Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief by Michael Salter (p.243 - 283) Faculty of Law - Faculty of Medicine - University of New South Wales in Proceedings of the 2nd Australian & New Zealand Critical Criminology Conference 19 - 20 June 2008 Sydney, Australia - Presented by the Crime & Justice Research Network and the Australian and New Zealand Critical Criminology Network Edited by Chris Cunneen & Michael Salter - Published by The Crime and Justice research Newtork University of New South Wales December, 2008 http://www.cjrn.unsw.edu.au ISBN: 9780646507378 (pdf)
“Since the 1980s, disclosures of organised abuse have been disparaged by a range of activists, journalists and researchers who have focused, in particular, on cases in which sexually abusive groups were alleged to have behaved in ritualistic or ceremonial ways...Whilst these authors claimed to be writing in the interests of science and social justice, what has emerged from their writing are a familiar set of arguments about the credibility of women and children’s testimony of sexual violence; in short, that women and children are prone to a range of memory and cognitive errors that lead them to make false allegations of rape.
This paper argues that this body of literature has systematically misconstrued allegations of organised abuse, and used organised abuse as a lens through which the debate on child abuse could be re-envisioned along very traditional lines, attributing victim status to accused men and constructing liars out of women and children complaining of sexual abuse. The instability, the uncertainty, and the complexity of cases of organised abuse have made it an important discursive site for a number of actors with ideological objections to the changes wrought by feminism and child protection. In particular, by framing allegations of organised abuse as bizarre and beyond belief, they sought to reassert an older politics of disbelief that contests the notion that women and children are reliable witnesses....
During a period in which women and children’s testimony of incest and sexual abuse were gaining an increasingly sympathetic hearing, lobby groups of people accused of child abuse construed and positioned “ritual abuse” as the new frontier of disbelief. The term “ritual abuse” arose from child protection and psychotherapy practice with adults and children disclosing organised abuse, only to be discursively encircled by backlash groups with the rhetoric of “recovered memories”, “false allegations” and “moral panic”. Seeking to recast the debate on child abuse according to an older politics of disbelief, these groups and activists attempted to characterise sexual abuse testimony, as a whole, through the lens of “ritual abuse." http://www.cjrn.unsw.edu.au/critcrimproceedings2008.pdf
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