Organised Sexual Abuse

Michael Salter

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415689779
• eBook ISBN: 9781136177798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Organised Sexual Abuse offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary investigation of this phenomenon. Since the early 1980s, social workers and mental health professionals around the globe have encountered clients reporting sexual abuse by organized groups or networks. These allegations have been amongst the most controversial in debates over child sexual abuse, raising many unanswered questions. Are reports of organized 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 organized 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 organized abuse; questions over the veracity of testimony; the gap between the policing response to sexual abuse and the realities of child sexual exploitation; 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 organized abuse in the criminal justice system and health system. Organized Sexual Abuse thus provides a definitive analysis that will be of immense value to those with professional and academic interests in this area.

Chapter 1

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A subject of smoke and
mirrors

Understanding organised abuse

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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 prostitution 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 homosexuality 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 heinousness. When it is referred to in Western media and commentary, it is 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 developing 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 contributions 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 construction 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 conceptualisation 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 organised 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, relatives 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 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 disclosures 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 describing 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 normally 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 perturbing 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 claiming they are caused by watching horror films (La Fontaine 1998), or comparable 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 postmodern attack. Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to 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 conceptualisation or explanation. The aim of this chapter is to review the ways in which organised abuse has been conceptualised by those researchers and clinicians 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 sociologically-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 offending 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 emergence 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 theory.

Conflicting approaches to 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 highlighting particular commonalities and advancing particular explanations (Clapton 1993).

Ritual abuse has proven particularly challenging for workers to understand 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, however 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 presumption 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 workers 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 foreknowledge 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 strategies 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 ofthose 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 experience in disclosing their abuse and accessing care and support. The psychological model of organised abuse emphasises individual rather than social factors and so it tends to characterise organised abuse as a drama of psychological 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 inquiries 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 psychiatric 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 individual psychological factors and overlooks the role of violence in criminal groups and the contexts in which such groups emerge.

The underlying assumption of literature on ‘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 paedophiles are those men who go to playgrounds or swimming pools, priests … I certainly don't want to exonerate them, but I would rather have paedophiles than the types we were involved with. There were men who never touched the children. Whether you were five, ten or fifteen didn't matter. What mattered to them was sex, power, experience. To do things they would never have tried with their own wives. Among them were some real sadists.

(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 inadequate explanation for environments in which sexual abuse has a social and symbolic function for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A subject of smoke and mirrors: Understanding organised abuse
• 2 Organised abuse cases: Network, institutional, familial and ritual
• 3 The historical context: Liberalism, libertinism and ideologies of masculine sexuality
• 4 Organised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief
• 5 Down the rabbit hole: My story
• 6 The experiences of survivors: Extraordinary crimes in everyday life
• 7 Living in two worlds: Familial organised abuse
• 8 Sadistic abuse: Control, violence and pleasure in organised abuse
• 9 Ritual and torture in organised abuse
• 10 Sexual murder and reproductive harm: The outer limits of organised sexual abuse
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Research methodology
• Bibliography
• Index