Organised abuse and the politics of disbelief

![CDATA[Organised abuse refers to any incident of child sexual abuse in which multiple adults act in a coordinated or premeditated way to sexually abuse multiple children. Although it is a relatively infrequent form of sexual abuse, organised abuse has been amongst the most incendiary issues in debates on child sexual abuse over the last thirty years (see Brown, Scheflin et al. 1998; Kitzinger 2004). This paper will explore how organised abuse came to play a central role in conflicts over the signification of child sexual abuse. As narratives of sexual violence have gained increasingly legitimacy in the public eye, it seems that organised abuse has come to represent a new frontier of disbelief. 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 (e.g. Eberle and Eberle 1986; Loftus and Ketcham 1994; Wakefield and Underwager 1994; Guilliatt 1996; Nathan and Snedeker 1996; Ofshe and Watters 1996). 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 ambiguities, the uncertainties, and the complexities 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.]]