In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Judith Lewis Herman Abuse Abuse Of Power Abuse Survivors Abusers Allegations Attacking Attacking People Backlash Child Abuse Credibility Criminals False Memory Syndrome Myth Lack Of Accountability Perpetrators Power Rape Rapists Recovered Memories Repressed Memories Secrecy Sexual Abuse Silence Silencing Children Silencing Dissent Society Denial Survivor Of Abuse Survivors Survivors Of Abuse Trauma Memories

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 to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights 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).

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Accusations Attack Authority Beliefs Blame Child Abuse Child Protection Child Sex Confabulation Cover Up Coverup Crime Cult Cult Abuse Debate Defence Denial Disbelief Discrediting Epstein Evidence Fairness Galton Horror Hysteria Injustice Innocence Investigation Just World Justice Karma Law Legal Media Memory Mental Health Miller Minimisation Miscarriages Of Justice Misunderstanding Moral Panic Organised Abuse Organized Abuse Paedophiles Pedophile Pedophile Rings Prosecution Recovered Memories Ritual Abuse Ritualised Abuse Sachs Safe World Satanic Ritual Abuse Scorn Self Efficiacy Sense Of Safety Sexual Abuse Sexual Violence Social Justice Social Workers Society Denial Testimony Therapists Toxic Trauma Traumatic Trust Understanding Victim Victim Blaming World View

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 struggle 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.

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Accusations Amnesia Attack Authority Beliefs Blame Child Abuse Child Protection Child Sex Chu Confabulation Cover Up Coverup Crime Cult Cult Abuse Debate Defence Denial Disbelief Discrediting Epstein Evidence Eye Witness Fairness Fantasy Galton Horror Hysteria Injustice Innocence Investigation Just World Justice Karma Law Legal Lie Media Memory Memory Error Mental Health Miller Minimisation Miscarriages Of Justice Misunderstanding Moral Panic Organised Abuse Organized Abuse Paedophiles Pedophile Pedophile Rings Prosecution Recovered Memories Ritual Abuse Ritualised Abuse Ross Sachs Safe World Satanic Ritual Abuse Scorn Self Efficiacy Sense Of Safety Sexual Abuse Sexual Violence Social Justice Social Workers Society Denial Testimony Therapists Toxic Trauma Traumatic Trust Understanding Victim Victim Blaming World View

It is dangerous to use our own ability to access non-traumatic memories as a standard against which we judge a trauma victim’s response.

~ David Yeung

David Yeung Abuse Survivors Child Abuse Disbelief Judgement Memory Not Believeable Ptsd Recovered Memories Repressed Memories Survivors Trauma Memory Traumatic Memories Traumatic Stress

The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciouness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Judith Lewis Herman Flashbacks Memory Nightmares Ptsd Recovered Memories Repressed Memories Trauma Trauma Memories Trauma Memory Traumatic Experiences Traumatic Stress Traumatization Traumatized Triggers

One hundred twenty-nine women with previously documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked detailed questions about their abuse histories to answer the question Do people actually forget traumatic events such as child sexual abuse, and if so, how common is such forgetting? A large proportion of the women (38%) did not recall the abuse that had been reported 17 years earlier. Women who were younger at the time of the abuse and those who were molested by someone they knew were more likely to have no recall of the abuse. The implications for research and practice are discussed. Long periods with no memory of abuse should not be regarded as evidence that the abuse did not occur. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol 62(6), Dec 1994, 1167-1176

~ Linda M. Williams

Linda M. Williams Child Abuse Child Rape Child Sexual Abuse Dissociative Amnesia Incest Memory Memory Loss Recovered Memories Recovered Memory Therapy Repressed Memories Repressed Memory Sexual Abuse Trauma Memory

We propose that use of the term “false memory” to describe errors in memory for details directly contributes to removing the social context of abuse from research on memory for trauma. As the term “false memories” has increasingly been used to describe errors in details, the scientific weight of the term has increased. In turn, we see that the term “false memories” is treated as a construct supported by scientific fact, whereas other terms associated with questions about the veracity of abuse memories have been treated as suspect. For example, “recovered memories” often appears in quotations, whereas “false memories” does not (Campbell, 2003).The quotation marks suggest that one term is questioned, whereas the other is accepted as fact. Accepting “false memories” of abuse as fact reflects the subtle assimilation of the term into the cognitive literature, where the term is used increasingly to describe intrusions of semantically related words into lists of related words. The term, rooted in the controversy over the accuracy of abuse memories recalled during psychotherapy (Schacter, 1999), implies generalization of errors in details to memory for abuse—experienced largely by women and children (Campbell, 2003).from: What's in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising From the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior

~ Jennifer J. Freyd

Jennifer J. Freyd Bias Child Abuse Child Rape Child Sexual Abuse Denial Denial Of Abuse False Memories False Memory False Memory Syndrome Foundation Fmsf Media Media Lies Media Manipulation Memory Misinformation Rape Recovered Memories Repressed Memories Sexual Abuse Sexual Assault Society Denial Trauma

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.

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter 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

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 their 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 he trusted; not all victimization claims are legitimate. (Pratt 2009: 70)

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Child Abuse Child Sex Colin Batley Crime Cult Eye Of Horus Grooming Kidwelly Memory Organised Abuse Organized Abuse Pedophile Prostitution Recovered Memories Ritual Abuse Ritualised Abuse Satanic Ritual Abuse Satanic Ritual Abuse Conviction Satanic Sex Ring Wales

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 typically more sadistic than solo offences and organised sexual abuse is no exception. Adults and children with histories of organised abuse have described 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 contestation 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 journalists and academics have found more convincing than the testimony of alleged victims.

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Abuse Of Power Accusations Allegations Authority Blame Child Abuse Child Protection Child Sex Colin Batley Contested Cover Up Coverup Crime Cult Debate Denial Disbelief Eye Of Horus Grooming Horror Incest Investigation Kidwelly Law Legal Media Memory Moral Panic Multi Perpetrator Multi Victim Organised Abuse Organized Abuse Paedophiles Pedophile Pedophile Rings Prostitution Recovered Memories Ritual Abuse Ritualised Abuse Ritualistic Satanic Ritual Abuse Sexual Abuse Society Denial Testimony Victim Blaming Wales

Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33Freyd: I see what you're saying but people in psychology don't have a uniform agreement on this issue of the depth of -- I guess the term that was used at the conference was -- robust repression.TAT: Well, Pamela, there's a whole lot of evidence that people dissociate traumatic things. What's interesting to me is how the concept of dissociation is side-stepped in favor of repression. I don't think it's as much about repression as it is about traumatic amnesia and dissociation. That has been documented in a variety of trauma survivors. Army psychiatrists in the Second World War, for instance, documented that following battles, many soldiers had amnesia for the battles. Often, the memories wouldn't break through until much later when they were in psychotherapy.Freyd: But I think I mentioned Dr. Loren Pankratz. He is a psychologist who was studying veterans for post-traumatic stress in a Veterans Administration Hospital in Portland. They found some people who were admitted to Veteran's hospitals for postrraumatic stress in Vietnam who didn't serve in Vietnam. They found at least one patient who was being treated who wasn't even a veteran. Without external validation, we just can't know --TAT: -- Well, we have external validation in some of our cases.Freyd: In this field you're going to find people who have all levels of belief, understanding, experience with the area of repression. As I said before it's not an area in which there's any kind of uniform agreement in the field. The full notion of repression has a meaning within a psychoanalytic framework and it's got a meaning to people in everyday use and everyday language. What there is evidence for is that any kind of memory is reconstructed and reinterpreted. It has not been shown to be anything else. Memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted from fragments. Some memories are true and some memories are confabulated and some are downright false.TAT: It is certainly possible for in offender to dissociate a memory. It's possible that some of the people who call you could have done or witnessed some of the things they've been accused of -- maybe in an alcoholic black-out or in a dissociative state -- and truly not remember. I think that's very possible.Freyd: I would say that virtually anything is possible. But when the stories include murdering babies and breeding babies and some of the rather bizarre things that come up, it's mighty puzzling.TAT: I've treated adults with dissociative disorders who were both victimized and victimizers. I've seen previously repressed memories of my clients' earlier sexual offenses coming back to them in therapy. You guys seem to be saying, be skeptical if the person claims to have forgotten previously, especially if it is about something horrible. Should we be equally skeptical if someone says I'm remembering that I perpetrated and I didn't remember before. It's been repressed for years and now it's surfacing because of therapy. I ask you, should we have the same degree of skepticism for this type of delayed-memory that you have for the other kind?Freyd: Does that happen?TAT: Oh, yes. A lot.

~ David L. Calof

David L. Calof Abuse Abuse Deniers Abusers Amnesia Anti Science Child Rape Confabulation Denial Of Abuse Denial Of Child Abuse Denial Of Incest Dissociate Dissociated Amnesia Dissociated State Dissociation Dissociative Amnesia Dissociative Disorders False Memories False Memory False Memory Syndrome False Memory Syndrome Foundation Fmsf Forgotten Memories Incest Interview Pamela Freyd Pedophilia Perpetrator Perpetrators Post Traumatic Stress Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Pseudo Science Pseudoscience Pseudoscientific Psychotherapy Ptsd Rape Recovered Memories Repressed Repressed Memories Repressed Memory Repression Scam Sexual Abuse Sexual Assault Sexual Offense Society Denial Soldiers Survivors Traumatic Amnesia Traumatic Memories Veterans Victim Perpetrators Victims World War 2 World War Ii World War Two

Richard J. McNally, a Harvard clinical research psychologist, considered the politics of trauma in Remembering Trauma (2003).[139] He argued that the definition of PTSD had been too broadly applied, and suggested narrowing it to include only those stressors associated with serious injury or threat to life —a suggestion that would drastically alter the public discussion of rape, incest, abuse by clergy, and the traumatic affect of racism and homophobia, to name just a few potentially trauma-inducing contexts and actions.[140] McNally presents his conclusion that most traumatic experience is remembered soon after the event, as if his view represents objective scientific research, when much evidence suggests that memories of traumatic events reoccur over time unpredictably. McNally’s bias is apparent in his strong support of Ian Hacking’s curiously fervent effort to discredit the diagnosis of multiple personality (dissociative identity disorder) and Hacking’s effort to blame clinicians attached to recovered memory therapy of the spurious rewriting of patients’ souls.[141] While McNally accounts for those who do recall their traumas, he does not equally offer an explanation for those who do not remember them, and his extensive bibliography and research do not cite key publications that would challenge his results.[142] - Page 19

~ Kristine Stiles

Kristine Stiles Child Abuse Denial Child Abuse Deniers Mental Health Mental Health Bias Mental Illness Discrimination Recovered Memories Recovered Memory Therapy Society Denial Trauma Memory

Several psychologists (L. Armstrong, 1994; Enns, McNeilly, Corkery, & Gilbert, 1995; Herman, 1992; McFarlane & van der Kolk, 1996; Pope & Brown, 1996) contend that the controversy of delayed recall for traumatic events is likely to be influenced by sexism. Kristiansen, Gareau, Mittleholt, DeCourville, and Hovdestad (1995) found that people who were more authoritarian and who had less favorable attitudes toward women were less likely to believe in the veracity of women’s recovered memories for sexual abuse. Those who challenged the truthfulness of recovered memories were more likely to endorse negative statements about women, including the idea that battered women enjoy being abused. McFarlane and van der Kolk (1996) have noted that delayed recall in male combat veterans reported by Myers (1940) and Kardiner (1941) did not generate controversy, whereas delayed recall in female survivors of intrafamilial child sexual abuse has provoked considerable debate.

~ Rachel E. Goldsmith

Rachel E. Goldsmith Abuse Survivors Authoritarian Bias Child Sexual Abuse Controversy Credibility Delayed Reaction Denial Doubting Mind Incest Psychological Trauma Recovered Memories Recovered Memory Sexism Sexual Abuse Society Denial Survivors Trauma Trauma Memory Traumatic Experiences

One hundred twenty-nine women with documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked about abuse history. Seventeen years following the initial report of the abuse, 80 of the women recalled the victimization. One in 10 women (16% of those who recalled the abuse) reported that at some time in the past they had forgotten about the abuse. Those with a prior period of forgetting--the women with recovered memories--were younger at the time of abuse and were less likely to have received support from their mothers than the women who reported that they had always remembered their victimization. The women who had recovered memories and those who had always remembered had the same number of discrepancies when their accounts of the abuse were compared to the reports from the early

~ Linda M. Williams

Linda M. Williams Child Abuse Child Sexual Abuse Dissociative Amnesia Incest Psychogenic Amnesia Recovered Memories Trauma Trauma Memory

You may experience waves of disbelief after each memory you retrieve. Whether as a phase or waves, the disbelief is usually accompanied by massive self-hate and guilt. ‘How can I even think such a thing? I must really be warped,’ you tell yourself.

~ Renee Fredrickson

Renee Fredrickson Child Abuse Child Abuse Survivor Child Sexual Abuse Disbelief Dissociated Dissociation Dissociative Amnesia Incest Recovered Memories Repressed Memories Self Doubt Trauma Memory

The child who attends school does not remember the abuse that happens at home or via the family, those memories are held in another part of the child's mind. The child does not even remember abuse that happened the preceding night.

~ Alison Miller

Alison Miller Child Abuse Dissociation Dissociative Amnesia Dissociative Identity Disorder Incest Recovered Memories Repressed Memories Split Personality