Michael Salter

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 __omment on the naïveté of those 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_.

During a period in which women and children__ testimony of incest and sexual abuse were gaining an increasingly sympathetic hearing, lobby groups of people accused of child abuse construed and positioned __itual abuse_ as the new frontier of disbelief. The term __itual abuse_ arose from child protection and psychotherapy practice with adults and children disclosing organized abuse, only to be discursively encircled by backlash groups with the rhetoric of __ecovered memories_, __alse allegations_ and __oral panic_.Salter, M. (2011), Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief.

Chapter 4,__rganised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief_, uses Zizek__ (1991) insights into cite political role of enjoyment to analyse the hyperbole and scorn that has characterised the sceptical account of organised and ritualistic abuse. The central argument of this chapter is that organised abuse has come to public attention primarily as a subject of ridicule within the highly partisan writings of journalists, academics and activists aligned with advocacy groups for people accused of sexual abuse. Whilst highlighting the pervasive misrepresentations that characterise these accounts, the chapter also implicates media consumers in the production of ignorance and disdain in relation to organised abuse and women__ and children__ accounts of sexual abuse more generally.