Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief
from _http://ritualabuse.us_ (http://ritualabuse.us/)
Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief by Michael Salter- 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_
(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_
(http://www.cjrn.unsw.edu.au/critcrimproceedings2008.pdf)
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