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 circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently 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.
accusations attack authority blame child-abuse child-protection child-sex confabulation cover-up coverup crime cult cult-abuse debate denial disbelief discrediting evidence horror hysteria innocence investigation justice law legal media memory miscarriages-of-justice moral-panic multi-perpetrator multi-victim organised-abuse organized-abuse paedophiles pedophile pedophile-rings prosecution recovered-memories ritual-abuse ritualised-abuse satanic-ritual-abuse sexual-abuse social-workers society-denial testimony therapists victim-blaming
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About Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse

Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse.

More quotes by Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse

“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 victim...”
— Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse
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“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. Howe...”
— Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse
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“The data on organised abuse has been simplified or distorted in an attempt force it to conform to mechanical psychological models of dissociative obedience or else to the psychiatric framework of p...”
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“As mandatory reporting laws and community awareness drove an increase its child protection investigations throughout the 1980s, some children began to disclose premeditated, sadistic and organised ...”
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“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...”
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“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 ro...”
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