on widely circulated misunderstandings, we might follow Žižek (1991: 2) in
suggesting that ‘ignorance is not a sufﬁcient reason for forgiveness since it
conveys a hidden dimension of enjoyment’. Sedgwick (1994) also argued
against reifying ignorance as an impersonal force that bestows ‘passive inno-
cence’ upon those that experience it. Instead she emphasises the political qual-
ities of ignorance and the ways in which a ‘plethora of ignorances’ circulate
as part of ‘particular regimes of truth’. From this perspective the ways in
which particular understandings of organised abuse were promoted and others

foreclosed or erased in public life can be understood as a collision of per-

sonal and collective interests in maintaining public non-awareness of a par-
ticularly disturbing form of gendered violence. As allegations of organised
abuse grew, the threat that the increasing recognition of child sexual abuse
posed to the gender order reached intolerable proportions. Social movements
sought to resolve this threat by imputing it to an ‘Other’ (usually identiﬁed
as the feminist/Christian zealot masquerading as a therapist or social worker)
and creating an ideological antagonism in which the social order could be
saved if this ‘Other’ was attacked and silenced. Sceptical literature on ‘satanic
ritual abuse’ played out this simplistic fantasy, ‘revealing’ the feminist/
Christian zealot as the ‘real’ threat who is then defeated through the superior
intellect of the author. Calling the motives of these workers into question
by characterising them as feminists, Christians and ideologues was a particu-
larly effective strategy, since it crafted a target that groups from both the
left and the right of the political spectrum felt justiﬁed in attacking. However,
regardless of their purported political orientation these attacks shared a
common and highly gendered vocabulary of ‘hysteria’ and contamination
as misogynist views of women and children, suppressed in the aftermath of
second-wave feminism, found cathartic and pleasurable release.
This chapter has argued that the credulity with which such blatant
hyperbole was greeted in many quarters can only be understood in terms
of the pleasures of disbelief, and the manner in which it served to occlude
recognition of the growing evidence of the pervasiveness of sexual violence
against children. Concerted attacks on the testimony of victims and those
professionals, such as therapists and social workers, who had created new
opportunities for them to disclose their abuse had a stultifying effect on the
nascent response to organised abuse. The next chapter will provide a personal
perspective on the consequences of this by describing the author’s experience
as a carer for a survivor of organised abuse, and highlighting the ways in
which the prevailing climate of disbelief can entrap victims within a cycle of
ongoing abuse and violence.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Down the rabbit hole

My story

All researchers carry with them the accumulation of their background and
personal history, and this shapes their work in important ways. This chapter
provides an account of my history as the friend and carer of a survivor of
organised abuse called ‘Sarah’ (a pseudonym). In a ﬁeld as controversial as this
one, allegations of personal bias and prejudice are widespread and questions
about how and why I came to study organised abuse are inevitable. This chap-
ter presents an answer to those questions, but hopefully it provides much
more than that. The majority of the relevant literature on organised abuse
has been written by survivors and the health professionals who have treated
them. I occupy neither category although my experience encompasses aspects
of both, having been prompted to research organised abuse as an academic
after having witnessed directly its ongoing harms on someone I care about.
My awareness of organised abuse developed in the context of my friendship
with Sarah, which began in my late teens. It culminated in the year I spent
in my mid-20s as Sarah’s carer in order to prevent the abusive group from
drawing her further into a life of violence and sexual exploitation. By docu-
menting my experiences I hope to add a new perspective and voice to the
burgeoning testimonial evidence of organised abuse.
This chapter reveals a set of intensely emotional experiences: the feelings
of fear and powerlessness that came from witnessing Sarah’s abuse, but
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

also the depth of the friendship that enabled us both to survive it. In aca-
demic as well as professional circles, respectability is coded according to a
personal bifurcation into discrete ‘public’ and ‘private’ personas. Feminists
have been the most vocal critics of this distinction because much of their
work concerns the political dimension of ‘private’ relations and behaviours.
Challenging those forms of domination and exploitation enabled by the
public/private division, according to hooks (1989), involves an analysis of
the points where the public and the private intersect. My time as Sarah’s
carer is one of these points. The act of caring has been coded ‘private’ in every
respect. It is emotional, undervalued, unpaid domestic labour concerned
with the everyday routine of ensuring that a sick person is made better. As her
carer, I spent a lot of my time trying to help Sarah to eat, to sleep, to maintain

her employment and to access the health services that she needed, and to liaise
with the police in an attempt to protect her from ongoing threats and assaults.
As a gay man this experience was not complicated by romantic or sexual inter-
est and this facilitated the establishment of an elevated sense of trust between
Sarah and I. However, I soon learnt that my role in Sarah’s life was viewed
with some suspicion by law enforcement and health workers, who found it
unbelievable that a young man might support a woman he was not sleeping
with or related to. And yet it was precisely my position in Sarah’s private
world as her friend and carer that exposed me to the complexities of her
enmeshment in the world of organised abuse. The captivity of victims of
organised abuse is not signified by locks and bars but instead by complex
psychological processes that require patience and empathy to decode.
It has primarily been those individuals engaged in the ‘emotion work’
(Hochschild 1979) of listening to victimised children and adults, and provid-
ing them with care and support, who have raised the alarm about organised
abuse. The notion that social work, therapy, nursing, parenting or caring is
a credible basis for making such claims have been disparaged by sceptical
commentators who have invoked science, rationality and objectivity to craft a
more authoritative position for themselves. There are authors and activists
who have been nothing short of savage in their efforts to disparage victims
of organised abuse and those who support them, and so I have not relished
the possibility that, in writing down my experiences, they might set upon my
story with similar ferocity. However, to omit my story from this book would
only affirm the false distinctions between emotionality and rationality,
the personal and the scientific, and the public and private that have derailed
reasoned discussion of organised abuse. It also risks collaborating in the per-
vasive devaluation of the vitally important work of supporting victimised
children and adults. This is what brought me to the field of organised abuse
and it is something that I share with most of the people who have chosen to
speak out on this topic.
This chapter proceeds in three parts that describes the three phases of
my personal engagement with the issue of organised abuse: first as a friend,
then as a carer, and finally as an advocate and academic. The history that
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

follows is as accurate as it can be given that some details must be left deliber-
ately vague in order to protect Sarah’s anonymity. The narrative presented
here has been reconstructed not only from memory but also from email records,
my own diaries and a qualitative interview that I undertook with Sarah a few
years after the events described here. As such, the chapter presents something
of a dialogue between myself and Sarah – and between our past as well as
present selves. In doing so, I describe my own tumble ‘down the rabbit hole’
and re-emergence into a world that was I no longer familiar with: one in
which a young woman could be stalked, assaulted and terrorised over a period
of years by a group of men without drawing the attention or interest of the
authorities. The stark reality is that neither the police nor any other agency

intervened to protect Sarah despite repeatedly being notiﬁed of her plight.

The disinterest and inaction of the authorities in the face of evidence of
organised abuse is irreconcilable with common stereotypes of police ‘always
investigating cases’ and investigators ‘always getting their man’ (Tamarkin
1994a). This irreconcilability lies at the very heart of the debate over organ-
ised abuse, and this chapter details my own struggle to recreate a coherent
worldview in the aftermath of a prolonged confrontation with extraordinary
abuse.

Being a friend
Throughout the 1990s, as a teenager, I had read newspaper reports about
adult women who, after attending counselling or therapy, were making
outrageous allegations of sexual abuse by ‘paedophile rings’ and ‘cults’. Like
many others, I accepted the proposition that such allegations were evidence
that the movement against child abuse had ‘gone too far’. I had no reason
to rethink my position until my late teens when I became friends with Sarah.
I had known Sarah only a short time before I came to realise that there was
a hidden dimension to her life. Sarah’s nightmares and cries in the early
hours of the morning were known to many of her friends but she was reluctant
to acknowledge them. There were days when her face was pale, her eyes
were dark and she spoke in short, clipped sentences. During these times she
seemed to be labouring under an immense burden, and she had an air of
fragility about her that was in stark contrast to the strong and gregarious
woman that I was otherwise accustomed to. I was already familiar with the
signs of sexual abuse, having grown up with relatives and friends who had
been victimised. Much of Sarah’s behaviour was similar to the other survivors
that I had known but Sarah bore a degree of pain that I had not encountered
before. It was the secrecy behind which she struggled to contain this pain that
I found particularly disturbing, and I decided to break through it.
Sarah went on long walks at night, sometimes only returning in the
early hours of the morning. One day, as she set off at dusk for her walk,
I insisted on coming along with her. We had barely turned the ﬁrst corner
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

before I confronted her with my belief that something traumatic had hap-
pened to her. In my characteristically blunt fashion, I told her that I thought
she had been sexually abused, and I asked her ‘Who was it?’ Sarah ﬁxed
me with a stare that I remember to this day. It was beyond shock, a kind
of gaunt, pale horror. I began to list likely suspects. ‘Was it a family member?
Priest? Teacher?’ I was met with a stunned silence that I tried to ﬁll with
reassurances that it was okay to acknowledge abuse, that I would believe
her and that I knew other people that had been abused. Her response, when
it came, was entirely unexpected. ‘They were … there was a few of them’
was all that she said. ‘They’ – plural – I was not prepared for. The rest of
our conversation was short but before it came to an end I made her a promise

that would prove fateful: that whatever she was going through, she didn’t
have to go through it alone.
The incident I have described may appear as a reckless intrusion into Sarah’s
privacy but I was 19 at the time and not conversant with the sensitivities
around disclosure. Nonetheless, when we were discussing this incident in
interview several years later Sarah cautioned me not to understate her agency
in disclosing her abuse to me.

It wasn’t really – it actually wasn’t that you – it wasn’t involuntary.

I had more control over it than you probably knew. In that, it was very
bit-by-bit, and that is how I do it. You know what I mean? I gauge the
trust, and then tell a little bit, and then gauge the trust.

And this is precisely how our friendship developed, ‘bit-by-bit’, as Sarah

cautiously let me into her world. I witnessed how she sustained her hopes for
her future in spite of the nightmares, terror and pain that frequently
incapacitated her. At times she maintained a frenetic pace of work and study,
only to be reduced by ﬂashbacks and anxiety to a lump under bedsheets
for hours or days. During these times she trusted me to come and visit her,
and we’d watch videos and share a companionable silence until she felt better.
We became close friends. With all the conﬁdence of inexperience, I assumed
that she and I could meet any challenge posed by her history. I knew nothing
about organised abuse and, after our initial conversation, we did not discuss
her experiences of it. She was unable to speak about it without great distress
and I had presumed that I knew what I needed to.
This was a presumption that would be tested by my dawning realisa-
tion that her abuse was not in her past, but rather it was continuing in the
present. I learnt much later that some of Sarah’s ‘walks’ at night involved
meeting the abusers from her childhood, who would contact her to arrange
a time and place where they could collect her and take her to be abused. In
hindsight, there had been signs. She sometimes had strange injuries that she
couldn’t explain, but she dismissed them and I didn’t give them much
thought. In interview, Sarah commented on the ‘two sides’ to her life during
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

this period:

I really did separate out my life. No one in my day-to-day life knew about
that side of it. It was really weird, like that – at night what was happen-
ing, compared to the day.

This was a facade of normalcy that began to deteriorate. In her early 20s,
Sarah was no longer willing to obey the demands of the abusive group, and
she stopped acquiescing to their instructions to meet them for abuse. They
responded with a barrage of emails and phone calls threatening to harm her
and the people she cared about if she did not comply. Sarah tried to manage

these threats by herself but the abusive group began to intrude further and
further into the boundaries that Sarah had established around her ‘day-to-day
life’.
One day, Sarah’s ﬂatmates reported that two men had come to the door,
ascertained that Sarah lived there, and promptly left without explanation.
This episode left Sarah terriﬁed although I reassured her that there was
probably a mundane explanation for this visit. A few weeks later, stricken
with grief and shock, she told me that two men had been waiting for her
outside her house at night when she came home from work. She described
this incident in an email to me at the time:

There were two of them, and they were just hanging around in the vacant
block across the road from my house. I didn’t even notice them at ﬁrst.
I got out of my car to go inside, and they walked over as if they were
just walking past. I didn’t really think twice about them. Until things
were already happening. I didn’t recognise them at any point. Well,
I didn’t really get to see their faces, because it all happened too suddenly.
It was what they said, oh and what they did, which was absolutely con-
gruent with both the emails and past experience. They mentioned that
they were never going to be out of my life, and that things would be
much worse if I told anyone what had happened when I was younger.

This was the ﬁrst of a number of incidents of violence and terrorisation.

Sarah moved houses a number of times to maintain her safety, however
ﬂatmates at each house began to complain of men stalking through the back-
yard at night or knocking on the door. Sarah frequently received emails
and phone calls telling her to ‘be ready’ to leave when a man came for her.
I slept on the ﬂoor of her room on a night after she received a text message
saying that someone was coming to ‘collect’ her. We woke up in the early
hours of the morning to the sound of multiple people knocking on the front
door and the windows of the house, calling her name. The situation began to
take on the unreal qualities of a horror movie but try as I might I couldn’t
convince Sarah to report her abuse to the police. At the time, I didn’t recog-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

nise the degree of terror that the abusive group evoked in Sarah.
A game of cat-and-mouse ensued as Sarah began moving houses in an
effort to stay ahead of the abusive group. Eventually she took to living in
her car and sleeping in parkland in order to stay safe. She reasoned that it
would be harder for the abusive group to track her if she maintained an
irregular schedule and ensured that her living arrangements were unpredict-
able. However, I became worried that she was only a few steps away from
homelessness and I arranged for her to stay with my family for a period
of time. I didn’t fully understand what Sarah was going through but, as the
abusive group persisted with their campaign of stalking and terrorisation,
I was faced with a simple choice: increase the level of support that Sarah was

receiving or watch the situation deteriorate further. In an email to me at

the time, Sarah identiﬁed how these repeated attacks were forcing her to
acknowledge the severity of her abuse as a child, which was producing new
opportunities for resistance:

There has been a clicking over in my mind – a resolve to change

things; a realisation that I can’t just go on and take everything and kid
myself that I can take it unceasingly and inﬁnitely without scarring
or caring … It also involves a different angle of thinking about myself.
A want to protect me, rather than the previous sense of surrender and
inevitability. Maybe not yet tangible and effective, but these subtle
changes in thinking patterns, I think are the beginning of making all the
difference.

Sarah and I became resolved to move away from the city in which she was
being terrorised, and ﬁnd a new home town in which we could ﬁnd her a life
free from ongoing violence. I was also determined to connect Sarah with
mental health services, with whom she had only intermittent contact, as well
as with the police. I found Sarah’s refusal to disclose her circumstances to a
third party immensely frustrating. If we lived together, I felt I would be in a
better position to bring in the help that I felt Sarah needed. We found a house,
I packed my bags, and so began the year I spent as Sarah’s carer.

Being a carer
With the beneﬁt of hindsight, it now seems to me that Sarah’s experiences
of stalking and violence were very similar to those reported by women
escaping domestic violence. She was being terrorised by threats she received
over the phone and via email, and periodically men could be found waiting
for her at home or work. To keep her safe we made sure that she was dropped
off and picked up from work, either by me or by friends. Our new rental prop-
erty was as secure as we could make it with our limited funds. We began
formulating strategies to ensure that she was eating and sleeping well and
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

accessing health services when she needed them. With encouragement, Sarah
was skilled at ﬁnding the supports that she needed, and my role was to pro-
vide an anchoring and stable presence in the house so that she was not alone
when she felt overwhelmed by depression or memories of abuse. Much of
my ‘caring’ time was spent in her room at night as she struggled through
another ﬂashback, holding her hand and trying to coax her back to reality.
The ways in which her memories could manifest in somatic ways was noth-
ing short of startling. During one incident, her body temperature dropped
dramatically and her lips turned blue. She was freezing cold to the touch
and began speaking about a childhood memory of being submerged and
nearly drowned in a tub of icy water. It was only when she began responding

to some hot water bottles and several blankets that I decided not to call an
ambulance.
I must confess that, until Sarah and I came to share a house, I had
harboured some lingering doubts about Sarah’s reports of organised abuse.
The degree and authenticity of Sarah’s distress was not in question but I wasn’t
entirely certain of its source. Nonetheless, it was not long before I was
confronted with irrefutable evidence that Sarah’s history of organised abuse
was continuing in the present.
A month or so after Sarah and I moved in together, she didn’t return
home from work. Later that night I received a text message from her,
and I eventually found her, semi-conscious, on the side of a city road. She
was wet, as though she had been recently washed, and she had deep marks
on her wrist and ankles where she had clearly been bound with a cord or
rope. I immediately called an ambulance and rode with her, but once in
the hospital, I quickly discovered how fluid and relative ‘evidence’ can be.
In the eyes of the doctors and police, the marks on Sarah’s wrists and feet
were less significant than her refusal to permit them to examine her
for a sexual assault. In the hospital, she became terrified at the prospect
of an internal exam and her non-compliance was interpreted by both the
police and the doctors that she could not be believed. In interview, Sarah
recalled:

One of the big things with me at hospital was that I didn’t want the doctors
taking photos of me, or touching me. And if I’d said, ‘Yes, you can examine
me’ – I think they would have believed us more. But it was the fact that
I wouldn’t let them … and any other proof [such as the rope burn] that
didn’t fit into the specific things that you look for in a sexual assault was
not seen as real.
I remember them looking for – because you are meant to look under
the finger nails, you are meant to look for defensive wounds – and of
course I’ve got no blood under my finger nails, because in that situation
[organised abuse] I don’t defend myself. And things like that. I remember
them getting my hand, and going ‘Nah, there’s nothing under her nails’
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

as though the only alternative is that I’m lying.

This was a pattern of disbelief that would reassert itself with each subse-
quent hospital admission. Despite our best efforts, Sarah ‘disappeared’ once
a month or so, only to appear semi-conscious in various parts of the
city or outside the city limits in the bush. For the first three or four times
that this occurred, I called an ambulance to take her to hospital. She often
had welts and bruising, and I had no way of knowing the extent of her injuries
without a qualified medical assessment. Importantly, I wanted a record of
the attacks on her and some official acknowledgement of her plight. I held
onto my faith that, as the evidence of Sarah’s abuse accumulated, the doctors

and police would intervene to improve a situation I was beginning to ﬁnd

intolerable and out of control.
However, the attending physicians and police had a standardised approach
for assessing the credibility of complaints of rape. Since Sarah did not con-
form to this model, she was considered to be a malingerer who was not a
legitimate focus of attention or concern despite her injuries. They made it
clear that there were questions about the nature and legitimacy of my rela-
tionship with Sarah, questions that, particularly for the hospital, came to
eclipse what was happening to Sarah. Since I was present at each of Sarah’s
admissions, the hospital staff accused us of engaging in some kind of folie a
deux or, worse, they suggested that I was responsible for the injuries that the
abusive group inﬂicted on Sarah. Sarah described the efforts of hospital staff to
substantiate their suspicions about me:

It was such a mind-fuck at the hospital. They got this psychiatrist to talk
to me. And ﬁrst off she’s saying, ‘So, do you think that Michael believes
you?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘Do you think he believes you too
much?’ And I didn’t know how to answer that question.
And then there’d be ‘And do you think Michael cares about you?’ And
I said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘Do you think he cares about you too much?’
And I said, ‘Maybe.’ Because I was feeling guilty. They seriously asked me
these questions.
And then she asked, ‘Well, why do you think he cares about you too
much?’ And I said something like, ‘I made a mistake, I shouldn’t have
done it’ – because I was feeling guilty, I was ashamed that I’d slipped up
and the group had – gotten to me, and it was four in the morning and you
were awake and scared and worried for me.
But the hospital had gotten the answer from me they wanted, and I didn’t
realise what they were doing. And the next time I ended up in hospital,
the same psychiatrist came to me and said, ‘Well, you said some really
interesting things about Michael last time. Do you remember?’ And she
had all these notes, saying ‘Michael cares about me too much.’ There was
another note, something like ‘I’ve made a big mistake.’
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

And I was just going ‘No, no, you don’t understand.’ And at the same
time, I was thinking – god, this is like a TV show. This is like an interroga-
tion sort of thing. They totally cornered me when I was completely vulnera-
ble. But they wanted to believe so much that we were completely delusional.

During this hospital admission, we had been separated for several hours
whilst staff attempted to encourage Sarah to implicate me in her abuse.
Reassured by the amount of time they were spending with her, I had fallen
asleep in the waiting room under the false assumption that, ﬁnally, she
was receiving the care she needed. It was a great shock when I was ﬁnally
permitted to see her and I found her limping to the toilet, hunched over in

pain and shame. She had wrapped the hospital blanket around her as tightly
as she could, like a cocoon, with only her eyes showing. Her eyelids were
fluttering from trauma and dissociation as she inched down the corridor,
desperately trying to cover the scant hospital gown with the blanket. Two
police officers were leaning against the wall, watching her without offering
assistance. The looks on their faces as they joked about her made it clear that
we should never come back.
This final hospital admission was, as I wrote in my diary at the time,
an event that fundamentally changed my perception of the ‘way things are’.
The fantasy that some outside force or agency would intervene to protect
Sarah was gone. We soon discovered that we had no recourse to the police.
Having been designated persona non grata during those hospital admissions,
there was no amount of evidence that could convince them of the merit of
our reports. This included an incident when I came home from work to
find the house that I shared with Sarah had been broken into and our
walls daubed with red paint and animal blood. Strange red symbols had
been painted on our walls and bedclothes, and I found an animal organ
lying in my bed. A baby’s ‘tippee’ cup, full of animal blood and offal, was
left on Sarah’s desk, with a bright, childish sticker on it reading ‘Drink me!’
I called the police who took photos of the vandalism and did some
fingerprinting. The advice from the forensics team was that we should change
our names and leave the state. Once they left, we never heard from them
again.
We lived in the vacuum created by the neglect of the police and medical
services and in such a space the only action left to me was to care for Sarah as
best I could. I tried to help her to eat, sleep and build her strength, all the
while knowing that the next attack could be only a few days or weeks away.
We made contact with local sexual assault services, psychologists and thera-
pists, and found a number of workers who were familiar with organised abuse
and sympathetic to Sarah’s situation. However, they were poorly situated to
respond to Sarah’s primary need, which was not for therapy but rather safety
from the ongoing abuse. It seemed that we were trapped in a vicious circle:
struggling to stabilise Sarah’s mental health because of ongoing abuse, but
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

unable to stop the ongoing abuse due to Sarah’s fragile mental health. In order
to wear away at Sarah’s resolve to protect herself, the perpetrators would
engage in days or weeks of sustained threats via telephone, text message or
email. For a few weeks, we heard from a woman who regularly telephoned the
house, claiming that her children were being sexually abused in Sarah’s absence
because Sarah was not allowing herself to be abused as instructed. Occasionally
the phone would be snatched away from her by a man who, in one memorable
instance, threatened to kill me. I took to sleeping with a knife under my bed.
When Sarah was feeling strong she was able to resist the entreaties, threats
and attempts at blackmail, but if she was feeling vulnerable or frightened
then she could leave the house and ‘disappear’ for hours.

After Sarah’s ‘disappearances’ it could take days or weeks for the bruises
and burns to heal. These were not simply the marks of violence but of torture.
After one particularly awful episode, she reappeared at the front door at
dawn having gone missing the night before. She was having difficulty walk-
ing and she winced when I tried to support her to walk to her bedroom.
The skin on her stomach and back was red and inflamed, but I didn’t ask why
and she didn’t tell me. It was a few days later, when the inflammation had
gone down, that I saw the lines on her skin where someone had traced symbols
on her body using a red-hot implement. My reaction was a horror compounded
by despair. Here was further physical evidence of her ongoing abuse, but
where could we go with it? What could we do with it? A previous email to
the local detectives had ‘bounced’. They had given me the wrong email
address. They didn’t return phone calls or messages. We were cut off from
external assistance, and the hospital had made it clear that they suspected
I might be responsible for the injuries Sarah incurred during abuse. We had
to do our best between the two of us.
My initial optimism that I could affect a decisive break in Sarah’s
contact with the abusive group, and my faith in the authorities, now seemed
to me to be hopelessly naïve. In this diary excerpt, I reflect on this dawning
realisation:

I thought I could make more of a difference than I can, in the

immediate present anyway. She must be free to negotiate the terms of
her contract with the torturers. It is a private world that I have no
entry into.

I was becoming aware of the complexity of our struggle to keep Sarah

safe, which in effect was a war fought on two fronts. The ﬁrst was the world
external to Sarah, a place where men could wait patiently for her outside
our house or her work with the intention of pulling her into a waiting car.
This was a world that might be frightening but at least it was a place where
I could make some difference by, for example, arranging to meet her at
her workplace to make sure she was safe as we made our way home. However,
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

the second front was Sarah’s mental environment which, I was slowly coming
to realise, harboured forces that wished her harm just as forcefully as
those anonymous men did. Sarah’s attachment to the abusive group was
anchored by the sedimentation of terror, shame and loyalty that had accumu-
lated over many years. These were emotions of such intensity that they were
often beyond articulation, compelling Sarah to place herself at risk despite her
own deeply held desire to ﬁnd a life free of pain and abuse.
Reading over my diaries from this time, it is undeniable that my time
spent as Sarah’s carer was often grim and frightening work. However, my feel-
ings of exhaustion, despair and anger served as an important counterweight
to Sarah’s habitual response to her abuse, which was to numb and dissociate

herself from the emotional after-effects. Even when Sarah felt vulnerable to
the manipulations and threats of the abusive group, she knew that she could
not obey their instructions to meet them for abuse without causing me
great distress and anxiety. This sense of responsibility to me served as an
anchoring point that Sarah could use to combat the compulsion to put
herself at risk. Furthermore, my sense of horror at the predations of the abu-
sive group enabled the expression of Sarah’s own long-suppressed emotional
responses. The very fact that I found her abuse unbearable validated her
own intrinsic experience of victimisation as excruciating rather than some-
thing she deserved and must learn to bear. This served as a bridge from the
secretive world constructed by the abusive group, with its predetermined
logic of torture and exploitation, to a freer state in which she could determine
the direction of her own life.
These were circumstances that should have eroded our friendship, and
they were probably intended to. The abusers had crafted an unbearable situa-
tion in which we felt isolated and alone. They tried to turn us against one
another, telling Sarah that I was one of them, and telling me on the phone that
she was a ‘slut’ who ‘wanted’ what they did to her. However, our resolve held
and strengthened and over time it became clear that we were incrementally
but irrevocably altering the cycle of abuse and shame that had bound Sarah
to the abusive group. In the context of our friendship, Sarah was shifting
between the identities that had been constructed through dehumanising
abuse and an emergent set of possibilities based upon a view of her as valuable
and deserving of love: a view that she could trust me to hold even when
she could not. As a friend and carer, I related to her as someone of intrinsic
worth and so I served as the stable reference point for a different sense of
self than one grounded in the humiliation and deprivation of abuse. Over
time, the threatening emails and phone calls that Sarah received no longer
seemed so compelling to her. The logic that the group used to manipulate
her still resonated but she did not instinctively assent to it any more. She
could distance herself from the threats and entreaties and consider the most
constructive way to respond.
Sarah began to make important gains in many areas of her life. She
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found new friends. She began dating. She enrolled herself in an intensive pro-
gramme for trauma survivors and made considerable improvements in her
mental health. She began eating and sleeping more regularly. Her day-to-day
conversations were increasingly concerned with mid- to long-term plans
about her education and career. Over time it became clear that Sarah no longer
needed the kind of intensive support that I was providing. She has always
been ﬁercely independent by nature and she was determined to move forward
with her life. In the meantime, I needed time and space to recover from a
period of anxiety and exhaustion, and to consider the implications of what
I had witnessed. Our lives had shared a common trajectory for a period of
years and now we needed to follow different directions, although we parted

with the mutual understanding that, together, we had achieved something

very important.

Being an advocate and academic

The process of caring for Sarah had involved investigating the limited range
of services available to her, and the dawning realisation that adults with his-
tories of sexual abuse are offered very little assistance indeed. I joined the
advocacy group Adults Surviving Child Abuse (ASCA) and eventually came
to serve as a director for three years. I was also active in various online mailing
lists and discussion boards pertinent to organised abuse and ritual abuse.
Writing and talking about organised abuse was a way of resisting the sense of
stigmatisation left by the disbelief of the doctors and the police. It also served
as an outlet for the frustrations and helplessness I had felt as Sarah’s carer. If I
couldn’t protect her then, at least, I did not have to bear the stifling silence
that hung over our ordeal. Through my work with ASCA, and my contact
with an expanding network of survivors and the workers who supported them,
I began to develop a social and political context for our experience.
There was a systemic quality to the neglect and invalidation Alex
experienced at the hands of the authorities, and this resonated with the
methods of control drawn on by her perpetrators, who often told her that
nobody would believe her. They were in fact quite correct. It was my own
belief that the authorities would assist us that proved naïve and unfounded.
I began to read the organised abuse literature but I couldn’t find answers
to my most pressing questions: How could Sarah’s plight have been ignored
by so many for so long? Why couldn’t we find mental health services or crisis
services to assist us? Why were the police and other agencies so unmoved by
her distress and her physical injuries? The material I could find online was
focused on ritual abuse and had a strongly conspiratorial slant, claiming that
ritualistic abuse is evidence of secretive global networks of abusers. However,
I felt that this presentation, in many ways, colluded with the abusers’
delusions of grandeur. Despite their claims that they were, as they dubbed
themselves, ‘kings’, ‘masters’ and ‘gods’, the abusers that had spat expletives
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

at me down the phone had sounded much like bitter old men and I was not
going to grant them the status of global puppet masters. What I wanted to
know was how a network of thugs and rapists could terrorise Sarah under the
very noses of the authorities without being stopped.
If I was nonplussed by the state of current explanations for organised
abuse, then the sceptical literature appeared to be coming from another
planet. Their insistence that allegations of organised abuse are nothing
more than the product of ‘recovered memories’ disclosed in therapy years or
decades after the events were supposed to have taken place had no relevance in
Sarah’s case. Sarah was not only describing events in the past but also in the
present, and her disclosures were not made in a therapist’s ofﬁce, nor were

they facilitated by me in any way except through the offer of a sympathetic

ear. Moreover, sceptics simply assumed that mental health care was accessi-
ble and affordable and that women and children who disclosed sexual abuse in
therapy and counselling were not only believed but they were encouraged to
elaborate. The truth was that many (and probably most) women with trauma-
related mental health problems cannot afford the mental health care they
need, and they often find themselves in the public health system where disclo-
sures of sexual abuse are viewed as a distraction if not an irrelevance. Behind
the din of the ‘false memory’ movement was a silent mass of abused women
unable to find adequate support who were frequently being subject to inap-
propriate and sometimes retraumatising treatment in a health system that was
not attuned to their particular needs and vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, activists,
academics and journalists claimed that the very therapy they could not find or
afford was responsible for mental health problems that were going untreated.
While I was grappling with these questions, Sarah was making a new life
in a new city, which was not without its own challenges. Her decision to move
away was hard for both of us, but she wanted a fresh start away from the accu-
mulation of bad memories. Despite the move, she still had to be vigilant,
since it was clear that the abusive group was tracking her movements. On a
few occasions, funeral wreaths were mysteriously left on the doorstep of her
new house on dates that were significant for Sarah in relation to her abuse. She
made sure that friends were available to escort her from work after being con-
fronted with a strange man who demanded that she get into his car. Despite
these ongoing efforts to revictimise her, she struck up a strong connection
with the man who is now her husband, and who has known about Sarah’s his-
tory since the early days of their relationship. Like me, Sarah’s partner has
been faced with the frank reality of Sarah’s situation, having been the recipi-
ent of strange threatening text messages and, on one occasion, discovering
that his car had been smashed in by unknown vandals. However, such inci-
dents became less and less frequent over time and eventually ceased altogether.
The fact that Sarah is now safe and well, with a family and flourishing profes-
sional career, is due to their joint resilience and perseverance.
It was Sarah who, observing my efforts to make meaning out of what
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

we had been through, suggested that I apply to study organised abuse as

a doctoral candidate. It was a timely suggestion. It seemed impossible for
me to ‘get on with my life’ if this meant trying to ‘un-know’ that other
people were enduring what Sarah had endured. It was in this spirit that
I enrolled in postgraduate study and began the research that forms the
basis of this book. I had expected to encounter some degree of scepticism and
resistance in relation to research into organised abuse, and hence the support
I have received as both a postgraduate student and now as an academic has
been both a relief and a pleasure. It is only recently that I have had the chance
to thank Sarah for nudging me onto the path to a career that I certainly had
not imagined when I took that fateful walk with her over a decade ago, and
asked her what was wrong.

Conclusion
Writing this chapter has not always been easy, and the notion of publishing
it is not a comfortable one. It is not my professional life that is being
exposed to scrutiny here but rather my personal life, since my awareness
of organised abuse developed in the context of a friendship that began when
I was still a teenager. I do not provide a biographical account here as an
attempt to underwrite the claims I present in this book as an unproblematised
‘truth’ authenticated by my own experiences. Instead, I have included my
story in order to make explicit the ways in which the theoretical and empirical
material presented in this book is founded on personal experience. Calls to
acknowledge the value of personal experience and knowledge in the social
sciences have generally come from feminists and almost uniformly from
women. However, in this chapter I highlight how men’s personal experiences
of violence against women can serve as the basis not only for personal transfor-
mation but also academic inquiry. This has required me to describe how
I came to witness the predations of an organised group of sexual abusers, as
well as the dynamics of the alliance that Sarah and I created in order to help
her survive her ordeal.
Whilst women have been most active in emphasising the ‘public’ value
of their ‘private’ experiences, this chapter illustrates that men also have an
investment in the ‘public’ recognition of our ‘private’ experiences. In many
regards, I am testifying here to the enduring power of the alliances that men
can forge with women in a shared resistance to gendered violence and the
mutuality that can ﬂourish between men and women more generally. Some
years have now elapsed since my time as Sarah’s carer, and what has lasted
for me is not the fear and fatigue but instead the admiration and even pride
that came from watching Sarah ﬁght with such determination to create
for herself the conditions that others take for granted every day – the right
to live a life that is secure, safe and free from violence. I am proud to say
that today it is Sarah who determines the direction of her life. This is an
accomplishment that speaks to the restorative powers of emotional support
as well as to Sarah’s own particular strengths and bravery. The path that
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

leads away from the trauma and captivity of organised abuse is not a linear
one and it is a form of abuse that leaves everyone who encounters it irrevoca-
bly changed. However, as Sarah’s story shows, a life worth living is a realistic
goal for survivors but it is dependent on a context of care that has, sadly, often
been lacking in the experience of survivors. The next chapter will discuss in
more detail the contexts in which organised abuse ﬂourishes, and in particular
the ways in which neglect and invalidation can entrap children and adults in
profoundly abusive arrangements.

The experiences of survivors

Extraordinary crimes in everyday life

Violence against women and children can be the primary organising principle
of collective criminal action but it often falls outside the definition of ‘real’
crime unless it overlaps with some other policing or policy priority. Behind
the rhetoric of concern over ‘sex trafficking’, for example, are a range of gov-
ernment priorities in relation to border control and national security that
frequently eclipse the needs and opinions of women deemed to have been traf-
ficked (Segrave et al. 2009). Organised criminal violence against children and
women is often not, in and of itself, an imperative for action. In Australia,
Cooper and colleagues’ (Cooper 2004, Cooper et al. 2006, Cooper et al. 2008)
research with women involved in bikie gangs, drug trafficking networks or
ritually abusive ‘cults’ has documented patterns of multi-perpetrator stalking,
battery and torture against children and women. They found that this vio-
lence is often ignored by police agencies whose focus is on the illicit profit-
making activities (such as drug manufacture or money laundering) of these
groups, not on their crimes against their partners or children (Cooper et al.
2008). Where physical and sexual violence has been arranged through ‘infor-
mal’ networks of friends or relatives then authorities do not consider it to be
‘organised crime’ in any meaningful sense (Cooper et al. 2008). European
policy-makers have shown a similar reluctance to consider that the organised
abuse of children and women for reasons other than profit should be categ-
orised as ‘organised crime’ (Kelly et al. 1995).
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This reﬂects a more general minimisation of the seriousness of gendered

violence. The accounts of survivors of domestic violence of being tortured
with cattle prods (eg Bibby 2011) and other experiences of extreme violence
may be briefly sensationalised by media coverage but otherwise the full spec-
trum of gendered violence rarely receives public recognition. Most victimised
women’s experiences do not include these extremes but the silence surround-
ing such crimes has the effect of camouflaging the ways in which ‘private’
violence can escalate to include organised abuse, torture and even death.
Furthermore, this silence renders the lives of children and women who have
survived extreme abuse very difficult. They face systemic barriers to seeking
help, finding support and being believed in medical, legal or social contexts

when they tell the truth about their lives. Chapter 3 examined the ways in
which notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ life in liberal democracies have camou-
flaged the vulnerability of children and women to gendered violence. The
politics of ‘privacy’ operates to filter social reality in ways that occlude the
severity of ‘private’ crimes from ‘public’ recognition, rendering invisible those
victims whose histories of violence are dissonant with the idealisation of
‘everyday’ spaces such as homes, schools and churches as safe environments.
This contradiction between ‘extraordinary’ abuses and ‘everyday’ life has
been important in debates over organised abuse. It is a distinction that is
also used throughout this chapter to introduce the findings of a qualitative
study of adults with histories of organised abuse. In interview, participants
described how organised abuse took form within the everyday power inequi-
ties and injustices of the ‘private’ spaces of childhood, such as homes, schools
and churches (see Appendix I for more information on the research project
and methodology). A great degree of powerlessness and vulnerability is an
objective condition of childhood in Western societies, although children’s
experiences of these conditions vary greatly depending on their life circum-
stances (Jenks 1996). Many children only ever experience their subordinate
position indirectly, through the seemingly arbitrary and erratic displays of
adult authority that occur frequently in childhood. However, in this study,
participants described how abuse and neglect in a range of sites made that
powerlessness known to them in the visceral terms of helplessness, betrayal
and exploitation. Their attempts at disclosure were usually ineffective and
where their distress was detected by other adults it did not result in efficacious
intervention or care and support, but instead they were labelled as ‘difficult’
or ‘slow’. In their accounts of childhood, participants described how they
learnt to adapt to the abuse they could not avoid whilst seeking to exercise
those opportunities for agency and resistance that they could find. However,
these experiences of powerlessness often persisted into adulthood, with many
participants describing recent experiences of violence, abuse and invalidation.
The aim of this chapter is to highlight the ways in which organised abuse
can be understood as an ‘extraordinary’ configuration of the coercion that
characterises the ‘ordinary’ intersections of age, gender and power. As partici-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

pants make clear, these intersections are so ordinary that the violence that can
result from them is easily overlooked, even when that violence takes on
extraordinary proportions.

Renee’s story
Sceptics have frequently compared allegations of organised abuse to stories
of alien abduction and past life memories, suggesting that accounts of organ-
ised abuse contain similarly fanciful or impossible elements. However, where
narratives of organised abuse are subject to study and analysis they have been
found to be far more mundane (Scott 2001, Itzin 2001). In this study, as in

others, survivors described sexually abusive groups in the context of common

social arrangements such as homes, schools and churches. Their abusers were
their parents, teachers and other adults with socially legitimised authority
over them. In effect, they were held captive within profoundly abusive rela-
tions by mechanisms of power that were invisible because they are widespread
and socially accepted. In this regard, organised abuse is similar to other forms
of interpersonal violence against children and women and indeed organised
abuse often occurs contemporaneously with emotional, physical and sexual
abuse and domestic violence. The story of one research participant, Renee,
illustrates the ways in which organised abuse is embedded within the
spectrum of woman and child abuse.
In Renee’s experience, sexual abuse was ‘everywhere’ when she was a
child. It was present at home and at school. She even recalls walking to high
school one day ‘and there’s this guy pulled over on the side of the road, car
door open, guy in his ﬁfties, bald, having a wank’. She recounted how she was
sexually victimised by her stepfather and stepbrother at home, as well as by
teachers at school.

The school I went to, one of the PE [physical education] teachers went
to jail [for sexual abuse]. There were other male teachers. We talked about
it! ‘Oh, Mr Smith’s wife has gone away, he asked me if I wanted to come
around to his place for a kiss.’ It’s almost like it was everywhere.
… My deputy head principal at high school, I have never actually said
the words, [cries] but he was into abusing girls. Y’know, we all wore uni-
forms up to here [indicates shortness of school skirt]. I’ve got memories
of him, because I was always getting sent to him – saying ‘Step back a bit,
step back a bit’, so that he could see. And I remember him telling me to
pull my dress higher, and going around the side of his desk and he is
having a wank.

When Renee was eight, her stepfather arranged for her to pose at a local pho-
tography studio for child abuse images, and he provided her for abuse
to a local group of men. Whilst this involved, at times, quite sadistic abuse
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

it was not discontinuous with her experience of a social world dominated by

the sexualised power of men over children. As she said, ‘I just thought it
[sexual abuse] was, this was just life, you know’.
Renee’s experience of sexual abuse as ‘just life’ can be understood as a
psychological adaptation to her persistent victimisation. It was a way of
conceptualising and accommodating the frequency of sexual abuse in her life
(see Summit 1983). However, this adaptation had important political dimen-
sions. At both home and school, it was through the privileges enjoyed by men
that Renee was sexually victimised. These two institutions were the primary
sites of her sexual victimisation, with each site compounding and reinforcing
the harms of the abuse she was experiencing in the other site. At home,

her stepfather Mark had untrammelled access to Renee’s body, having ensured
her mother’s compliance through a combination of violence, alcohol and
drugs.

There was a lot of drinking. Every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday
were just – they would both go out with their own friends and get abso-
lutely rotten. During the week there were always two or three drinks
straight after work. Then the violence started. My stepfather started
hitting mum and hitting us and that went on for a while.

The pervasiveness of sexual abuse imparted to Renee the message that

she was devalued and disreputable and that sexual abuse was a natural part
of her social landscape. She described herself as one of the ‘dead shits’ at school;
misbehaving, drinking, unlikely to be believed if she reported abuse and
therefore vulnerable to a few predatory teachers who targeted school children
for abuse. Whilst Mark’s authority was unquestioned at home, at school,
the deputy principal and other male teachers used their positions of authority
to sexually abuse Renee and her friends. The abusive deputy principal and
her stepfather occupied comparable positions of authority over Renee in
their respective spheres and they abused this authority in similar ways.
In order to explain why Renee considered sexual abuse as ‘just life’ and ‘every-
where’, it is important to understand not only her victimisation in organised
abuse, but how this experience resonated with other abusive experiences in
her life, and the ways that these experiences were organised by common struc-
tures of gender, age and power.
Participant’s descriptions of organised abuse had much in common with
their other accounts of abuse and violence but it also had particular character-
istics that set it apart. Not only was organised abuse associated with particu-
larly severe forms of physical and sexual violence, but perpetrators engaged
in creative strategies with the intention of enhancing the fear, pain and con-
fusion of victims. As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 8, Renee
described incidents of abuse by men who dressed up as children’s cartoon
characters and police ofﬁcers to intimidate and disorientate her. They staged
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mock forensic interviews and physical ‘examinations’ of Renee by men posing

as doctors or therapists in order to make Renee terriﬁed of cooperating
with professionals who might initiate an investigation into her abuse in
the future. Renee explained how, if she or other children resisted the abuse,
they were subject to torture techniques better known in military contexts,
including the use of stress postures and the stretching of limbs that, whilst
agonising, does not leave a mark on the victim.
So whilst Renee’s experiences of organised abuse had many parallels
with her other experiences of physical and sexual abuse, it involved a degree
of sadism and premeditation that marked it as particularly painful, confusing
and traumatising. On the one hand, it is important to recognise both the

similarities between organised abuse and other forms of child abuse and
gendered violence, but on the other hand it is clear that organised abuse has
unique characteristics with particular implications for victims and survivors,
and indeed for investigators, therapists and others concerned with preventing,
intervening in and treating child sexual abuse. The following sections seek
to maintain this ‘dual vision’ of both the common and uncommon character-
istics of organised abuse as a form of gendered violence, with a particular focus
on the spectrum of abuse disclosed by participants in the home, school and
other institutions.

Power and abuse in the home

Research has found a common group of family characteristics associated
with both incest and extra-familial abuse, particularly a lack of emotional
support and closeness (Gold et al. 2004, Yama et al. 1993, Gold 2000). Loose
or tenuous emotional relations between family members were a dominant
theme in participant’s accounts of family life. Some of the parents described
by participants clearly wanted the best for their children, however, they
often lacked the solutions to the problems that characterised their everyday
life, whether it was poverty, family violence, mental illness, or substance
dependency. Other parents, and particularly fathers, were characterised as
violent, abusive, and unconcerned about the wellbeing of other family
members. Smart (2007) highlights ‘how grim families can be’ (p 155) and her
notion of the ‘everyday unhappiness’ of children (p 154) was in evidence
throughout these participants discussions of their family life.
Of all 21 participants, only Helena and Sarah indicated that they grew
up in homes without any physical or sexual violence. All other partici-
pants reported witnessing or experiencing physical or sexual abuse at home.
Sixteen female participants reported being sexually abused by their fathers,
as did a transgendered male participant who was born and raised as female.
Their family structures were highly authoritarian, where roles within the
family were strictly deﬁned by paternal power. These interviewees often spoke
of their role in the home as ‘little mothers’ (Herman 1981) or ‘little wives’ for
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their fathers; cooking, cleaning and raising their siblings. Throughout their
childhood, they learnt that sexual coercion was part and parcel of the gen-
dered division of labour that fell to girls and women. Incest took place in the
context of severe emotional abuse and neglect.

It was after she [Mum] died that my father started, well, basically, I replaced
her as far as he was concerned … He made the decision to turn her life
support off. And he came back to us to tell her she was dead. And that was
the ﬁrst night that a part of me shared his bed. That’s it. ‘You are taking
her place’.
Rhea

Jane recounted how, at the age of eight, her mother was hospitalised with a
major depressive illness, and Jane was instructed to ‘take over’ from her. She
says, ‘And I bloody well did!’ In addition to raising her younger sibling and
doing the housework, Jane was subject to sexual abuse by her father through-
out her childhood and adolescence.

Daddy was a monster, when it came to his sexual orientation. He was a

paedophile, a rock spider. And he was a bad one.
Jane

A number of participants reported witnessing and/or being subject to their

father’s domestic violence in the home. In their accounts, the police refused to
intervene when men battered their wives, and their battered mothers were
provided with no alternatives by family, friends or the authorities. Most par-
ticipants grew up prior to the advent of domestic violence services and no-
fault divorce in the 1970s and hence their mothers had few options available
to them if they sought to bring their abuse, or the abuse of their children, to
an end. Even where abuse was absent in their house, participants indicated
that, if they wanted, fathers could, and did, impose silence when faced with
distress, ignore and invalidate unwanted opinions, withhold healthcare if they
did not view an injury as deserving of attention, and control the ﬂow of eco-
nomic resources in such a way as to curtail the freedoms of their wives and
children.

I get the impression that Mum was totally powerless with Dad. She was
totally reliant on him for money, I guess, she was repeating lots of mes-
sages she must have gotten from her family – she said things like, ‘There’s
no divorce in our family.’ She had been instructed not to leave him, there
was no back-up for her if she did. And I don’t think there was support for
single mothers at that stage. But she deﬁnitely acted as though she had
no choice. That she wasn’t going to leave, she was going to stay with him
for the money, and that he had to support his children.
Anne
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Some participants in this study came from middle-class families, in which

family problems were concealed from outsiders by a well-maintained facade
of respectability. Other participants came from working-class families in
which their parents struggled to work long hours and raise their children.
The ﬁnancial and emotional pressure on their parents was often of such mag-
nitude that, even where parents were ostensibly protective or nurturing, the
needs of their children came second. Participants often described themselves,
or their siblings, being forced to shoulder adult responsibilities as children.
Says Colleen: ‘We acted like adults, I never felt like a child. When I was a
little girl, I was always an adult’. That was a common sentiment amongst

research participants. Whilst their parents worked, or were otherwise inca-

pacitated through illness or substance dependency, some participants described
raising infant siblings whilst still children themselves.

Being the eldest, in a family with an alcoholic father, um, my mother

shoved me into the parent role. With, ah, the younger kids, much younger.
And would talk to me as if I was an adult, and conﬁde in me. Ah … I didn’t
like it, and, ah, so, in my later teen years, I avoided involvement in the
family at all. Ah. It was noisy, it was often violent, when it wasn’t violent,
you were waiting for it to break out, and there’s this very awkward posi-
tion I was put in, in being responsible for supervising the other kids, but
no authority over them, and certainly no experience. And so on.
Seb

Participants described families facing a range of challenges in which

parents and children engaged in a range of strategies in order to craft a more-
or-less cohesive and functional family environment. These efforts were often
complicated by the informal dynamics of gender and power that structured
the relations between parents and between parents and children. Helena
was one of the few participants in the study to describe a caring father who
was not violent or neglectful. Her family was poor, and whilst both of her
parents worked long hours it was her mother who was forced to accept what
Hochschild (1989) called the ‘double shift’ of paid labour and domestic labour.
Helena’s mother rose at three each morning to work as a cleaner, returning
home at 11 in the morning in order to attend to the domestic labour of child-
rearing and house keeping. Her father enjoyed time away from the family
whilst his wife laboured at home:

Mum did all the cooking and cleaning, you know, the old way. Mum
did the cooking and cleaning, dad, you know, was down at the races, he
liked to back a horse. Um, he … yeah, that was dad, they had very deﬁned
processes in the house.
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Through their control of the material and subjective conditions of family life,
fathers were in a position to establish and enforce what Smart (2007) calls the
‘rules of remembering’. That is, they were able to determine and enforce what
their wives and children were permitted to acknowledge occurring in their
daily lives, and how they were to understand those occurrences. This had par-
ticular implications in those homes in which fathers were engaged in physical
and sexual abuse. Jo described her father as a sexually abusive ‘woman and girl
hater’ who forcefully imposed his view of her thoughts and feeling upon her:

He would tell you what you were thinking and what you were feeling,
and you had to agree. ‘You did that because you are insolent’. My mum

used to despair because I used to want to try and stand up to him and say,
‘No, it’s really like this’.
Sometimes there would be arguments, and sometimes it would be
going on for ages, but eventually I would just have to back down and say
‘Yes, you’re right, I was thinking this, I was feeling that, blah blah blah’.
Eventually, even when I got older, one time, I was trying so hard not
to cry, but I couldn’t help it, and then I would start crying, and it’d be
‘Oh, you see, now you are turning on the water works, trying to be
manipulative’.

Families are, in Misztal’s (2003) terms, ‘mnemonic communities’ that shape

what children remember about their lives, and how they understand
those memories. For many participants in this study, their families were
places in which their identities and recollections were ‘storied’ in ways that
conﬂicted with their own direct experiences. Abusive fathers used their
position of authority to deny the presence of abuse, obfuscate responsibility
and silence their children and partners. In such an environment, participants
were frequently required to silence their own opinions or suppress their
needs in order to meet the requirements of their parents, who had their own
complex investments in viewing their families, and their own competency as
parents, in a favourable light. May commented how, in her family, it fell to her
to meet her mother’s need for validation and support, and not the other way
around:

She wants to be really loving, she wants to be the perfect mother. She
wants her kids to be the best. In a lot of ways, but in other ways, she’s very
needy. It’s almost as though we have to validate her need to feel perfect,
in a lot of ways. But she’s very sincere about all that.

Participants became aware at a very young age that discussing their

experiences of abuse at home was not possible, either due to likely reprisals
or denials from parental perpetrators, or due to the fragility of non-abusive
parents who were struggling to meet their own needs, let alone the needs of
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their children. The similar descriptions provided by participants of families

involved in organised abuse, and families not involved in organised abuse,
were striking. It was rare for participants in this study to describe a nurturing
or protective home environment. If abuse of some variety was not present at
home, and it usually was, then their parents’ capacity to provide care and
supervision was often limited by life stressors outside their control. In this
regard, participants in this study fell into two categories: those participants
raised in highly regimented families in which their fathers exercised power in
harmful ways, including physical and sexual abuse, and those participants
raised in struggling and sometimes chaotic families in which children were
often forced to make sacriﬁces from a young age.

Abuse in schools, churches and residential care

In this study, extra-familial abuse usually occurred in an institution such as
a school, church or children’s institution. Outside the family environment,
a few participants described opportunistic sexual abuse by strangers, however
it was in institutional settings that such abuse was prolonged and severe.
Burman (1994) suggests that dominant notions of the ‘proper’ child prescribe
normal routes of development that rely, as reference points, upon hegem-
onic values of gender, class, sexuality and ethnicity. One of the central goals
of adult strategies of surveillance and control over children is not necessar-
ily the child’s wellbeing, but rather the progressive constitution of the
child into prescribed modes of adulthood. In Parkin and Green’s (1997: 76)
research into residential care in the United Kingdom, they found a ‘high
emphasis on surveillance and discipline and little evidence of caring for
children’, concluding that in an institutional setting ‘issues of control and
containment take precedence over care’. Whilst the ofﬁcial discourses
surrounding schools, churches and other children’s institutions is one of
pedagogy and care, a ‘second’ or hidden curriculum is often in operation in
which child wellbeing is subordinate to the requirements of normalisation
and discipline.
In this study, participants recalled how institutional regimes of power
had the effect of constraining their agency and intensifying adult control
over them to such a degree as to exacerbate their vulnerability to abuse and
violence. Reports of sexual abuse by teachers were common in this study, with
almost half of participants reporting sexual abuse at school.

Teachers grabbed you – I had a teacher come after me, and I fought it
off, and then he turned on me and encouraged everyone to bully me. It
was – I just called school ‘jail’, it was awful. I wasn’t safe at school as well
as home.
Sky

The priests were supposed to take us for some sort of leisure activity, and
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I can remember they would try to sexually abuse – we were very young,
only about ﬁve, kindergarten! You just want to kill them when you think
about it.
Jane

Later on in high school, there was a chaplain who was sexual towards me.
And there was another teacher who was sexually abusive.
Kate

In participants’ accounts, the emphasis on surveillance and discipline in

children’s institutions simultaneously enabled sexual abuse but it also led to
an institutionalised disinterest in children’s wellbeing or safety. Participants’

narratives of school foreground the unresponsiveness of regimes of adult sur-

veillance to behavioural indicators of child abuse. Virtually all participants
described institutional environments in which staff were, at best, incurious
when faced with evidence of child distress and trauma. More often than
not, the child’s abuse-related problems were misrecognised as evidence of
slow social development or a learning disability. The normalising judge-
ments of families and schools then constituted the child’s symptoms of
abuse as evidence of a moral or intellectual ﬂaw, thus consigning them to a
diminished status that enabled sexual abuse to continue.
Sarah described how her victimisation in organised abuse, through a
babysitter, coincided with her transformation from a bright and gregarious
child to a shy and confused little girl. Her behaviour at school began to change
as she became more and more withdrawn.

I was feeling really different and unable to connect and that sort of
thing at school. My school work was still – I still did well with that – but
even in earlier years, from an adult’s perspective, they identiﬁed that some
of my behaviours were a bit strange.

Sarah’s teachers noticed this transformation and repeatedly contacted

Sarah’s parents about ‘a whole lot of things whereby teachers said that
they were concerned about my social interactions and behaviours and social
development, I suppose’. Whilst her parents and teachers observed this trans-
formation, and were clearly concerned by it, they did not consider that it
could be the result of sexual abuse. Instead, Sarah was labelled as socially
underdeveloped and erratic, and subject to an array of sanctions designed to
correct her behaviour. Her shyness and lapses in memory and concentration
were interpreted as evidence of an innate ﬂaw within Sarah that her parents
and teachers became increasingly frustrated in their efforts to change. Sarah’s
sense of helplessness as she tried to live up to their expectations, whilst still
enduring increasingly severe levels of organised abuse, reinforced the message
that she was receiving from her abusers; that is, that there was something
wrong with her, and hence that she was deserving of abuse and harm.
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Most participants went to school during the 1960s and 1970s, and it is
tempting to suggest that there are now more controls in place to prevent
institutional sexual abuse. Nonetheless, it is evident from ongoing reports
of harassment and abuse in schools, churches and children’s institutions
that the male sexual prerogative remains intact from many adults in institu-
tional environments. In children’s institutions, in which children’s lives
are subject to extraordinary degrees of adult oversight and regulation,
the prevalence of physical, sexual and emotional abuse of children in care
has been frighteningly high (Hawkins and Briggs 1997). A survey of over
2,000 American high school students found that 6.7 per cent of all children
in years 8 to 11 reported contact sexual abuse by a teacher (Shakeshaft 2003).

Jenks (1996) notes that child abuse remains an enduring feature of adult-
child relations despite the emergence of new forms of adult surveillance
over children that were supposed to render it impossible. She wonders whether
the emergence of the disciplinary apparatus, far from heralding a new era of
child welfare, has instead ‘rendered child abuse less visible, or considerably
more subtle’ (Jenks 1996: 97).

The continuum of abuse and powerlessness

The powerlessness of children is commonly accepted as a biological fact
and necessity. After all, an infant or a young child is physically, emotionally
and psychologically dependent upon adults. However, whilst children are
necessarily immature in physiological and psychological terms, their depend-
ency on adults is shaped by and mediated through social structures that
situate children within power relations (Jenks 1996). Children’s powerless-
ness does therefore not take a ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ form but rather it is
mediated by, and formed within, social structures. In this study, the spaces of
childhood – particularly home, church and school – provided the geographic
locus of profoundly unequal relations between adults and children. In partici-
pants’ accounts, their diverse experiences of sexual abuse in different sites
shared an important point of commonality: namely, the largely unchecked
power of adults at home and outside to coerce them into abuse. The abject
powerlessness of children faced with organised abuse was a consistent theme
in participants’ accounts. This was graphically illustrated in the following
quote by Neil:

Now, I spent a lot of my time absolutely black and blue from these
people. They’d butt out their cigarettes on me, they’d use me as an
ashtray, they’d piss on me, they’d shit on me, they’d belt the fuck out
of me, kick me around the room if I didn’t do something properly.
But nobody in my family noticed it. Nobody noticed my distress on that
ﬁrst occasion. Nor any other time. It was just put down to me being a
clumsy kid.
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Neil was the only participant in this study to be sexually abused by a

group of strangers who were not afﬁliated with his family, school or some
other institution. However, neither Neil’s family nor teachers inquired
into the injuries Neil sustained during abuse nor his withdrawn and dis-
tressed demeanour. The two men that Neil was closest to as a child were
his uncle and a teacher at school, both of whom were sexually abusive.
When Neil disclosed his organised abuse to them, they used it as an opportu-
nity to normalise and minimise their own abuse of him. Other participants
described how their attempts as children to disclose their abuse generated
shock and disbelief by adults, who appeared to be paralysed by what they had
heard.

I [often] went over to the convent and had a hot lunch. And I can remember
sitting in the sun, and trying to – one of the older nuns, in her long habit,
was talking to me, and I just said – because I was the sort of kid that was
very ‘in your face’ – and I think she was trying to talk to me about Mum,
and what was wrong. And I must have told her about Dad. Because she
sat in her chair screaming and ﬂittering, and ran screaming into the con-
vent. And I, I think I must have just said, ‘My father gets into my bed and
shows me his penis’ or something. [laughs] The poor woman!
Jane

As these excerpts from Jane and Neil demonstrate, participants were not
simply the passive recipients of harm. They exercised agency and resistance in
relation to their abuse, however it is notable that no participant reported an
effective intervention in childhood into their experiences of abuse. To the
contrary, the actions that adults took when confronted by their distress was
often counter-productive and harmful. This led to a pervasive sense of help-
lessness and powerless was captured perfectly by Darren when he said:

Because there’s just – there just was nobody. I tried going to the police as
a kid, and got laughed out of there. I tried everything. I tried writing
letters to the prime minister. Tried all sorts of things as a kid. And noth-
ing happened. And there’s just that feeling that there’s not a real hope.
And there wasn’t anybody.

In effect, participants became entrapped in social life as the pervasive condi-

tions of childhood simultaneously rendered them vulnerable to victimisation
whilst preventing them from protecting themselves. Throughout this proc-
ess, participants became sensitised to their subordinate and powerless status,
although they did not experience it as such; instead, they blamed themselves
for the experiences of humiliation and marginalisation that they felt so viv-
idly. The ways in which they internalised responsibility for their abuse had
serious consequences for their subsequent health and wellbeing. Shame and
self-blame led many participants to a state of complicity in relation to their
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own abuse, which they described facilitating in a range of ways, including

meeting their abusers at prearranged times and places, remaining obedient
during abuse and silent afterwards. In the following excerpt, Jo recalls her
internal dialogue during an incident in her mid-teens in which she had been
told to meet the abusive group after school.

I remember thinking ‘I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, I don’t want
to go, oh, but I have to go, but I have to go’. Because my parents worked
after school, and, so I would go off, walk off.

The conundrum of ‘I don’t want to go, but I have to go’ articulated by

Jo was evident in many participants’ accounts of organised abuse. Gaspar and

Bibby (1996: 50) observe that it is often difficult for investigators of organ-
ised abuse to understand ‘why children keep going back to be abused, some-
times in the most degrading manner, and why, when away from the offender,
they do not disclose’. In this study, children’s obedience was not simply a
product of the coercive strategies utilised by abusive groups, although the
threats, violence and emotional manipulations of the abusive group certainly
exerted a powerful influence. Rather, the acceptance that ‘I have to go’ was the
product of a process whereby participants became enmeshed within a larger
cycle of abuse, invalidation and powerlessness, as their attempts to disclose
were ignored, their symptoms of abuse were misunderstood, and their escalat-
ing need for intervention and support went unmet.
Participants’ lives as adults had been marked by violence and physical
and mental illness. For seven female participants, organised abuse continued
into adulthood and three participants spoke, with great difficulty, about the
fact that their children had also been victimised. Rhea and Isabelle described
how, in the early years of their children’s lives, they were still struggling
to extricate themselves from the abusive group and as a result their children
were also abused. Anne’s son Jimmy was subject to organised abuse by Anne’s
parents when she left him with them for babysitting. It was only after Jimmy
began describing sadistic sexual abuse by his grandparents that Anne began
recalling her own childhood abuse (Anne’s case is discussed in more detail in
Salter 2011). Anne immediately reported Jimmy’s disclosures to child protec-
tion services and the police, and moved away from her parents, however she
lived for many years with feelings of guilt at having placed her child in the
care of her parents in the first place.

The denial – for ages, I had the guilt. How can you be forty and not know
this about your dad? I still idolised dad. And then, when these facts came
out [Jimmy’s abuse], then eventually I was just hearing things [about
sexual abuse and traumatic amnesia] on the radio at the time. And I think
the guilt must have lessened enough for me to hear it [information about
sexual abuse and traumatic amnesia]. They said [on the radio program],
‘The more trauma you’ve experienced, the less you are likely to remember
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it.’ But it took me years [to accept that], even after hearing hints like
that, and doing counselling courses. I felt so guilty that there was no way
I could accept that I didn’t, somehow, know that this was the family
I came from.

Achieving a sense of personal safety and autonomy was a project that

took some women years or even decades of struggle, and some participants
reported that they were still not safe. Members of abusive families and groups
used a range of strategies to coerce them into abuse, including threatening
phone calls and emails, violence against pets, and even home invasions. Sarah
reported an incident in her mid-20s when the abusive group sent an envelope

of pornographic magazines to her employer with her name attached to them

in an attempt to disrupt her employment. .

All the stupid discrediting sort of stuff that the group did. Things that
set me up. In the mail, when they sent – oh my god – they sent those
porno magazines in the mail to my boss. With a note saying they were
returning them to me. It was so full on.

Rhea described how her friends and supporters were targeted by the
abusive group during a period in her 30s.

They made threats against my friend’s daughters that they were going
to bring them in, they were going to be raped, they were going to be
brood mares, they were going to be sent overseas to live with people over
there. All that stuff. Really scary stuff.

Sky moved a number of times to maintain his safety, and he stated that
he was still receiving strange emails, letters and phone calls. He reported
a recent phone call in which he was told he had only a few days to live. His
anxiety and fear escalated with each passing day until a group of men showed
up at the front door:

And on the last day, at twenty past ten at night, a car pulled up. And
there were three guys outside my house, with someone else still in the
car – the engine was running – and they just kept knocking on the door.
And it was like – are they just going to grab me?

Participants actively resisted attempts to revictimise them and they

worked hard to establish a safe and stable life as adults. However, this was
dependent in many respects on their capacity to afford mental health care
and the level of support they could ﬁnd from partners and friends. With
their employment and their relationships severely impacted by their abuse
and ongoing mental health concerns, they were often unable to ﬁnd the
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necessary levels of professional or personal support. For many female parti-

cipants, their intimate relationships as adults had been characterised by
patterns of financial abuse, coercive control and domestic violence. Male
participants also spoke of their difficulties in interpersonal relations but
when they encountered violence and abuse, it was primarily in the context
of public brawls and street fights. There were intimations of domestic
violence in the accounts of two male participants and another had spent
considerable time in prison for serious child sex offences. Early experiences
of chronic abuse set the men and women in this study onto a troubled trajec-
tory through life, with women evincing a high level of tolerance for abusive
behaviour and/or an inability to trust themselves to make safe choices in sexual

relationships, and men tending towards displays of aggression and sometimes

abuse.
It is important to recognise the ways in which the powerlessness that
participants confronted as children persisted in myriad ways for them as
adults through victimisation in interpersonal relationships, the disability and
poverty associated with serious mental illness and the disinterest shown in
their plight by a range of authorities. Participants discussed at length their
struggles to ﬁnd accessible, effective mental health care, and their attempts
to notify the authorities of ongoing abuse against themselves and others.
However, as people with mental health problems and other psychosocial
issues, such as alcohol or drug use, their narratives were often discounted by
professionals. The opportunity to document their histories and voice their
opinions freely in the context of the interview was a rare and welcome one
for participants, many of whom had become so accustomed to being invali-
dated that they rarely spoke about their history of abuse. The efforts of per-
petrators to silence their accounts through threats and violence was in
many ways perpetuated by institutionalised forces of disavowal and disbelief
that actively undermined their efforts to seek care and support, and prevented
them from ﬁnding justice for the crimes committed against them and
witnessed by them.

Conclusion
Whilst the speciﬁcs of their life circumstances varied widely as children,
in each case participants’ enmeshment within organised abuse arose out of
the ‘ﬁt’ between the power of adults to identify and manipulate vulnerable
children, and the gaps and contradictions within adult regimes of control
and surveillance at home and school. This introduces one of the key paradoxes
of child abuse more generally: in a culture in which gender-based violence
is widespread and frequent, adult regimes of control and surveillance have
both protective and harmful aspects. Some participants were subject to organ-
ised abuse because their parents, teachers and others were unable or unwilling
to provide adequate care and support. However, there were also participants
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

whose organised abuse was made possible by a high degree of control and
surveillance enabled by disciplinary regimes at home, school and church.
Whilst it may be that ‘childhood is the most intensely governed sector
of personal experience’ (Rose 1989: 123), it seems that this governance has
not ameliorated the inequities of adult-child relations and indeed may have
exacerbated them. The impacts of abuse followed participants throughout
their lives, and the consequent physical and mental illness limited their capac-
ity as adults to protect themselves from ongoing abuse or pursue fulﬁlling
relationships or employment. Where they sought external assistance, they
often found that their complex needs undermined their credibility in the eyes
of health professionals, police and other authorities.

Child-care strategies of control and surveillance are often legitimised as

being in the child’s best interest. In this study, however, it seems that chil-
dren’s interests are frequently deﬁned according to the adult imperatives
and interests rather than to the child’s wellbeing. Within the disciplinary
apparatus operating at home, school and other institutions, the principle
of adult control was pre-eminent, and abusive adults were provided with
a range of opportunities and strategies through which they could identify
vulnerable children, and manipulate them into abuse. Simultaneously,
children faced an uphill battle in making their needs known and urgent to
authority ﬁgures, who were accustomed to determining the child’s needs in
their own terms. Whilst adult scrutiny of children can be extraordinarily
intense, its goal is the reproduction of children as prescribed kinds of subjects,
which has traditionally necessitated a certain level of physical or emotional
coercion. Discomfort, confusion or distress is considered a ‘natural’ part of
childhood; that is, a necessary by-product of the pedagogical or parenting
process. Hence families and institutions can foster a culture of indifference
to children’s wellbeing which, in the accounts analysed in this chapter,
effectively silences abused children and forces them to accept abuse as their
lot. The following chapters will consider this paradox in more detail by ana-
lysing the experiences of participants subject to familial, institutional and
network abuse.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Living in two worlds

Familial organised abuse

It is well recognised that some abusive families contain multiple members

who are active in the sexual abuse of children to the point where a familial
‘culture of abuse’ begins to ﬂourish. In their research and clinical experience,
therapists Bentovim and Tranter (1994) have found that families harbouring
cultures of sexual abuse are of two types: openly dysfunctional and well known
to welfare agencies, or closed systems unknown to the authorities and isolated
from their surrounding communities. Whilst both kinds of families place a
high premium on loyalty and secrecy, abuse within openly dysfunctional
family types is more likely to be detected due to their contact with police and
health and welfare services. In contrast, organised abuse within apparently
‘normal’ families who are not dependent on government assistance can go
unnoticed for many years if at all. The children of these families are afforded
few opportunities to disclose their abuse or to seek external intervention.
Some have taken to the streets to protect themselves, disclosing their abuse to
crisis services (Scott 1998) whilst others may report their victimisation in
therapy following years or decades of abuse (Sinason 2002). The frequency of
brain injury, developmental delays and mental illness amongst victims of
familial organised abuse (Bentovim and Tranter 1994) suggests that many
victims of such abuse are unlikely to ever disclose and others are silenced
through suicide (Salter and Richters forthcoming).
The life stories analysed in this chapter provide an important insight into
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

the closed and isolated family regimes of organised abuse that rarely attract
the attention of the authorities. Interviewees described highly regimented
families that were enmeshed within abusive networks of extended kin and
family contacts in which sexual abuse was normative, widespread and expected.
Their families formed a nodal point within a larger system of abuse, in which
their parents had obligations to provide their children for abuse to relatives,
friends and other associates. These obligations structured all of family life so
that the directives of abusers, and the defence mechanisms and adaptations of
the abused, constituted the primary family dynamic. In these participants’
accounts, the involvement of their parents varied by degrees from passive

acquiescence to active participation and facilitation. Some participants’ par-

ents grew up within a familial culture of organised abuse, whilst other par-
ticipants indicated that their parents became voluntarily involved with a
sexually abusive group. In either case, organised abuse transformed the family
environment into a training ground and holding pattern for sexual exploita-
tion. Faced with parents who they couldn’t trust or depend upon, the chal-
lenge that faced participants was summarised by Sky, who described his
realisation as a young child: ‘Alright, I’ve got to keep myself alive’.
Participants described a range of benefits accruing to adults who partici-
pated in organised abuse, including professional, social, financial and sexual
benefits. However, it was clear that organised abuse was neither a free nor
voluntary system of exchange. Like other forms of organised crime, familial
organised abuse occurred within strictly observed hierarchies of men who
maintained control through blackmail and the threat of injury and death.
Participants indicated that parental involvement in organised abuse was a
source of fear for both parent and child, who could both be subject to
serious sanctions if they did not comply with the requirements of the sexually
abusive group. Fear of more senior or powerful men within the abusive
network loomed large in the minds of abusive adults as well as children, and
the act of providing a child for abuse was a mechanism through which an
adult could defer or displace the violence that was an ever-present threat
within the abusive group. This chapter will explore the relations between
family members trapped within organised abuse, and the manner in which
children and adults adapted to a situation that was simultaneously intolerable
and inescapable.

Private abuse, public facade: dissociation and the

public-private divide
Participants subject to familial organised abuse described their childhoods
as bifurcated into ‘two worlds’: there was the ‘everyday’, in which they went
to school and maintained the pretence of a happy family, and ‘night-time’,
which represented the unpredictable and dangerous reality of living with
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organised and (often) ritualistic abuse. Rhea encapsulated this perspective

when she said:

There were two lives. It wasn’t like living in a cult where you were kept
segregated from the outside world. It was nothing like that. I think that’s
so extreme, and we hear about those now. What we don’t hear about are
the kids that are just living absolutely normal, middle-class-type lives,
where nobody’s able to open the door and get behind to see what’s hap-
pening. The group always talked about people being outsiders, you never
speak to outsiders. Ever. You don’t tell outsiders about what happens in

the home, you don’t talk to outsiders. And what we learnt to do was not
to talk to anybody about what was happening.

Lily and Darren spoke in similar terms:

Y’know, there’s the two worlds. There is the normal, everyday world, and
there is the ritual abuse world.
Lily

[S]o much of my life is just sectioned off. And it had to be while I was a
kid. I mean, I couldn’t be going to school and remembering all that stuff.
Y’know, there was two worlds.
Darren

It is notable that participants lived in households that maintained (to

greater or lesser degrees of success) a veneer of normalcy. Despite the
abuses contained within them, their families did not attract the attention
of the authorities, since family life was carefully structured around a collec-
tive denial and disavowal of organised abuse. Participants’ parents maintained
a strict distinction between the ‘private’ world of organised abuse and a
‘public’ facade that was employed in interactions with those outside the
family.

They [parents] portrayed themselves as decent law-abiding, working-

class citizens. Which, of course, then – it was just a big front. A pretence,
anyway. And they would make sure that they would follow all day-to-day
laws, and look good, and respectable. And it worked, because nobody dug
underneath, and had a good look at them. Took the mask off their face.
But they were hiding a great deal.
Lauren

A neighbour had come to our house, and Mum said to her, ‘I don’t hit my
children’. And I distinctly remembered being hit by her a few days ear-
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lier. So, again, this is what I mean about the way we were fed certain
stories about our family, which was different to what was really happen-
ing. But it wasn’t until I was older, and I remembered that conversation,
and I thought, ‘But that’s not true’. But we were all taught to bury the
truth.
Anne

I think, I recall, a lot of my childhood life not making sense because what
happened during the day was very different to what happened at the
night, or on weekends. What was happening was the total opposite to
what was being portrayed during the day, you know, the whole Brady

Bunch thing. Mum, Dad, kids, everything looks hunky dory. It was the
opposite to that.
Isabelle

For many participants, this divide between ‘day’ and ‘night’, and ‘public’ and
‘private’, was so stark that it was internalised and became manifest through
psychic structures. Speciﬁcally, many participants developed psychological
adaptations, such as dissociation and amnesia, in which the lived experience of
schooling and life outside the home was ‘split off’ from the fear and terror of
organised abuse in domestic contexts. Scott (2001) argues that, in circumstances
of organised and ritualistic abuse, children develop multiple personalities
because their roles in abusive family contexts are incompatible with their roles
at school and outside the home. Such an argument ﬁnds support in this study,
where participants subject to organised abuse described in detail the contradic-
tory roles that they were expected to adopt inside and outside the home, and the
multitude of rules and regulations that demarcated this divide. The child was
placed in an impossible situation by organised abuse: under pain of death she
was to deny (even to herself) that any abuse was taking place, nonetheless she
was expected to conduct herself at all times according to the code of secrecy and
loyalty imposed by the abusive group and enforced by her parents. Jo described
the strict policing of her ‘everyday life’ by the group, who stipulated a set of
requirements to Jo that, she felt, she must obey or else risk being killed.

It wasn’t only a question of telling, you had to not draw attention to your-
self … You’re not [allowed to be] a trouble maker or having problems,
but you’re not [allowed to be] drawing to attention to yourself the other
way as well [ie excelling in any way]. You’ve got to be fairly average,
particularly not be noticed, and not just in terms of what happened [ie
organised abuse]. If you were in any way drawing attention to yourself
that there might be something funny [there would be consequences].

Trapped by irreconcilable demands to ‘not know’ about their own abuse but
to ‘know’ not to tell anyone about it, participants described themselves inhab-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

iting an in-between space of awareness during ‘everyday life’, as they avoided

any stimulus that might remind them of their abuse whilst simultaneously
maintaining semi-awareness of the rules against disclosure and disloyalty. As
children, their response to this life-threatening paradox was to dissociate,
which participants described as ‘ﬂying away’, ‘going inside’ or going to the
‘deep dark’. This ‘going inside’ was described by participants as their only
available response to a totalistic and life-threatening environment in which
other options for resistance were unavailable. Says Anne:

That’s the only safe place, your own brain. Because, deﬁnitely, your body
has been invaded, your body is not your own.

Dissociation enabled the child to enact the multiple, contradictory roles

demanded of her whilst also maintaining the illusion of control and order in
her life. Over time, the child came to identify herself according to these mul-
tiple roles; she develops DID, in which her social interactions and practices are
mediated by multiple, alternating self-states. Fittingly for a last-ditch psycho-
logical defence mechanism, participants’ descriptions of DID emphasised its
functional quality, and the manner in which it enabled them to perform ade-
quately within life-threatening and unpredictable circumstances. Rhea
described how she generated new personalities and identities according to the
respective dispositions demanded of her in sexual exploitation:

Cult was separate to our day-to-day life. Me, Rhea, was there just for the
day-to-day things that were happening. If cult stuff was happening, it
would be other parts that were involved. I guess there were a few things
that were happening around a few people that knew cult, knew we were
involved, um, but they were very careful – a lot of them, they were very
careful. As I said, we were just leading ordinary, normal lives. And only cult
parts – cult parts would be activated if certain triggers were being used.

Rhea described her multiple personalities in almost mechanistic terms: when a

different ‘part’ was necessary for a particular function, that ‘part’ would ‘switch’
in and fulﬁl its role. The maintenance of two separate lives was achieved, for
Rhea, through the amnesia that comes with dissociation. Nonetheless, she also
indicated that maintaining the distinction between these ‘two worlds’ required
explicit instructions by her father at times, and her conscious obedience:

There were marks after some rituals, I did have – I remember, we had
marks on us, physical marks of the abuse, and our father told us that we
were not to get undressed, we were not to get changed [at school].

Jo had also been diagnosed with DID and, like Rhea, she also indicated that
her ‘two worlds’ were kept separate not only by amnesia and dissociation, but
also through semi-conscious effort. This gave rise to considerable anxiety.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

I did sometimes lie in bed and wonder, and worry that I would have
enough … left to live in the day. So much was being taken up with
coping with everything that was going on, I was worried that I would
have actually enough resources to actually go about my everyday life and
put on a facade of everything being ﬁne.

The literature on trauma and dissociation is written almost wholly by psy-

chologists and psychiatrists, and hence it maintains a primary emphasis on
the psychopathological impacts of violence for the individual victim. However,
it is important to note the political nature of dissociation, and how the spatial

distribution of relations of gender, age and power can organise children’s lives
in ways that generate an intolerable contradiction between their ‘public’ and
‘private’ roles. In this study, participants described how they responded to the
contradictory roles demanded of them at home and elsewhere by generating a
multiplicity of identities that corresponds to speciﬁc conﬁgurations of power
in particular circumstances. Over time, dissociation may become the child’s
primary response to a world that they experienced as unpredictable and vio-
lent, resulting in the proliferation of identities until, as Darren put it, ‘you are
so splintered, and so divided, that you have no particular strength left in your
compartments – no compartment is particularly big or strong’.

Paternal domination
For the majority of these participants, their fathers were their primary abuser who
subjected them to incest as well as organised abuse. Fathers featured in their
histories as the ‘perfect patriarchs’ that have been noted throughout the literature
on incest (Herman 1981, Williams and Finkelhor 1990, A. Morris 2009). They
were the arbiters of family life to the point where it was unusual for participants
to report domestic violence by their fathers; the suggestion was that such violence
was unnecessary. In many participants’ accounts, their fathers’ capacity to dictate
the terms of family life was so entrenched that it went largely unspoken, and was
expressed and reinforced through subtle displays of control and coercion.

There was no physical stuff [domestic violence]. Occasionally, I can

remember them having an argument or two. But – nah, there was no need
for it. Because what he said went. Nobody ever questioned it. As soon as
he walked into the room, everyone knew what their place was, and what
they were allowed to say, and what they weren’t allowed to say.
Isabelle

I didn’t see any violence [between Mum and Dad] – I’m not saying it
didn’t happen, but it was never in front of us. No, it was psychological,
looking back on it to see what the relationship was, and looking at domes-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

tic violence in those terms. It was total, y’know, it was ﬁnancial depend-
ency, it was psychological, emotional abuse. He didn’t need to hit her.
Rhea

I think she [Mum] must have been very deﬁned in her role as mother and
wife, I think. But it wasn’t the sort of house where there were any kind of
arguments or disagreements. Everyone agreed with everybody. Um. And
you didn’t get angry, and you didn’t cry, and you didn’t complain, and
you had perfect manners. And those things were kind of unspoken, rather
than actually spoken.
Felicity

In this study, the dominant position of abusive fathers in these households

was constantly reafﬁrmed through a regime of discipline and control embed-
ded within the everyday routine of family life. Participants’ families adhered
rigidly to the traditional sexual division of labour. Most of their mothers were
involved in full-time housework and childrearing, or else in low paid service
or administration roles. In contrast, most fathers were engaged in higher
status, better paid professional work. A number of authors have remarked on
the alienation between mothers and daughters which seems to prevail in
incestuous families (Herman 1981, Laing 1999, A. Morris 2009). This was a
noticeable feature in participants’ accounts of familial organised abuse.
Participants often described their mothers as weak and helpless and unable to
nurture or protect them. This characterisation of their mothers was most fre-
quently reﬂective of the fathers’ treatment of them, which was both implicitly
and explicitly disparaging.

He was scathing [of my mother] in his cynicism, on the one hand, and he’d
put her down. So much so that, when I was a teenager, I didn’t think much
of her, I thought she was a stupid woman with no brains – which is terrible,
really. On the other hand, at other times, he would show a sort of – it was
almost a borderline personality type switch there – he’d go into ‘Oh, if it
wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have any friends come to visit’ and ‘Oh, look at
you, Madam, you do such wonderful things here in the house, making this
beautiful meal.’ He’d be so effusive in his praise, but you knew it could
drop any second. He could go into a temperamental rage in a moment, and
then switch it off at a moment’s notice if someone unexpectedly came by or
the phone rang.
Kate

Typically, participants’ descriptions of their mothers were richer and lengthier

than their descriptions of their fathers, since their mothers were largely
responsible for childrearing and featured more frequently in their lives as
children. Nonetheless, it was clear that fathers and grandfathers loomed
over participants’ families as powerful ﬁgures in a totalistic regime of coer-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

cion and exploitation. Many participants described their fathers’ alarming

and unpredictable oscillations in mood between aggressive violence,
cold aloofness and sexually inappropriate or abusive affection. These mood
swings were all the more terrifying because of the seriousness of the crimes
that participants had witnessed their fathers engaging in within organised
contexts.

Maternal complicity
In autobiographies of familial organised abuse, survivors often refer to their
mothers as being actively involved in their organised abuse (eg Lorena and

Levy 1998). Scott (2001: 106) has documented the claims of survivors of ritu-
alistic abuse that women are ‘as bad’ or ‘worse’ in abusive contexts than men.
In this study, it was rare for participants to describe an incident in which their
mothers were enthusiastic participants in organised abuse. Sky was the only
participant who spoke of his mother as a regular and proactive participant in
organised abuse alongside his father. Sky remembered his mother as ‘the boss’
in family life. His parents formed a tightly-knit unit and he suggests that,
together, they manipulated their children with great skill.

I think I have three memories of my mother hugging me as a child, and

they were all – even as a 12-year-old – I was thinking ‘You are faking it.’ I’m
bawling my eyes out and thinking, ‘You don’t even know how to hug.’
[…] It’s almost clinical, the day-to-day relationships with my parents.
At least, when you are in class with your mates, you say, ‘Are you having a
decent day? What’s going on for you?’ But I knew more about the emo-
tional life of my next door neighbours than I did about my family. In my
family, sentences never start like ‘I feel … blah blah blah.’ It was very odd.

inﬂicted on Cara by her father and the abusive group.

[Mum would say] things like, ‘This is just the way it has to be.’ ‘It’s not
as bad as you think.’ Just minimising stuff.

Whilst the behaviour of these women can be conceptualised as complicit, it

can also be understood as protective, in that it facilitated the long-term well-
being of the family.
In denying the seriousness of organised abuse, these women were able to
maintain their attachment to an abusive husband, thus ensuring the social
status and ﬁnancial security of their family, and ameliorating the escalation of

violence against themselves and their children. The lack of options available
to victimised children and women was a material condition of life that these
women had to adapt to, due to the systemic neglect of the needs of abused
women and children by the health and welfare services and by the government
more generally. This prompted a kind of learned helplessness that was reﬂected
in their dispositions and parenting practices.

Her [my mother’s] biggest message to me was always ‘Don’t get your
hopes up.’ And she acted as if she was doing me a favour by squashing
everything I ever wanted to do, because it was like, ‘No, just don’t get
your hopes up.’
Anne

Some mothers did attempt to protect their children from organised abuse but
to no avail.

Mum did try, I’ve got to admit, Mum did try a few times to get us out of
it. But she was very much under his control. And on one occasion, she did
take off, she was – I was probably about eight or nine, and my brother –
she was actually pregnant again, and she took off with us. And it was very
hard at the time to, when it started coming back, and I had to talk about
it – because a part of me rang my father and told him where we were. So
it wasn’t me, it wasn’t Rhea, but it was certainly a part of me, a [different
personality], and he and a few of his cronies showed up and brought us
back. And due to what they did to her at the time, she miscarried, so, she
lost that baby. She was punished very severely for that.
Rhea

I remember lying in bed, being really sick, and hearing them in the next
room, and my mum saying ‘I don’t know what you are doing, I don’t
know what you’ve done to her, but you have to stop.’ And then just hear-
ing this thump, thump.
And what the hell could she have done? She had two kids, and was
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

incredibly conscious of her position in society. And divorce was just not
done.
Lily

When considering participants’ descriptions of maternal complicity in organ-

ised abuse, it is important to be mindful of the constrained choices available
to their mothers. Most participants indicated that their mothers’ involvement
in organised abuse was leveraged through threats and abuse, or else their
mothers were not directly involved. Regardless of their level of involvement,
it seems that these women had few choices available to them if they sought
to protect themselves or their children from abuse. It is also pertinent to

consider how years or decades of exposure to the household gender regime

described in the previous section (and, indeed, the gender regime of the abu-
sive groups within which these families were embedded) may serve to under-
mine the autonomy and agency of women and delegitimise individual
resistance to sexual abuse or organised abuse.

When one parent doesn’t know: the complexities

of deceit and denial
The complexities of complicity, deceit and denial in families involved in
organised abuse are well illustrated by the life histories of those participants
who had a ‘non-involved’ parent; that is, a parent who was unaware and unin-
volved in the organised abuse of their child. In interview, May and Felicity
reported being subjected to organised and ritualistic abuse by their father
whilst their mother was unaware of this behaviour. In their life histories, ‘not
knowing’ about organised abuse emerges as a situated accomplishment for
non-involved parents. It seemed that the non-involved parent was unaware of
the organised abuse, not because they had failed to ‘put the clues together’,
but because the circumstances of their life were such that inquiring further
into the distress of their abused child would have placed them in an intolera-
ble position. As such, the division between the ‘non-involved’ parents
described by these participants, and the ‘coercively involved’ parents described
by other participants, was somewhat indistinct.
These families shared a great deal in common with families in which both
parents were aware of their organised abuse. At home, their fathers were dis-
tant, unavailable and unpredictable, and their mothers struggled to raise their
children without partners who provided emotional support or assistance with
childrearing and domestic labour.
May characterised her mother’s state of ‘not-knowing’ as an ongoing proc-
ess constituted by a complex array of defensive techniques, ranging from
denial, minimisation and dissociation to insults and angry outbursts. She
described her mother’s efforts to maintain the ideal of a ‘happy family’. This
ideal was all the more valuable for its fragility. As her father subjected her to
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

incest and organised abuse, May became a troubled child, with frequent
migraines, nightmares and inexplicable phobias. She describes ‘switching off’
as a child, dissociating in the family home and being unable to recall daily
events or participate fully in family life. In her home environment, May’s
symptoms of trauma were rationalised away. May says her family ‘seemed to
think that the way I was being and acting was very normal, and that was the
way I was expected to act’. May was frequently tearful at home, and her mother
viewed May’s depression as a personal affront:

It was almost as though she felt that she had failed as a mother if I was
upset. And I had to validate her then. ‘Perfect mother’.

Maintaining a relationship with her mother required May to fulﬁl her moth-
er’s emotional needs whilst denying her own. In her early teens, however, the
scale of her distress became impossible to hide.

She would often ﬁnd me – I was often crying, but I wouldn’t know why I
was crying? I didn’t know why I was upset. And she would always be dig-
ging and needling me, ‘Why are you upset?’ Questioning me and trying
to get to the bottom of it.
And anyhow, this particular time – I really couldn’t tell her, I didn’t
really know – but I think the only way I could describe what I was feeling
was, like, ‘I don’t think Dad is loving me right. I don’t think he’s loving
me right. When he’s hugging me, he’s not hugging me as a daughter.’ And
Mum was most offended. And she said, ‘Aren’t you lucky that I’m not the
jealous, vindictive type of mother who would believe this type of stuff.’

This pattern of disclosure and invalidation was repeated a year later when, at
the age of 15, May attempted to kill herself.

What was your family’s response to that?

Oh, my mum was angry. ‘We gave you everything you need, why
would you try to kill yourself?’ She was the only person I told [about the
suicide attempt]. I don’t think she took me very seriously anyway.

May demonstrated a great deal of insight and empathy regarding her mother’s
inability to acknowledge her distress.

It was very hard for me. But, I think about how it must have been for her
– being the type of person, with the emotional neediness she had, to be in
the situation in which all hell was happening to her daughter, and she felt
she couldn’t do anything about it. Really, she had no option but to turn
off. And dissociate from it.
So do you feel that she was aware of your distress?
Umm … yeah, I do, I think she felt that there was something not
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right. But I think she felt that it wasn’t safe to pursue it any further.

Felicity’s descriptions of her mother are in contrast to other descriptions of

parents who were unaware of their organised abuse. At the time of interview,
Felicity was still putting together an image of her childhood and life in the
family home. Nonetheless, she describes her mother as a protective and
involved parent, although she suggests that the family home was somewhat
devoid of spontaneous displays of emotion or affection.

I think she was a pretty amazing sort of woman, really. She was very
family oriented … She had a great sense of humour, I remember her

laughing a lot. I remember her being at home, I can remember her clean-
ing, doing things.
But I don’t ever remember anything much in the way of physical
touch. I don’t remember her hugging me. Possibly that’s how it was at
that time, I’m not really sure. But I don’t remember physical touch within
the family happening at all.

Felicity recalled her father subjecting her to organised and ritualistic abuse
within an abusive group that met at the local church. Like May, Felicity spoke of
her need to ‘protect’ her mother from this knowledge, and she tried to compen-
sate by being the ‘perfect child’. Unlike May, however, Felicity’s mother acted
decisively when she was confronted with evidence of her child’s sexual abuse.

[M]y mother discovered him [my uncle] abusing me one day, and then
he was thrown out of the house, I assume, that night, and I never saw him
again … I was too scared to ask her about things for a long time – this
was about my uncle – because there were things that I remembered but I
didn’t know how much she knew. And when I asked her about it, she said
she believed that it started when I was a baby.

Felicity’s account suggests that, in the gender-divided world of the 1950s, an

otherwise protective mother could be deceived by an abusive spouse as he
sexually exploited their child. Felicity’s father was a distant man who was
home only infrequently, and Felicity suggested that there was little commu-
nication between her mother and siblings, and her father.

I’d have to say that I don’t think I ever really knew him. He wasn’t part
of our lives. The only conversation I remember having with him – 1952,
I think it was, the morning the king died – he was having breakfast,
because he started early, and I could hear the national anthem playing.
And I asked him what that was, and he said the king had died. And I
think that’s kind of … about the only conversation we had.
[…] And he was always out a lot at night, and saw the family, I think,
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

as Mum’s responsibility. She brought us up, she took us to church, and,

um, he didn’t see that as part of his – which is probably what happened
in those days, a lot. But I don’t know much about him.

The colonisation of family relations by

organised abuse
For those participants with a ‘non-involved’ parent, the encroachment of
organised abuse into the family home was somewhat limited. The abusive
parent often had to wait for their spouse to be absent from the home, or else
ﬁnd excuses to take their child from the home, in order to expose the child to

organised abuse. These boundaries and constraints upon organised abuse were
not in place for those participants whose entire household was aware of, and
active in, organised abuse. The nuclear ‘units’ of these families were often
embedded within extensive networks of abusive kin within which incest and
violence was widespread and normative. The abusive group was an unspoken,
although powerful, factor in family life. Organised abuse was rarely openly
acknowledged in the home and participants described parents who were at
pains to conform to conventional family norms. Nonetheless, participants
indicated that the sadistic violence of the abusive group was a silent but pow-
erful threat that permeated the family home.

But then there was this kind of reign of terror of my father, and my
mother, and what they would do in a ritual context. It took over everyday
life too. It was just keeping us in check with fear. I don’t know if you
would call that discipline, but it kept us in line.
Sky

Everything that I did, somehow, had a link back to sex and candles
and dark places, religion and basically, if I didn’t do what I was told, I
was told it would result in something happening to me, something
happening to the people that I care about. You know, there were times
where I had something that I did care about, like pets, they never stayed
around.
Isabelle

Many participants were kept in a state of isolation by their fathers, who con-
trolled and monitored all aspects of family life. In Isabelle’s family it was con-
sidered a male prerogative to supervise and restrict the activities of women.

I was kind of my father’s property. He sort of saw me as his second wife.

So everywhere he went, I did. If he was at home, I was at home. If he went
shopping or something, and it wasn’t a school day, I would be with him.
There was no space to go on your own. It was kind of, ‘I’m not letting you
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out of my clutches, because if I let you out of my clutches you might start
talking to people, and things might start making a different sense.’
Isabelle

Many participants were deterred from establishing any social contact outside
the family. Their fathers and grandfathers consolidated their power by isolat-
ing their wives and children from the outside world. For some participants,
the women in their family were just as active in policing their conduct as
men. As a child, Lauren and her mother lived in her grandparents’ home, and
it seems that all adults in the home took responsibility for the micro-control
of children.

Growing up with my family, they wanted to control every aspect of my

life. They want to know everything you do, every conversation you’ve
had, because you are never allowed to speak about what’s going on. So it’s
to keep this tight control, tabs on you.

Lauren lived with her three siblings and her mother in her grandparents’
house and was expected to engage in regular sexual activity with her grand-
parents as well as with her uncles and other family members and friends. The
participation of children in this activity was coerced by withholding food.
Lauren reported that she and her siblings were often hungry and were given
small amounts of money for sex acts. They used the money to buy food.

We were all constantly abused. And also the involvement of other family
members from a very early age. […] In particular, one uncle would come
to the house, and … any one of us would have to perform oral sex or what-
ever with this uncle. Whoever he wanted. And that’s where money would
start changing hands. […] Because there was major food deprivation and
all that, you would accept that money and just use it so you could buy
some food.

This excerpt demonstrates how, in circumstances of familial organised abuse,

sexual abuse can become one of the organising principles of family relations.
Lauren’s mother lived with her parents, and in lieu of rent and board she pro-
vided her children for sexual abuse to her father. In turn, when Lauren’s uncle
came to visit his parents, he would regularly abuse Lauren and her siblings,
providing payment to his parents as well as small amounts to the children. In
this way, lateral and intergenerational relations within Lauren’s family were
expressed through the medium of child sexual abuse. Adult male family
members acted as abusers whilst adult female family members acted as facili-
tators, a division of labour that reﬂected, more generally, the relative status of
women in Lauren’s family.
In participants’ histories, their abusive families and kin networks over-
lapped substantially with religious, fraternal and other male-dominated
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organisations. Their families maintained involvements with churches, Masonic

groups and other institutions in which they had close linkages with other
sexual abusers. The patterns of sexually abusive exchange outlined above were
therefore not limited to intra-familial relations; they included relations with
family ‘friends’ and contacts across a range of institutions and social contexts.
The abusive group could include members of mainstream institutions who,
by acting cooperatively, were able to create systems of patronage and favour
for others within the abusive group. A number of participants suggested that,
through organised abuse, their fathers were provided with professional con-
nections and opportunities that would otherwise have been closed to them.
For example, May’s father rose from humble beginnings to become a senior

business executive in a relatively short period of time. May noted that his
rapid advancement coincided with his ‘association’ with a group of wealthy
men who subjected her to organised abuse.

He [Dad] didn’t have a lot of education. And he didn’t have a lot of money.
But somehow, he had all these rich people in his life. And there was
this group of people that he used to be associated with. And they are
all quite wealthy. I always thought he started associating with them
when he started getting wealthy himself, and moving up in the business
world.

Anne also described her father’s swift promotion from a relatively low-paid
and unskilled position into a very senior position in the public service. Cara
charted a similar path for her father from impoverished beginnings, to par-
ticipation in organised abuse, to a managerial position. Isabelle noted a gen-
eral relationship between her father’s sexual exploitation of her and his ability
to obtain social and economic advantage.

He [Dad] always knew prominent people in the community – lawyers,

solicitors, doctors, police ofﬁcers – he could always manage to get out of
something, or make excuses for something. He always had people coming
to the house – males. Always. Every night there was always people chit-
chatting and stuff, and I had to be his … I don’t know, prize possession
thing. Like, let’s show off the daughter thing, let’s put her on display. It
was almost like you were a part of this meat market, being checked out
for possible … whatever.

Both Lily and Rhea commented on the afﬂuent and professional status
of the men who participated, with their fathers, in organised and ritualistic
abuse.

I think, in a lot of ways, ritual abuse is an upper class crime. It’s your
solicitors and QCs and surgeons and academics and all those professions.
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Lily

Dad was a partner in a large ﬁrm. The people who were members of the
cult were all professional people. And some of the names, as I said, I
mean, the names are all very well known. Oh, gosh, yes.
Rhea

For these participants, organised abuse was linked directly to their family’s
socio-economic status and their father’s professional standing. In these con-
texts, children were assets or objects. There was little emotional investment
by parents in their relations with their children. Lily described her father as

‘incredibly aloof’ and her mother as ‘cold’. As a child, she felt her most sym-
pathetic attachment ﬁgures were her pet and her teddy bear.

We had a dog, and I have memories – like, a couple of very clear memo-
ries of sitting on the back step, talking to the dog, and sitting on the back
step, and talking to the teddy bear. They were the two that were going to
listen.

Isabelle described her father as a ‘mask’ for a man whose primary obligations
lay outside his family.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him as my father. I have a birth certiﬁcate,
in that sense. But I’m not sure that I ever put it in that context. I saw him
connected to something outside the family, as opposed to … He played
the role of being the, you know, ﬁgurehead, and I’m sure there were times
where there were some nice things that he did just so that you knew he
wasn’t 100% horrible. But I’m not sure that I even related to him that
way. It’s kind of, ‘I have to do that at home, because that’s the game we
are playing’.

The subjection of children within these families to organised abuse became

linked not only to their father’s ﬁnancial wellbeing but to their physical safety,
even their lives. Parental involvement in organised abuse appeared to be a
product of interlocking disincentives as well as incentives. Cara describes how
her grandfather’s fear of the abusive group effectively hollowed out and colo-
nised all relations in her nuclear and extended family, as he sought to ensure
the compliance of his wife, children and grandchildren to the demands of
organised abuse and thus avoid any ‘trouble’ for himself.

Even though Poppy was still a 33rd degree [a senior role within the abu-
sive group], it felt like he was still being controlled from above too. If he
didn’t do what he was meant to do, it was like he was going to be in trou-
ble. It felt like he was acting from a place of fear. I know that Nanna
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deﬁnitely was. She was totally dominated by Poppy. And it just went
down, of course, Dad was dominating Mum and Mum was very scared. So
I think it was all about control.

Kate’s father became involved in a sexually abusive group whilst overseas

on missionary work. He pursued his interest in organised and ritualistic
abuse when he returned to Australia although the abusive group became
increasingly violent towards him as well as his children. Kate witnessed her
father’s physical and sexual victimisation in the organised group, and she
spoke of her belief, as a child, that he would be killed if she didn’t ‘go along
with this’.

It was almost, though, as if he [Dad] was scared for his life. He was
both a victim and a perpetrator. I had the sense that I had to go along
with this, or else father would be killed. So I was kind of protecting
him.

As the violence escalated, Kate’s father found it difﬁcult to extract himself and
his family:

We kept moving all the time. Father kept us moving, and I presume now
that it was to get away from them. We could be gone at a moment’s
notice. But it was sort of a love-hate thing with father. He was a weak
man, and I guess he loved the money [that he gained from organised
abuse], too, although he didn’t need it by that time. He was making good
money. But I guess he just loved that, you know, they would tie you up,
and they’d hurt you, and then they’d assault you, and it’d be on ﬁlm, and
then he’d get paid.

Smart (2007: 45) describes family relationships as ‘sticky’, suggesting ‘it

is hard to shake free from them at an emotional level and their existence
can continue to influence our practices and not just our thoughts’. Within
organised abuse, the ‘sticky’ quality of family relationships took on over-
whelming and life-threatening dimensions, as men viewed them as pro-
prietary links that justified their exploitation of wives, children and
grandchildren. In participants’ accounts, these relationships were enduring
and extraordinarily difficult for women, in particular, to extract themselves
from. For example, Jo’s mother had been subject to organised abuse by her
own family as a child. Although she had escaped ongoing abuse by marrying
Jo’s father, and moving away from her family, the original abusive group
threatened the safety of her infant son if she did not permit them regular
access to Jo.

The ﬁrst thing that happened was when I was about three these men
appeared during the day at our house, and I had a brother who was about
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eighteen months at the time. So they came and basically threatened my

mother and I, and said that they would kill my brother if we didn’t
comply and I had to go with them. And my mother, I think, also having
been pre-programmed … um … uh, didn’t resist and I can remember her
standing there kind of shaking, like almost in anger, kind of shaking like
this and pointing to me [mock voice] ‘Get in the car’, so I basically had
to go with them.

Frankel and O’Hearn (1996) used the social dynamics of the Jewish ghettos in
the Holocaust as a metaphor for the intra-psychic processes of people
subjected to severe abuse, highlighting simultaneous patterns of strategic

complicity, victimised coping, and underground resistance in victimised

people as well as victimised communities. These patterns emerge in partici-
pants’ accounts as characteristic of both the intra-psychic processes and famil-
ial relations that dominated their home environments, highlighting the
constraints that organised abuse imposed upon parents as well as children.
In a system of exchange regulated through threats of violence and death,
the decision to participate – enthusiastically or otherwise – is neither simple
nor free. These participants described their parents’ complicity occurring con-
temporaneously with their compulsive denial of the abuse, and sometimes
their frantic efforts to escape.
Nonetheless, parental involvement in organised abuse cannot be reduced to
a simple pattern of incentives and disincentives. The significance of sexual
abuse in the lives of the families described by participants in this project was
not a simple matter of economic gain. As children, participants occupied the
lowest rung of a hierarchy of abuse and victimisation that structured their
immediate family environment, and children were objects of sexual exchange
that regulated relationships between their nuclear family, their extended
family and other family friends and contacts. Within these networks of rela-
tionships, fathers, grandfathers and other male authority figures used the
bodies of children to establish their status vis-à-vis one another as well as to
gain professional advantage and other forms of prestige. Mauss (2000) argued
that systems of reciprocal obligation and exchange give rise to, and organise,
mutually affirming relations between men, however he notes that exchange
can also be part of brutal and destructive competitions between men in the
establishment and maintenance of social hierarchies. This system of exchange
described by participants arguably created the context in which groups of
men could generate a sense of self and status through practices of sexual abuse.
However, once they began to engage in organised abuse (and, for some par-
ticipants’ parents, it appeared they had little choice as they were born into
familial organised abuse) they could not disengage without the threat of vio-
lence or death. In participants’ childhoods, this process was experienced
through the depersonalisation and objectification of children that character-
ised their home lives.
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‘It’s all a bad dream’: parental facilitation

of abusive incidents
Participants subject to familial organised and ritualistic abuse generally
reported an abusive ordeal at least once a week, most often on Friday and/or
Saturday nights. Their reports of the transition from the family environment
to abusive ordeals followed a common pattern. A number of participants
reported their parents providing them with a drink before bed-time, and they
would either quickly fall asleep as though sedated, or become aware of changes
to their perceptions.

I would get this horrible drink before I went to bed. It must have had
something in it. And then we’d be in the car and I’d be taken out some-
where, I’d be semi-conscious type of thing.
May

We were given juices and milk drinks before going to bed, and waking
up an hour or two later. And then we’d be taken off later.
Cara

My mum would say, ‘Kiddies, I’ve made you all a hot chocolate.’ For my
brothers and sisters, she would use any old cup … but they would always
bring out a particular cup and make sure they gave it to me. And they’d
say to me, ‘This is your special cup.’ And sometimes they’d put cinnamon
on the top. I don’t know if the cinnamon was about disguising the taste,
or if it was meant to be a trigger or something. But it was primary school,
and that would happen, and then I’d get all the symptoms – I realise now
– of being drugged.
Sky

Anne reports a similar pattern, in which she was lying in bed as a child, and
she would begin to see ‘black and yellow swirls’ behind her closed eyes. This
was the inevitable precursor to a ‘nightmare’ of organised and ritualistic abuse.
Her parents had assured her that these experiences were just ‘bad dreams’, and
she believed them as a child. It was very common for participants to report
being told by their parents that a recollection of abuse was a ‘bad dream’.

If it had been a really bad night [of organised abuse], I would always be
told the next day that it was nightmares. That it wasn’t real.
Lauren

I’d be put in my bed, and sometimes I’d open my eyes and see these men
in robes in my room, and I’d close my eyes and I’d try to wake myself up
– because I’d been told they were a dream – I’d open my eyes, and they
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were gone, and I’d scream for my mum. And she’d come in and say, ‘It’s
all a dream, it’s all a dream.’
Sky

And my father would even say, if I questioned something, ‘No, that was
just a dream. That was your imagination and it wasn’t real.’ So you could
never piece anything together.
Isabelle

Participants maintained differing levels of awareness of the physical transition

– that is, the travelling – from their family home to instances of organised abuse.

Although they sometimes ‘woke up’ from sedation in the car, there were inci-
dents in which they woke up at an abusive ordeal. For Isabelle, home life
seemed to cease when she went to bed, giving experiences of organised abuse
a dream-like and unreal quality.

There were a lot of times in life where you’d be doing your normal daily
school activities and stuff and you’d go to bed asleep, and all of a sudden
you’d wake up in the car. Going on these long drives into the bush and
things would happen where you couldn’t ﬁgure out, ‘Was I dreaming?
Did I have a nightmare? Was it real? Am I crazy?’

Most participants who experienced familial organised abuse indicated that,

during childhood, they were not always aware of their experiences of abuse;
that is to say, in the periods of time between abusive incidents, they did not
necessarily recall that abuse had occurred. They were not entirely unaware of
the abuse and yet their capacity to recall it was intermittent. Freyd (1996)
argues persuasively that such forms of forgetting are a logical response for
children abused by a parent or caregiver, since forgetting the abuse enables the
child to maintain their relationship with the person(s) upon whom they are
dependent for their basic needs. However, for these participants, abusive par-
ents appeared to reinforce the amnestic process by assuring the child that the
abuse was a bad dream. In Lily’s case, she was instructed not to remember her
abuse. In this excerpt, Lily describes her father’s use of a strategy of ‘directed
forgetting’ in the immediate aftermath of an abusive ordeal.

We are coming home, and my father saying, ‘You know that I love you.
It didn’t happen. You don’t remember. You know that I love you. It didn’t
happen. You don’t remember.’ And it’s like … um, and it still just com-
pletely fogs my head.

This strategy of directed forgetting may well be an effective one. Cognitive

research has found that people are less likely to remember information that
they have been told to forget (Sahakyan and Kelley 2002). Sivers, Schooler
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and Freyd (2002) have identiﬁed that the encoding of memory by children
may be inhibited by a lack of discussion and validation for the event, and the
threats or denial of perpetrators. In this study, it seemed that abusive parents
placed great faith in the child’s capacity to forget traumatic events. Anne’s
father was able to sexually and ritually abuse Anne’s children because she had
not, at that time, recalled his abuse of her. In interview, she recalls a telling
slip-of-the-tongue.

Before I knew what Dad was up to, at a conscious level, he said something
that has stayed with me. He was talking about something innocuous,
like, he said, ‘Do you remember when you were little we used to say this

little rhyme?’ It was something about Mickey Mouse. And we’d have to
answer, making a squeaking noise like a mouse. It was in regards to that.
And he said, ‘You don’t remember that? We did it all the time?’ And he
made a little laugh, and he said, ‘For some reason, when they grow up,
kids don’t remember.’ And then he caught himself, and it was as if, ‘Oh,
I’ve just said something I shouldn’t have.’ And that’s precisely how he got
away with abusing my children.

The mind-bending and incomprehensible nature of the abusive ordeal was

often taken advantage of by fathers and abusive adults, who encouraged vic-
timised children to forget what had happened to them. Nonetheless, adults
frequently utilised processes of amnesia and dissociation to compartmentalise
their own involvement in organised abuse. Levi (1986: 24) notes ‘A person
who has been wounded tends to block out the memory so as not to renew the
pain; the person who has inﬂicted the wound pushes the memory deep down,
to be rid of it, to alleviate the feeling of guilt.’ Lily, whose father’s soothing
mantra after organised abuse was ‘you don’t remember’, would repeat similar
words to himself just prior to his death.

A friend of mine was a priest and he decided that he wanted to go and

visit my dad. […] And my friend just said who he was, and that he was a
friend of mine. And Dad just sat there, saying, ‘I don’t want to know. I
don’t want to remember. I just want to forget. I don’t want to remember.
I don’t want to know.’ And my friend said it was the most heartbreaking
thing. And so my friend left.

Conclusion
The violence unfolding around and within families described in this chapter
was of such magnitude that it prompted last-ditch psychological defence
mechanisms, such as denial and dissociation, in parents as well as their chil-
dren, in abusive men as well as their victims. Family life was structured
according to a system of obligation in which parents provided their children
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

for abuse to other family members and family contacts, who in exchange pro-
vided access to other children as well as financial and professional advantage.
This created a strong inducement for some men to enter into organised abuse
but it was a system of obligation enforced by blackmail and threats that locked
members of abusive groups into ongoing compliance. Participants described
how their parents, usually their fathers, could sacrifice the wellbeing of their
children in order to meet these obligations, thus maximising access to the
benefits of organised abuse, whilst minimising the risk of serious harm to
themselves. This created a family environment fraught with danger in which
any form of power or authority represented a means to ameliorate the threat
of violence. A number of participants described how their mothers became

allied with the abusive group, or acquiesced to the abuse of her children, out
of fear of the potential repercussions of resistance or disobedience.
Given the prohibitions against and consequences of breaking the silence,
children and women were forced to accept and cope with organised abuse as a
condition of their lives. Treated as ‘objects’ by the very people designated as
their caregivers, participants described creating spaces within themselves
through which they could craft alternative identities and self-histories, which
enabled them to maintain their attachment with abusive caregivers whilst dis-
sociating overwhelming emotions and memories. For participants, simply
maintaining a memory of their abuse, however dissociated, was an act of rebel-
lion in an environment with so many directives against remembering or dis-
closing. Through the gender regime controlled and maintained by their fathers
(and/or other abusive relatives), participants’ familial environments were organ-
ised in such a way as to inhibit the formation of alliances with their mothers or
other potentially protective individuals. They described homes in which they
were on their own, unable to trust their parents or siblings, from the youngest
age. The very space that has been idealised within liberal democracies as the
locus of paternal love, care and protection – that is, the family home, which
must be veiled from state oversight in an act of respect for the sanctity of the
relations therein – thus becomes the space through which serious and life-
threatening crimes against children can be coordinated and camouﬂaged.
The sadism evident in these accounts will be examined in more detail in
the next chapter, which draws on life histories of network and institutional
abuse to map out the relationship between control, violence and pleasure in
organised abuse. In circumstances of familial organised abuse, the child is
constituted as an ‘object’ of sexual exchange through an ongoing process of
abuse and neglect by a parent(s). Chapter 8 will examine the functional and
symbolic dimensions of this process.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Sadistic abuse
Control, violence and pleasure in
organised abuse

Psychoanalysts have long argued that fantasies of control and domination

are integral to psychic life. Feminist theorists have identiﬁed the gendered
dimensions to these fantasies, suggesting that common childrearing and
socialisation practices lead to rigid psychic formations in boys and men that
predispose them to differentiate themselves from girls and women in aversive
ways (Benjamin 1990, Chodorow 1978, Dinnerstein 1978). This literature
suggests that archaic fantasies of control and domination are experienced by
both sexes, however through processes of socialisation and sexualisation these
fantasies become intertwined in the efforts of boys and men to establish a
sense of masculine selfhood by distancing themselves from feminised ‘Others’.
These efforts can become manifest in social institutions and cultural patterns,
however they can also be manipulated by social agencies in ways that give rise
to ‘highly irrational and affectively charged social processes’ (Bohleber 2010:
161–2). This is particularly the case in group environments, which can involve
the delegation of individual authority in ways that enable the expression of
aggressive and violent urges.
This chapter will examine the ways in which organised abuse creates a
symbolic matrix in which fantasies of control and domination can materialise
and thrive, giving rise to sadistic abuses that seek to reduce victims to compli-
ant and dehumanised objects. Sadism is a deﬁning characteristic of many vic-
tim’s experiences of organised abuse, to the point where some commentators
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

have dubbed organised abuse ‘sadistic abuse’ or ‘organised sadistic abuse’

(Goodwin 1994b). This chapter argues that, in organised abuse, sadism is a
collective performance of eroticised violence that takes the child quite liter-
ally as its object, since the child’s status as agent is effaced and her subjectivity
is denied. Such processes were central themes in the accounts of familial
organised abuse discussed in the last chapter but they featured somewhat dif-
ferently in the histories of those participants whose abuse was predominantly
or exclusively extra-familial, and it is these histories that will be the focus of
this chapter. For participants subject to network or institutional abuse,
the work of ensuring that they remained silent, obedient and compliant
during organised abuse was undertaken by abusers from outside the family.

This involved a process of sadistic abuse to prepare the child for entry into a
sexually abusive economy, in which the status of the child was primarily that
of an object exchanged between perpetrators in order to generate status and
prestige within cultures of violence.
As the discussions of institutional and network abuse in this chapter will
show, these cultures emerged as extreme configurations of the masculine hier-
archies operating in a range of licit and illicit contexts, ranging from schools
and churches to illicit brothels and drug-trafficking networks. The sadism
described in this chapter eludes explanation in terms of either profit or pleas-
ure. Instead, organised sexual violence emerges as a kind of ‘participatory
theatre’ (Franklin 2004) within which men establish their collective claim to
a masterful and dominant subject position by performing the reduction of the
victim to a passive, compliant object. In this manner, sadistic abuse is a pow-
erful method through which profoundly unequal power relations can be ero-
citised, intensified and imposed within a group culture of sexual violence.

Grooming and processes of control

The preparation of a child for sexual abuse has been called ‘grooming’ in the
literature on child abuse, which has emphasised how perpetrators can use
inducements and emotional manipulation to coerce a child into sexual abuse.
However, this section argues that so-called ‘grooming’ behaviour has sym-
bolic as well as practical dimensions, and can be more accurately identified as
a process of objectification through which a perpetrator can seek to ensure that
the child’s behaviour during abuse affirms a view of her as an object: compli-
ant, obedient and without a will that contradicts his own. This can be achieved
through promises and entreaties, however the sadism described by research
participants suggests that processes of objectification can include more force-
ful strategies such as threats, violence and drugging. The reduction of the
child to object is particularly important in organised abuse since the child
is then to be incorporated into larger systems of sexual abuse in which the
child’s silence and compliance is paramount. The availability of the pliant
child ‘object’ serves as the precondition for the embodiment of a perpetrating
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

subjectivity and the associated fantasies of domination and control that bind
abusive groups together.
For extra-familial abusers, selecting and manipulating a particularly vul-
nerable child was a key strategy for ensuring that abuse and exploitation
would go undetected by others. Perpetrators often capitalised upon crisis
points in the child’s life to initiate sexual and organised abuse. This is a
common tactic amongst sexual abusers generally, who speciﬁcally target chil-
dren with family problems and/or children who lacked conﬁdence and have
low self-esteem (Elliott et al. 1995). In this study, Jane described how she was
targeted by a neighbourhood priest for organised abuse after her mother was
hospitalised for major depression. Helena and Seb also described being subject

to organised abuse at school once their teacher became aware there was a seri-
ous illness in their family:

She [Sister Beryl] knew that my mother had a heart attack, she knew that
my mother was sick – and it took me a very long time, even as an adult,
when I found out what had happened to me, to tell Mum – I only told my
parents a year and a half ago. Because I was still so frightened that my
mother would die. Because she [the Sister] told me that my mother would
die if I ever told anybody.
Helena

At the time, when this started, my father was in hospital. He spent six
months, I think, in hospital. A very long stay, anyway. So, yeah, the family
was very vulnerable, I was very vulnerable. And it was open season.
Seb

Seb was targeted for sexual abuse by a teacher, Father Grenham, who taught at
Seb’s school and slowly ingratiated himself with Seb’s family. According to Seb,
Grenham initially acted like ‘a big kid’ or an ‘older brother’, buying him presents
and cigarettes whilst sexually abusing him under the guise of ‘tutoring’.

Somewhere along the line, he started buying me plastic models, ﬁrst of

aeroplanes, then military aircrafts and ships, military ships. He was mad
keen on military stuff. Um. They were OK, but they didn’t fascinate me.
After a while, he realised I was really interested in cars, so he used to by
me these – at the time, very expensive and elaborative – plastic, stick-
together model cars.

In the experience of other participants, the onset of organised abuse was also
marked by small gifts and compliments from perpetrators. Renee, whose his-
tory of organised abuse was also discussed in Chapter 6, described how the local
proprietors of a photography studio lured her and other children to participate
in the production of child abuse images with compliments and sweets.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

So they basically befriended us and started saying things like, ‘How pretty
you are!’ and that they took photos of pretty children and, y’know, like,
you are this chosen, special one.
It sort of went from talking outside, from opening the studio doors up,
and there were photos of children on the walls … And that’s how it
started, with, just, ‘take pretty pictures’.
And, look, I can’t remember the exact step from being in the studio to,
one day, lying on this mattress with another kid just in our underwear on,
and simulating sex. But we had been shown, by Frank and Amy, and we
were being ﬁlmed.

… It was always – we were always told it was love. Our games after
school were called S and L, which was ‘sex and love’.

These attempts to establish a rapport with victimised children through friendly

and reassuring behaviour conforms with other research on abusive ‘grooming’
in sexual and organised abuse (Burgess and Lindeqvist Clark 1984, Elliott
et al. 1995, McAlinden 2006). Evident throughout Renee’s experience of
organised abuse were the efforts of perpetrators to appeal to, and manipulate,
her childish sensibilities, but over time, the ‘games’, lollies and ice creams
began to blur into increasingly serious and disorientating abuse. She described
abuse by men dressing up as television characters such as ‘Fat Cat’ and a skunk
from a popular children’s cartoon:

And there was one guy, ‘Fat Cat’, there was actually dress-ups, and he
used to dress up like Fat Cat. There was dressing up, there was a skunk,
um, it all sounds crazy … And this skunk used to omit an odour, and
things became smoky … And, like, a game, but there were lots of older
men there. And it was almost like a, like a pick the child thing … Because
it was always, it was ‘a smartie’ they called it, and they had a smiley face
on it. Saying, you know, ‘Have a lolly, pick your smarties’. And always,
we were always waking up, coming out of a sleep, hair stroked, ‘It’s
alright, it’s just a terrible dream’.

Participants suggested that, as children, they became aware fairly quickly of

the seriousness of their situation once organised abuse had begun. The initial
niceties and compliments typically associated with ‘grooming’ dropped away
quickly and victims were confronted with the enormity of their abuse and
their powerlessness to defend themselves, a point that was often reinforced
and emphasised by the perpetrators themselves. However, costumes, uniforms
and other staged performances remained an important feature in the control
of children in organised abuse even where the pretence of ‘fun’ and ‘games’
had been left behind.
Shortly after telling another victimised child that she was thinking of dis-
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closing her abuse to another adult, Renee was driven by her stepfather to see
someone she was told was a counsellor. This ‘counsellor’ asked her questions
about her abuse, who she had told about it and the extent of her disclosures.
Once he had ascertained that Renee had not disclosed her abuse to an outside
party, the counsellor suddenly ‘turned’ and began threatening her with vio-
lence if she spoke about her abuse to the authorities.

It must have been pretend, a psychologist or something like that [cries]

getting all this information out of me. Right, even though – it was like,
‘OK, she’s spoken up, how much does she know?’ And then came all the
mental games, which were worse than anything. The person who played

the counsellor role, being oh, so nice, and all ‘You poor thing, what hap-
pened to you’ and then just turning on me. And [I was] being threatened
with violence. All these mind games because I spoke up.

Following the ordeal with the ‘psychologist’, Renee received a visit from a
man and woman in police uniform:

We were latch-key kids, and I came home from school one day, and the
police knocked on my door. And there was a man and a lady. And I can’t
remember word for word but it was basically, ‘We’ve been told to come
and see you because you’ve been telling stories.’ Now. I truly don’t …
believe they were real police. They may have been, I don’t know, but they
took me for a walk up the street and back home and that was it.

In reﬂecting on the role of uniforms in ten cases of ritualistic abuse, psycholo-

gist Hudson (1991: 15–16) states: ‘It is obvious that the costumed perpetra-
tors tried to destroy the child’s trust in law enforcement and in the medical
community’, resulting in ‘noncooperation during investigation or trial’. In
Renee’s account, costumes and uniforms were part of a larger strategy to
undermine her capacity to distinguish between her abusers and potentially
helpful authority ﬁgures. Through drugs, ‘games’ and costumes the perpetra-
tors sought to dissolve the boundaries between reality and deception so that
Renee’s fear of torture and punishment became all-pervasive, and every adult
loomed large in her world as a potential abuser.
Perpetrators used a range of strategies to inhibit disclosure and ensure the
compliance of children in organised abuse, including blackmail. Neil
described, at the age of eight, being abused by a neighbour who had lured him
into his home, promising to give Neil pocket money if he undertook some
household chores. However, he instead took indecent photos of Neil and vio-
lently sexually assaulted him.

And then he became really really apologetic. You know, ‘I’m sorry, mate,
I shouldn’t have done that, I don’t know why’ … Anyway, he, um, you
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know, ‘be a good boy and I’ll give you a whole dollar. And please don’t tell
anybody’… And he said, ‘Come with me, I’ll get you some money now.’
Anyway, when he looked in his wallet, he showed me that he didn’t have
any small notes there. And he said, ‘Come back here tomorrow, and I’ll
give you two dollars. I promise I won’t do anything to you. And I’m really
sorry for what I did.’

At the age of eight, these promises made sense to Neil. His mother had also
oscillated between ﬁts of rage and burst of affection, and through a sexually
abusive uncle Neil had become accustomed to the intertwining of abuse with
apologies and promises of affection. When Neil returned the next day for his

money, which he reasoned was rightfully his, the man blackmailed Neil with
the photos he had taken of him the previous day.

He said to me, ‘How would you like me to put some of these photos in
the school grounds for your friends and teachers to see – they’ll see what
a little shit you really are.’ And he said, ‘I can put them in the milk bar
window.’
And I didn’t know at that stage that he couldn’t put them in shopping
windows and all of that. And he made the whole thing out that it was my
fault, I caused him to do it, all that. And he said to me, ‘You’ve got a
choice, boy. You can either come here and do what I tell you, when I tell
you, how I tell you. Or I’ll send one of these photos every week to your
mum and dad, and put them in the school.’ And everything. And I believed
he would do that …
And at that stage, I was just trapped, I knew I was. And he took out
some photos, he’d obviously followed me home to make sure I’d given
him the right address. And he’d taken photos of my two sisters, and my
dad. And the housekeeper we had at the time. He would have thought she
was my mum. Anyhow, that was that. I mean, I was just completely
trapped.

All participants reported that child abuse images were made of them, and the
shame and fear associated with the potential distribution of these images to
family and friends was a powerful factor in preventing them from disclosing
their abuse. Whilst some child sex offenders appear to experience their abuse
of children as an expression of love, affection or a ‘special bond’ between them
and their victims (Elliott et al. 1995), the perpetrators described by these
participants were brutally instrumental in their manipulation and silencing of
their victims. Even once they were assured of the child’s compliance, drugs
were often used to sedate or render the child unconscious prior to abuse. The
clear implication is that the inner world or subjective experience of the child
– the child’s status as a living subject and agent – was of little or no relevance
to perpetrators, who sought to reduce the child to an entirely passive, silent
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body.

Sadism and internal colonisation

In participants’ accounts, perpetrators of organised abuse were willing to
acknowledge and engage with the subjectivity of children insofar as compli-
ments, sweets and ‘games’ could be used to manipulate them into placing
themselves at risk of abuse. Once organised abuse was underway, threats,
blackmail and reality-distorting techniques were employed to cement the
control of the abusers over the child and minimise the risks of disclosure
and detection. What is striking in survivors’ accounts is that the natural

emotional responses of children were of interest to perpetrators only where

they could be utilised to subordinate them to abuse. The perpetrators engaged
with the child’s subjective experience in an effort to inhibit disclosure but
otherwise their wellbeing was of no interest to them. Interviewees described
groups of perpetrators who were prepared to inﬂict considerable degrees of
harm upon their victims in order to accomplish their aims. Violence and
threats of death were common techniques of control and domination:

Brainwashing stuff, y’know, that ‘If you do tell, we’ll kill you, and there
are people out there that will ﬁnd you’ and the threats, y’know, with
knives held at throats and that kind of stuff.
Renee

These threats were often substantiated with torturous practices designed to

inﬂict agony upon the child whilst leaving little if any detectable mark.

If you want to take a person to death and back again, all you need is a bit
of gaffer tape. Y’know. Wrap around their hands, put it over their mouth,
two ﬁngers [pinches nose] over the nose, that’s as scary as it gets. And
afterwards, there isn’t a mark on their body. There is nothing to say that
anything happened. That’s how vulnerable human beings are.
Darren

They had me stripped off, and they put stakes in the ground and tied me
to the stakes … And he lifted me up around my middle, and pushed away
the dirt there, and there was a bull ant’s nest beneath me. And I had to lie
there, with bull ants crawling all over me. And he said, ‘If you don’t want
to get a mouth full of these things, keep your fucking mouth shut.’
Neil

… As a child, in the studio, as part of the punishment, it’s like this

stretching, like, lying on the ﬂoor with your hands and legs outstretched,
one person each side, and lift you, stretch you, until you feel like your
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arms are popping out of your sockets.

Renee

‘Mentalisation’ is a term that is used in psychotherapy to refer to the phenom-

enon in which, ‘whilst interacting, each person remains attentive to mental
states, holding the other person’s mind in mind as well as their own’ (Allen
2006). In contrast, ‘mindblindness’ refers to failures of mentalisation in which
the inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the subjectivity of others leads
to a largely behaviourist style of engagement (Allen 2006: 11). However,
Allen (2006: 12) acknowledges that mindblindness can be dynamic in that it
is possible to acknowledge some aspects of the subjective experience of others

whilst denying or ignoring other aspects, and this balance can shift depending
on circumstance. In their reduction of the child to an object, the perpetrators
shifted strategically between mentalisation and mindblindness, engaging
with the child’s subjective experience in order to entrap them in organised
abuse before eliciting abject terror and agony in an effort to negate their sense
of agency and identity altogether. The victim did not exist for them as an agent
or subject but rather as a body in which a range of responses could be stimu-
lated. The mental activity therein was acknowledged by them insofar as it
could facilitate their aims, otherwise the subjective experience of the child was
ignored or torture and brainwashing could be used in an effort to actively
deconstruct the agency of the child and reconstruct it according to the needs of
the abusive group. This amounted to a form of internal colonisation, in which
the body of the child was harmed and invaded in an attempt to transform and
ultimately annihilate any impulse towards self-determination and autonomy.
This phenomenon is illustrated by Colleen who described being subject to
organised abuse by grounds staff at the children’s institution where she had
been taken into care. Colleen’s parents were poor immigrants and her father
suffered from an acute mental illness that contributed to his violent and erratic
behaviour at home. Out of desperation her mother was forced to place Colleen
and her siblings in care until she could ﬁnd more stable living conditions. The
day after Colleen was ﬁrst admitted to the home at the age of seven, an older
boy, Hugh, offered to show her around the home, however, he then took her
to meet the abusive group.

Hugh said that he would show me around the home, and then he’d take
me to [my brother]. Well, he showed me around the home, but he took
me down to the dairy. And I remember there were men at that dairy, and
I remember they were very interested in me. And it wasn’t long before I
was being raped in that dairy.

The men who sexually abused Colleen were a group of labourers led by a violent
and sadistic man who was a gardener at the institution. Colleen recalls the manner
in which this primary abuser regulated a clandestine network of abused children
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

and abusive staff members. He forced the victimised children to ‘police’ one
another by threatening to harm them all if one of them disclosed their abuse.

On Saturdays, the man would take the older children that he had under
control down to the dairy. He’d make me go around, and tell all the older
children, certain children, that they had to go down to the dairy. And
then he would take a chicken, break its neck, throw it and shoot it. And
then he would say, ‘If you tell your parents, or anyone that comes tomor-
row’ because Sunday was the day where we had visitors, ‘you will be the
chicken.’ And you didn’t want to be the chicken. On Sundays, he would
hide and watch us. You always knew he was watching.

In Colleen’s account, former wards and abusive staff cooperated in the

sexual and physical abuse of children in the home within a culture of exploita-
tion, violence and fear. This institutionalised culture of abuse was camou-
ﬂaged from view during government inspections, as the nuns who ran the
orphanage threatened to beat the children if they disclosed any maltreatment
or violence. The primary abuser pursued a degree of control over Colleen that
can only be described as obsessive. The practice of sexual abuse was not only a
strategy of power through which he sought to realise his capacity for control
and domination. Rather, sexual abuse was the foundational practice of a fan-
tasy of omnipotent control in which Colleen’s body was also the doorway to
her mind. She described how, during sexual abuse, he would bite sensitive
areas on her body with such force that she recalls ‘blacking out’ from the pain.
His campaign of terrorisation was so extensive that Colleen would follow his
punishing injunctions, even in his absence:

Once he told me, as punishment, that I couldn’t drink any water. He told
me all the places I couldn’t drink water – the tap, the bubbler, the water
tanks, the dam, the pool. But he didn’t tell me I couldn’t drink from the
toilet. So I had to go to the toilet to drink water.

Colleen described how she sought to forget the extent of her abuse whenever
she could. Over Christmas she would leave the home to stay with relatives,
and she described the ways in which she ‘blanked out’ her abuse during this
time in order to be ‘healthy and normal’.

When I went on holidays, I just blanked out what was happening at the
home. I saved myself for that time – I would just be healthy and normal
and do what normal kids do. When that man was abusing me, I used to
go to my bed at night. Do you know what I used to do? I used to cry, and
I used to say, ‘Me. Me. Me.’ Every now and again when I’m self-soothing,
I say the same thing. ‘Me.’ Because I lost my whole self.

The ways in which sadistic abuse performs the reduction of the abused child
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

to a ‘thing’ or dehumanised object was experienced by Colleen as a total loss

of selfhood and identity. The utility of sadistic abuse as a gendered perform-
ance may rest upon its capacity to destroy or annihilate the victim’s sense of
agency and thus reinforces the abuser’s sense of dominance and control. Mollon
(2001: 216), a psychologist specialising in treating sexually abused people,
notes that, in the act of abusing a child:

a signiﬁcant part of the motivation of the abuser may be to evoke projec-

tively in the child the unwanted negative images of the self – to make the
abused one feel utterly helpless, humiliated, shamed, violated and abject
– and to bring about a near annihilation of the true self of the abused.

In this process, a kind of splitting is observable whereby the child is

constituted through abuse as a container or holder for despised aspects of
the self: vulnerability, powerlessness, helplessness and so forth. Through acts
of sadistic abuse, deMause (1990: 4) argued that children are reconstituted by
perpetrators into ‘a receptacle into which one can project disowned parts of
one’s psyche, so that one can manipulate and control these feeling in another
body without damage to one’s self’. By forcing the child to occupy a subordi-
nate subject position deﬁned by intolerable degrees of exposure to abuse and
intrusion, the perpetrators appeared to craft a corresponding fantasy of power
that bestowed a collective sense of impunity and supremacy. Darren suggests
that, for the victimised child, the overwhelmingly intrusive nature of this
abuse causes psychological trauma of such magnitude as to render resistance
almost impossible, a state that he labelled as ‘slavery’.

Slavery can be as simple as – if you take someone up to what I call a ‘crisis

mind’, if you take someone up to a crisis mind, it’s like – When people
have a car accident, they hardly ever remember the actual accident. They
remember up to it, and then the actual moment, or whatever, is just
blanked out – it might even be ten or ﬁfteen minutes beforehand.
And that’s the same sort of thing that they utilise when they break
you. Because you don’t actually remember the trauma. The mistake that
most people make is that they don’t inﬂict enough trauma, because then
people can remember, and come back from it.
These guys, they will go so hard on you that you just never want to go
back there. You will block it out of your mind. Y’know, if you have to
remember, relive all that, it will just be too much for your sanity. So you
stay where you are, trapped.

Critical masculinity theories have typically emphasised the importance of

conformity to hegemonic ideals in men’s performance of gender. Even typi-
cally ‘transgressive’ acts of criminality or delinquency tend to conform to a
script that preserves heterocentric gender norms. However, Darren’s interview
emphasised the utility of radical transgression as a resource for ‘doing gender’
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(West and Zimmerman 1987) in organised contexts. This is not the ‘opposi-
tional masculinity’ of disenchfranchised men and boys, as described by
Messerschmidt (1993) and Connell (1987). Darren’s account suggests that the
attraction of child sexual abuse in the context of organised abuse is its illegal-
ity and immorality. It is not simply in the commission of these acts that per-
petrators ﬁnd pleasure, but also in orchestrating these acts in order to get away
with it.

It’s taboos. What you are not allowed to do is the greatest thrill. Y’know,
crossing the gender line is one thrill, and crossing the age line is another
thrill, and crossing the pain line, and, y’know – what can you do that is

more horrible and nasty and taboo than killing a child? Well, I’ll give you
an answer. You eat it. So they did that.
They were always looking for the next thing. [...] You see, other people
have a sexual lust, but these people, they thirst for pain. They want to
degrade and it builds up. Whatever a person can’t do this month – after
successive steps – they’ll do the next month, y’know. And once again,
they are just leading them through the paths, the people who have already
been there.

In this excerpt, Darren situates the sadistic abuse he experienced within the
culture of the sexually abusive group, detailing the ways in which perpetra-
tors overcome one another’s inhibitions over time. ‘The group gives the rapist
protection through loyalty and support, but also puts pressure on the man to
imitate his peers and live up to or even exceed their expectations with his
actions’ (Hague 2007: 57). The objectiﬁcation of children through the act of
sadistic abuse served as a form of patriarchal bonding between men, for whom
collective sexual violence served as the crucible for the transformation of indi-
vidual and collective identity. Sadistic abuse therefore has both intersubjec-
tive and collective dimensions, as the psychological changes wrought through
sadistic abuse serve as the foundation for a subculture of sexual violence.

Conclusion
Sexual abuse is frequently explained in the psychological literature in terms of
the perpetrator’s pursuit of sexual pleasure. Indeed, the bodily experience of
pleasure in sexual abuse may have a powerful role to play in the symbolic
afﬁrmation of the perpetrator’s gender identity (Liddle 1993). However in
this study, an act of sadistic pleasure was also a strategy of control and vice
versa. In this context torture is simultaneously practical and expressive: the
measures that the abusive group used to silence and control children were the
same behaviours that they revelled in. Through this violence, the emotions,
responses and behaviours of children are shaped to correspond with profoundly
unequal and violent relations of domination. The self-legitimising quality of
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

sadistic abuse is similar in many regards to political torture, which Scarry

(1985) observes crafts a ‘spectacle of power’ that legitimises abusive regimes
and beliefs. ‘The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer
its quality of “incontestable reality” on that power that has brought it into
being’ (Scarry 1985: 28). Similarly, sadistic abuse was a manifestation of ide-
ologies of masculine sexual aggression operant within groups of abusive men,
and means whereby violence against children was infused with pleasure and
fantasies of absolute domination over others.
In participants’ account, abusers appeared to ﬁnd a particular pleasure in
inhibiting or preventing the child from exercising any agency to shut out the
persistent efforts of the abusers to invade both physically and mentally.

Participants described being continually, and it seems quite deliberately,

exposed to overwhelming and intolerable intrusions from which they were
prohibited from defending themselves against: any show of resistance was
simply met by even greater excesses of psychological invasion. The child is
forced to accommodate and absorb the excessive force produced by masculine
fantasies of omnipotence and control. The harm that is caused by this intru-
sion goes largely unrecognised by perpetrators who engage their victims with
strategic forms of objectiﬁcation and ‘mindblindness’, or else the pain that
they incite is then woven back into a fantasy of power and control.
These fantasies could at times take on a metaphysical or pseudo-religious
signiﬁcance, giving rise to ritualistic practices and occult beliefs. Neil’s account
demonstrates the overlap between sadistic and ritualistic abuse. Whilst most
of the perpetrators who harmed him were engaged in organised and sadistic
abuse, there was a subset of abusers who orchestrated ritualistic ordeals that
Neil stated were quite distinct from the other abuses he had suffered.

They used to get really, really – revved up [during ritualistic abuse]. I

can’t think of the right word, but they used to get to such a state where
they were frantic … It was totally different to ordinary group days.

The escalation of sadistic abuse to ritualistic abuse will be discovered in more

detail in the following chapter. It will emphasise in particular the ways in
which ritualistic abuse represents an intensification of the efforts of perpetra-
tors to symbolically distance themselves from their victims, who are consti-
tuted as defiled or dehumanised ‘objects’. This intensification can at times
give rise to calculated acts of life-threatening aggression which will be exam-
ined in the Chapter 10.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Ritual and torture in

organised abuse

In the ‘psy’ professions, the ritualistic practices of abusive groups have been a
cause for alarm and uncertainty for over 100 years. Confronted with a client
who described recollections of ritualistic abuse, including bloodletting and
genital cutting, Freud stated in a letter to a friend: ‘I dream, therefore, of a
primeval devil religion whose rites are carried on secretly, and I understand
the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges’ (quoted in Masson 1985: 227).
Masson (1984: 105) states: ‘Freud is implying here that the Sabbats were real
events (part of a ritualized religion in which sexual perversions were acted
out). He seems to be saying: The torture and the murder of witches are under-
standable, for the judges were attempting to curtail a heinous cult.’ However
this chapter will argue that, in the context of organised abuse, ritualistic abuse
is not a form of perverse cultic activity but rather it is part of a range of
legitimising practices whereby abusive groups express, intensify and justify
the sexualised subordination of women and children.
The connection between sexual violence, irreligiosity and masculinity was
described in detail in Chapter 3, and this chapter will expand on this linkage
by examining contemporary accounts of ritual abuse. In the context of organ-
ised abuse, sadism is a mode through which children are dehumanised and
objectiﬁed, and through the exchange of these ‘objects’ abusers experience and
afﬁrm one another as masterful subjects. However, ritualistic abuse serves as a
way of drawing clearer boundaries between ‘master’ and ‘slave’. Benjamin
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

(1990) suggests that a paradoxical dynamic is at work for the ‘master’ who
constitutes himself as dominant through his dehumanisation of the ‘slave’. In
this process, he brings himself into close proximity with a person that he
views and treats as subordinate and contaminated, which threatens the sense
of superiority he has established through his perpetration. This chapter argues
that ritualistic abuse serves to evade the threat of pollution through symbolic
performances that seek to afﬁx, for the perpetrator and the victim, the dis-
tance between the two. In doing so, perpetrators establish a fraternal solidar-
ity based on a symbolic relation between masculinity and femininity, and
power and powerlessness, expressed through the extremes of dehumanisation

and degradation. In such an environment, victims are at risk of severe and

life-threatening abuse.
A smaller subset of participants also reported a range of ‘mind control’
experiences, in which they were tortured by abusive groups with the apparent
intention of inculcating a dissociative and amnestic reflex in the child. This
chapter will explore the ways in which abusive groups adopted scientific as
well as religious ideologies to legitimise their abuses and to mystify the rela-
tions of gender, age and power that formed the basis of their power and con-
trol. In subcultural environments structured around narcissistic fantasies of
omnipotence, sexual violence can take on florid and bizarre forms that seem to
evade comprehension. This chapter suggests that the seemingly bizarre con-
tent of the ideologies espoused by ritually abusive groups can be understood
by relating them to the contexts and practicalities of child sexual exploitation,
and the efforts of perpetrators to realise and embody impossible ideals of con-
trol and domination.

Ritualistic abuse and deviant scripturalism

Those participants subject to ritualistic abuse reported that their abuse
included references to a range of religious mythologies, particularly
Christianity, Satanism and occultism. Kent (1993a, 1993b) described the
misuse of ritualistic practices within organised abuse as ‘deviant scriptural-
ism’, noting that abusive groups draw from a range of ritualistic traditions in
the course of harming children. Participants’ accounts of organised abuse were
replete with examples of ‘deviant scripturalism’ in which abusive groups
appeared to adopt and parody many of the traditions of the Christian churches.
Allegations of ‘satanic’ abuse have been particularly controversial but some
participants pointed to an indistinct boundary between ‘Satanism’ and a per-
version of Christianity.

I think what they did centred around Christian, I can’t say ideals, can I, but
Christian symbols and worship. You know, I’m sure it wasn’t Satanistic
stuff, so I think it was some kind of, abomination, perhaps, of Christianity.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Felicity

I wonder whether the inverted Christian stuff is just … if you have an

extreme Christian background, and you want to have sex, and you are raised
not to have a lot of empathy for women and children – maybe that’s how
you justify it to yourself, that’s how you form your sexuality, that’s how you
justify it to the kids. And then you come to believe it? I don’t know.
Sky

Other participants were unequivocal about the Satanic or occult ideology

that informed their abuse, however these ideologies often had mainstream

origins, since abusive groups often emerged from within ostensibly benevo-
lent religious and fraternal organisations. There was not a consensus between
participants in this study regarding the motivations of their abusers in engag-
ing in ritualistic abuse: some argued that their abusers were following a per-
verse religious creed, but others suggested that a signiﬁcant degree of cynicism
and manipulation underlay their abuser’s incorporation of ritual and iconog-
raphy into abuse. These two positions are not mutually exclusive. Bourdieu
(1977) has observed that social agents often legitimise their conduct through
mytho-poetic logic that they subsequently become ‘enchanted’ by; that is to
say, an individual or group may believe in the ideologies that they use to
rationalise their conduct. The emotional and socio-practical dimensions of
ideology are therefore important in understanding its descriptive content.
Ideological statements about the supremacy of Satan, for example, were
common in the experience of participants, but these claims were not simply
enunciations of religious conviction. They were linked to the perpetrator’s
sense of entitlement to abuse others, their efforts to terrify children into obe-
dience, and their attempts to outdo one another in performances of sadism
and violence. Polly argued that, in her experience of ritual abuse, references to
Satan featured mainly as a tool for controlling young children through fear:

I think Satan gets brought in because he’s very handy for terrifying small
children. If I was brought up in a Hindu country, they wouldn’t use Satan,
they’d use whatever their religious bad guy is.

In contrast, May suggested that her abusers had some conviction in the ‘quasi-
religious’ gnosticism that they practised. However, she suggested that their
belief was functional since it operated to engender a sense of superiority and
to legitimise the abuses that they engaged in:

It seemed a very elitist type of gnosticism. Stuff like ‘We are God, the
masters of the universe, so we are entitled to do whatever we wish. We
need to overcome our petty moral human standards which the world has
imposed on us.’
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

May emphasized the practical dimension to the ritualisation of her abuse,

which she felt had enabled her abusers to engage in extreme forms of abuse
that they might otherwise have felt inhibited to.

I have often wondered why they did that [the rituals] as they didn’t actu-
ally seem particularly religious at all. When I think about, I see that,
psychologically, the ritualisation made people feel like they didn’t have
to stay in their little moral boundaries – they could go across them,
become capable of doing anything. Become detached from their own
personalities.

Participants’ accounts of ritualistic abuse suggested that ideology and

ritual practice were interlinked in ways that legitimised their exploitation to
their abusers. Ritualistic abuse can be understood as a form of praxis whereby
the discourses of supremacy and entitlement espoused by the abusive group
was acted out and experienced at a group level. A number of participants
described the ways in which ritualistic ordeals were orchestrated to assist men
in overcoming their hesitation and to initiate them into the abusive fraternity
of the organised group. Sky said:

When new people came, there was an induction process. And often the
men would be quite unsure. They would be hesitant. Sometimes they
would be put in groups together, like, three of them, and they would all
have to ‘perform’ together. There would be themes, someone would say,
‘Alright, everyone today is doing this particular act to this kid’.
And then they would get up the front, and heaps of other people would
do it, and they wouldn’t. They’d freeze a bit. And my dad would come
over, and be like ‘OK, this is what you do, this and that and that.’ And
everyone is watching, of course. Not necessarily directly at them, it wasn’t
necessarily a direct pressure, but I can understand that they would be feel-
ing it. It was deﬁnitely, it’s like – you start a new job, and here’s the poli-
cies and procedures, and you’ve got to know it.

Ritualistic abuse is a behaviour that is often explained as a technique for

inducing dissociative and traumatic symptomology that inhibits disclosure
and increases the control of perpetrators over victims. However, it seems that
the role of ritual abuse in cultures of sexual abuse is more complex than this.
Sky’s account emphasises the transformative qualities of ritual abuse for per-
petrators as well as victims. He describes a scenario in which children feature
as little more than passive objects to be acted upon by men within an abusive
pedagogical process, as ‘new’ abusers are taught the rules of appropriate abu-
sive conduct and, through open displays of sexual violence, establish their
status in the eyes of other men. Whilst these ritual performances incorporated
ﬂorid occult mythologies and symbols they served an important practical
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

function that has been noted in the anthropological literature on ritual prac-
tice: afﬁrming the hierarchy of the group, encouraging a sense of loyalty and
belonging, and ushering disparate individuals into a shared worldview.
In participants’ accounts of ritualistic abuse, ritually abusive groups over-
lapped with cultural institutions of masculine hegemony, such as Christian
churches or Masonic groups, from whom they drew on symbols, iconography
and rituals that were incorporated into child sexual abuse. Ritualistic abuse is
clearly at odds with the ethical principles of such mainstream institutions as
Christianity and Freemasonry. However, in this study ritualistic abuse shared
a practical and experiential logic with the gender regime of religious or fraternal
groups. For instance, Kate was raised within a strict evangelical Christian sect.

Several local men of the sect, including her father, participated in a group that
sexually abused children in satanic rituals. In Kate’s childhood, her father’s
‘dual practice’ of fundamentalist Christianity and abusive Satanism was fraught
with contradictions.

It [Satanism] would have been something consciously abhorrent to all of

us. We consciously were all – certainly, Mother was – talking about the
goodness of God, and trusting him, and everything we stood for was
against that. We were against anything of the occult, or the bad. Mum
broke apart an LP of a singer who was maybe from some New Age group,
because we thought, ‘Oh, that’s maybe demonistic’. In the belief, things
could be demonistic, and they had to be wiped out, which was rather
ironic. There was … ambiguities everywhere.

At a superﬁcial level, the evangelical sect and the abusive group appear irrec-
oncilable in theological terms, although both groups maintained a belief in
Satan as an active and inﬂuential force in daily life. At the level of practice,
however, both groups shared a power structure in which male authority was
supreme and unquestioned. Sexual abuse was endemic within the sect, and
the sect’s professed ignorance of sexual matters enabled the ongoing violence
of male sect members against women and children. Kate notes:

If you did get some men who were abusive in there [the sect] – like rocks
under the water – they could have one hell of a time. A lot of people have
sexually abused me, in my life. The pattern started early. And of all those
people, probably forty per cent were of the original religious group,
although the beliefs were against abusing children. Nevertheless, it hap-
pened within them, and some from the leadership.

In the context of ritualistic abuse, Kate described torturous and gruelling ordeals
of sexual violence that mirrored, in many respects, the power differentials that
were perpetuated in her day-to-day life in the evangelical sect. The sect was
dominated by male ‘elders’ who, whilst sometimes physically and sexually abu-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

sive, were considered above reproach since it was their shared responsibility to
administer justice within their communities. Without a male witness to vouch
for them, the value of women’s and children’s testimony was negligible, which
reﬂected their marginal and subordinate status in the community as a whole.
Whilst the sect was ideologically opposed to the kinds of beliefs espoused during
ritualistic abuse, such abuse revelled in the power differentials between men,
women and children that formed the power structure of the sect itself.
On a practical level, the overlap between ritualistic abuse and male-
dominated institutions provided a power base that ampliﬁed the capacity of
abusive men to maintain their control over victimised children and women.
Acting collectively, and utilising existing systems within the institutions

they controlled, these men could exponentially increase their control over a
victimised child to the point where organised abuse was, in Sarah’s words,
‘present in all aspects’ of the child’s life. Sarah grew up in a small township, in
which a number of sexually abusive men held prominent roles in local organ-
isations, schools and churches.

It sort of encroached into all aspects of my life, in a very concrete sense.

Because of how the group … you know, basketball was another signifi-
cant area of my life. And sometimes these things [organised abuse] would
occur at school, sometimes at basketball, sometimes in parks close to my
home. And so it was just there, even physically, it was present in all
aspects.
… I don’t know if it was facilitated in living in the place that I lived
– it was a small community anyway. One of the men involved was a key
organiser of the local basketball club and things like that. But that’s easy
to do when everyone in the town either plays basketball or joins Scouts or
whatever.
… One of them was a local priest, one of them was the president of the
basketball club who was also the local GP [general practitioner]. Yeah.
Let’s just say they were influential people, definitely. Everyone knew and
respected some of these people.

Participants generally felt that the involvement of their abusers across a number
of different institutions meant that they had the capacity to coordinate their
abuse of children and to camouﬂage their activity. As May said, ‘these people
know how to cover their tracks and have the resources to do so’. Anne connected
the power of her abusers to conceal their activities with a socio-cultural envi-
ronment that invalidates and stigmatises victims of sexual violence.

They are ahead of the game. I think they were set up and organised a long
time ago. I think they are aware of the system and they’ve been co-existing
in it for much longer than the victims. We still live in a culture where it’s
much better to be an abuser then to be a victim.
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From object to abject: dehumanisation in

ritualistic abuse
Crossley (2004: 39) notes that ‘the value of the ritual’ is ‘its capacity to “con-
dense” meaning and circumvent verbal negotiation’. In ritual, the exhaustive
lists of rules that govern acceptable conduct do not need to be articulated or
discussed, because ‘[t]he ritual brings them to pass’ (Crossley 2004: 40). The
indisputable ﬁnality that is implicit in ritual practice was an important fea-
ture of participants’ experiences of ritualistic abuse. In participants’ accounts
of ritualistic abuse, the abusive group integrated sexual assault and taboo

substances into ceremonies of degradation that resulted in the victim inter-

nalising a profound sense of shame and dehumanisation. For example, Kate
describes how vaginal, oral and anal rape were part of a continuum of sexually
abusive practices in the abusive group that included bestiality, the mutilation
of animals and the forced ingestion of animal faeces, blood and ﬂesh.

So they would hurt their own children, then they would hurt the others’
[children] as well. And they would use vaginal and oral and anal entry.
They also forced – they would force – they did it to me – your face onto the
genitals of the black dog. And then they tried to make you eat the faeces of
the dog. And when they killed the chicken, they tried to get you – they
would put it into the bowl, and they’d push your face towards it – and they
tried to make you drink it. Which I refused. And when they killed the goat,
the ﬂesh was warm and they tried to make you eat it. It was horrible.

Previous chapters have described the strategies that perpetrators use to sym-
bolically reduce the child to the status of a pliant and passive object, who is
then provided for abuse to other men as part of a sexually abusive economy of
status, pleasure and profit. However, in ritualistic abuse the process of objec-
tification becomes in effect one of ‘abjectification’, as the subordinate position
of the victim is inscribed upon them through increasingly horrifying acts.
Kristeva (1982) described the ‘the abject’ as all that is ‘radically excluded’
from the symbolic order and the world of social relations, comparable to taboo
substances such as corpses, sewage and vomit. Kristeva argues that the con-
struction of meaning and relations are premised upon the extrusion of know-
ledge of such phenomena from awareness:

A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay,
does not signify death. In the presence of signified death – a flat encepha-
lograph, for instance – I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true
theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I per-
manently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement,
this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being

(Kristeva 1982: 3, emphasis in original).

During ritualistic abuse, the child is forced to take into herself an array of
taboo substances and objects, and in doing so, she experiences herself as syn-
onymous with those substances. In this process, all that is extruded from the
symbolic order is made synonymous with the selfhood of the child, who
becomes, to herself as well as to her abusers, the embodiment of all that must
be quarantined from the social order. Anne spoke powerfully and disturbingly
of the ‘sewage cesspool inside myself’; May had felt she was ‘this corrupted,
violated, horrible person’; Lily learnt that ‘if I loved somebody, they died’

because ‘I’m poisonous, and if people touch you, if they love you, if you love
them, the poison that is within you will kill them’. Through violent degrada-
tion and ritualised exposure to taboo substances, the child is assigned to a
non-place beyond the hope of comfort or love. She is treated as a vessel and
source of contamination, and she comes to share the view of her abusers that
she must be extruded from the social compact between persons.
Indeed, it seemed that it was through collective participation in the extru-
sion of children that abusive groups constructed and afﬁrmed the ‘sacred’
bonds of their masculine fraternity. The accounts of participants show that
abusive groups embody a gender order in which maleness is synonymous with
personhood, and this relation could only be maintained through the constant
ritualistic cleansing of ‘abject’ feminising contaminants (that is, children
and women) from their idealised body politic. In his account of the portrayal
of sexual violence in Western cultural production, Kramer (1997: 259)
observed:

At a visceral level, misogyny expresses itself by identifying femininity

with ﬁlth. Stray, formless matter, oozing liquids and the stains they leave
behind, become both the signs that betray the true character of the femi-
nine and the traces that women accordingly seek to cover or erase. The
feminine is that which has to be cleaned up. If necessary, it has to be
scoured.

In participants’ accounts, this ‘cleansing’ of the feminine took symbolic and

literal forms. Kristeva (1982) suggested that the corpse is the paradigmatic
example of the abject: it places us ‘at the border of my condition as a living
being’ (p 3), it is ‘death infecting life’ (p 4). It is telling that, in this study, a
number of participants recalled being forced into prolonged contact with dead
bodies. This contact was disturbingly intimate; the child did not simply wit-
ness a corpse, but was forced into the subject position of a corpse. For exam-
ple, Jo recalled an abusive ordeal in which she was placed in an open grave and
told she no longer had a soul:
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

They also did various rituals, I can remember one where, they had, this
one scared the hell out of me, I think they dug up a grave, and put me in
it and stuff and started putting dirt on me and said ‘Jesus is killing your
soul’ kind of anti-Christian type things … just rituals that they did …

Polly was subject to a similar ordeal by her grandfather, in which she was
required to accurately mimic the properties of rigor mortis:

My grandfather, there was some ceremony where he had to place me in

the ground and bury me. And he trained me for it – and I remember, I
was quite little, just three or four, and I remember trying to make him
proud of me. Trying to do it right. To not struggle, to keep my body limp

but not totally limp, to go through it all according to how I’d be trained.
To make him look good.

Polly lived with her mother and sister on her grandparents’ property, where
they ran a nursing home. When a resident died, her grandmother would force
Polly to share a bed with the deceased for a night:

So if one of the residents died, which happened fairly often, because they
were very old and frail – hopefully, they weren’t assisted on their way –
but one of the things my grandmother would do, is she would come and
get me from my bed, and take me into the room where they kept the dead
body. There was one particular bedroom in the room where they would
place the body until the undertaker came. And she would make me sleep
with the dead body, naked, skin on skin. And when the nursing home
closed down, that room was given to me as my bedroom. Of all the bed-
rooms they could have given me, that was the one.

Through these ordeals, abusers disrupted the child’s sense of belonging within
the social/symbolic order and effected an enduring transformation in the child’s
sense of self. They crafted an alternative subject position for the child in which
she was a non-subject, synonymous with a corpse, an exile from both the social
order and the subcultural hierarchy of the abusers. Polly’s non-status as a child
who was also a living corpse, having undergone both burial and disinternment,
was reflected in the treatment she received living under her grandparents’ roof.
She was treated not only as a defiled object but as a source of defilement. She
was not allowed to sit on the furniture within the house. She was frequently
denied a bed at night and forced to sleep on the floor, or else collared and
chained up outside the house. In her words, she ‘wasn’t even a little girl’ to her
family but something else entirely, something non-human and untouchable.

Even when we were sitting in the lounge at dinner time, watching televi-
sion, I was not allowed to sit on the furniture. I had to sit on a wooden
box. So I had this role in the house, where I wasn’t part of the family. And
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

I’ve never felt like I had a family. The group has become my family. And
if I was upset or hurt, as a child, I had no one to turn to for comfort or
reassurance. Or anything.

Anne described how the abusive group enacted a range of ordeals that were
designed to craft a subject position for her at the symbolic borderline of life
and death. She was brought into contact with murder and death and the pos-
sibility of her own death was made vividly real to her:

I also have a memory of being held over an acid bath. The reason why I
know it was acid is because they put things in it – bones – so that you
knew that there was no way you could survive.

The abusive group frequently terrorised Anne with a black dog and sat her in
the midst of a writhing pile of snakes. Anne recalls her father’s anger during
an incident in which she failed to display any fear of these snakes, possibly due
to the effects of the sedatives she was given prior to organised abuse. Anne’s
son Jimmy, who began disclosing victimisation by Anne’s father when he was
three years old, also spoke of being terrorised with snakes.

Jimmy brought it up, and he said it like I should already know – ‘Grandpa
uses snakes, and he always tried to tell me I was poisoned.’ And Jimmy
did say to me that he felt sick after some events like this, so maybe Dad
does try to make the snakes bite you.

It seems that Anne’s father employed non-venomous snakes as part of a per-

formance in which the child’s very nature was purportedly transformed into a
venomous poison. In this sustained process of abjectiﬁcation, Anne’s parents
employed their faeces and urine, and mimed murdering their grandchild in an
oven:

And that night, Jimmy said to me, ‘They didn’t give me anything to eat
or drink. They peed and pooed on me. They scrubbed me in hot water to
get the poo off. The shower was too hot. Grandpa put my head in the
oven. Made me scared. I got nearly an asthma attack.’

Rationalising ritual abuse: coercing victim

consent for their own abuse
Within these traumatic ordeals victims came to experience organised abuse
as an inevitable and natural extension of who they were; that is, they inter-
nalised their non-status as objects or property who can only achieve value
through abuse. However, an ideology that functions solely to distract victims
from gross inequality and injustice is unlikely to win their consent for
very long, and sexually abusive groups utilised a range of strategies to encour-
age victims to become invested in the discourses and practices that rational-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

ised their abuse. Sagan (1988: 12) notes the ways in which the Nazis blurred
the boundaries between morality and immorality by promoting genocide
through the invocation of concepts such as ‘purifying, healing, curing,
oath, community, the Volk, social usefulness, ideal society, sacrifice, dedica-
tion, ideology, idealism and morality’. Similarly, participants described
how their experience of dehumanisation in organised abuse was inflected
with ideological tropes to rationalise their abuse and torture. For some
participants, ritual abuse was presented to them as a form of purification
from some undefined ‘original sin’. Says Sarah, ‘It fitted that I was the one
who [was abused] … It was like a comic book. I was the evil that the rest of
the world is trying to fight’. Other participants were told that ‘sacrificing’

themselves to organised abuse was a form of penance that would ultimately

redeem them.

… I always grew up with this sense of: ‘Our body’s a sacriﬁce, and we’re
just there for their pleasure. And somehow, we’re evil, and the only way
that we are going to get some form of repentance and get our soul back,
because we don’t have one, is if we comply and do what is expected of us.’
Isabelle

Some participants were told that that their abuse was a form of ‘training’ that
they required in order to fulﬁl their ‘destiny’. Sky said ‘I was brought up to
fervently believe that the apocalypse was coming’ and hence his abuse was
framed as an ‘honour’ in preparation of the end of time: ‘It’s an honour to do
things for them, it’s an honour to die for them, it’s the greatest honour to be
picked for them. It’s my destiny’. Polly referred to the farm where she was
often taken for ritual abuse as the ‘training ground’ in which she was not only
abused but subject to tortures that, she was told, would strengthen and pre-
pare her for the future.
Rhea described how as a ‘ﬁrst-born girl’ in her family she was told she had
a ‘privileged position’ within the abusive group, and hence she needed to be
taken for ‘training’ which involved rape and torture. Abused children were
promised positions of authority within the abusive group such as ‘high priest-
ess’ and ‘occult queen’ for girls and ‘assassin’ or ‘warlock’ for boys. From Lily’s
point of view, such promises are so ubiquitous in the testimony of survivors of
ritual abuse that she wondered if it was just another strategy of control:

And I was always told that I was in training to be a high priestess. But I
also know of a few other ritual abuse survivors who say the same thing, so
I’m never sure if that’s a line that is used regularly, and it’s just a lie.

In ritualistic abuse, girls and women were constituted as degraded objects

before being offered a speciﬁcally crafted subject position as ‘priestess’, ‘queen’
and so forth, the sole preparation for which was rape and torture. The sociali-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

sation of boy children within the abusive group took a somewhat different
route. Abusive groups often became disinterested in victimising boys once
they reached adolescence, but for those boys who continued to be victimised
they were often socialised into perpetration rather than forced to acquiesce
to continuing victimisation. Sarson and MacDonald (2008: 429) comment
that, in their interviews with survivors of ritualistic abuse, ‘[s]ocialized sexual
victimization and aggression was frequently spoken of as being central to the
enforcement of gender-based roles’. Whilst ‘perpetrators tell a little girl
she needs to be taught “How to be a woman”, justifying her rape’, a boy ‘is
socialised to be an aggressor; forced into sexual acts with another child, he is
taught “how to be a man”’. Within abusive groups, it seems that abusive men

conceptualised their ‘true’ nature in terms of an unmitigated right – indeed,

a duty – to sexually abuse children and women. In the same context, women
and children are expected to find expression of their ‘true’ nature through
subservience to, and complicity with, men.
Nonetheless, the gender order that emerges from participants’ accounts of
organised abuse is not a totalistic or inflexible one. Participants described
perpetrator groups that were diverse in structure, and it is clear that some
women could, and did, achieve a sense of power and status in the context of
sexual exploitation. In organised abuse, women could engage in a variety of
strategies in order to ameliorate their subordinate status. However, their
opportunities to exercise power within the conditions of organised abuse
appear to have been limited to facilitating their own abuse or participating in
the abuse of others. All these actions ultimately reaffirm representations of
women and children as maleficent and deserving of abuse and harm. For exam-
ple, Rhea described how, whilst women’s role in the abusive group was largely
restricted to being ‘victims’, they took an active role in ‘managing’ children
throughout abusive ordeals. They could then leverage the information they
gathered in this role in an attempt to curry favour with abusive men:

Then there’s also the times when there are groups of kids who are waiting,
um, for rituals to be performed. It’s often women who are looking after,
um, and it’s women who will trick, it’s women who will get close and
make you start to trust them, and then report that you’ve actually trusted,
or acted in some kind of faith, and so then there’s the brutality or the
murder that comes as a result of that.

Both Sky’s parents were actively involved in his organised and ritualistic
abuse, much of which took place in the family lounge room. He describes his
parents’ relationship as close and affectionate, and he describes his mother as
‘the boss’ at home, as well as in organised contexts.

I still get really confused about my mum’s role in this. So much of what
I’ve read [about organised abuse] is about the woman being enslaved and
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

captive. I think my sister is in that position. But my mum – I thought,

very recently, does she have any symptoms of a battered woman? In terms
of being grateful to the perpetrators and so forth? But she didn’t have any
of that. She’s the dominant one in day-to-day life.
But I do remember one event where – I don’t know, there were guys on
her, and I was next to her, and there were guys on me. But I just wonder,
if for her it was an S&M type thing. I don’t know.

Sky’s memory of this scene in which there were ‘guys on her’ just as there were
‘guys on me’ clearly troubles him. It contradicts his perception of his mother
as ‘dominant’ and in control of her life. His example highlights the complexity

of ritualistic abuse, and how difﬁcult it can be to neatly assign categories such
as ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ to individuals whose lives have been ‘permeated
with abuse and its legitimations’ (Scott 2001: 130). Nonetheless, the life his-
tories gathered in this study illustrate the iterative relationship between the
gender regimes of abusive households and abusive groups, and the gender
order within which these groups and families are embedded. The patterns of
violence within ritual abuse overwhelmingly have women and children as
their objects, and they are forced to accept and adapt to this violence to the
point where ‘the most intolerable conditions of existence’ are ‘perceived as
acceptable and even natural’ (Bourdieu 2001: 1).

The use of torture to inscribe and trigger obedience

Of the 15 participants who stated that they had been subject to ritualistic abuse,
nine described a continuum of pseudo-medicalised abuse in which ‘doctors’ or
other abusers used a variety of techniques, usually incorporating hypnosis and/
or electro-shock, to induce dissociative or hypnotic states. For some participants,
this activity appeared to be designed to inculcate or induce a dissociative reﬂex,
possibly with the intention of disrupting the child’s capacity to accurately recall
or report her abuse. For example, May described her father taking her to a
‘doctor’ who hypnotised her and taught her to ‘ﬂoat away’ in the year prior to the
commencement of organised and ritualistic abuse. May said that this ‘treatment’
only occurred a few times, and ceased once her ritualistic abuse began.

I used to have these nightmares, when I was a very young child. Of being
taken to a doctor, and he would hypnotise me, and tell me to leave my
body. And I didn’t know what to make of this for a very long time. Not
so long ago, I realised that this was part of the abuse. And that’s how it
all started … when I was a toddler.

Other participants reported more intensive, prolonged, structured kinds of

experiences. Participants described these ordeals in terms such as ‘mind-bend-
ing’ or as a ‘mind fuck’ in which perpetrators systematically undermined and
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

invalidated the child’s sense of reality. Of the nine participants who reported
these pseudo-medical experiences, ﬁve reported that they believed they were
subject to a programme of torture designed to induce DID. They claimed that
this programme had been carried out by a particular person, or group of
people, within the abusive group who were trained in the inducement of DID.
Such descriptions of torture and hypnosis are recurrent themes in disclosures
of ritualistic abuse around the world (see Becker et al. 2008). In cases of organ-
ised abuse, clinicians have suggested that traumatic and dissociative psycho-
pathology may be deliberately induced by sexually abusive groups in order
to inhibit victim disclosure and reduce the likelihood of detection (Sachs
and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012), resulting in what

Chu (2011: 263) has described as ‘massive devastation of the self’. In the litera-
ture on organised abuse, such ordeals are frequently referred to as ‘mind control’.
Unsurprisingly, accounts of ‘mind control’ have contributed little to the
credibility of narratives of organised abuse as a whole. As Bell et al. (2004)
point out, claims of ‘mind control’ are common themes in the clinical presen-
tations of people with schizophrenia. Nonetheless, the majority of adults
with histories of ritualistic abuse do not meet the diagnostic criteria for schiz-
ophrenia (Ross 1995), and indeed there are a number of differences between
their reports of mind control and those of people with schizophrenia (Lacter
and Lehman 2008). In fact, whilst some observers have dismissed such disclo-
sures as evidence of delusion in cases of ritualistic abuse (Richardson et al.
1991), there are a number of criminal cases in which complainants have
reported mind control and hypnosis in relation to their claims of sexual abuse
and sexual assault. In these cases, ‘women were sexually abused while in trance
states that were induced powerfully and quickly caused the women to lapse in
their normal, self-protective behaviours’ (Noblitt and Perskin 2000: 82). In
Australia, hypnosis and brainwashing have featured in child sex prosecutions
(Petraitis and O’Connor 1999, Grant 2005). In these cases, child victims
reported amnesia for their sexual exploitation as a result of hypnosis.
Sky described how his organised abuse transitioned from a focus on rituals
and the supernatural into pseudo-medicalised sexual abuse as a teenager.
When he was a young child, he recalled that his abuse predominantly involved
what he called ‘the ghosts’ – that is, men and women would come to his
house, and they and his parents would dress in robes, and subject him to ritu-
alistic abuse. In his early teens, the emphasis of the abuse began to change.
Rather than wear robes, the abusers began to wear medical outﬁts, or suits,
and claim to be ‘the government’ engaging in ‘experimentation’. However,
Sky maintains that these were the same people as those who had previously
worn ‘robes’ and told him they were supernatural ‘ghosts’.

And then there were the ‘doctors’. And, again, as a kid I didn’t under-
stand. I guess, when I hit about eight or nine, I remember trying to ﬁgure
out what was going on. But I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t move, I
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

was just paralysed with drugs, and didn’t know where I was. But they’d
all be dressed up in white, I’d be put on this table – I remember them in
the same marching pattern, the same number of people as the supposed
‘ghosts’. And then tortured with electricity.

Initially Sky’s abusers told him that they were abusing him in preparation for
the coming apocalypse, but later they claimed to be abusing him for the ‘gov-
ernment’.

I was brought up to fervently believe that the apocalypse was coming.

And a lot of the theme was to do with the end of the world, blah

blah blah. [...] Then, when I hit 13, ‘the government’ theme appeared in
my day-to-day awareness. And my understanding of it, I was just con-
fused out of my head. I was like, ‘Why is the government interested in
me? Like, seriously, I’m a kid, what do they want?’

By connecting his abuse to the ‘government’, Sky’s abusers crafted the

impression that they could locate and harm him if he attempted to escape or
evade them. In interview, Sky was still very fearful of the abusive group.
Whilst he was uncertain that they were connected to ‘the government’, he was
nonetheless terriﬁed of the potential consequences of resisting or disobeying
a direct order from the abusive group, since they claimed that the FBI or
some other government agency would track him down if he did not do as he
was told. This account raises the possibility that ritualistic abuse and ‘mind
control’ are two sides of the same coin – practices that employ different
ideologies (one religious, the other scientiﬁc) to mystify the relations of dom-
ination in abusive groups and make the abuse appear both inescapable and
inevitable.
Polly’s account of her ‘mind control’ illuminates the complex emotional
dynamics that survivors of organised abuse may have in believing, and adopt-
ing, particular explanations for their organised abuse. In Polly’s description of
her childhood, she had been ‘sold’ by her family to a psychiatrist called
Christian who then engaged in ‘mind control’ research upon her. This ‘research’
involved sadistic sexual abuse, however by accepting that it was ‘research’
Polly was able to preserve a sense of attachment to Christian in a life that had
often been devoid of opportunities to experience love and support:

When I was sold into that [mind control] program, or given into that
program, or whatever it was – there was never any love or care in my
family – and any approach that I made to a member of my family was
rejected. I was rejected. I was pushed away. And forced to bond with this
man. And I did. And he was, you know, compared to everyone else in my
life, he was the best of a bad lot.
There was nothing sadistic about him. Mind control was a science.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

And there were all these distasteful things he had to do as part of his
work. But he didn’t enjoy them, he didn’t get off on them. And so I have
this really strong sense with him that these were necessary evils to try and
achieve what he was trying to create.

Through the frame of ‘mind control’, Polly was able to minimise Christian’s
rape and torture of her as ‘distasteful things he had to do as part of his work’,
and thus maintain her sense of affection for him. Nonetheless, her conceptu-
alisation of Christian as a ‘scientist’ with no personal investment in his ‘work’
of rape and torture was frequently disrupted by her own narrative. Despite her
repeated insistence that Christian ‘wasn’t sadistic, he wasn’t violent, he wasn’t

awful’, she also described the pleasure he found in watching children ﬁght and
struggle:

I remember him saying to me once, that nothing interests him about

broken people. He wants people who still have something intact and will
ﬁght him. He wants the challenge. And so I’ve got lots of memories of
him, when I was a kid, because I’m fairly feisty, and I’ve got some feisty
alters, where there would be this active resistance in the middle of a ses-
sion – and the smile would come on his face and his eyes would twinkle,
and this little chuckle, and this genuine enjoyment of this feisty child …
that would present a challenge to him.

Polly’s conceptualisation of her sexual abuse as a form of scientiﬁc ‘research’

was contradicted by her admission that Christian appeared to be sexually
attracted to children:

But I think, with Christian, when I look at how he was with adults, he
really had a thing for kids. And I’m aware of a lot of grief about losing
him, about him losing interest in me as I got older. By the time I was
seventeen ... I would still see him – whenever I went home – but the
relationship wasn’t the same any more.

The pseudo-scientific trappings of ‘mind control’ may function much like the
religious overtones of ritualistic abuse, legitimising the abuse and enjoining
the victim to participate in her own exploitation. This practical but symbolic
relation may explain why the two forms of abuse frequently co-occur, and why
it is frequently unclear where ritualistic abuse ends and ‘mind control’ begins.
Polly’s description of Christian’s ‘mind control’ programme includes refer-
ences to prolonged confinement, sensory deprivation, and torture with snakes,
spiders and insects, and possession by ‘the beast’, all of which are also well-
identified features of ritualistic abuse.

There was a lot of electroshock. Of all sorts of different voltages. Conﬁnement

in small, dark places with creepy crawlies. Which is always revolting. I can
remember one session that happened, when the two overseas visitors were
there, and it was a session about silencing. One guy had a huge insect that
he kept putting in my mouth. And I was strapped down with my mouth
strapped wide open. With all these references to ‘I can see the beast right
inside you’ and ‘My my, you have a big mouth’ and all this stuff. And he
killed a spider and I had to swallow it. Using a lot of those archetypal
things that humans are instinctively terriﬁed of. Spiders, snakes. A lot of
that kind of thing. Sensory deprivation, isolation. There were drugs used.
And some of the programming just went on and on and on. It was this real,
progressive activity, wearing me down. This prolonged torture.

Many of the ‘mind control’ ordeals described by participants had similar

themes to other sadistic and ritualistic ordeals. This observation disrupts the
‘scientific’ justification of ‘mind control’ as a functional method of control and
instead highlights its similarities with ritualistic abuse and other practices
that serve to legitimise organised abuse. Indeed, in the broader social context,
just as religion is a domain within which masculine domination is simultane-
ously sacralised and mystified, so too has scientific authority traditionally jus-
tified men’s dominance over women and children. It may be that, in abusive
groups, religious and pseudo-medical/scientific ideologies serve to inform the
abusive practices of the group and thus serve as an ideological framework
within which abusive men craft and enhance experiences of domination and
superiority.

Conclusion
Understanding the origins of ritual practice, Bourdieu (1977: 114) argues, ‘is
not a question of decoding the internal logic of a symbolism but of restoring its
practical necessity by relating it to the real conditions of its genesis’. In a simi-
lar vein, this chapter has sought to contextualise ritual abuse and ‘mind con-
trol’ within the practicalities of child sexual exploitation. Through symbolic
practices such as ritualistic abuse and ‘mind control’, the abusive groups gener-
ate a symbolic universe of domination and subordination that has experiential
validity for victims as well as perpetrators, grounding the practices of organised
abuse within a primordial ‘nature’. This ‘nature’ is the metaphysical pretence
that abusers give to their shared interest in inﬂicting harm on children and
women. Within traumatic rituals in which they were forced into contact with
death and blood and human waste, participants’ views of themselves ultimately
came to accord with the view of their abusers. The embodied experience of
ritualistic abuse involved such overwhelming trauma that it became the basis
for the development of a subordinated and obedient disposition amongst vic-
tims that predisposed them to ongoing compliance with sexual exploitation. In
turn, it seems that such abuses also transformed the worldview of abusers, ena-
bling them to view victimised children and women as dehumanised and shame-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

ful, and thus legitimate objects of hatred and sexual violence.

In the experiences of participants, perpetrators of ritual abuse and ‘mind
control’ adopted florid titles for themselves (eg ‘kings’, ‘warlocks’ and so on)
and imposed similarly florid labels on victims (eg ‘priestess’, ‘assassin’ etc).
They generated a complex vocabulary of abuse to the point where the real
relations that enabled abuse (eg parent-child) becomes veiled by mythological
or ‘scientific’ roles and symbols. The totality of the abusive system is frag-
mented by this logic and becomes difficult for the victim to grasp as a whole,
let alone communicate effectively and coherently to ‘outsiders’. The mun-
danities of sexual exploitation and abuse are transmuted into a set of self-
referential signifiers with little meaning to those who have not been socialised

through the cycle of victimisation and perpetration. Through ritualistic prac-

tices, organised abuse becomes, in effect, a closed system that is less vulnerable
to resistance by victims and inscrutable to ‘outsiders’.
When faced with such extreme abuse, it is easy to lose sight of their rela-
tion to the ‘micro-practices’ of power in operation throughout in the more
mundane circumstances of victims’ lives. Whilst ‘mind control’ and ritualis-
tic abuse are processes that dehumanise and degrade victims, this degradation
is all the more powerful because it intensifies and legitimises the normative
structures of power, as discussed in Chapter 6. It is the reproduction and
intensification of the gender order within organised abuse, through practices
of rape and torture, that lend the relationship between abuser and abused
its concrete and inescapable quality. This relationship between the gender
order and organised abuse explains why, whilst investigators may experience
organised abuse as ‘grappling with smoke’ (Gallagher 1998), victims experi-
ence organised abuse as, in the words of one survivor, an ‘almost unbreakable
circle’ (Carli 1998). It is in the context of this abject captivity that children
and women are vulnerable to the extremes of sexual violence, and survivor
accounts of murder and mutilation in organised abuse will be discussed in the
following and final chapter.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Sexual murder and

reproductive harm
The outer limits of organised
sexual abuse

I am always amazed when people are so staggered by the atrocities com-

mitted during war. Have you noticed they are always perpetrated by the
‘other’ side?
Lily

It is not uncommon for survivors of organised abuse, and particularly ritualis-

tic abuse, to describe witnessing crimes so serious that they are better described
as atrocities. Card (2002) suggests that atrocities have two defining character-
istics: (a) culpable wrongdoing by perpetrators, and (b) foreseeable intolerable
harm to victims, whose lives, if they are not ended, are likely to have been
forever marked. Whilst the term ‘atrocity’ is usually reserved for serious vio-
lence in political or civil conflicts (see Chapter 3) the two dimensions of Card’s
definition are often present in the context of early and repetitive child abuse,
in which children are repeatedly subject to levels of violence that are likely to
have serious and life-long impacts on physical and mental health. Shengold
(1979: 556) has described the ‘deliberate traumatisation or deprivation’ of
children by a parent or authority figure as a form of ‘soul murder’. In this
process, ‘[t]he victim is robbed of his identity and of the ability to maintain
authentic feelings’ (p 556). This process is often attended by ‘brainwashing’,
since the child is forced to turn to her abuser for relief of the distress that the
abuser has caused, who in turn compounds this distress by insisting that the
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

child’s abuse is normal and no harm has taken place. The resulting delusion
that the ‘bad’ adult is in fact ‘good’ (a point that is often actively reinforced by
the perpetrator/s’) leads to a splitting of consciousness that profoundly com-
prises the child’s mental and emotional wellbeing.
This enmeshment of ‘brainwashing’ and coercive control with repetitive
and deliberate abuse is a characteristic of organised abuse. The dependency
and powerlessness of children is turned against them by abusers who seek to
craft a grandiose image of themselves through the negation of another’s agency.
Previous chapters have examined the intensiﬁcation of this process through
processes of objectiﬁcation and ritualisation. This chapter will explore the

ways in which this logic extends beyond ritualisation into desecration and to
the ‘outer limits’ of organised abuse: sexual murder and reproductive harms
such as non-consensual impregnation, termination and infanticide. Such hor-
rors have been linked to the organised and ritualistic abuse of children in
high-proﬁle investigations including Fred and Rosemary West’s ‘House of
Horrors’ in Britain and in the Belgian organised abuse scandal that centred on
the sex offender Marc Dutroux (Kelly 1998). Less well-known cases of organ-
ised abuse have also included evidence of child torture, rape and murder.
American psychotherapist Lenore Terr (2003) has documented her long-term
psychotherapeutic work with ‘Cammie’, who was removed from her parents as
an infant after her 25-day-old sister was found dead in the family home from
fatal brain injuries. The child’s corpse was covered in teeth marks and so too
was Cammie, who had internal injuries from rape requiring surgery. During
the subsequent investigation, Cammie’s relatives described satanic rituals and
the torture and slaughter of sheep and stray cats in her family home. Whilst
there was strong evidence of multiple perpetrators in the torture, rape and
possible ritual abuse of Cammie and the death of her sister, there were no sex
offences or murder charges laid, with Cammie’s father imprisoned for the
death of his infant daughter ‘without malice’.
Sceptics have been at pains to exaggerate the numbers of deaths reported in
cases of ritualistic abuse and to suggest that such deaths could not go unde-
tected. For example, Bromley (1991: 56) alleged that survivors of ritualistic
abuse collectively report ‘tens of thousands’ of child murders a year in North
America. He offers no source for this claim, nor do other sceptics who refer to
the ‘thousands’ or ‘hundreds of thousands’ of murders that they suggest would
be taking place if allegations of ritualistic abuse were factual. In this study,
participants did not report the mass or random murder of children or adults
by abusive groups. Instead, some participants described witnessing the care-
fully orchestrated and planned murder of vulnerable infants and adults. Rhea
offers a reasonable explanation for the deaths she witnessed, deaths which she
suggests were neither a common nor indiscriminate aspect of her experience
of organised abuse.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

And people say, ‘Oh, how can people be killed, and not be found?’ Now,
I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of missing people. And they stay missing.
And it didn’t happen all the time. It didn’t happen on a regular basis. But
it did happen.

A small proportion of people reported missing are not found and they are
likely to be homicide victims (Cameron and Frazer 1987). However, accounts
of homicide in organised abuse often pertain to children who are never listed as
‘missing’ because they were born, raised and killed without being registered.
Whilst such accounts may appear far-fetched, it is clearly possible to bear and
raise children without attracting the attention of the authorities. In 2005,

American police found that multiple children had been born and raised in a
cult that routinely sexually abused them. Press reports stated ‘many of the
children in the group have no birth certificate, Social Security number or any
type of documentation’ (Brady 2005). Where such children ‘disappear’ they
may never be found. In Australia, at the time of writing, a coronial inquiry is
ongoing into the disappeared child of Kate Hutchinson, a mentally ill woman
with a suspected history of involvement in ritualistic abuse (O’Neill 2009). It
was two years before the authorities detected that her two-year-old child was
missing, and they uncovered the disappearance inadvertently in the course of
investigating another child protection issue. It has since been suggested that
the woman may have given birth to another missing child (O’Neill 2009).
Even where the bodies of children murdered in the course of organised
abuse are found, the specific circumstances of their deaths may go unacknowl-
edged. In her autobiography, Owen (2010) described secretly giving birth at
11 due to incest and organised abuse, and the subsequent murder of the infant
by Owen’s mother in order to cover up the abuse. It was over three decades
before the Dublin coroner’s court confirmed that the murdered infant, whose
body was found by the police immediately following the murder, was Owen’s
child. When reflecting on the cases of torture, murder and infanticide that
have been linked to organised abuse, it is notable that they were often detected
inadvertently rather than through systematic police work. In this regard,
murders in the context of organised sexual abuse have important similarities
to serial and sexual murder, where cases of repeated rape, torture and murder
have gone undetected by the authorities because victims are vulnerable and
easily overlooked (Cameron and Frazer 1987, Caputi 1988).
In light of the evidence of torture and murder in the course of organised
abuse, this chapter will take seriously the descriptions of atrocious violence
recounted by participants in interview. These atrocities were intimately bound
up within the gender regime of the abusive group, who were already engaged
in the sustained processes of dehumanisation and degradation associated with
the ritualistic abuse and torture of children. In acts of atrocity, the abusive
group engaged in acts of intensive and homicidal aggression towards girls,
women and their reproductive capacities in ways that were designed to either
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

end or deform the lives of their victims. The aim of this chapter is not to offer
a comprehensive explanation for these acts but rather to open the dialogue
around them and point to future areas for inquiry and exploration. The avail-
able data on atrocity in organised abuse is fragmented and uncertain, involv-
ing the testimony of survivors and some substantiated case studies as described
above. Emerging from this evidence is a compelling picture of atrocity within
the ‘private’ confines of abusive groups who orchestrate the lives and some-
times the deaths of others in accordance with an ideology of masculine
supremacy and sadism. In these performances of murderous violence, the per-
petrating ‘subject’ seeks to extend the logic of objectification and abjectifica-
tion (as discussed in previous chapters) to the point of desecration. The foul

and unclean ‘object’ that is represented by the victim is physically and sym-
bolically entered by the masterful ‘subject’ who destroys her utterly, and in
doing so seeks to ﬁnally embody the transcendental subjectivity that animates
much of organised, sadistic and ritualistic abuse. These acts generally fell
under the two general categories of (a) sexual murder and (b) reproductive
harm and infanticide, which will be discussed in turn.

Sexual murder
A number of participants described the sadistic and sexual murders of infants,
children and adults, followed by acts such as necrophilia and cannibalism. The
instinctive response to such acts has been to ‘banish them from consciousness’
(Herman 1992: 1), either by denying that they could occur, or else by sym-
bolically quarantining them as the pathological aberrations of a select few. The
atrocities described by participants have parallels with the crimes studied in
the literature on ‘sexual murder’ or ‘sexual homicide’, the ‘intentional killing
of a person during which there is sexual behaviour by the perpetrator’ (Meloy
2000: 1). Cameron and Frazer (1987) deﬁne ‘sexual murder’ as those acts of
murder in which ‘killing is itself a sexual act’ (p 17), the ‘eroticisation of the act
of killing in and for itself’ (p 18). In the act of sexual murder, the moment of
death does not demarcate the end of the rape and torture of the victim. The
murderer engages with the body of the victim in a manner that erases the vic-
tim’s subjectivity in life or death. Such acts are generally considered to be
symptomatic of a deep-seated psychological pathology, however psychological
screenings of sexual murderers ﬁnd that the majority of perpetrators do
not have psychotic or delusional disorders or some other mental illness that
might predispose them to such violence (Meloy 1988, Meloy et al. 1994,
Warren et al. 1996). In their analysis of a sample of 42 mass and serial killers,
Levin and Fox (1985) found that sexual murderers are not mentally ill but
rather they are motivated primarily by the desire to control and dominate
others.
This desire for control and domination was closely associated with a hatred
of women and a history of violence against women (Revitch and Schlesinger
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

1981, Beauregard and Proulx 2000, Meloy 2000). Dietz and colleagues (1990)
studied 30 men convicted for murders that were sexually sadistic and included
acts of torture. They found that the men had carefully planned the murders
with the intention of causing and witnessing the victim’s fear, pain and the
realisation of impending death. These research ﬁndings support Cameron and
Frazer’s (1987) argument that sexual murder is motivated by the pursuit of
masculine transcendence. This is a transcendental subjectivity that can be claimed
by men through the destruction and desecration of ‘Others’ who symbolise
the feminine, corporeal ‘nature’ from which men (according to this sexual
ideology) must free themselves. This explanation of sexual murder accords
with the accounts provided in this study, in which sexual murder featured as

the culmination of the efforts of perpetrating ‘subjects’ to claim a position of

unassailable domination and prestige by utterly destroying victimised ‘objects’.
This act of negation was strongly gendered, with Seb the only participant to
report witnessing the murder of an adult man in organised contexts:

There was one young man who was deﬁnitely in his twenties, probably
late 20s, who was beheaded by Doherty. And … I had my, ah, Doherty
brings the axe down on his neck, and rushes around to the front, and
there’s this gushing blood. And he’s drinking it, he’s just wild with excite-
ment. Then he comes over, grabs me by the hair and pushes my face into
the severed neck. And I’m told to drink it.

Such a description is unusual in this study. Where participants reported the

sexual murder of teenagers or adults, the victim was almost invariably female.
It is notable that, in Seb’s report of this man’s death, he does not describe any
sexualised component. In contrast, where participants reported that teenage
girls or women were murdered, the victim was subject to a range of sexualised
tortures. Such tortures were present, for instance, in Seb’s description of the
murder of a teenage girl, which was attended by the cannibalisation of her
body:

She – she’s ﬂailing around, she’s naked, and [the abusers] are trying to
grab her and get her up onto this table. And she’s resisting it. Presumably,
she knows what is going to happen. And in the next instance, she’s lying
quite motionless, so I presume they’ve drugged her.
But I’m watching this, quite helpless. And then, um, I’m brought
around to the side of the table, the dagger is put into my hands, and
Doherty’s hands over my hands, and it’s placed on her throat. And her
throat is cut, very quickly, quite deeply … And the next thing, I’m on the
other side of the table, there’s Grenham and Doherty on the other side,
her body in between. And they’ve cut her breasts off, and they’re eating
them. Y’know, this is great for them, they’re happy as Larry.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

During acts of atrocity, perpetrators expressed a sense of god-like or omnipo-

tent selfhood. During abuse, Lily’s father would tell her ‘I am God, I am
the God you must worship. I am the God you must adore. I am evil’. Other
participants reported that their abusers called themselves ‘gods’, ‘the masters
of the universe’, ‘warlocks’ and ‘kings’. Participants described perpetrators
wearing robes, hoods, medieval ruffs and other paraphernalia designed to
designate a special and superior status. According to participants, some
perpetrators even claimed to have magical powers. It was acts of ritualistic
violence and murder that appeared to most powerfully activate these fantasies
of transcendence and omnipotence, in which the victim’s personhood is denied
as they are literally and symbolically reduced to a violated and eviscerated

body. In other contexts such as serial murder and war crimes, perpetrators of
atrocities also report a feeling of ‘godlike’ power and manhood (Caputi 1988,
Warren et al. 1996, Kelly 2000).
In acts of ritualistic atrocity the subjectivity of the ‘other’ is not simply
negated but utterly obliterated through symbolic enactments of all-consuming
masculine sexual aggression. Neil described an occasion of sexualised murder
followed by necrophilia, in which the sexual assault of a young girl before and
after death constituted a joint performance between two men who character-
ised the child solely in terms of ‘a fuck’.

On one of these occasions, there was a young girl, only about three
years old, that had been raped. And she actually died there. And one
of her abusers looked and said, ‘What a waste of a fuck. Fucking little
shit just died on me.’ And another man came over, and said, ‘Can I have
my turn now?’ And the other guy is still going aggro that she’d died.
And he’s saying, ‘Fucking little bitch, she’s dead.’ And the other guy
just looked and said, ‘Well, she’s still warm, she’s still fuckable.’ And
he dragged her away and, you know, did what he wanted to her. And
over the years there were many children who were killed, maimed and
very badly injured. You know. And I can say that because I was there,
I witnessed it.

In psychoanalytic theory, the wish to destroy or obliterate others is not only

common across the human lifespan but crucial to psychological development.
Benjamin (1995: 39) argues that in ‘the mental act of negating or obliterating
the object, which may be expressed in the real effort to attack the other, we
found out whether the real other survives’. That is, the fact that others con-
tinue to exist even where rage gives rise to a wish to harm or negate them
establishes that they exist outside and independently from the subject, and
hence they are not just a mental object of subjective experience. This is a
realisation that leads away from narcissism and towards a more fully inte-
grated and meaningful engagement with others as subjects rather than objects.
It is the survival of others in spite of the destructive impulses of the subject
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

that establishes them as entities in their own right and thus constrains the
force of primary narcissism (Benjamin 1995). However, in some sexually abu-
sive groups, the sadistic impulse of narcissistic fantasies are given free reign,
and participants described how acts of torture, murder and desecration induced
‘ideal states’ in perpetrators who appeared captivated by a sense of beatiﬁc/
horriﬁc transcendence and masculine supremacy.
This quest for transcendence is a noted feature of other criminal practices,
including armed robbery, car theft and joy riding, in which going over the
‘moral edge’ delivers intense experiences of power, control and supremacy over
others (Katz 1988). However, transcendence is essentially an imaginary and
perpetually out-of-reach state, and the inevitable failure to realise this ideal can

prompt ‘painful, sometimes frenzied, attempts to drag an unwilling psyche

into line with the unwanted social expectations’ (Jefferson 1994: 13). In this
study, the cultures of abject violence that prevail amongst sexually abusive
groups serve as the backdrop to escalating acts of group violence up to and
including the sexualised destruction of the ‘Other’ – that is, women and chil-
dren, who are represented often enough in a patriarchal culture as embodying
all that is ‘split off’ from masculinity and despised accordingly. Within the
symbolic order of the abusive group, women and children are symbols of pow-
erlessness and base corporeality that men must destroy from within and with-
out if they are to realise their ‘true’ and transcendental self. Practices of
ritualistic violence and sexualised murder were the embodiment of this logic,
through which perpetrators could grasp at a ‘supreme’ masculine subject posi-
tion. However this state is inherently unrealisable and perpetrator groups were
locked into a cycle of carefully planning and staging the deaths of others in
order to reproduce the momentary experience of transcendence arising from
abject destruction.

Reproductive harm and infanticide

The forced murder and cannibalisation of children is a widely reported feature
of organised and ritualistic abuse (Rutz et al. 2008, Young et al. 1991, Scott
2001), dating back to the earliest attempts to prosecute organised abuse in the
United States. The allegations of organised and ritualistic abuse in Jordan,
Minnesota made by a number of children in 1983 included reports of the
murder and cannibalisation of an infant (Hechler 1988). In this study, some of
participants recalled incidents in which they witnessed infanticide, and were
forcibly engaged in the murderous act. The abusive group typically orches-
trated the murder in order to inculcate a deep sense of culpability in the child.

I remember, once, I was made to hold a knife while an adult held a baby.
And, to me, it was a feeling that they were trying to make me feel guilty,
so that I would never speak. They tried to make the child – and I knew,
at the time, I wasn’t strong enough to do what they did with that knife
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

– but they try and make you feel involved, make you feel like you are in
it. But that was one of the most traumatic times.
Anne

Participants’ accounts of infanticide and cannibalism parallel recent reports

from Africa in which militia groups abduct children and, as part of their ‘ini-
tiation’ as sexual slaves and child soldiers, force them to participate in the
ritualistic rape, murder and cannibalisation of adults and other children (for a
newspaper report, see Judah 2004). Through such a process, the child experi-
ences a symbolic transformation of the ‘traditional system of meaning’ result-
ing in ‘cultural and mental destruction’ (Medeiros 2007: 500). The resulting

internal sense of anomie then binds the child to the abusive group, since they
have lost their sense of communion or belonging to a wider social order. In
Lauren’s experience these acts were considered to have magical or supernatural
signiﬁcance by perpetrators:

The sacriﬁce of babies. The eating of their ﬂesh, and the drinking of their
blood. That is – the purpose of that, they believe, they believe it is the
eternal fountain of life. And by eating new life, they will live forever.

In participants’ accounts, and in the literature on ritualistic abuse, infanticide

and murder tended to be referred to as a ‘sacriﬁce’ or in similarly religious
terms, with perpetrators readily appointing themselves ‘gods’, ‘kings’ and
‘warlocks’ with the power of life and death over their victims. Such delusions
of grandeur are not limited to ritualistic abuse. In their study of serial killers,
Warren and colleagues (1996: 974) noted that ‘This sense of being godlike
and in control of [the] life and death of another human being … is reported
by some of the men as one of the most exhilarating aspects of the sexual expe-
riences and of their crimes’. Claims to immortality and omnipotence fre-
quently attend acts of sexual murder, which somewhat obscures questions of
gender and power in relation to the commission of the crime (Caputi 1988).
In this study, such acts were heavily gendered and formed part of a cycle of
reproductive harm and infanticide. Through this cycle, the speciﬁcally female
work of gestation and child-bearing was not only integrated into organised
abuse but it was annihilated through acts of reproductive harm. In partici-
pants’ accounts, women’s and girl’s bodies and their reproductive capacities
were the targets of many of the atrocities enacted by abusive groups. These
acts seemed designed to establish male dominance over the female body in the
most atavistic and primal way possible.

They actually managed to get a pregnant woman from somewhere, they

abducted a pregnant woman. And, I kind of think, um you know, you
think that … um … you know, I know that she was terriﬁed and you’d
might think actually think if I was making this up, you’d think if I was
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

making this up … but I remember that he, he pulled her apart with, with
his bare hands … it was terrible and I actually had, I had to eat parts of the
baby.
Jo

The infants and children subject to sexualised murder were the children of
captive teenage girls and adult women who had fallen pregnant through rape.
Such pregnancies were rarely carried to full term. Participants stated that
these pregnancies were typically aborted in the second trimester, or induced
early in the third trimester, and these procedures were undertaken at home by
members of the abusive group.

I’ve read all this ‘How ridiculous, the idea that they could have “baby
breeders” where girls could get pregnant and walk around to term and
have a baby and no one will notice.’ And I’m thinking, ‘You stupid idiots,
what makes you think that they let us carry it to term?’
Jo

Two male participants, Darren and Neil, identiﬁed that pregnant teenage
girls were frequently targeted by the abusive group, and their children
removed from them after birth.

It’s so easy for them, the actual killing of infants, they would just get one
of these addicted women, removed her from society – and when that child
is born, there is nothing, no records, nothing to ever say that child has
been born. And so they can do what they like.
Darren

For their ‘breeding purposes’, as they called it – [they used] runaways.

People who had stained the family name, back in those days. They put
these people into places where, you know, to have the child and whatever.
Neil

These descriptions accorded with some female participants’ descriptions of

having been sequestered in the latter stages of pregnancy and giving birth to
children who were subsequently murdered. For example, Rhea recalls being
pregnant as a teenager, and being taken in her ﬁnal trimester to a remote
house where she gave birth to a child who was later murdered.

There were a number of early pregnancies which were hidden. The only
one that I remember was up in the house, in the forest, where we were kept
up there for must have been for about three months until we delivered.

Rhea recalled a number of secret pregnancies as a teenager and young woman.

Some of these pregnancies were carried to term and she believed that some of
these children may still be alive, although she was uncertain. As an adult,
Rhea was still being victimised in organised abuse and she gave birth to a
child in the apartment of the group leader, Peter. In the following excerpt, in
which Rhea refers to herself in the third person, she describes how one of her
personalities, Leah, agreed to allow Peter to keep the child in his apartment,
and the subsequent murder of the child. She also reﬂects on her uncertainties
over the fate of other children born in secrecy.

She [Leah] even had a child at that stage that he kept there for a while.
The child died … I mean, I’ve got one son, who’s very much alive, well

and kicking, but, um, there were others, I, I don’t know, some, some I
know are alive, but others, others I don’t know what may have happened
to them. But this one certainly I saw her when she was about two months
old, and he decapitated her, so I saw her die – Leah saw her die.

Rhea characterises Leah as a willing, if duped and coerced, participant in

organised and ritualistic abuse. However, it seems that this was a period in her
life in which Rhea was employing a dual strategy of overt obedience and
covert resistance against Peter. After witnessing the murder of the child
described above, Rhea terminated a subsequent pregnancy without Peter’s
knowledge, and found some safety by initiating a relationship with her now-
husband. Peter responded to Rhea’s emerging autonomy with increasingly
brutal and terroristic measures, including stalking, home invasions and
sexual assaults. Throughout this prolonged and terrifying ordeal, any act of
self-determination in which Rhea exercised her right to control her body
and her reproductive capacity was viewed by Peter as an intolerable affront.
In this excerpt, Rhea describes how she again fell pregnant following a
sexual assault by Peter, and his violent response when she terminated the
child.

We were raped, we were almost killed. He found out we’d terminated the
baby, that he knew was his, and he wanted it, that was one he did want.
It was gone, and, um, he abused us physically – he really got stuck into
us for that.

It is telling that Peter responded violently when Rhea took it upon herself to
decide the fate of a foetus whom she knew she could not keep safe from harm.
It may be that, in organised abuse, the act of impregnation of a girl or non-
consenting woman is a performative act that establishes the virility of the
abuser, and this act of pride can only be undone by an equivalent or greater
demonstration of masculine control and domination; non-consensual abortion
or induced birth and infanticide. Arguably, Rhea’s termination was an act of
self-determination and therefore a slight against Peter’s masculine prestige,
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

which he maintained by subjugating Rhea and utilising her reproductive

capacities, in effect, as a form of literal and symbolic colonisation. This is
similar in many regards to the reproductive control exercised by domestic
violence offenders who coercively impregnate their partner with the intention
of demonstrating masculine potency and establishing control over her and
their offspring (Miller et al. 2010).
A number of female participants alluded to violent and non-consensual
abortions and/or the murder of their children. The ongoing grief associated
with these ordeals prevented them from speaking further about the conditions
under which these abortions and infanticides took place. For example, Lily
referred in passing to two pregnancies conceived through rape when she was a

teenager, their violent termination and the incorporation of the foetal tissue
within ritualistic abuse:

How far advanced were your pregnancies permitted to go?

Enough … month wise I don’t know, but enough so that when it was
terminated there was enough for there to be a pretty graphic ritual. And
very identiﬁably ...

Lily was not able to speak in detail about these events. Nonetheless, these
were ordeals that stayed with her throughout her life, impacting upon her life
choices and how she negotiated issues relating to her body, reproduction and
sexuality. She situated the violent impregnations and terminations as the cul-
mination of a series of ritualistic abuses that had become progressively more
intrusive and soul-destroying throughout her childhood. In interview, she felt
that these terminations had destroyed her capacity to willingly have children,
emotionally if not physically.

I remember as a very young child being dedicated to Satan, then at another

point I had to pledge allegiance, and then later on was impregnated by, and
married to, Satan. So those things, whilst at an essence, they are the same,
each one is more complex, each one takes more from me, and then, with
the, the impregnated and married to Satan, there was also an abortion, as a
result of that. And that, still, is kind of one of the absolute worst memories
of the whole, the whole thing. Not just the abortion, but the way it was
done, and what happened. And I still think that still has a huge amount to
do with why I don’t have children. I was going to say ‘why I chose not to
have children’ but I’m fairly sure that was never a free choice.

Lily’s description of the phased escalation of her abuse over time is driven by
what Benjamin (1990: 58) called the ‘dialectic of control’. It is through
the process of objectiﬁcation and dehumanisation that the perpetrator extracts
recognition from the victim of his dominant status, and so ‘the struggle to
possess her must be prolonged’ (p 58). Therefore, sadism proceeds ‘piece by
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piece’, with perpetrators seeking out ‘new levels of resistance’ so that the
victim can be ‘vanquished anew’ (p 58). Lily described how desperately she
wanted to keep the pregnancies, and her father’s promises that she would
be permitted to keep, at least, the second pregnancy: ‘Of course you will
be able to keep this child. Yes, this will be your baby. Yes, it’s special,
nobody can take this away. You know you can trust me, you know that I love
you.’ She called the violent termination of this pregnancy ‘the ﬁnal death
of hope’:

Because that was the point, I think, where I really just gave in. And that
was really the point where I moved into being a perpetrator. Because of

the despair. It was like there was no point any more. And the hope, that,
as a perpetrator, you’ll get treated better.

The manipulation of children’s reproductive capacities was a strategy of power

that could be extended to entrap captive boys as well as girls and women.
After Seb had witnessed the murder of a child, and was forcibly engaged in
the murderous act, he was told that the child was his. Like Lily, Seb describes
this incident as a moment of ‘collapse’.

After the baby had been killed, there was another occasion after that, I’m
told that the infant was mine. That I’d fathered it with [a teenaged girl
who was also being abused by the group]. And it was quite impossible
because I hadn’t reached puberty. But I didn’t quite understand that at
the time. I must have understood puberty and all the rest of it, but, still,
I believed them, or I was at least confused by it. And she is wailing and
she just falls over me, and, y’know, saying ‘You killed my baby, you killed
my baby’. And then I started, I just collapsed onto the ﬂoor.

Participants employed a range of strategies to protect themselves and others

from the emotional and physical harms of the reproductive harms they had
witnessed. In Rhea’s case, she utilised abortion not only to protect herself, but
to protect the foetus. As she wrote in her diaries after she found out she was
pregnant after a sexual assault: ‘It must be taken gently, nor not at all. It must
not die in terror and pain but gently on its way, towards the light.’ Lauren
utilised anorexia as a strategy to disrupt her menstrual cycle, prevent preg-
nancy and thus gain a sense of control over her body. As a child, Lauren wit-
nessed the devastation wrought on her older sister through the murder of her
children and she grew to adolescence seeking to forestall the horror of an
induced birth and infanticide. She reported witnessing her sister haemorrhage
to death in the family home after the early inducement and murder of her
newborn by the abusive group. Lauren believed that, in order to staunch her
bleeding following the home birth, her sister was administered a high level of
a blood clotting agent and died the following day of a blood clot.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

… One of the drugs that they used to use, after the girls or women in the
group gave birth, they’d give them a blood-clotting agent. So they
wouldn’t haemorrhage, and bleed, and continue to bleed … I didn’t see
them administer her the drugs, but that’s what I believe happened to her.
She was given a blood clotting agent.
And the next day, she had this pain all up through her leg and into her
groin. And she was just getting sicker and sicker. Something was really
wrong. And she said she had to go lie down. I was getting really
concerned, she was only 22 but she had this look on her face, a look
of death. That was when I said to the mother, ‘You’ve got to call an

ambulance, there’s something wrong.’ She wouldn’t, so I went and called

an ambulance.
And the next thing, I went back into the bedroom, and there’s my sister,
and she can’t breathe. And I’m watching the mother thumping her chest,
giving her CPR, but she’s full on with it – like she’s going to break every
rib in her. So I went back to the phone again, to call for an ambulance
again. And this all went on in the space of 40 minutes, before she died. It
was horriﬁc … I rang for the ambulance three times, but it was too late.

After her sister’s death, Lauren utilised anorexia in a strategy to prevent her-
self from falling pregnant. She says:

The primary reason for anorexia was the total paranoid fear of not want-
ing to get pregnant. I had heard that anorexia throws out your periods.
And nothing – because, they [the abusive group] kept count of every-
thing, even your periods. You had to tell them when you had your last
period, and when you’d be fertile. So anorexia was my way of ﬁghting it
– ‘I’ll do whatever it takes, you are not making me pregnant’. Because I’d
seen my sister go through that, and it totally destroyed her.

In her study of ritualistic abuse, Scott (2001: 121) also noted that starvation
was ‘practised by some survivors as providing some measure of control and
experience of personal power. One woman claimed to have been able to keep
her body weight so low in her mid-teens that she ceased menstruating and
could not fall pregnant’. In Lauren’s case, the struggle over her right to repro-
ductive control became central to her survival, both emotional and physical,
and she employed starvation as the only method available to her.
Connell (1987) notes that sexuality is one of the central structures through
which relations of gendered domination are eroticised, acted out and repro-
duced. In organised abuse, the pursuit of unobtainable fantasies of omnipo-
tence demands relations of domination so totalising that they can only be
sustained by the expansion of the terrain of sexuality into the realm of the
atrocious. In this study, the bodies of girls and women were the primary
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

objects upon which abusive groups wrote what Scarry (1985) calls their ‘fic-
tion of power’, as fantasies of transcendence and supremacy were made corpo-
real through acts of mutilation, murder and desecration. These acts were
staged progressively across the childhood of the victim in ways that were
designed to intrude further and further into the body and mind of the victim
until the victim is finally ‘possessed’ by her perpetrators, and experiences her-
self as an emptied-out object or abject vessel without agency or hope. In truth,
this ‘final’ point may never actually be reached, with perpetrators repeatedly
re-staging the surrender or submission of their victims for their own pleasure.
However, the abjectification of the victim, who is constituted as a dehuman-
ised and contaminated object, can find final and definitive expression through

murder and desecration. Such acts are powerfully symbolic for abusive groups,
as the culmination of the sadistic narcissism that animates much of their
activity, however they are not engaged in indiscriminately. Rationality and
the maintenance of control are central to the dynamic of masculine sadism
(Benjamin 1990) and in this study perpetrators orchestrated their most sadis-
tic and atrocious crimes with great care and forethought.

Conclusion
In patriarchal settings, women’s bodies are defined as the property of men, and
their sexuality and reproductive capacities are the medium through which
men established their self-identity as potent masculine subjects: husbands,
fathers and patriarchs. Rape and forced impregnation is the inverse expression
of this common logic, in which sexual violence is used to craft a transgressive
but superior masculine subject position for perpetrators. Bergoffen (2005)
describes the ways in which, during the Bosnian war, the use of rape by the
Serbian forces routinely involved multiple perpetrators and they were staged
in front of family members of the victims and other detainees. ‘As publicly
performed, they engage the power of the spectacle of violence to construct and
formalize subject positions’ (2005: 74). Participants described a similar patri-
archal logic at work within sexually abusive groups, however in this instance
rape was an instrument in a private war against women and children; a war
against the threatening ‘Others’ that featured as objects of derision and hate.
Through their destruction (literal or symbolic) the fiction of a transcendental,
supreme masculine self was established.
Whilst participants reported that atrocities stimulated grandiose delusions
of power amongst perpetrators, the impact of this violence upon victims was
far from illusory. Through acts of reproductive harm, participants’ reproduc-
tive capacities were turned against them. Non-consensual pregnancies con-
ceived through rape served as a form of physiological and symbolic colonisation.
The subsequent terminations and infanticides were horrifying ordeals that left
many participants mute with grief, shock and terror. In organised and ritual-
istic abuse, it may be that the historically contingent configuration of mascu-
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

linity in terms of sexuality, supremacy and domination has found one of its
most extreme and violent expressions. Through this lens, we can see the logi-
cal progression of organised abuse from objectiﬁcation to abjection and ﬁnally
to desecration. From participants’ accounts, it is clear that the impact of atroc-
ity, as a gender strategy, upon the children and women that survive it is dev-
astating. The adaptations that participants were forced to make in order to
ameliorate the constant threat of death in abusive groups that practised atroc-
ity stayed with them throughout their lives, in the form of ongoing fear,
terror and the guilt borne by all those that survive campaigns of atrocity and
terror whilst those around them fell victim to it.

The debates over allegations of organised, sadistic and ritualistic abuse have
been based on a distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ of questionable util-
ity, with various parties struggling over whether organised abuse is ‘real’ or
just the product of imagination and memory error. This simplistic dichotomy
between reality and fantasy has in many respects obscured the common ground
shared by all sides in the disagreement, which is that fantasies of extreme
sexual abuse exist and have a signiﬁcant impact on the people that are affected
by them. The point of disagreement is on how and where these fantasies are
‘acted out’. Sceptics argue that they are manifest in ‘false memories’ and ‘mass
hysteria’ that are then projected onto innocent men, leading to false allega-
tions, prosecutions and so forth. Therapists, social workers and people who
allege to have been victimised in organised abuse do not necessarily discount
this possibility. Their contention is that such fantasies are also embodied in
abusive group practices. Both arguments describe a process whereby psycho-
logical fantasy gives rise to particular kinds of harmful social behaviour: false
allegations on one hand, and sexual violence against children and women on
the other hand. The question is not how to distinguish ‘reality’ from ‘fantasy’
but instead how psychological and cultural forces shape individual and collec-
tive behaviour and vice versa.
Survivors of organised abuse have described abusive behaviours of such
severity that social workers and therapists have struggled to account for such
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crimes using the usual vocabulary of ‘child abuse’ or ‘domestic violence’. At

times this has given rise to partial, unlikely or even irrational explanations but
the sceptical position has also proven to be somewhat incoherent. It is not
logical to argue that fantasies of sadistic and ritualistic abuse are so pervasive
and powerful that they animate ‘mass hysteria’ and epidemics of ‘false memo-
ries’ and ‘witch-hunting’ but they have no inﬂuence of note over the behaviour
of child sexual abusers. This position has won admirers despite its shortcom-
ings because the alternative – that allegations of organised abuse are accurate
descriptions of criminal conduct – is incongruous with ‘commonsense’ under-
standings of contemporary society. However, the widespread assumption that
physical and sexual violence in Western countries is a limited phenomenon is,
as Walklate (2008) put it, a product of the collective ‘imaginary’. The majority

of incidents of gendered violence go undetected, and victims often struggle to

find care and support. Severe and repeated incidents of abuse tend to occur in
situations in which the perpetrator has considerable control of his victim(s) and
hence the most serious cases of sexual abuse frequently do not come to the
attention of the authorities. Nonetheless, it is generally ‘imagined’ to be the
case that physical and sexual violence is contained by the police and other
agencies, that organised and coordinated sexual abuse only occur in faraway
places, and survivors are adequately served by health and justice systems. This
act of ‘imagination’ has also served as the basis for the misleading elaborations
advanced by the ‘false memory’ movement and its allies, who have
reaffirmed illusory but idyllic images of community and family life by charac-
terising allegations of sexual and organised abuse as a conspiracy launched by
malicious and hysterical women.
One of the reasons that accounts of organised abuse are so vulnerable to
discrediting attacks is because they are replete with cultural clichés of evil and
wrong-doing, such as rituals, witches and Satanists. Lauren felt that the
behaviour of her abusive family was ‘like the B-grade horror films’, noting ‘It’s
so pathetic, but of course, afterwards, it wasn’t’. Her point was that the
‘Vincent Price’ aesthetic of some abusive group might appear garish or ridicu-
lous to others, but to survivors such as herself it signified extremes of aggres-
sion and violence:

With victims, what can appear to be really dorky or harmless – as a child,

these things, they are connected to things that are absolutely terrifying.
It might seem hammy, pretending to be vampires and witches and things,
but, as a kid, you’ve seen them go through with it.

Upon reﬂection, it is perhaps unsurprising that symbols that are culturally

associated with degradation and fear are not limited to ﬁctional representa-
tions such as ﬁlms and novels, but they also inform real acts of abuse, violence
and torture. In the histories of participants, the use of these symbols was stra-
tegic as well as expressive, as costumes and rituals were integrated into simple
but terrifying performances that communicated to young children as well as
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adults the consequences of disclosure and disobedience. The grandiose claims

of magical powers and supernatural forces that often accompanied these per-
formances could provoke considerable fear in victimised children although the
pomposity of such behaviour had a demythologising effect over time for some.
For example, Jane’s abusers had forced her to call them ‘Master’ and claimed to
have unlimited power and inﬂuence, but as she observed them over the years
she came to see their behaviour as a deviant form of adolescent posturing.

I have to remind myself of this, because of the brainwashing that’s gone

on that these are big powerful men, ‘Jane, you are dealing with school-
boys.’ That’s it, basically.

Other participants had complex reasons for accepting and even exaggerating
their abuser’s claims to power and status. The life circumstances of many par-
ticipants were challenging, characterised by poverty and physical and mental
illness. For some, the belief that they were survivors of a mysterious, unspeak-
able evil bestowed a sense of dignity upon the problems that they had strug-
gled with throughout their life. Each participant faced the question of how to
create a sense of order and meaning from their abuse in their own way. I would
suggest that the interviewees have undergone a doubled trauma: not only
have they suffered severe sexual abuse but they have been failed and, in fact,
silenced by prevailing cultural idealisations of ‘childhood’, ‘family’ and so
forth. They lacked any collective representation of their suffering to console
them or to provide a means through which they can communicate to others
the enormity of their victimisation and survival. Hence their descriptions of
ﬁnding hope and strength in the context of abuse and powerlessness were
particularly moving. I am not a Christian but Kate’s account of her discovery
of the ‘god who made the trees’ can still bring a tear to my eye:

When I was a little girl, I learnt that, if I was going to survive these hor-
rendous things, I was going to have to ﬁnd strength bigger than mine …
One time, when this [abuse] is going on, I looked at the trees, and I
thought, ‘Well, my father’s useless, my mother’s useless, and my sister is
a kid. Everybody I know is pretty shitty. I’m going to take the god who
made the trees.’ And from that moment on, all day, every day and night,
I made friends with the god who made the trees. And he was my strength,
and he was my help, and I could withstand anything.
… Whether a person thinks that this exists, or does not exist, is prob-
ably immaterial inasmuch as it worked, and it kept me to goodness, to
integrity, to a sense that one day, I would triumph, and I would transform
all of this. And it’s going to be alright. As a child, at three, I said to
myself, ‘I have to help these children’ and I did. I was kind to them, even
then. And I managed to do that later on, all the way through the years,
and now my work is – of course – helping others who have been hurt in
the same way. I’ve been very happy in the way I’ve been able to transform
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my childhood.

This book has described how children and women often feature as ‘objects’ in
a symbolic order that is structured by masculine domination and gender polar-
ity, in which recognition of the personhood of the ‘Other’ can become constrained
in ways that conﬂates masculinity and subjectivity. This is a symbolic order
that not only promotes and rationalises violence against women and children,
but it shapes responses to this violence in ways that ultimately reafﬁrm the
symbolic order from which it emerges. The proliferation of sceptical literature
on organised abuse has staged, at a social and cultural level, the same efface-
ment of the subjectivity of victims that underpins organised abuse itself.

However, the accounts of survival provided by participants in this project are

a testament to their active agency and resistance. Through their own words,
they are revealed as people with needs that must be addressed and voices that
should be heard, rather than as passive victims of abuse or ‘objects’ of thera-
peutic malpractice that can be spoken for, and spoken over, by others.
Sexual abuse is mostly practised by solitary offenders but it is always social
to the extent that it is a practice that reinforces structures of gender and age
(Cossins 2000). The testimony of survivors suggests that the objectiﬁcation of
children and women through collective sexual violence is a strategy through
which abusive groups construct and shape a shared sense of belonging and
identity. For its ‘raw material’, this subculture draws on cultural associations
between authentic masculinity, sexual aggression and control of children and
women that are common in a range of contexts. As children, participants were
confronted with the institutional power available to their abusers through their
roles as fathers, grandfathers, priests, teachers, doctors and other patriarchal
ﬁgures of authority. This power was given terrifying form through the practice
of ritualistic abuse, as abusers adopted the ritualistic traditions of masculine
domination and integrated them into organised abuse. The power that their
abusers held over them as adults and as men was only the precursor to the long
shadow they cast as representatives of a network of abusers who had
co-opted the symbolic and functional power of larger institutions. This was a
shadow that followed some participants well into adulthood as their victimisa-
tion continued and, for some women, came to include their own children. These
years and decades of abuse and violence were not only symptomatic of the obses-
sive control exerted by the abusive groups, but they also illustrate the disinter-
est shown by a range of agencies in the plight of abused children and women.
It is clear that survivors of organised abuse face a number of systemic bar-
riers to disclosure and help-seeking. In abusive groups, victims are subject to
intensive manipulation by perpetrators in order to inhibit disclosure, includ-
ing the induction of fear and pain of such a degree as to profoundly dysregu-
late memory and emotional processes. Those who have been victimized over a
prolonged period of time have typically been forced into acts of perpetration,
and they often harbor a genuine fear that, should they report their abuse to
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

others, then they will also face criminal prosecution alongside those that
abused them. Despite these barriers, many victims and survivors of organised
abuse do seek a better life for themselves by contacting health and welfare
services or the police and disclosing their abuse. However, at present these
agencies often have limited capacity to marshal an appropriate response, and
the needs of victims and survivors typically go unmet. As a covert and secre-
tive form of sexual violence, organised abuse often evades detection and iden-
tiﬁcation. Where sexual abuse is investigated, the possibility of an organised
dimension often goes unexamined, whilst action taken against organised
crime rarely addresses the plight of children and women trapped in physically
and sexually abusive groups (Kelly 1996, Cooper 2004). Policing strategies in

relation to organised abuse appear to be highly reactive and developed in

response to community concerns or media scandals rather than through scru-
tinising the evidence. There is a clear need to raise the profile of organised
abuse amongst those likely to encounter sexual abuse cases.
There is a heaviness in the heart that comes from prolonged exposure to
graphic descriptions of abuse of the kind contained in this book, whether as
author or reader. Books that parody or trivialise accounts of severe trauma
have sold, and sold well, in bookstores and airports because they offer a brief
foray into a controversial issue before restoring and affirming the reader’s pre-
existing assumptions about the nature and order of their society. In contrast,
the lives that have been documented in this book are deeply troubling and
they raise questions without simple or reassuring answers. They point to a
hidden strata within society in which children and women experience irre-
versible injury and loss at the hands of abusers who have ordered their lives
around the pursuit of harming others. This strata flourishes between the cracks
of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ divide, drawing on the spaces and opportunities
offered by normative arrangements of gender, age and power to craft a zone of
impunity for serious physical and sexual violence. Lacan (1949) used the term
‘body in bits and pieces’ to describe the experience of the body as a fragmented
assemblage of flesh, organs and bone, in comparison to the ideal image of the
body as a perfect whole. Such an archaic experience of ‘lack’ or absence, I
would suggest, is also present in the experience of society offered by organised
abuse. Rather than a society purged of barbaric inclinations that offers unfail-
ing protection to the vulnerable and never wavers in its execution of justice,
we are confronted with a ‘society in bits and pieces’: a complex and imperfect
place containing contradictions and hypocrisies from which we cannot neatly
extricate ourselves. It is within these contradictions that organised abuse and
other forms of gendered violence flourish but they also generate the impulses
of denial, disbelief and minimisation that serve to mask the excesses of the
gender order and preserve illusory but idealised images of society.
Recent allegations of organised, sadistic and even ritualistic abuse have
received relatively limited media coverage in comparison to the controversies
of the 1980s and 1990s. On the face of it, the diminished public profile of
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

organised abuse may be interpreted as a negative consequence of these contro-

versies, but it may also reﬂect a number of positive developments. It may be
that the culture of news production is less hostile to such allegations and that
kneejerk scepticism is a less common response to allegations of sexual abuse
than it once was. It also appears that investigative practices by the police
and child protection authorites with complex cases of sexual abuse have
advanced to the point where allegations of organised abuse can no longer be
dismissed outright as the product of professional malpractice or incompetence.
The organised abuse ‘scandals’ of the 1980s and 1990s promoted the deve-
lopment of more integrated and standardised investigatory arrangements
in relation to allegations of sexual abuse, which, rather than eliminating

allegations of organised abuse, have increasingly resulted in their substantia-

tion. Ongoing revelations of cultures of sexual abuse in religious organisations
has lent further credibility to allegations of organised abuse (Keenan 2012).
Importantly, organised abuse is now a subject with a substantial (although
somewhat dispersed) evidence base from which to formulate and generate best
practice models, whether in relation to child protection practice, mental
health care or investigation and prosecution. The challenge is to integrate
this evidence into policy and practice in spite of widespread resistance to the
recognition of the extremes of gendered violence that occur in ‘ﬁrst world’
countries that pride themselves on being too modern and progressive to
harbour such inclinations.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

The qualitative research drawn on in this book began in 1997 as part of a

Doctorate in Philosophy in public health, which was awarded in 2010 by the
University of New South Wales. Recruitment notes were circulated through
networks of mental health services and relevant community-based organisa-
tions in the ﬁelds of child abuse, sexual assault and child protection inviting
adults with histories of organised abuse (‘forms of sexual abuse involving mul-
tiple perpetrators and multiple victims’) to contact the researcher if they were
interested in being interviewed about their experiences. Potential participants
were ﬁrst sent a short questionnaire asking (a) if they had received or were
receiving mental health care in relation to their history of abuse, and (b) whether
they had friends or other supportive people in their life who knew about their
abuse. Participants were also asked about their willingness to be interviewed
and what they would like the outcome of the project to be.
Questionnaire respondents were considered for the project if they indicated
via the questionnaire that they were currently accessing mental health services
or if they had supportive people in their life that knew about their history of
organised abuse. If this was the case, the participant would be contacted to
initiate formal consent procedures and to establish a time and date for inter-
view. If participants did not have current access to care and support of any
kind, or if they showed prima facie indicators of severe distress or untreated
mental illness, then they would be declined from the project and referred to a
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

local mental health agency or sexual assault service if need be. Since no poten-
tial participant indicated that they were without support or demonstrated
evidence of serious mental illness or distress and were therefore ineligible for
the project, it did not prove necessary to screen any participant from the
project or make any referrals during the recruitment phase. This supports the
proposition of Becker-Blease and Freyd (2006) that adult survivors of child
sexual abuse can self-select accurately for qualitative research.
After I had received a completed questionnaire, I contacted each potential
participant via the phone, email or mail, depending on the mode they had
elected to be contacted by, in order to discuss the research process further. In
the pre-interview phase, I established whether they would like to have a sup-
port person present for the interview, and discussed with them the potentially

traumatic nature of the interview and the steps we could take to maximise their
comfort and security. I outlined the aims of the research and the planned con-
duct of the interview, and invited participants to ask questions of me. The most
common of these was ‘Why have you chosen this research project?’ which pro-
vided me with an opportunity to provide a truncated history of my experiences
as a carer. Participants frequently found this reassuring; my impression was that
they were worried that, if I was a survivor, I would be traumatised by what they
had to say, or that I was potentially a perpetrator. Conversely, if I was a dispas-
sionate ‘outsider’, they knew from experience that it would be unlikely I would
be able to grasp the full range of their experiences.

The interviews
Over the course of this project, 21 adults with histories of sexual abuse by
multiple perpetrators shared their life histories with me. Sixteen participants
were women and five were men. Prior to the interview, participants had often
experienced years, if not decades, of grief and disability, as they struggled to
construct a coherent life story from a maelstrom of amnesia, invasive flash-
backs and overwhelming distress. My role as an interviewer was to provide a
context in which participants felt safe engaging in the exposition of these
histories with me. The literature on qualitative research heralds ‘the inter-
view’ as the site of the construction of knowledge between researcher and
participant, yet the focus on ‘the interview’ as the site of the emergence of
knowledge in qualitative research runs the risk of trivialising the significance
and durability of the life histories and self-identities that participants bring to
the interview. Whilst participants readily recognised (and were intimately
familiar with) the vagaries and ambiguities of memory, they came to the
interview with a robust sense of their history and identity. Underlying their
stories was a firm conviction that, although they might not always have got
the details right, the stories they were recounting were sadly based in fact.
The semi-structured nature of the interview process in this project was
designed to trace the life history of the participant and to explore the manner
in which their recollections of organised abuse were embedded in their larger
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

narratives of childhood, adolescence and development to the present day.

Interviews were conducted within an open framework to allow for focused,
conversational, two-way communication. I initially brought a prompt sheet
to the interview but this proved unnecessary. Each interview had its own pace
and style, since participants felt free to raise the issues and events that they
felt were signiﬁcant, and there was no need to impose a preconceived structure
or chronology on the discussion. Interviews typically lasted three or four hours,
although some interviews went for as long as eight hours (in multiple ses-
sions). Face-to-face interviews were carried out through ﬁeldwork in Tasmania,
Victoria and New South Wales, and telephone interviews were carried out for
participants in Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland. A telephone
interview was also used for one participant who lived in New Zealand.

Whilst interviews did not necessarily proceed in a linear fashion, they gen-
erally began with a focus on the participant’s early childhood and the family
environment. I usually opened with a question such as ‘Can you tell me about
your childhood and your family when you were a young child?’ and the inter-
view proceeded from there. In this initial phase of the interview, establishing
a rapport with the participant was just as important as the data that was being
generated. My questions focused on generic childhood experiences, such as:

Starting primary school: ‘How did you feel starting school?’, ‘What
were your impressions of starting school?’
Familial environment: ‘What are the words you would use to describe
your mother/father?’, ‘Did you get along with your brothers/sisters?’,
‘What was your parents’ relationship like?’

These questions enabled the participants to relax and paint a general picture
of their early life. Once the participant felt comfortable with me, they would
generally begin to speak about the circumstances in which their organised
abuse took place, eg at home, at school, at church. I sometimes prompted
participants with questions such as: ‘Was home/school a safe space for you? If
not, why not?’ Conducting an interview that was safe and comfortable for
participants involved identifying their strengths early in the interview and
building on those strengths, rather than pressing them for information regard-
ing experiences that were unclear or frightening.

Transcription and analysis

All interviews were personally transcribed by me, and identifying data was
anonymised in the process of transcription. Each participant was provided with
two copies of the interview transcript: one to make changes to and return, and
another to keep for their own records. The transcripts were sent to participants
with a letter in which I explained that they could make any changes that they
wished to the transcript, including removing or adding material for any reason
they saw ﬁt. They were also free to withdraw from the project during this period.
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Once they returned the transcript to me, I explained that they were giving me
permission to proceed with analysis, at which point I would begin to incorp-
orate their interview into the project. My copy of the audio file of their inter-
view was then destroyed, although participants were sent a copy if they wished.
This ensured that no identifying data was being held at the university.
Once transcribed, interview data was imported into the qualitative analysis
programme, NVivo, which enables users to assign a code to specific lines or
segments of text, and I began to develop a preliminary coding ‘matrix’ of
common themes emerging from the data. This process was based on the prin-
ciples of grounded theory to create coded categories and to develop concepts
that emerge from the data. This approach is defined by Strauss and Corbin
(1998) as the breaking down, naming, comparing and categorising of data,

a process in which hypotheses or theories are generated directly from the data,
rather than through a priori assumptions or existing theoretical frameworks.
In grounded theory, data collection, analysis and theoretical development are
iterative processes that often occur alongside and impact upon one another.
This was certainly the case throughout this project. Throughout coding and
analysis, I adopted and tested a range of theoretical approaches in an effort to
identify fruitful conceptual approaches to the data, which affected the kinds
of questions I asked of participants in interview.
Over time, the coding of the data moved from a focus on generating catego-
ries and determining their dimensions and relationships to one another towards
the more systematic development and linking of themes and issues. This phase
coincided with a general shift in analysis from description to conceptualisa-
tion, as I considered the findings of the research in light of existing theoretical
and empirical literature on sexual violence. Whereas the initial focus of analy-
sis had been on identifying common themes and issues across the data, as
analysis developed I increasingly turned back to the narrative form of the life
history interviews to contextualise these issues and to consider, in more depth,
the role that they played in the histories of individual participants. I also
began to consider, in a more systematic way, the role of ‘outliers’ or those par-
ticipants whose life stories ran counter to a particular theme or argument I was
developing. In this way, I was able to review the emerging theoretical insights
for internal consistency and logic. Once the coding categories specific to each
chapter had reached ‘saturation’ point (that is, no significant new information
seemed to emerge from coding (Strauss and Corbin 1998: 136)) the remaining
task was to ensure that they were logically presented, the relationship between
them properly explained and articulated, and the theoretical implications of
each chapter, and the thesis as a whole, compellingly presented.
Taking reports of organised abuse seriously, in my view, involves subject-
ing them to a degree of analysis commensurate to the seriousness of the crimes.
It is a mistake, however, to presume that self-reflexivity is the sole province of
the researcher. Throughout this project, participants demonstrated a high
degree of awareness of the manner in which they have constructed their auto-
biographies over time. In the lives of survivors of organised abuse, memory is
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

often a force to be reckoned with, assaultive and elusive in equal measure.

Survivors often endure extensive amnesia for their childhood as well as the
intrusion of vivid recollections of dehumanisation and shame into their every-
day life. Autobiographical coherence is a goal that many survivors have to
work proactively towards, often over years of torturous reality-testing and cor-
roboration. Some participants brought an extraordinary high index of suspi-
cion to their own recollections, refusing to introduce new recollections into
their life history before they had rigorously tested them for accuracy. Parti-
cipants were, in a very real sense, the ethnographers of their own lives, with
an unusual level of insight into the process by which they constructed their
stories, their identities and their social positions.

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Abel, G. G. 40 Back, K. 30
abjectiﬁcation 145–8, 156, 163 ‘bad dreams’ 122–5
absence of safeguards 33 Bader, C. D. 11
Abu Ghraib 54–5 Bagley, C. 40
abuse culture 34–5, 104 Baird, M. 29
‘abuse experts’ 64–5 Balkan wars 55, 170
abuse and powerlessness continuum Barnum, R. 27
98–102 Beauregard, E. 160
adequacy anxiety 19–21 Becker, J. V. 40
adrenalin rush 22 Becker, T. 151, 163
adult–child relations 20, 39, 48–9, Becker-Blease, K. A. 177
98, 102 Beckett, K. 62
Adults Surviving Child Abuse 85 Bell, V. 152
advocacy 13, 47, 62, 68, 85–6 Benjamin, J. 20, 23, 31, 127, 139, 162,
age in organised abuse 39–42 167, 170
agents of patriarchy 17 Bennetts, L. 66
aggressive heterosexuality 19 Bentovim, A. 104
Ahlmeyer, S. 15 Berghoffen, D. B. 170
Airaksinen, T. 52 Best, J. 63, 152
alien abduction 11, 89 bestiality 36
Allen, J. G. 133–4 betrayal 89
amnesia 4, 13–14, 100, 107–8, 125, BFMS see British False Memory Society
140, 152 Bibby, P. 6, 13, 88, 99–100
Anaf, J. 57, 88 black market of exploitation 53
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Andrés-Hyman, R. C. 92 blackmail 82, 105, 125, 131–2

anonymity 36 blindness to power 19
anorexia 168–9 Bohleber, W. 127
approaches to organised abuse 12–16 Bourdieu, P. 141, 151, 155
ASCA see Adults Surviving Child Abuse bourgeoise masculinities 47
Atmore, C. 10 Bourgois, P. 22
atrocity 53, 57, 64, 157, 159–64, 169–70 Bowden, M. 57, 88
attachment 13–14, 30–31, 112, 120 ‘boyfriends’ 30–31
Australian Memory Syndrome Brady, Ian 52
Association 66 Brady, N. S. 159
author experience 74–87; being an advocate brainwashing 133–4, 152, 157–8, 172
and academic 85–6; being a carer 79–85; Brannan, C. 32
being a friend 76–9; conclusion 87 Braun, B. G. 37, 163
autonomy 20, 166 Brewer, G. 49

Briere, J. 27 Chu, J. 4, 152

Briggs, F. 32–3, 97 churches and abuse 10, 24–5, 33,
British False Memory Society 67 89–90, 96–8
Bromley, D. G. 63, 152, 158 civil rights movement 44, 47
Brooks, I. 27, 70 Clapton, G. 13
Brown, A. 9 Cleaver, H. 34–5
Brown, N. J. 9 co-abuse 6
Brown, S. J. 21 co-offenders 41–2
Browne, K. 128, 130, 132 codiﬁcation of ideology 24
Brownmiller, S. 16 coercion 30, 46, 49, 51, 57, 89, 92,
Buck, S. 13 100–101, 114, 118, 148–51, 157
Bullough, V. 49 cognitive dissonance 24–5
bullying 19, 96 Cohen, M. 47–8
Bulte, A. 15 Cold War 9
Burgess, A. W. 27, 29–30, 34, 130 Coleman, J. 27, 39
Burgess, C. 11 collective masculine performance 22–4
Burgess, M. 11 collusion 3, 26, 32–3
Burman, E. 96 colonisation of family relations 116–22
Burton, S. 23, 88 colonisation of women’s minds 12
Butler, J. 16, 71 Colton, M. 33
Commission of Inquiry 31–2
calculation 14 community hysteria 2, 12, 62, 67–8,
Calof, D. 68 73, 171
Cameron, D. 50, 52, 158–60 complexities of deceit and denial 114–16
Campbell, B. 10–11 compliance 54, 125, 127–8
Cann, J. 15 complicity 27, 30, 41, 110–114
cannibalism 59, 64, 70, 160, 163 condoning sexual abuse 32–3
Caputi, J. 24, 52–3, 56, 159, 162, 164 confabulation 4, 11, 37, 60, 66–7, 72
Card, C. 157 conﬁdentiality 70
Carli 156 connective model 6
Carrigan, T. 16–17 Connell, R. 16–18, 25, 55, 58, 136, 169
Carter, A. 51 consequences of pleasures of disbelief 70–71
case studies; familial organised abuse conspiracy theories 13, 65, 67–8
104–126; Renée 89–92; ritual and torture construction of ‘satanic ritual abuse’ 62–7
139–56; sadistic abuse 127–38; Sarah Conte, J. 27
74–87; sexual murder 157–70; survivor contemporary society and Sadean
experience 88–103 abuses 54–7
categories of organised abuse 26–43; contexts of organised sexual abuse 1–7,
conclusion 42–3; familial organised abuse 26–43; terminology 6–7
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33–6; gender, age, power in organised continuum of abuse and powerlessness

abuse 39–42; institutional organised 98–102
abuse 31–3; limitations of data 26–7; control 19–23, 37, 127–38; processes of
network abuse 29–31; research into 128–32; see also domination
organised abuse 27–9; ritualistic Cook, C. 39
abuse 36–9 Cooper, L. 13, 57, 175, 888
cautionary tales 1–2 COPINE scale 55–6
‘Central Park Jogger Rape’ case 22 Corbin, J. 179–80
ceremonial abuse see ritualistic Corby, B. 14
organised abuse Cornell, W. F. 68
child pornography 27–8, 34, 52, 55–6 Cossins, A. 16, 19–20, 174
child prostitution 9, 27, 30–31, 38–9, 49 cover-ups 33
child protection 28–9, 33, 36, 60, 69–71 Cowburn, M. 10
Chodorow, N. 127 Cozolino, L. J. 27, 39

Creighton, S. J. 26–9, 34, 36–7, 39–40 ‘doing gender’ 16, 18, 136
criminality as gendered practice 16–18 domestic power 92–5
critical masculinity theory 17 domestic violence 13, 16, 93
Crossley, N. 144 dominant symbolic structure 11–12
Crowley, Aleister 38 domination 17, 19–22, 41, 56, 109–110,
Crowley, M. 33 135, 155; see also control
cult abuse 38; see also ritualistic organised Dominelli, L. 10
abuse Donaldson, M. 17
cult of womanhood 48 Doran, C. 32
culture of abuse 34–5, 104 Douglas, M. 11
Cunningham-Rathner, J. 40 Driscoll, L. 36–7, 39, 41
drug trafﬁcking 88, 128
Daly, G. 60 drugging 27, 37
Darwinism 45 drugs 22
data on organised abuse 26–7 dual imperative 3
Davies, N. 27 dynamics of abuse 31, 40–41
day–night divide see public–private divide dysfunction 35, 39, 94, 104
de Bruxelles, S. 38
de Conick, D. 15 ecstasy 38
deceit 63, 114–16 edgework 22, 25
Decker, M. R. 166 Elaine, C. 30
defence 11 Elliott, M. 128, 130, 132
deﬂowering 49 Ellzey, D. 37, 66
degradation 54, 138–40, 146, 156, 167 emotion work 75
dehumanisation 135, 138–40, 144–8, emotional wellbeing 2, 4
156, 167 empathy 21, 23, 115
deMause, L. 136 encoding of memory 124
demonology 68 Engels, Friedrich 54
Deneys, A. 51 Enlightenment 50–51
denial 58, 100, 114–16 enmeshment of sadism and ritual 24, 60
dependence 20–21, 27 enslavement 52, 136
depersonalisation 32 entrapment 33
desecration 54, 158, 160, 162, 169–70 Epstein, O. B. 2, 14, 37, 151
detection of abuse 11 eroticised violence 3, 44, 57, 127
deviant scripturalism 36, 140–44 essential nature 18
Devine, S. E. 65 ethnic cleansing 57
dialectic of control 167 evisceration 55, 162
DID see dissociative identity disorder exchange of children 23
Dietz, P. E. 160, 162, 164 experiences of survivors 88–103; abuse in
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Dinnerstein, D. 127 schools, churches, residential care 96–8;

directed forgetting 124 conclusion 102–3; continuum of abuse
disavowal 3, 69, 102, 106 and powerlessness 98–102; power and
disempowerment 22, 69 abuse in the home 92–5; Renée’s story
disenfranchisement 136 89–92
disorganised sexual abuse 33 extent of organised abuse in developed
dissociation 13–16, 34, 37, 82, 105–9, countries 27
114, 151 extra-familial abuse 10, 28–30, 92, 96–8,
dissociative identity disorder 71–2, 128–32
107–8, 151 extraordinary crimes in everyday life
Dixon, L. 26 88–103
Dobash, R. 16
Dobash, R. E. 16 Faller, K. C. 27, 33, 41
Doig, A. 14 false memory 2, 59–72, 171

False Memory Syndrome Foundation 61–4, gang rape 22–4, 48, 53; see also torture in
69, 72 organised abuse
familial organised abuse 33–6, 104–126; gang-related crime 22
colonisation of family relations 116–22; Ganzel, B. 4
deceit and denial 114–16; maternal Gaspar, R. 62, 99–100
complicity 110–114; parental facilitation gender 39–49; in organised abuse 39–42;
122–5; paternal domination 109–110; and sexual violence 46–9
private abuse, public facade 105–9 gender order 17
familial power 92–5 gendered nature of crime 18
familial ‘ritual’ abuse 28–9 gendered practice 3, 16–18
Fejes, F. 9 gendered regime of power 24
female role in culture of abuse 34–5, 155 gerontocracy 69
female subordination 16–17, 22, 47–8, Gilgun, J. F. 16
50–53 Gitta, S. 27, 31
feminist agenda 67 Glaser, D. 16
feminist research 16, 46–7, 58, 127 Goddard, C. R. 70
Ferrell, J. 22 Goffman, E. 32
Fetkewicz, J. 66 Gold, S. N. 92
fiction of power 169 Golston, J. C. 54
Finkelhor, D. 27, 31, 36, 41 Goodwin, J. M. 37–9, 45, 52, 127
first propensity 19 Gough, D. 27
flashbacks 77, 79 Gould, C. 27
flattery 30 Gozna, L. 15
FMSF see False Memory Syndrome Grant, D. 152
Foundation ‘grappling with smoke’ 34, 156
Fogas, B. S. 92 Green, L. 32, 96
Foucault, M. 32, 46, 58, 61 Griffith, G. 55
Fowley, D. 27, 35–6 grooming 30, 33, 128–32
Fox, J. 160 Guilliat, R. 66–8
fractured family relationships 28, 30 guilt 27, 30, 100, 125, 163, 170
Frankel, A. S. 121
Frankfurter, D. 63–4 Habermas, J. 51
Franklin, K. 22, 128 Hacking, I. 12, 64
Fraser, G. 14, 65 Hague, E. 137
Frazer, E. 50, 52, 158–60 Hanks, H. 13, 36
Freeman, P. 34–5 Harkins, L. 26
Freemasonry 142–3 Hartman, C. R. 30, 34
Freud, S. 139 Harvey, K. 48
Frey, L. 4 Hastings, D. 37
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Freyd, Pamela 72, 124, 177 Hawkins, R. 32–3, 97

Friendship, C. 15 Hayden, T. 13
from object to abject 144–8 Hazelwood, R. R. 160, 162, 164
Frosh, S. 12, 16, 58 Healey, C. 13
frustration 20 Hearn, J. 17
fundamental Christianity 37 Hechler, D. 10, 62, 163
Furies 67 hedonism 50
Hegel, G. W. F. 20
Gacono, C. B. 160 hegemonic masculinity 17–19, 25, 32,
Gallagher, B. 6, 26–9, 31–4, 36–7, 41, 58
39–40, 156 Heid Bracey, D. H. 27
Galton, G. 2, 14, 37, 71, 151 Heil, P. 15
gang bangs 22 Herman, J. L. 3, 57, 92, 109–110, 160

historical context of organised abuse 44–58; Itzin, C. 13, 42, 89

conclusion 57–8; from liberalism to
libertinism 50–51; ideologies of James, C. 13, 36, 69
masculine sadism 45–6; liberalism, Janus, S. S. 27
gender, sexual violence 46–9; Marquis de Jefferson, T. 19, 22, 163
Sade/libertine excess 51–3; Sadean abuses Jenkins, P. 10
in contemporary society 53–7 Jenks, C. 69, 89, 98
Hitchcock, T. 48 Jones, J. 33
Hobbs, C. J. 32 Jonker, F. 13
Hobbs, G. F. 32 Jonker-Bakker, P. 13
Hochschild, A. R. 75, 94 Judah, T. 163
Holland, G. 55 Judge Forer 23
Holocaust 121 June, S. 30
homelessness 30 ‘just world’ theory 2
homophobia 9, 22 Justine 51
homosociality 23, 48
hooks, b. 74 Karriker, W. 151, 163
horror ﬁlms 11 Katz, J. 162
Hudson, P. 36, 39, 131 Kaufman, A. 41
Hughes, B. 6, 26–9, 34, 36–7, 39–40 Keenan, M. 19, 176
humiliation 19–20 Kelley, C. M. 124
Hunt, P. 29 Kelley, S. 27
Hyman, S. M. 92 Kelly, L. 6, 10, 13, 23–4, 27, 33, 35, 39–40,
hypnosis 151–2 54, 56–7, 88, 158, 162, 175
Kelly, R. J. 13, 36, 41
ideologies of masculine sexuality 44–58 Kenney, L. 160
Ignatieff, M. 55 Kent, S. A. 36, 140
images of child abuse 30–31, 38, 90 Ketcham, K. 63
impossible ideals of masculinity 19 Kilcoyne, J. 128, 130, 132
impurity 11 Kimmel, M. S. 17
Incardi, J. 34 Kincaid, J. 10
incest 16, 33–5, 40 Kinscherff, R. 27
independence 20 Kitzinger, J. 10, 62–3, 67, 70
infanticide 158–60, 163–70 Kluft, R. 27, 62, 71
infant–mother dyad 20 Koester, G. A. 41
inhibition on disclosure 27, 30–31, 151–2 Koselleck, R. 51
initiation rites 22, 24, 53; see also torture in Krafft-Ebbing, Richard von 51
organised abuse Kramer, L. 56, 146
innocence 49, 72 Kristeva, J. 145–6
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inscribing obedience 151–5

institutional organised abuse 31–3, 96–8 La Fontaine, J. S. 6, 11, 28, 64, 66, 68
interdependence 35 Lacan, J. 175
intergenerational abuse 35, 41 Lacter, E. 152
internal colonisation 132–7; see also sadism Laing, L. 110
International Society for the Study of Trauma Lanning, Kenneth 65–6
and Dissociation 34, 71 learned helplessness 113
intersubjective theory 21 learning disability 97
intersubjectivity and abuse 20–22 Lee, J. 16–17
intimidation 33 LeGates, M. 48
inversion 11 Lehman, K. 152
irreligiosity 37–8 Lerner, M. 2
isolation 39, 84, 104, 117, 154 Levenson, R. R. 166

Levi, P. 125 ‘matter out of place’ 11

Levin, J. 160 Matthews, J. 4
Levy, P. 110–111 Matza, D. 22
Lewis, M. 4 Mauss, M. 122
liberalism 44–58; gender and sexual Medeiros, E. 163
violence 46–9 Meloy, J. R. 160
libertine excess 51–3 mental illness 41, 71, 92, 100, 102, 104,
libertinism 38–9, 44–58 134, 160, 173, 177
Liddle, A. M. 19, 47, 137 mentalisation 133–4
Lief, H. 66 Messerschmidt, J. W. 16, 18–19, 22,
limitations of data 26–7 25, 136
Lindeqvist Clark, M. 27, 29–30, 130 Metcalf, C. 56
lived experience 10–11 Middleton, W. 71
living in two worlds 104–126; colonisation Milivojevic, S. 88
of family relations 116–22; conclusion Miller, A. 2, 151
125–6; deceit and denial 114–16; Miller, E. 166
maternal complicity 110–114; parental Millett, K. 16
facilitation of abuse 122–5; paternal ‘mind control’ 140, 152–6
domination 109–110; private abuse, mindblindness 133–4, 138; see also
public facade 105–9 mentalisation
Loewenstein, R. J. 27 misogyny 22, 32, 44, 146
Loftus, E. F. 63–4 Misztal, B. 95
Lord, E. 51 Mittelman, M. 40
Lorena, J. M. 110–111 mnemonic communities 95
Louf, Regina 15 Mollon, P. 11, 36, 65, 135
low self-esteem 128 money laundering 88
lynching 69 moral panic 2, 10, 60, 62, 67, 72–3
Lyng, S. 22 Morris, A. 109–110
Morris, S. 1, 30
McAlinden, A. M. 130 multiple personality disorder see dissociative
McCauley, H. L. 166 identity disorder
McCausland, M. P. 30, 34 Munoz-Solomando, A. 152
McCord, J. 13, 36, 41 murder as sexual act 160–63
McDonald, L. 111, 149 Murphy, W. D. 40
McFadyen, A. 13, 36 Muslim ‘sex rings’ 9
McKeon, M. 48 mutuality 21
MacKinnon, C. 47
McLeod, L. 16 narcissistic fantasy 6, 140, 162, 170
Maiden, C. 152 National Society for the Prevention of
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

maintenance of power relations 19 Cruelty to Children 28; see also child

male penetration 34 protection
male privilege 16–17, 44–5, 48–9, NCA Joint Committee Report 14
54, 58 necrophilia 160, 162
marginalisation 18, 48 nefarious inﬂuence 14
Marquis de Sade 5, 38–9, 44–5, 51–4 neglect 5, 32, 39, 43, 82–9, 92, 94,
Marx, Karl 54 113, 126
masculine performance 22–4 Nelson, S. 70
masculine sadism 45–6 network abuse 28–31
masculinity 18–20 neurosis 67
mass child molestation 9 nihilism 50–52
massive devastation of the self 152 Noblitt, J. R. 71, 152
Masson, J. M. 139 NSPCC see National Society for the
maternal complicity 110–114 Prevention of Cruelty to Children

obedience 15–16, 151–5 Pines, A. M. 31

objectiﬁcation 21, 24, 49, 51, 126, 158, 167 pleasure in organised abuse 127–38
occult ideologies 13, 51, 140–41 pleasures of disbelief 59–73; conclusion
occultism 140 72–3; consequences of 70–71;
O’Connell Davidson, J. 9 construction of ‘satanic ritual abuse’
O’Connor, C. 152 62–7; rise of ‘false memory’ movement
Ofshe, R. 63, 66, 71 60–62; sceptical literature 67–70
Ogden, E. 66 Plummer, K. 44
O’Hearn, T. C. 121 polis 46
Olio, K. A. 68 polyincest 33
Olivieri, M. K. 13, 36, 41 polymorphous perversity 34
120 Days of Sodom 51 Pope, K. S. 61
O’Neill, M. 159 pornography 27–8, 34, 48–9
online technologies 30 Porter, R. 50
oppositional masculinity 136 post-pubescent children 28–9
oppression 16 post-traumatic stress disorder 36
organised abuse cases 26–43 postmodernism 12
organised paedophilia 14–15 power in organised abuse 23–4, 39–42,
orphanages 33 92–5
O’Sullivan, C. 23 powerlessness 18–19, 32, 57, 98–102, 130,
the ‘Other’ 9–10, 21, 23, 55, 69, 72–3, 127, 136, 139
160–61, 163, 170, 173 Powers, P. 30, 34
Otnow, D. 4 Pratt, J. 1
outer limits of organised sexual abuse pregnancy through rape 164–8
157–70 premeditation 6, 33, 91
Overkamp, B. 151, 163 Pritchard, C. 40
Owen, C. 27, 159 privacy 76–9
private abuse, public facade 46–8, 54–5, 57,
paedophile rings 1–2, 9, 14–15, 29, 40 88–9, 105–9
paedophilia 9–10, 12, 14–16 private men’s clubs 51
paganism 59 processes of control 128–32
paranoia 67 protest masculinity 18
parental facilitation of abuse 122–5 Proulx, J. 160
Parker, H. 6, 26–9, 34, 36–7, 39–40 Prout, A. 69
Parkin, W. 32, 96 pseudo-religious ideologies 24, 138
participatory theatre 22, 128 psychic polarisation 21
Passmore, J. L. 27 psychological invasion 138
past life memory 11, 89, 95 PTSD see post-traumatic stress disorder
Pateman, C. 44, 46–7 public–private divide 46–8, 54–5, 57, 74,
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

paternal domination 109–110 87–9, 105–9

patriarchy 17
patterning of gender relations 17 Quayle, E. 55
peer group solidarity 22, 26
penetrative heterosex 48 racial subordination 18
pernicious grooming 30 radical feminism 16–17, 67–8
Perskin, P. S. 71, 152 Rafferty, J. 71
Peter, T. 41 rape 13, 16, 22–3, 38, 48–9, 53–6, 67, 145,
Petraitis, V. 152 149, 154–6, 158, 163–6, 170
Philadelphoff-Puren, N. 22 rationalising ritual abuse 148–51
Pickering, S. 88 rebellion 18
Pierce, R. L. 27, 34 recall 27
pimping 31 recovered memories 68; see also false
Pincus, J. H. 4 memory

Reddy, V. 152 ‘Sarah’s’ story 74–87

Regan, L. 13, 23, 27, 88 Sarson, J. 111, 149
Reid, S. 9, 30 satanic iconography 37
Rendall, J. 47 satanic ritual abuse 37, 59, 62–70
‘Renée’s’ story 89–92 Sax, R. 72
Renold, E. 27 scandals 31
reproduction of power relations 19 scapegoating 63, 67
reproductive harm 157–70; conclusion Scarry, E. 137, 169
163–70; sexual murder 160–63 sceptical literature 67–70
research into organised abuse 27–9 schizophrenia 152
research methodology 177–80; interviews Schlesinger, L. 160
178–9; transcription and analysis Schoenwald, P. 166
179–80 Schoettle, U. C. 27, 34
residential care and abuse 31, 96–8 Schooler, J. 124
Revitch, E. 160 schools and abuse 10, 24–5, 89–90, 96–8
rewards for silence 28 Schultz, T. 27
Richardson, J. T. 63, 152 Schwartz, J. 2, 14, 37, 151
Richters, J. 27, 104 Scott, S. 13, 33, 39–42, 55, 64, 66–7, 89,
rise of ‘false memory’ movement 60–62 104, 107, 111, 151, 163, 169
‘ritual abuse’ 1–2, 12–13 Scully, D. 16
ritualist organised abuse 36–9, 139–46; second propensity 19
conclusion 155–6; dehumanisation second wave feminism 60, 73
144–8; and deviant scripturalism 140–44; secrecy 35, 104
rationalisation of 148–51; use of torture Sedgwick, E. K. 72
151–5 Seenan, G. 71
Roberts, V. 14 Seery, B. 33
Robinson, A. L. 41 Segrave, M. 88
Rogers, N. 70 self-aggrandisement 45
Rose, N. 102 self-construction 19–21
Ross, C. A. 4, 71, 152 self-validation 20
Rouleau, J. L. 40 sensationalism 10–11
Rousseau, G. S. 50 sense of self 16
Rousseau, J.-J. 46 ‘sex rings’ 9, 27, 29–30, 34, 40
rules of remembering 94 sex trafﬁcking 88
Rutz, C. 151, 163 sexual conquest 19, 45–6, 51
sexual murder and reproductive harm
Sachs, A. 2, 14, 37, 71, 151 157–70; conclusion 170; infanticide
Sachs, R. G. 37, 163 163–70; killing as sexual act 160–63
Sadean abuses in contemporary society 54–7 sexual offending 18–20
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

sadism 45–6, 132–7; and internal sexual subculture 44

colonisation 132–7; as masculine sexual violence 46–9
phenomenon 45–6 Shaffer, R. E. 39
sadistic abuse 28–9, 127–38; conclusion Shakeshaft, C. 97
137–8; grooming and control processes shaping collective behaviour 171–6
128–32; sadism and internal colonisation shared sexual interest 29–30
132–7 Sheehan, P. 45
sadomasochism 58 Shengold, L. L. 157
safety 10, 79–85 Showalter, E. 12, 64
Sagan, E. 148 Silbert, M. H. 31
Sahakyan, L. 124 siloed data 27
Sakheim, D. K. 65 Silverman, J. G. 166
Salter, M. 27, 45, 61, 68, 100, 104 Simon, K. 55
Sanday, P. R. 23–4, 48, 53 Simons, D. 15

Simpson, A. E. 48–9 third world exploitation 9

Sinason, V. 35, 72, 104 Thornton, M. 44
situated accomplishment 16, 18–19 thrill-seeking 17–18, 22
Sivers, H. 124 Tomison, A. 41
Smart, C. 47, 92, 94, 121 Tomsen, S. 18, 45
Smith, M. 36–7, 41 torture in organised abuse 24, 36–7, 54–5,
Snow, B. 13, 39 57, 67, 88, 139–56; coercing victim
Socarides, C. W. 21 consent 148–51; conclusion 155–6;
social practice 14 dehumanisation 144–8; deviant
socioeconomic disadvantage 18 scripturalism 140–44; to inscribe and
solicitation 49 trigger obedience 151–5
Sorenson, T. 13, 39 Tovey, S. L. 92
soul murder 157 transcendental control 24, 53, 160–63
South Australian Ombudsman 71 transgression 11, 17–18, 22, 25, 51, 136
Spanos, N. 11 Tranter, M. 104
splitting 21, 107, 109, 136 Tremlett, G. 33
stalking 78–9 triggering obedience 151–5
Stanley, L. 12 trivialisation 11
Stein, M. 32 Turner, J. G. 50
‘sticky’ family relationships 121 Tyler, R. P. 27
stigma 61, 85
Stone, L. E. 27 underclass 35
Strauss, A. 179–80 understanding organised abuse 9–25;
street-based sex workers 31 abuse, domination, intersubjectivity
subcultural capital 23 20–22; collective masculine performance
subject of smoke and mirrors 4, 9–25 22–4; conclusion 24–5; conﬂicting
subjectivity 19 approaches to sexual abuse 12–16;
submission 42 criminality/violence as gendered practice
substance abuse 41 16–18; masculinity and sexual offending
suicide 71, 104, 115 18–20
Summers, A. 16 Underwager, R. 67
Summit, R. 4, 12, 70, 90 unknowing parent 114–17
superior status 17, 19, 22 urination 22
supernatural powers 36–7 use of torture 139–56
survivors’ experiences 88–103
Svedin, C. G. 30 value of the ritual 144–8
Swann, S. 30 Vandiver, D. M. 41
Swica, Y. 4 Vanstone, M. 33
Sykes, G. M. 22 venereal disease 49
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

systemic organised abuse 32–3 vicarious traumatisation 4

victim consent for abuse 49, 148–51
taboos 11, 54, 136–7, 144–6 victimisation 24, 30, 32, 34–5, 37, 40,
Tamarkin, C. 63, 76 60–61, 67–8, 90–91, 122, 148
Tancredi, D. J. 166 victimised coping 122
Tate, T. 34, 55–6 Victor, J. S. 63–4, 68
Taylor, J. 33, 55 Vigarello, G. 49
team bonding rituals 22 violence 16–18, 127–38; control and
terminology of sexual abuse 6–7, 27 pleasure 127–38; as gendered practice
Terr, Lenore 158 16–18
terrorisation 78–9, 135, 148 violence as gendered practice 16–18
testimony reliability 10–12 Voltaire 49
theft of enjoyment 68 vulnerability 9, 19–21, 30–33, 69–70,
therapy 12, 60–64, 67–9 89, 136

Wakefield, H. 67 Winnicott, D. W. 20
Waldman, J. 166 witchhunting 39, 59, 63–4
Walker, K. 21 Wolff, L. 49
Walklate, S. 171 women as perpetrators 41–2
Walt, V. 35 Wood Report 14
Warren, J. 160, 162, 164 Wright, C. 36–7, 39, 41, 66
Waterman, J. 13, 36, 41 Wynne, J. M. 27, 32, 34, 39
Watkins, R. T. 37, 163 Wyre, R. 14
Watters, E. 63, 66, 71
Weisberg, D. K. 27, 31 Yama, M. F. 92
West, C. 16, 136 Yeager, C. A. 4
whitewashing 71 Yoder, C. Y. 27
Whitfield, C. L. 61 Young, W. C. 37, 163
Wild, N. J. 27, 29, 34, 39 Youngson, S. C. 36
Williams, L. M. 27, 31, 36, 41, 109
Wingfield, R. 23, 88 zeal 59–60, 65, 70, 73
Wingfield Schwartz, R. 2, 14, Zimmerman, D. H. 16, 136
37, 151 Žižek, S. 5, 55, 60, 68–9, 72
Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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