child-abuse

The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. ____ freeeee_ SPLAT!_.

Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

The major abscess in the mind is a lack of acknowledgement of evil.

All we think about in the cycle of violence is men. If we miss the oestrogen factor we cannot solve the cycle of violence. We cannot bring peace to the world unless we hold women accountable and morally responsible, particularly for their attacks upon children.

Blaming therapy, social work and other caring professions for the confabulation of testimony of 'satanic ritual abuse' legitimated a programme of political and social action designed to contest the gains made by the women's movement and the child protection movement. In efforts to characterise social workers and therapists as hysterical zealots, 'satanic ritual abuse' was, quite literally, 'made fun of': it became the subject of scorn and ridicule as interest groups sought to discredit testimony of sexual abuse as a whole. The groundswell of support that such efforts gained amongst journalists, academics and the public suggests that the pleasures of disbelief found resonance far beyond the confines of social movements for people accused of sexual abuse. These pleasures were legitimised by a pseudo-scientific vocabulary of 'false memories' and 'moral panic' but as Daly (1999:219-20) points out 'the ultimate goal of ideology is to present itself in neutral, value-free terms as the very horizon of objectivity and to dismiss challenges to its order as the "merely ideological"'. The media spotlight has moved on and social movements for people accused of sexual abuse have lost considerable momentum. However, their rhetoric continues to reverberate throughout the echo chamber of online and 'old' media. Intimations of collusion between feminists and Christians in the concoction of 'satanic ritual abuse' continue to mobilise 'progressive' as well as 'conservative' sympathies for men accused of serious sexual offences and against the needs of victimised women and children. This chapter argues that, underlying the invocation of often contradictory rationalising tropes (ranging from calls for more scientific 'objectivity' in sexual abuse investigations to emotional descriptions of 'happy families' rent asunder by false allegations) is a collective and largely unarticulated pleasure; the catharthic release of sentiments and views about children and women that had otherwise become shameful in the aftermath of second wave feminism. It seems that, behind the veneer of public concern about child sexual abuse, traditional views about the incredibility of women's and children's testimony persist. 'Satanic ritual abuse has served as a lens through which these views have been rearticulated and reasserted at the very time that evidence of widespread and serious child sexual abuse has been consolidating. p60

How much our society values its children can be measured by how well they are treated and protected.

The Unexpected GiftTorn asunder from her slumberin the hour of half past threeThe child knew the tyrannical regimeand followed instinctively.-(slice from Enigmatic Evolution)

Tender Ember...Barred and brandedto be forever unlovedI was a tender emberseeking solace from above...

Sometimes when the three of us were together on our own, we would have a good time. I was pretty young, but sometimes we would go off in the woods and build forts and fight Indians and I think things were about as close to fine as they ever got right then during those times. In the woods. No parents. No yelling.

Like stars are to the sky, so are the children to our world. They deserve to shine!

There can be no love without justice. Until we live in a culture that no only respects but also upholds basic civil rights for children, most children will not know love.

the seriousness of emotional deprivation:It is not difficult to understand how children who have suffered from malnutrition or starvation need food and plenty of care in their bodies are to recover so they can go on to lead normal lives. If, however, the starvation is severe enough, the damage will be permanent and they will suffer physical impairments for the rest of their lives. Likewise, children who are deprived of emotional nurturing require care and love if their sense of security and self-confidence is to be restored. However, if love is minimal and abuse high, the damage will be permanent and the children will suffer emotional impairments for the rest of their lives.

Let us be the ones who say we do not accept that a child dies every three seconds simply because he does not have the drugs you and I have. Let us be the ones to say we are not satisfied that your place of birth determines your right for life. Let us be outraged, let us be loud, let us be bold.

When I was 14-15 There was nothing to my lifebut dancing and sexI'd go to night clubs and danceThen I'd meet someone and have sexit was Fine and easynothing to doBUT Think with my bodylike a birdI Thought I was FreeTrAcey Emin

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 __aedophilia_. Psychopathology alone is an inadequate explanation for environments in which sexual abuse has a social and symbolic function for groups of adults. Abusive groups do not emerge in a vacuum but rather they are formed within pre-existing social arrangements such as families, churches and schools.

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 this book is focused on organised abuse as a criminal practice; as well as a discursive object of study, debate and disagreement. These two dimensions of this topic are inextricably linked because precisely where and how organised abuse is reported to take place is an important determinant of how it is understood. Prior to the 1980s, the predominant view of the police, psychiatrists and other authoritative professionals was that organised abuse occurred primarily outside the family where it was committed by extra-familial __aedophiles_. This conceptualisation; of organised abuse has received enduring community support to the present day, where concerns over children__ safety is often framed in terms of their vulnerability to manipulation by __aedophiles_ and __ex rings_. This view dovetails more generally with the medico-legal and media construction of the __aedophile as an external threat to the sanctity of the family and community (Cowburn and Dominelli 2001) but it is confounded by evidence that organised abuse and other forms of serious sexual abuse often originates in the home or in institutions, such as schools and churches, where adults have socially legitimate authority over children.

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. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to __anage_ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women__ minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, __ real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means_ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a __ubject of smoke and mirrors_, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of __aedophilia_ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi__erpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.

Like the psychological model outlined above, the psychiatric understanding of __rganised paedophilia_ is a framework that is focused primarily on individual psychological factors and overlooks the role of violence in criminal groups and the contexts in which such groups emerge. The underlying assumption of literature on __rganised paedophilia_ is that members of sexually abusive groups are motivated by a pathological sexual interest in children but this does not accord with evidence that suggests that abusive groups can simultaneously abuse children and women. It is increasingly recognised that sexual offenders may not specialise in one particular victim category, and a significant proportion of child sexual abusers have also offended against adults (Cann et al. 2007, Heil et al. 2003). Furthermore, many of the behaviours of abusive groups appear to be designed to elicit fear and pain from the victim rather than to generate sexual pleasure for the perpetrator per se., are not mutually exclusive, but there is a sadistic dimension to organised abuse that is not explicable as __aedophilic_. A survivor of organised abuse from Belgium, Regina Louf, made this point clearly when she said: I find the expression __aedophile network_ misleading. For me paedophiles are those men who go to playgrounds or swimming pools, priests_I certainly don't want to exonerate them, but I would rather have paedophiles than the types we were involved with. There were men who never touched the children. Whether you were five, ten, or fifteen didn__ matter. What mattered to them was sex, power, experience. To do things they would never have tried with their own wives. Among them were some real sadists. (Louf quoted in Bulte and de Conick 1998) A credible theoretical account of organised abuse must necessarily (a) account for the available empirical evidence of organised abuse, (b) address the complex patterns of abuse and violence evident in sexually abusive groups, and (c) explain the ways in which sexually abusive groups form in a range of contexts, including families and institutions.