A requiem for Abigail

Almost ten years ago, I interviewed a survivor who made a lasting impression on me. One interview was not enough - she had so much to say, and had been through so much, that I spent an entire week speaking to her. In all, we talked for 20 hours and her interview transcripts, when I received them all, totalled over 100 000 words. 

To protect her anonymity, I gave her the pseudonym Abigail. She survived a childhood of organised sexual abuse orchestrated by her sociopathic father and collusive mother. Her father was known to police on other matters, but they never investigated him for sex offences. Abigail disclosed her abuse at school in the 1980s and her teacher told her mother, who told her father, which had devastating consequences for Abigail. This was a prestigious private school, and it seems that her teachers were reluctant to engage child protection services or police.

Abigail went to police, once, in her late teens, after sustaining serious injuries during sexual violence. They took her statement but she retracted it when she realised that they were going to interview her father and his associates, which would place her at immediate risk of their retaliation. Abigail began using alcohol and heroin to cope with her abuse.

Her father and his friends continued to abuse Abigail until her twenties, when her mental health broke down completely. She become wildly unwell, beset by intrusive anxieties and hallucinations that haunted her throughout her life. I always wondered if this 'breakdown' was, in some ways, protective, since it meant that she could no longer be controlled.

It was at this time that Abigail was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID), and she would go on to receive treatment for DID for many years. I’ve interviewed dozens of people who live with DID over my career, but I think I learnt the most about the condition directly from Abigail.

For most of our interviews, she was clear with me that “Abigail” was not the person talking to me, but another self-state who was in control at the time. In one interview, she sat down in front of me, and I couldn’t recognise her. There was, physically, another person there – her face, posture, gaze, tone and the tenor of her voice was someone else, someone who had something important to tell me.

And once that person had delivered her message, Abigail (well, the other state who insisted she also was not Abigail) returned. I’m not sure I ever actually met the person who Abigail would agree was “Abigail”, only other selves.  During that week of interviews, at night, I would receive very short video messages from childlike parts of Abigail who wanted to tell me things as well.

When I was interviewing her, Abigail’s first romantic relationship had just come to an end. She disclosed her childhood history of abuse to her partner, who used it to humiliate and shame her. She didn’t know that this behaviour was not normal or acceptable, and when she realised that she was being abused again, she was deeply ashamed and angry. But she had never known anything different.

Abigail was funny, insightful, self-deprecating, and gentle. She was wracked with the traumatic shame of the abuse inflicted on her and its indelible traces on her mind and body, but she was also inhabited by something unbroken and irrepressible. When the week of interviews finished, we stayed in touch. I wrote her letters supporting her applications to the NDIS and for better public housing. She had a knack for gathering people around her to care and be cared for, even though she never received the quantum of support that she needed, and deserved, in the wake of successive failures to protect her from her parents, their “friends”, her ex-boyfriend, and the alienating and cold systems that she found herself entrapped within as she fought for healthcare and housing.

A few years ago, I asked Abigail if one of my honours students could base her thesis on Abigail’s interview. Abigail was trepidatious about a stranger reading her story, but also excited, and she agreed. The student wrote her entire thesis about Abigail, pouring over the interviews, drawing out the moments of institutional betrayal and failure that made Abigail’s abuse and trauma possible, but also the moments of institutional courage where community members and professionals took a stand to defend Abigail, protect her and help her recover.

The student received first class honours, and I sent the thesis to Abigail to see what she thought. It took many months for Abigail to work up the nerve to read it. She wrote a gorgeous letter of appreciation about how much it meant to be believed and seen in this way, which I shared with the student, and Abigail and the student began corresponding directly. The student wrote to Abigail, explaining what she had learnt from Abigail’s perseverance and resilience, and how Abigail had changed her career choices. Abigail recorded a video of herself thanking the student, expressing her astonishment that a stranger could be so kind.

A few months ago now, Abigail passed away suddenly. One of her friends reached out to let me know. A lifetime of hardship caught up with her. It is desperately unfair that she is gone while her abusers live on. Abigail could never quite accept that a university professor, or a student studying social work, or frankly anyone, could find something redeemable in her. For the chronically abused, hope is dangerous. It is safer to believe what the abusers tell you about yourself than to dare to listen to others with a different view. But there was always a mischievous part of Abigail who was listening nonetheless, hoping, in spite of everything, that there was truth in the mirror we held up to her.

I’m going to miss you Abigail, and I’m not going to forget you. Perhaps your abusers are relieved you are gone, and you can’t implicate them in their crimes against you and others. But I will remember, and your story will keep helping other survivors like you, and will keep helping other professionals understand what you’ve been through, until the day comes when we begin to protect children like you and hold people like your parents accountable. Go well and thank you x

Jennifer J. Freyd wins the American Psychological Foundation 2024 Gold Medal Award for Impact in Psychology

The American Psychological Foundation of the American Psychological Association granted Dr. Jennifer J. Freyd the 2024 Gold Medal Award for Impact in Psychology, which recognises psychologists whose work is impactful, innovative, and transformational. Read full article here.

Professor Emerit Jennifer J. Freyd is a globally recognised and award-winning psychology researcher and educator whose innovative theories and empirical studies of trauma, betrayal and institutional responses to sexual violence have revolutionised the field of trauma psychology. Widely hailed as a hero for her courageous stance in support of victims and survivors of sexual violence, and in the advancement of gender equality, her work has influenced therapeutic approaches, policy frameworks, legal considerations and social attitudes. Dr. Freyd has been a scientist, feminist and activist throughout her career, which she has dedicated to making the world a more just and equitable place. In recognition of her extraordinary contribution to research and treatment of complex trauma, in April 2016, Dr. Freyd was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Trauma & Dissociation.

Dr. Freyd’s most distinctive achievements have involved, firstly, the development of cutting edge theoretical and empirical insights into trauma and betrayal, and secondly, the translation of those findings into policy, practice and social transformation. Her seminal contributions include the development of the theory of betrayal trauma, a framework that illuminates the psychological consequences of betrayal by close individuals. Today, it is uncontroversial that memory recall can be disrupted for survivors of child sexual abuse, particularly where the abuser is a parent or caregiver. However, Dr. Freyd was a pivotal voice in the 1990s when high-profile figures within academic psychology were asserting that “false memories” of child sexual abuse were rampant, while denying the realities of memory disruption amongst sexual abuse survivors.

Research

Dr. Freyd was among the first to name betrayal of trust, the actions or inaction of bystanders, as central to the psychological harms inflicted on survivors of violence and abuse. She identified this dynamic both on the interpersonal level of family and friendship and on the institutional level of government, business, education, and religion.

Betrayal Trauma

Dr. Freyd’s landmark book, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse (Harvard University Press), which has been cited almost 2,000 times, both detailed the existing research on trauma and memory and proposed betrayal trauma theory (BTT). Trained as a cognitive psychologist, Dr. Freyd was acutely aware that scientific theory and research could not explain why victims of child abuse would go on to have fragmented memories for the trauma they had experienced. This disruption of memory could include traumatic amnesia, or absence of memory for child abuse, which came to be known as repressed memories. In her book, Dr. Freyd reviewed the evidence, including longitudinal studies, showing that some adults who had been sexually abused in childhood (e.g., as confirmed by doctors, social workers, etc.) would have disruptions or absence of memory for the abuse in adulthood. Given that it is evolutionarily advantageous to remember traumatic events in order to protect oneself from them re-occurring in the future, Dr. Freyd proposed BTT as a scientifically testable, explanatory framework for disruptions to trauma memories. In BTT, Dr. Freyd proposed that the attachment and dependency that a child has on a parent, including an abusive parent, will trump the need to protect oneself from abuse. If a child is fully aware and mindful of the abuse they are experiencing, then the child would confront their parent or withdraw from the relationship with the parent. However, given attachment theory and the child depending on the parent for socio-emotional and physical needs (e.g., relational connection, housing, food), Dr. Freyd proposes through BTT that the child engages in betrayal blindness, or unawareness, of the abuse and/or the impact of the abuse. This facilitates the child’s needed relational closeness with the abusive parent.

When Dr. Freyd proposed BTT in the 1990’s, the veracity of child sexual abuse claims was under attack. Dr. Freyd’s BTT, and subsequent empirical research (see below section), provided the needed evidence to answer questions about trauma and memory, such as “If the sexual abuse really happened, how could you ever not remember it?” Betrayal trauma theory provides the scientifically sound answer.

In her career, Dr. Freyd has published over 200 articles and editorials and 3 books. Her early research testing BTT centered around trauma memory. Her work showed that after controlling for abuse perpetrated by a stranger, abuse perpetrated by someone close was statistically associated with disruptions in memory. Additionally, Dr. Freyd contributed methodological rigor to trauma measurement through co-developing the Betrayal Trauma Inventory and the Brief Betrayal Trauma Survey. Over almost 30 years, Dr. Freyd’s BTT research has expanded beyond trauma memory, producing empirical evidence for the ‘high betrayal’ harm of abuse perpetrated by someone close on mental, behavioural, and physical health outcomes.

Institutional Betrayal

Institutional betrayal applies the vulnerability of trust and dependence between individuals to people’s relationship with their institutions. The first article testing institutional betrayal (Smith & Freyd, 2013) has been cited 600 times, with the institutional betrayal theoretical article published in American Psychologist (Smith & Freyd, 2014) being cited 800 times. The institutional betrayal paradigm has engendered much published empirical research from independent authors, as well as special issues of journals (e.g., Institutional Betrayal & Betrayal Trauma in Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, & Trauma, Editor Geffner). Published in 7 languages, Freyd & Birrell’s book, Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Fooled (cited 243 times), is a culmination of the betrayal trauma and institutional betrayal research for a general audience.

Institutional Courage

After decades of documenting the interpersonal and institutional harm of abuse and trauma, Dr. Freyd has expanded her work through proposing and testing her concept of institutional courage. Given that her and others’ work with institutional betrayal has shown the harm that institutions can do to victims, Dr. Freyd provides the antidote through institutional courage—which are measurable actions, policies, and procedures that promote equitable, peaceful environments that prevent and appropriately address violence, discrimination, and myriad other harms. Dr. Freyd’s contributions to institutional courage are both theoretical and empirical, producing research on specific mechanisms and strategies. Additionally, she is a leader in actionable institutional courage, including through founding the Center for Institutional Courage non-profit organisation, in which she has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to fund empirical research and dissemination. Thus, through Dr. Freyd’s leadership atop the decades of trauma research she has spearheaded, her direction in institutional courage serves to promote long-lasting, impactful, and evidence-based institutional change that can benefit all members of society.

Mentorship & Influence in Scholarship and Psychotherapy

In addition to the stand-alone contribution of BTT and its empirical evidence base, Dr. Freyd’s impact is demonstrated by the multitude of work that is based within the betrayal paradigm that she created: institutional betrayal (Smith & Freyd), family betrayal (Delker, Smith, Rosenthal, Bernstein, & Freyd), and colleague betrayal (Courtois), as well as my own work with rotating betrayal blindness (Noll & Gómez), judicial betrayal (Smith, Gómez, & Freyd), and cultural betrayal trauma theory (Gómez). Dr. Freyd’s work itself has been foundational. Additionally important was Dr. Freyd’s academic, scientific, and personal support in other scholars’ building upon her work. This point of support is important to fully appreciate. Dr. Freyd’s impact in the field comes from both her own trailblazing and impactful research, and her identity and behaviour as an ethical scholar and researcher who is not threatened by new work that builds and expands on her own—including those who are marginalised themselves and whose work incorporates marginalised populations (e.g., Dr. Gómez’ cultural betrayal trauma theory).

Dr. Freyd’s influence and acclaim within the field of trauma psychotherapy cannot be overlooked. Betrayal trauma has significant implications for clinical practice, guiding clinicians to recognise the specific challenges faced by survivors, and informing effective therapeutic interventions into relational disruption and traumatic amnesia. Her work is cited extensively throughout clinical treatment guidelines and scholarship.

Social Justice Impact

Since the 1990s, Dr. Freyd’s work has galvanised social movements for survivors of sexual violence, legitimised the efforts of therapists who were treating them, and informed civil and criminal court processes involving allegations of child sexual abuse and sexual assault. Her efforts were met with considerable resistance, and this backlash informed Dr. Freyd’s development of the world-famous concept of “DARVO” (deny, attack, reverse victims and offender) which describes the ways in which perpetrators of harm can adopt a victimised posture. DARVO is immensely influential across responses to domestic violence, sexual assault, child sexual abuse and beyond. It is so ubiquitous that it is has broken out beyond the bounds of scholarly discourse and is regularly used in the media and in pop culture. For instance, there was a 90 second explainer of DARVO presented in the globally popular South Park cartoon series in 2019.

Dr. Freyd’s advocacy and activism has included participation in protests for survivors of campus sexual violence, and numerous opinion pieces and media contributions to discussions of violence. Her work has become a core part of public understanding of sexual violence. In 2017, in a high profile interview with Diane Sawyer, actor and political activist Ashley Judge referred to Dr. Freyd’s concept of DARVO in order to explain the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations. Dr. Freyd’s concept of institutional betrayal was showcased in an 8 minute Washington Post mini-documentary in 2018 to explain how sex offenders such as Harvey Weinstein are able to hide in plain sight.

Policy

Dr. Freyd’s scholarship is foundational to the contemporary response to gender-based violence. Her language of betrayal trauma, institutional betrayal and courage have become part of the professional and activist lexicon. Over her decades of service, she has furnished the field with the language, conceptual frameworks and research methodologies that we needed to advance the health and safety of women, children, and any group vulnerable to sexual violence. Her work is so globally impactful that it is difficult to single out only a couple of examples of impact because her influence is so pervasive.

For example, in Australia, the development of the National Strategy to Eliminate Violence Against Women and their Children drew on Dr. Freyd’s research to successfully advocate for including addressing the problem of institutional abuse in the next 10 year strategy, emphasising that systematic responses to sexual and domestic violence are causing compounded trauma in addition to the harms of gender-based violence. As a result, the National Strategy includes efforts to redesign of service systems and responses in order to reduce the public health burden of institutional betrayal. Dr. Freyd’s framework of institutional courage has provided us with the scaffolding to inform this redesign process.

Furthermore, Dr. Freyd’s formulation of betrayal trauma has played an influential role in public and legislative debate on domestic violence, sexual violence and coercive control. Television documentaries, newspaper and magazine coverage have included explanations of DARVO and betrayal trauma. Her work is featured in the National Domestic and Family Violence Bench Book of Australia, which assists in the education and training of judicial officers so as to promote best practice and improve consistency in judicial decision-making and court experiences for victims in cases involving domestic and family violence across Australia. Major state-funded primary prevention organisations dedicated to preventing gender-based violence before it occurs include resources about DARVO and betrayal on their websites and in their literature and training.

In the United States, Dr. Freyd secured a major win for gender equality in academic settings recently, with her successful sex discrimination lawsuit against the University of Oregon. After an independent review established that Dr. Freyd’s salary was considerably lower than her male colleagues of equivalent seniority, the University of Oregon refused to address this pay gap. Dr. Freyd filed suit in 2017 under The Equal Pay Act, Title VII, Title IX, and Oregon’s state sex discrimination statutes. In 2019, the court ruled in favour of the university, a decision which garnered national and international media attention and outrage. Prof Freyd successfully appealed the decision, setting an important precedent in sex discrimination matters. The university settled with Dr. Freyd in 2021, which included a $100,000 donation to Dr. Freyd’s initiative, the Center for Institutional Courage, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to scientific research, education, and data-driven action which Dr. Freyd founded in 2020.

In 2021, Dr. Freyd retired from the University of Oregon to dedicate her time to the Center for Institution Courage. The Center is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) institution dedicated to transformative research and education about institutional betrayal and how to counter it through institutional courage. Through the Center, Dr. Freyd has funded research into better responses to institutional wrongdoing, and established ethical and decision-making frameworks to inform institutional decision-making. This perspective has not only prompted critical discussions within academic circles but has also influenced policies and practices aimed at preventing and addressing institutional betrayal. Her policy impact is evident in appointments such as her membership of the Advisory Committee of the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education, National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine from 2019 – 2023.

Righting Wrongs

It is not an overstatement to say that Dr. Freyd and her theoretical and rigorous empirical research over decades has transformed the field of trauma psychology (H-Index: 79, Citations: 22,629). Additionally, Dr. Freyd’s exemplary personal courage deserves recognition, as she has persisted in her work despite a well-orchestrated campaign of hostile attacks in the media. She has also stood up for survivors who dare to seek redress in the justice system through her forensic testimony as an expert witness. Many professionals avoid this kind of work because they do not want to be subjected to the stresses of an adversarial system. Her principled stance is an inspiration.

Despite having an unquestionably successful career, Dr. Freyd and her work remains under-recognised and underappreciated in mainstream psychology circles, including American Psychological Association. This is likely due to two interrelated reasons regarding child sexual abuse in her personal life and professional scientific inquiry. First, Dr. Freyd’s history of child sexual abuse by her father was made public, without her consent, by her parents, who additionally began the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in the United States in the 1990’s. This betrayal did not stay within the family. Many of Dr. Freyd’s academic colleagues, including psychologists, conspired with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, engaging in a campaign of defamation and professional ostracisation that has persisted for decades, even as the Foundation has folded in 2019. While the overt attacks have lessened over time, the insidious ostracism and silence has remained.

Within the context of these sustained personal attacks on her professionality, Dr. Freyd’s scientific research amplifies the prevalence, scope, and deleterious impact of phenomena that we as a society would prefer to pretend does not exist: namely child sexual abuse, including father-perpetrated against daughters, along with interpersonal violence that occurs within all kinds of relationships— and even implicates the organisations that we love. It is no exaggeration to say that Dr. Freyd was grossly betrayed by academic psychology as a field, and yet she withstood these personal and professional attacks with extraordinary grace and patience. In the process, she transformed her personal experiences into cutting-edge academic insights, developing tools that have inspired researchers, clinicians and other survivors to the present day. The American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Impact in Psychology provides the opportunity for psychologists and other professionals—including those outside of feminist trauma psychology—to know of, appreciate, and value her and her work, while simultaneously truly honoring Dr. Freyd as the living legend that she is.

In deep appreciation of Dr. Jennifer J. Freyd,

Michael Salter, Jennifer M. Gómez, & Judith L. Herman

Recognising two pioneers of our field

This piece appeared in the June edition of the ISSTD newsletter.

This month, two pioneers in the field of complex trauma and dissociation retired: Professor Jennifer Freyd and Professor Ross Cheit. They were personal heroes of mine a long time before I had the chance to meet them. While each has made a distinctive contribution, I’ve been struck by their similarities. They are not only esteemed scholars but also renowned advocates for survivors of child sexual abuse. 

Jennifer’s research on the impact of betrayal on trauma responses has transformed our understanding of the relational and contextual dimensions of memory. Her early career as an academic psychologist was marked by the establishment of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation by her parents. The grace and thoughtfulness with which she faced those controversies left an indelible impression on me. Time and again, Jennifer has enriched the field with new conceptual and empirical insights, including her recent focus on institutional courage as the antidote to institutional betrayal. Jennifer has served the ISSTD as the editor of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation since 2006 and the journal has flourished under her stewardship. 

In 1994, in the midst of the so-called “memory wars”, Ross filed suit against the San Francisco Boys Chorus, having recalled child sexual abuse committed by a summer camp counsellor. Ross’ testimony was corroborated by other victims as well as the confession of the perpetrator, and the Chorus settled the claim and apologised for Ross’ abuse. His suit was a powerful statement about the credibility of recovered memories of child sexual abuse. Since that time, Ross’s impactful research and publications on child sexual abuse have been characterised by a forensic attention to detail. His magnus opus “The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children” is the definitive history of the American response to child sexual abuse. 

While their scholarly achievements are immense, I’m particularly grateful to Jennifer and Ross for the personal example they have shown: the courage to break through disbelief and silence, to find words for harms that haven’t been named, to speak on behalf of people who have been denied a voice. May all our work by guided by the same commitment to justice. 

The facts and fantasies of dissociation

This piece was published as my 2023 presidential editorial in the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, Volume 24, Issue 1

For many years, I’ve had a Google news alert set up for “dissociative identity disorder”. Google automatically sends me a daily email notifying me of global news items that mentioned DID in the last 24 hours. Ever since I subscribed, the same pattern has been evident: the majority of news items mentioning DID do not involve science, mental health or crime reporting, as you might expect, but are instead summarising the plots of television shows and movies. It seems that, in the public sphere, DID features more often as a fictional plot device than it does as a factual condition experienced by approximately 1% of the population. Too often, these portrayals of DID are hackneyed pantomimes of “split personalities” (see the many justified critiques of M. Night Shamalan’s “Split” movies e.g. (ISSTD, 2017) that overlook much of what is unique about the life histories of people with DID. So many stories are told about DID that are not of DID. Many if not most of these shows and movies continue to obfuscate what DID reveals about the development of the human infant in conditions of hostility and adversity. They are unable to represent the substratum of suffering and malevolence that makes DID a necessary adaptation for too many.

Awareness of DID and its fictionalisation have long gone hand-in-hand. Even as dissociation became the subject of scientific study in the late 19th century, it was a novel – Robert Lewis Stevenson's 1886 book The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – that would bring the possibility of multiple personalities to public attention (Simeon & Loewenstein, 2009). Throughout the 20th century, popular and dramatic (although not fictional) accounts of multiple personality such as The Three Faces of Eve (Thigpen & Cleckley, 1957) and Sybil (Schreiber, 1973) laid the groundwork for both public and clinical understandings (and misunderstandings). Even the backlash against the dissociative disorders field can be understood as a fictionalising movement, attempting to consign the condition back to the realm of the imagination (Cheit, 2022; Conway & Pilgrim, 2022; McMaugh & Middleton, 2022). People with DID have been routinely accused of mimicking the condition based on books and movies, while children disclosing the kinds of abuses that give rise to DID have been labelled as watching too many horror movies (Campbell, 1995). Today, the relationship between the facts and fantasies of dissociation continues to be debated with the rise of children and young people self-diagnosing as DID based on their immersion in social media, and their exposure to ‘influencers’ who present with the condition (Giedinghagen, 2022).

As the facticity of DID becomes ever more concrete through neurobiological (Reinders & Veltman, 2021) and epidemiological (Kate, Hopwood, & Jamieson, 2020) research, this editorial reflects on the tension between the facts and fantasies of dissociation, and how we might navigate through the conflicted epistemic terrain of dissociation and responses to it. There is no doubt that DID is coming “out of the shadows at last” (Reinders & Veltman, 2021), and so too are the dynamics of neglect, abuse and exploitation that give rise to it (Simeon & Putnam, 2022). Recognition of the prevalence, severity and diversity of child maltreatment and its impacts into adulthood have expanded considerably. Membership of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation is the largest that it has been in over two decades, and demand for our educational and training offerings has never been so strong.  Nonetheless, a consistent response to dissociation remains elusive across health, welfare and other settings where people with dissociative conditions – and, often enough, supportive professionals - are regularly encountering misunderstanding and disbelief. In my context here in Australia, the dissociative disorders are rarely acknowledged in public policy documents on mental health, violence and child abuse (Salter et al., 2020). Recognition of dissociative symptoms and disorders in clinical settings is highly variable, while people with dissociative conditions experience entrenched obstacles in the criminal justice and family law courts (Salter et al. 2020). Against the ongoing marginalisation of people living with dissociative conditions, it is tempting to insist on the objective reality of dissociation rather than its less tangible phenomenological and cultural aspects.

However, the conflicted status of dissociation in mental health and other fields reflects something of the character of dissociation itself, and its incongruous position within foundational cultural and scientific frameworks.  To have knowledge of dissociation is to have knowledge of psychological forces that are fundamentally pre-cognitive and pre-rational. Many people are at least dimly aware that we share our mind with elements of what Bromberg (2003) called “not-me”: thoughts, feelings and memories that we have not chosen, that we do not control, and that feel fundamentally alien to those parts of our mind that we are comfortable identifying with as “me”. This encounter between the “me” and “not-me”, in which we look in our own psychic mirror and see elements of our mind that we do not recognise or understand, but cannot escape, is the very crux of horror and dread, and hence instinctively disavowed or imputed onto something other than the self (Alford, 1997). Where it is represented at all, dissociation often surfaces within inverted or indirect symbolic registers, as something that can only be acknowledged by through processes of denial, splitting or projection (“DID does not exist”, “I’m a rational sceptic opposing the hysterical believers”, “this so-called victim is actually a perpetrator of false allegations”) or through fantasy (in which the zombie, alien or vampire serves as a receptacle to represent “split off” and apparently monstrous parts of self).

Dissociation cloaks itself in irrationality to avoid being known, and, by and large, this has been a highly effective form of camouflage, particularly in an environment like ours that conflates knowledge with cognition and rationality. The political frameworks of liberal democracy are not sympathetic to dissociation. After all, liberal democracies are founded on the demand that laws, state institutions and society at large should functional according to a rational basis. Under liberalism, rationality is often understood in terms of what can be proven, measured and known (Bernstein, 2009), whereas dissociation emerges from conditions of secrecy, lies and distortion, and it presents in strange and unexpected ways. Knowledge of dissociation can appear, then, as a contradiction in terms, and dissociative people are a poor fit within the rationalised structures of liberal democracies. As feminist and other critics have observed (Hunter, 2016), liberalism assumes an autonomous individual whose choices are governed by rational self-interest. Bureaucratic systems of health, welfare and criminal justice have all instantiated this idealised subject at their core, and insist on the instrumental processing of human beings as interchangeable units.  In such an environment, dissociation is more than the pea under the mattress; it is the monkey wrench that jams these systems full of individuals, families and communities who do not respond to “standardised” treatment, who do not “reform” or “behave” when punished, and who generally do not do as they are told. Such explosions of apparent irrationality are then disciplined through sanction, producing a spiral of escalating human need and state harm that simultaneously promotes and obscures dissociative processes and pathologies.  

So the study of dissociation is not only the study of forces that wish not to be studied, but also of intersubjective forces that operate contrary to dominant logics of knowledge. The science and treatment of dissociation is somewhat inevitably an audit of failures: failures of safeguarding and protection, of identification and recognition, of responsibility and accountability. Little surprise, then, that for many years, the scientific and professional field of dissociation was treated as an unruly throng to be domesticated through lawsuits, mockery and exile (Crook, 2021; Orr, 2021). As the study of dissociation began to build a picture of the human mind as a network of self-states whose interconnections could be damaged, lost or unformed (Bromberg, 2012; Howell, 2013), a range of actors (from psychology to sociology and journalism) mobilised in defence of the image of the rational liberal subject as a singular, indivisible entity, and to preserve their view of the social order as transparent and free from barbarous violence. Sceptical researchers, clinicians and journalists persistently conflated the study of dissociation with irrationality and hysteria (Salter & Blizard, 2022). They insisted that the light of scientific inquiry would dispel the shadows conjured by children and adults diagnosed with dissociation, who described betrayals and abject abuses of a kind deemed implausible under the civilising influences of modernity. A notable irony is that the same scientific positivism mobilised in defence of the rational liberal subject has persistently undermined it. Rather than dispelling dissociation, scientific research and clinical literature has instead illuminated its depths, and in doing so, provided frameworks for thinking about the unthinkable and engaging dissociative children and adults in rapport-building, relational repair and psychological re-association.

Dissociation is always simultaneously individual and social. It emerges out of a dialectic between the micro and the macro, the individual and their family/community (Ozturk & Sar, 2006), and between the family/community and its broader social and political environment and history (Atkinson, 2002; Vaughans, 2016). Those experiences that are most chronically dissociated and split off by individuals are those that cannot be recognised or addressed within their social and relational context. Progress in the dissociative disorders field inevitably pushes against those psychosocial structures that make dissociation necessary in the first place. However, this dialectic between individual and social dissociation is not fixed and is being disrupted by ongoing scientific and moral paradigm shifts. Burgeoning research into dissociation is part of a larger movement towards a social neuroscience, which have destabilised individualistic notions of human biology and psychology that position the human being as autonomous and self-determining in the classic liberal mode (Meloni, 2014). Social neuroscience has instead emphasised the centrality of the relationship with caregiver/s in early infant life, identifying not only relational but also intergenerational determinants of psychological wellbeing. These “biosocial” developments reformulate traditional oppositions between body and mind, individual and society, and psychology and the social sciences (Meloni, 2015) and reject simple biomedical ontologies in which “real” psychiatric conditions are brain-based pathologies that develop separately from social and cultural factors. 

Indeed, contemporary research on the ways in which trauma, dissociation and attachment processes are shaped by inequalities of gender, race, sexuality and other social structures are raising urgent questions about the psychological costs of politics as we know it (Gómez & Gobin, 2020; Hall, 2021; Keating & Muller, 2020). Running alongside these developments, many of those forms of abuse that have been linked to severe dissociation – child sexual exploitation, in particular – are now front-of-mind for policy makers. In the 1980s and 1990s, scepticism about dissociation was synonymous with scepticism about child sexual exploitation. According to sceptics, “multiple personalities” emanated from the same imaginary place as children’s disclosures of organised sexual abuse (Salter, 2013). Founding member of the “false memory” movement, Dr Ralph Underwager, claimed in court that child protection interviews were an invitation for children to confabulate testimony of sexual exploitation since, according to him, the “fantasy world of children is filled with mayhem, murder, cannibalism, blood and gore” (Struck, 1986). Widespread disbelief in children’s testimony, expressed through the language of “false memories” and “moral panic”, laid the groundwork for the establishment of an internet with few safeguards to protect children or disrupt sexual exploitation (Salter & Whitten, 2021). Today, the internet is swamped in millions of images of children being sexually abused and tortured. Authorities are overwhelmed by reports of online child sexual exploitation, which is becoming more common and severe with each passing year (Salter & Whitten, 2021). Victims present with the expected dissociative and traumatic syndromes (Silberg, 2021).

Progress in the dissociative disorders field, it would seem, is made most effectively by holding binaries in tension - “fact” and “fantasy”, body and mind, individual and society, even science and politics – and finding ways to productively synthesise apparent oppositions. Dissociation is, after all, the very stuff of fantasies made in a collision with intolerable facts. It involves the use of imaginative capacity to cope with, defer acknowledgement of, and indirectly symbolise encounters with realities that cannot be mentalised. The fact that human beings need dissociation in the first place – the fact that many infants are born into relational conditions that are deeply aversive to their basic needs – is perhaps the most intolerable fact that induces dissociation individually and collectively. The dissociative disorders field has made extraordinary progress in the study and treatment of individual dissociation, and has pioneered new insights into the psychosocial and political aspects of dissociation. The next frontier is: how do we implement these insights in the world outside the clinic? How do we promote systems and institutions that are not only trauma informed and dissociation sensitive, but that are, in Freyd’s (2018) terms, “courageous”: actively opposing processes of denial and betrayal and offering reparative experiences? The dissociative disorders field has always been a socially and politically engaged one, and as our core concerns go mainstream, the expansion of our key insights beyond the clinic is both a pressing challenge and an unprecedented opportunity. 

References
Alford, C. F. (1997). What evil means to us. Cornell University Press.

Atkinson, J. (2002). Trauma trails, recreating song lines: The transgenerational effects of trauma in indigenous Australia. Spinifex Press.

Bernstein, J. H. (2009). Nonknowledge: The bibliographical organization of ignorance, stupidity, error, and unreason: Part one. KO KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION, 36(1), 17–29.

Bromberg, P. M. (2003). One need not be a house to be haunted: On enactment, dissociation, and the dread of “not-me”—A case study. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 13(5), 689–709.

Bromberg, P. M. (2012). The shadow of the tsunami: And the growth of the relational mind. Routledge.

Campbell, B. (1995). Moral panic. Index on Censorship, 24(2), 57–61.

Cheit, R. E. (2022). Hyping hypnosis: The myth that made Capturing the Friedmans persuasive. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 1–13.

Conway, A., & Pilgrim, D. (2022). The policy alignment of the British false memory society and the British psychological society. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 23(2), 165–176.

Crook, L. (2021). The rocky road to false memories: Stories the media missed. In V. Sinason & A. Conway (Eds.), Trauma and memory: The science and the silenced (pp. 29–35). Routledge.

Freyd, J. J. (2018, January 11). When sexual assault victims speak out, their institutions often betray them. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/when-sexual-assault-victims-speak-out-their-institutions-often-betray-them-87050

Giedinghagen, A. (2022). The tic in TikTok and (where) all systems go: Mass social media induced illness and Munchausen’s by internet as explanatory models for social media associated abnormal illness behavior. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 13591045221098522.

Gómez, J. M., & Gobin, R. L. (2020). Black women and girls &# MeToo: Rape, cultural betrayal, & healing. Sex Roles, 82(1), 1–12.

Hall, H. (2021). The role of discrimination and social defeat on black mental health. Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, 15(1), 88–97.

Howell, E. F. (2013). The dissociative mind. Routledge.

Hunter, R. (2016). Contesting the dominant paradigm: Feminist critiques of liberal legalism. In M. Davies & V. E. Munro (Eds.), The Ashgate research companion to feminist legal theory (pp. 13–30). Routledge.

ISSTD. (2017January23). ISSTD Statement on the Movie ’Split’. ISSTD News, retrieved from: https://news.isst-d.org/dissociative-identity-disorder-individuals-societal-threat-or-societal-victim/

Kate, M.-A., Hopwood, T., & Jamieson, G. (2020). The prevalence of dissociative disorders and dissociative experiences in college populations: A meta-analysis of 98 studies. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 21(1), 16–61.

Keating, L., & Muller, R. T. (2020). LGBTQ+ based discrimination is associated with PTSD symptoms, dissociation, emotion dysregulation, and attachment insecurity among LGBTQ+ adults who have experienced trauma. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 21(1), 124–141.

McMaugh, K., & Middleton, W. (2022). The history and politics of ‘false memories’: The Australian experience. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 23(2), 177–190.

Meloni, M. (2014). How biology became social, and what it means for social theory. The Sociological Review, 62(3), 593–614.

Meloni, M. (2015). Epigenetics for the social sciences: Justice, embodiment, and inheritance in the postgenomic age. New Genetics and Society, 34(2), 125–151.

Orr, M. (2021). False memory syndrome movements: The origins and the promoters. In V. Sinason & C. A (Eds.), Trauma and memory: The science and the silence (pp. 17–28). Routledge.

Ozturk, E., & Sar, V. (2006). The “apparently normal” family: A contemporary agent of transgenerational trauma and dissociation. Journal of Trauma Practice, 4(3–4), 287–303.

Reinders, A. A., & Veltman, D. J. (2021). Dissociative identity disorder: Out of the shadows at last? The British Journal of Psychiatry, 219(2), 413–414.

Salter, M. (2013). Organised Sexual Abuse. Glasshouse/Routledge.

Salter, M., & Blizard, R. (2022). False memories and the science of credibility: Who gets to be heard? (Vol. 23, pp. 141–147).

Salter, M., Conroy, E., Dragiewicz, M., Burke, J., Ussher, J., Middleton, W., … Noack-Lundber, K. (2020). “A deep wound under my heart”: Constructions of complex trauma and implications for women’s wellbeing and safety from violence. ANROWS. Retrieved from: https://www.anrows.org.au/publication/a-deep-wound-under-my-heart-constructions-of-complex-trauma-and-implications-for-womens-wellbeing-and-safety-from-violence/

Salter, M., & Whitten, T. (2022). A comparative content analysis of pre-internet and contemporary child sexual abuse material. Deviant Behavior, 43(9), 1120–1134.

Schreiber, F. R. (1973). Sybil: The true story of a woman possessed by 16 separate personalities. Regnery Chicago.

Silberg, J. L. (2021). The child survivor: Healing developmental trauma and dissociation. Routledge.

Simeon, D., & Loewenstein, R. J. (2009). Dissociative disorders. In L. W. Roberts, J. G. Hoop, & T. W. Heinrich (Eds.), Clinical psychiatry essentials (pp. 239–256). Wolters Kluwer.

Simeon, D., & Putnam, F. (2022). Pathological dissociation in the national comorbidity survey replication (NCS-R): Prevalence, morbidity, comorbidity, and childhood maltreatment. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 1–14.

Stevenson, R. L. (1886). The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Longmans, Green & Co.

Struck, D. (1986, December 29). Little found to substantiate accounts of bizarre, satanic child abuse. The Baltimore Sun.

Thigpen, C. H., & Cleckley, H. M. (1957). The three faces of Eve. McGraw-Hill.

Vaughans, K. C. (2016). To unchain haunting blood memories: Intergenerational trauma among African Americans. In J. Salberg & S. Grand (Eds.), Wounds of history: Repair and resilience in the trans-generational transmission of trauma (pp. 246–262). Routledge.

How did a prestigious academic journal publish a paper about masturbating to child sexual abuse material?

Two decades ago, as a sociology honours student, I was in a tutorial discussing some variety of post-structural “high theory”, which was the dominant flavour of my degree. I made the point to the tutor – a professor of sociology at the time – that the authors didn’t actually believe what they were writing.

I felt that the theory I was being assigned to read contained so many counterintuitive assumptions about the way the world worked that, if I applied those theories to my day-to-day life, I would be incapable of doing practical activities. I still remember the exchange because the professor was surprised by the comment but he didn’t disagree.

This memory came to mind this week during a conversation with a young scholar. By way of introduction, she was born overseas and comes from a different cultural background to me. As we were talking, she hesitantly mentioned that the dominant theoretical approaches to cultural difference that she is expected to adopt in her academic work do not fit with her experience.

She had found another conceptual framework that she could relate to and wondered if she should use it in her research. She felt some internal pressure to quash her intuitive dissatisfaction and apply the expected theoretical approach, mainly to avoid being seen to criticise or reject it.

We had a useful conversation about the ethical drift that occurs as the gap widens between what we really know and believe, and what we actually write and say as academics. Of course, academics don’t just hit the page with everything that comes to mind. A gap between what we think, and what we write, can encourage self-reflection and open us up to new modes of thought. And we need to be strategic about how we express ourselves.

But what if you get into the habit, as an academic, of saying and writing things that you don’t really believe, but that you think you are supposed to believe? After all, saying and writing what other people expect avoids conflict, and makes it easier to get into journals and even win grant money.

But who do you become in the process? What happens as you professionally dissociate from your personal insights, observations and moral impulses? What can creep through a habituated disconnection between professional self-presentation and personal conviction?

These questions are pertinent in the aftermath of the publication (and retraction) of a paper by a PhD student and “pederast” activist in which he describes himself masturbating to child sexual abuse material, published in the prestigious methods journal Qualitative Research.

The author Karl Andersson has long advocated for the mainstreaming of sexual attraction to under-aged boys, publishing his own magazine with eroticised images of boys. In some instances, he appears to have taken and published revealing photos of children in middle and low income countries without their knowledge.

Andersson’s article in Qualitative Research included graphic descriptions of masturbating to sexual images of young boys in Japanese comic books. This content is illegal in many jurisdictions. However, the article did not raise any red flags for the editorial team of the journal, the two peer reviewers, or the hundreds of readers of the article from its publication in April to its retraction in August.

The passivity of the journal’s editors, reviewers and readers were in stark contrast to the outcry amongst academics when the publication came to broader awareness last month. The vast majority of academics were as disgusted by the paper as people outside the higher education sector.

That vocal consensus should not obscure the fact that the paper was reviewed, accepted and published by a top tier journal, and was available for months apparently without raising a complaint.

As outrage around the paper grew, a number of academics went public on social media with gestures of sympathy for the author. They were apparently concerned that the author was being “bullied” or “emotionally abused”, that the response to the article constituted “masturbation shaming”, and that the content of the article was not particularly problematic. For some, the entire incident smacked of “moral panic”.

I think there are two interlinked explanations for the fact that this paper was published and defended, alongside these expressions of support for the author.

The first is what Catherine Liu has called “virtue hoarding”: the tendency of academics, amongst other white collar professionals, to create moral hierarchies that position themselves at the top, counterposed to imaginary hordes of less educated individuals. 

There is a long and shameful academic history of using the moral consensus against child sexual abuse as a foil against which the intellectual positions themselves as more sophisticated and enlightened. Many scholars have made their careers by characterising the public response to child sexual abuse as “panicked” and hysterical, compared to their own supposedly more tolerant and intellectually daring stance.

The second explanation is the professional dissociation that I described earlier: people who have become so accustomed to talking the expected talk that they inadvertently walked off an ethical cliff without noticing. Certain academic scripts and cliches have become so banal that people get used to invoking them in any situation, regardless of the underlying facts, which, in this case, were nothing short of alarming.

I’ve spoken to a few senior leaders in the non-government sector about the furore around this article, as well as the tendency of some academics to minimise or trivialise its significance. They made the point that they could never, in good faith, trust those academics to conduct research with their clients.

To put it bluntly, if you really believe that it is disproportionate or punitive to publicly condemn someone for masturbating to child sexual abuse material (and then flaunt this proclivity in an academic journal in an apparent attempt to legitimise it), then there are serious questions about your judgement and suitability to work with children and vulnerable adults.

This logic is self-evident to anyone who is concerned about safeguarding. And yet a surprising number of academics found themselves on the other side of the argument. They were blind to the obvious risk to public safety posed by anyone who is aroused by sexual images of children, or to the serious social implications of publishing scholarly work that normalises such patterns of arousal.

I don’t believe that (the majority of) those academics who reviewed, published, read, supported or defended Andersson share his sexual interests. I think they are detached from their own basic ethical intuitions and insights, and have become accustomed to playing word games and asserting pre-fabricated arguments without much in the way of personal conviction.

What begins as accommodation to professional expectations and a vulnerability to in-group thinking ends in moral hypocrisy and paedophile apologia.

Andersson’s article is not the only example of egregious rationalisations for child sexual abuse evident in recent peer-reviewed literature. There is more to be said about those theoretical tendencies that are conducive to these dissociative ethical failings. Lisa Ruddick describes them well.

But in the meantime, it seems to me that the solution is passionate scholarship: work that is grounded in our deeply held commitments and direct observations about the world, where we are willing to disagree or endure uncomfortable moments, where we ask questions about conceptual frameworks that lead into imaginary spaces where our usual ethical systems for decision-making begin to dissipate.

Many young scholars feel this gap between theory and life - I did, my colleague does. Academia contains incentives to overlook this feeling and internalise complex abstractions that overwrite, or at least dull, our immediate observations and concerns.

The ethical cost of this process is vividly illustrated by the publication of Andersson’s article. It’s a mistake to view this incident as an aberration or a one-off problem. It’s a sentinel event that should serve as a wake-up call to academia as a whole.

The challenges of developing a comprehensive response to organised child sexual abuse

This piece was published in the 2022 CommonProtect report, a major report reviewing all Commonwealth legal systems and their responses to child sexual abuse and exploitation.

Organised child sexual abuse refers to the sexual abuse of one or more children by multiple adult perpetrators who are acting in concert.[1] Organised abuse is one of the most serious forms of child maltreatment and a common scenario for the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The propensity of child sex offenders to network with one another and conspire in the sexual exploitation of children has been recognised for over forty years.[2] While organised abuse is a serious form of organised crime, state responses to organised abuse have been halting and uncertain. It is sometimes assumed that organised abuse is a particular problem for low and middle income countries however high income countries have struggled to acknowledge and address organised abuse. Organised abuse reveals significant and ongoing failures of child safeguarding and responses to child sexual abuse. While there are persistent obstacles and challenges to developing a comprehensive response to organised abuse, examples of promising practices and constructive policy shifts are also evident.

What is organised abuse?

The term “organised abuse” was coined in the early 1990s to describe complex child protection cases in high-income countries such as England, the United States and Australia, involving multiple children who disclosed sexual abuse by networks of perpetrators.[3] These cases included family-based organised abuse (often orchestrated by one or both parents), organised abuse in institutional settings (such as childcare, churches and schools), and the street-based exploitation of children missing from home or children in out-of-home care.[4] Children in organised abuse cases disclose severe and sadistic forms of maltreatment and presented as highly traumatised. Their presentations were congruent with an adult cohort of mental health patients who describe similar patterns of exploitation in their formative years.[5] This group of victims and survivors typically disclose the production of CSAM as part of their abuse.

When organised abuse cases first emerged in the 1980s, they highlighted the need for increased coordination across all agencies involved in sexual abuse investigations. The disclosures of multiple victims and the involvement of multiple perpetrators introduces significant complexity into organised abuse investigations, requiring careful planning and cooperation between law enforcement and child protection agencies.[6] The divergent prerogatives of child protection and law enforcement agencies undermined investigations in some high-profile cases, while prosecutors sought to develop a strategic approach to the prosecution of multiple perpetrators based on the evidence provided by multiple young and vulnerable witnesses.[7] Investigative missteps and failures to secure prosecutions in some organised abuse cases have been highlighted in sceptical media coverage as evidence that organised abuse allegations are baseless and the product of “moral panic” and “false memories”.[8] The consequent media backlash complicated the efforts of child protection and mental health practitioners to develop a specific response to the problem of organised abuse. By the late 1990s, the proposition that child sex offenders might collude in the abuse of children was widely rejected in media and scholarly literature.[9]

Paradoxically, this sceptical position was firming up at the same time that the popularisation of the internet was providing undeniable evidence of the scale of organised abuse. Child sexual abusers have proven to be highly sensitised to the opportunities offered by new technologies to contact each other and facilitate the abuse of children. Organised abuse networks have formed online while face-to-face networks make extensive use of online technologies to groom and surveil victims and distribute CSAM.[10] Reports of CSAM have increased exponentially over the last twenty five years to a point of unprecedented availability, with a distinct trend towards the more serious abuse of younger children.[11] The so-called dark web has enabled the development of communities of child sexual abusers numbering in their millions.[12]

The accumulation of digital evidence has disrupted although not entirely displaced scepticism over organised abuse. Other developments including recurrent scandals over clergy and institutional abuse and revelations of sexual violence by high-profile individuals, have underscored a collective propensity towards passivity, denial and complicity in the face of the mass abuse of children. There has been a paradigm shift in public and state willingness to acknowledge and address organised abuse although current responses are uneven and shifting. However many challenges remain.

Contemporary responses to organised abuse

Responses to organised abuse and conceptualisations of it are driven by terminological and legislative distinctions that are somewhat arbitrary when applied to complex fact scenarios involving multiple perpetrators and victims of abuse. Over the last two decades, the vocabulary of “trafficking” and “sexual exploitation” have become prominent in legal and policy frameworks that address multi-perpetrator, multi-victim cases of sexual abuse. However, definitions of these terms vary considerably between jurisdictions with significant impacts on policy and practice.[13]

The policy language of “sexual exploitation” originally targeted commercial (that is, profit-driven) abuse of children, however, most organised abuse is not motivated by financial gain, and hence this language excluded the majority of relevant cases.[14] Contemporary definitions of sexual exploitation recognises abuse that includes any inducement or benefit to victim or perpetrator, however this definition is so broad that it arguably includes most cases of child sexual abuse, which typically includes such elements. Jurisdictions often focus on particular scenarios of sexual exploitation linked to media scandal or policing priorities. For example, in the United Kingdom, media exposure of groups of men targeting girls in out-of-home-care led to a policy response to child sexual abuse that targets street-based “grooming”.[15] In contrast, in Australia, child sexual exploitation is generally framed as an online offence, since Commonwealth legislation on child exploitation focuses specifically on telecommunications services.

In the United States, “trafficking” has become a frequent nomenclature when referring to the organised sexual abuse of children, although the relevance of this term varies in other countries due to legislative differences. The terminology of trafficking is politically fraught since it can conflate child sexual exploitation with the sexual exploitation of adults and voluntary sex work, and is linked to other policy issues including illegal migration and border security concerns. Responses to trafficking are frequently led by law enforcement with a focus on victim remedies that facilitate their cooperation with police investigation, rather than on underlying victim-perpetrator dynamics and impacts.[16]

While the terminology of “trafficking” and “exploitation” address common elements of organised abuse, they do not specifically recognise the presence of multiple perpetrators which constitutes organised abuse as a form of organised crime. Victims of organised abuse report being terrorised into silence and compliance, developing traumatic and dissociative conditions that inhibit their ability to disclose or provide testimony, and being stalked and threatened by networks of offenders.[17] State agencies and police units who target organised crime have often failed to address the extent of organised abuse and the threat that it poses to victimised children and adult survivors.[18]

Key scenarios of organised abuse are routinely overlooked by state authorities. A major block to a more fulsome understanding of organised abuse appears to be the prevalence of parental perpetration. Research based on victim report and criminal prosecution consistently finds that parents are the largest and most serious category of perpetrators of organised abuse.[19] A recent study of the most highly traded CSAM series found that the most popular images were made by fathers abusing their prepubescent daughters.[20] However governments and state authorities in high income countries have proven to be reluctant to recognise and address familial sexual abuse as a specific policy priority, preferring instead to target extra-familial abuse and online abuse.[21] Children subject to familial organised abuse are likely to grow to adulthood in the absence of a protective intervention, accruing chronic and acute psychological and psychosocial disability.

Promising practices

Responding to organised abuse requires acknowledgement of the problem, which can be challenging for government and state authorities. The persistence of networks of sexual abusers is evidence of both political and policy failure, in that child safeguarding mechanisms and systems are clearly failing to detect, intervene in and prevent the egregious exploitation of children. There is therefore a political disincentive to acknowledge this problem. The prevalence of family-based organised sexual abuse suggests that, at the very least, some child sex offenders are siring children with the intention of abusing them, which raises questions about familial privacy and parental control over children that are without simple resolution.[22] While many jurisdictions have responded to the challenges of complex child protection cases with the development of interagency protocols and joint investigative teams, investigation and prosecution of organised abuse remains infrequent and fraught.

An effective response to organised abuse should be driven by evidence rather than service prerogatives or legislative distinctions. Such a response would take into account victim report studies which include the “dark figure” of unreported or unknown incidents as well as evidence gleaned from police investigation and prosecution. It is common for child and adult victims reporting multi-perpetrator abuse to encounter significant disbelief from frontline professionals.[23] Therefore, there is a need for professional training in organised abuse, as well as interdisciplinary collaboration and information sharing between law enforcement, mental health professional and social workers. Organised abuse requires intelligence-driven policing that includes data-matching between victim reports, such that one or more perpetrators named by different victims can be flagged, as well as other innovative examples of policing practices. For example, police may engage in the active disruption of known networks of child abusers through strategic policing interventions even in the absence of criminal charges.

Child victims and adult survivors of organised abuse are vulnerable and easily intimidated witnesses who find the investigation and prosecution process very destabilising. Investigation and prosecution strategies need to be trauma-informed to facilitate victim cooperation and the provision of high-quality witness evidence. Victims and survivors require specialist, effective and affordable mental health care as well as measures to address other common psychosocial needs amongst this population, including housing.

Child victims and adult survivors of organised abuse often have safety concerns linked to the online circulation of CSAM of their abuse. At present, it is very difficult for survivors to find information about the extent of the online circulation of their CSAM or to find support to have this content detected and removed. The ongoing circulation of this content directly undermines their safety. A significant proportion of CSAM survivors report ongoing threats and harassment from CSAM consumers.[24] Organised abuse survivors require support from online safety agencies who can proactively monitor and seek the removal of their CSAM where it has been detected. More broadly, it is clear that effective internet regulation is a crucial tool in addressing the harms of organised abuse, not only to reduce and remove CSAM but to inhibit the formation of online networks of offenders.[25]
Footnotes

[1] M. Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse  (London: Glasshouse/Routledge, 2013).

[2] Tina M. Berenbaum et al., "Child Pornography in the 1970s," in Child Pornography and Sex Rings, ed. Ann Wolbert Burgess and Marieanne Lindeqvist Clark (Lexington MA; Toronto: Lexington Books, 1984).

[3] Peter Bibby, ed. Organised Abuse: The Current Debate (London: Arena, 1996).

[4] B. Gallagher, B. Hughes, and H. Parker, "The Nature and Extent of Known Cases of Organised Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales," in Organised Abuse: The Current Debate, ed. P. Bibby (London: Arena, 1996).

[5] Michael Salter and Juliet Richters, "Organised Abuse: A Neglected Category of Sexual Abuse with Significant Lifetime Mental Healthcare Sequelae," Journal of Mental Health 21, no. 5 (2012).

[6] Bernard Gallagher, "Grappling with Smoke: Investigating and Managing Organised Child Sexual Abuse - a Good Practice Guide," in Policy, Practice, Research (London: National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1998).

[7] R. Cheit, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[8] Michael Salter, "Organized Child Sexual Abuse in the Media," in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Crime, Media and Popular Culture, ed. N. Rafter and M. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[9] Cheit, The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children.

[10] Janis Wolak, "Technology-Facilitated Organized Abuse: An Examination of Law Enforcement Arrest Cases," International Journal for Crime, Justice & Social Democracy 4, no. 2 (2015).

[11] Michael Salter and Tyson Whitten, "A Comparative Content Analysis of Pre-Internet and Contemporary Child Sexual Abuse Material," Deviant Behavior (2021).

[12] WeProtect, "Global Threat Assessment," (WeProtect Global Alliance, 2021).

[13] WeProtect Global Alliance, "Framing Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Online as a Form of Human Trafficking: Opportunities, Challenges and Implications," (2021).

[14] L. Kelly and L. Regan, "Sexual Exploitation of Children in Europe: Child Pornography," The Journal of Sexual Aggression 6, no. 1/2 (2000).

[15] M. Salter and S. Dagistanli, "Cultures of Abuse: ‘Sex Grooming’, Organised Abuse and Race in Rochdale, Uk," International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 4, no. 2 (2015).

[16] Keren David and Michael Salter, "‘They Are Here without Chains, but with Invisible Chains’: Understandings of Modern Slavery within the New South Wales Settlement Sector," Social & Legal Studies 31, no. 1 (2022).

[17] Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse; M.  Salter, "Organized Abuse in Adulthood: Survivor and Professional Perspectives," Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 18, no. 3 (2017).

[18] Leslie Cooper, Julie Anaf, and Margaret Bowden, "Contested Concepts in Violence against Women: 'Intimate', 'Domestic' or 'Torture'," Australian Social Work 59, no. 3 (2006).

[19] C3P, "Survivor's Survey Preliminary Report," (Winnipeg: Canadan Centre for Child Protection, 2017); Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse; Michael Salter et al., "Production and Distribution of Child Sexual Abuse Material by Parental Figures," (2021).

[20] MC Seto et al., "Production and Active Trading of Child Sexual Exploitation Images Depicting Identified Victims: Ncmec/Thorn Research Report," (Alexandria, VA: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children & Thorn, 2018).

[21] M. Salter, "The Privatisation of Incest: The Neglect of Familial Sexual Abuse in Australian Public Inquiries," in The Sexual Abuse of Children: Recognition and Redress, ed. Yorick Smaal, Andy Kaladeflos, and Mark Finnane (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2016).

[22] Salter et al., "Production and Distribution of Child Sexual Abuse Material by Parental Figures."

[23] M. Salter, "Multi-Perpetrator Domestic Violence," Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 15, no. 2 (2014).

[24] C3P, "Survivor's Survey Preliminary Report."

[25] Michael Salter and Lloyd Richardson, "The Trichan Takedown: Lessons in the Governance and Regulation of Child Sexual Abuse Material," Policy & Internet 13, no. 3 (2021).

False memories and the science of credibility: Who gets to be heard?

The following piece was published as an editorial in the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, and was co-authored with Ruth Blizard.

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was officially dissolved on December 31, 2019. The FMSF launched in 1992 in the United States, with the stated aim of promoting awareness of a supposed epidemic of “false memories” of sexual abuse. At this time, social awareness of child abuse had led to considerable cultural and legal change. Children and adults were disclosing child abuse in unprecedented numbers, and therapy for complex trauma and dissociation was emerging as a specialist mental health field. Scientific recognition of delayed disclosure and traumatic amnesia prompted a range of law reform efforts to expand opportunities for adult survivors to pursue civil damages or criminal charges, acknowledging that most abused children don’t disclose at the time, and that some survivors may have limited or no recall of the abuse (Mindlin, 1990).

In reaction, there was a backlash against child protection investigations and criminal prosecutions of child sexual abuse cases (A. Salter, 1998).  This backlash had been gathering momentum throughout the 1980s, as US-based advocacy groups such as Victims Of Child Abuse Laws claimed that suggestive interviewing techniques were leading children to make false allegations of sexual abuse (Hechler, 1988).  The FMSF appears to have been a continuation of this campaign, albeit targeting new legal remedies for adult survivors (Blizard & Shaw, 2019). The FMSF argued that many or most adults disclosing abuse in childhood were suffering from “false memory syndrome”, in which therapists implanted false memories of abuse that never took place. Despite the passionate claims of FMSF advocates to rationality and science, false memory syndrome was never accepted in psychiatric diagnostic systems. Nonetheless, as a concept, it leant pseudo-scientific heft to the denials of parents (often fathers,) accused of sexual abuse by adult children (typically daughters) (Gaarder, 2000).

The therapeutic field of complex trauma and dissociation was the main target of the FMSF and “Multiple Personality Disorder” (MPD, now dissociative identity disorder or DID) served as their stalking horse. At the time that the FMSF was founded, MPD had only recently been recognised in the third addition Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980. The FMSF exploited public ignorance about this relatively new diagnosis to mischaracterise the mental health field as saturated with professional misconduct. The subsequent legal and media attacks on therapists and authors in the trauma field have been well documented (Calof, 1998; Pope, 1996; A. Salter, 1998). Like any field of practice, but particularly in an emerging specialisation, the quality of treatment for MPD/DID existed on a spectrum from outstanding to less so, but lawsuits targeted some of the best in the field as well as others. The implications for professional practice in complex trauma and dissociation were far-reaching. Those therapists who continued to research, diagnose and treat dissociative disorders did so in the face of professional scepticism and isolation. Some left the field while others were dissuaded from entering.

The original scenario of false memory implantation involved a client with no history of abuse who was subjected by a therapist to highly suggestive techniques designed to elicit misleading thoughts and feelings about abuse (Chris R Brewin & Bernice Andrews, 2017). However, over time, the false memory movement would identify a range of potential indirect influences that might give rise to false memories. Just being exposed to information about child sexual abuse through television or books might be enough, advocates suggested, to trigger the onset of false memories (Pope, 1996). The image of the false accuser shifted from a victim of therapeutic malpractice to a malingerer or opportunist who was motivated to concoct false memories for attention, financial compensation or to explain away their own shortcomings.

The elasticity of the logic of false memories attracted many admirers. Kitzinger (2004) has remarked upon that extraordinary appeal of false memory syndrome amongst journalists in the 1990s, some of whom took up the cause of accused men as a personal crusade. She attributes the activist role of journalists in debates over false memories to a male-dominated newsroom culture that was sceptical of claims of sexual violence, and who found the novel and emotional dimensions of false memory stories to be commercially appealing. Journalist championing of false memory syndrome played a central role in the establishment of international false memory societies well beyond the bounds of the United States (M. Salter, 2017). 

 False memory societies forged close working relationships between academics and lawyers, and theories of false memories became influential in civil, criminal and family court matters. Warnings that false memory researchers who received substantial sums of money as defence experts were in a conflicted position vis a vis their interpretation of their results went largely unheeded (Freyd & Quina, 2000). This research bias may have had a chilling effect on publication of studies challenging research claims that false memories are easy to develop (Chris R. Brewin & Bernice Andrews, 2017).  The narrow focus of false memory research on preventing uncorroborated allegations of abuse may have deflected inquiry away from the possibility that abuse survivors’ testimony may be wrongly dismissed, along with the ways perpetrators may interfere with survivors’ memories for abuse (Becker‐Blease & Freyd, 2017).

Within an echo chamber of academic, legal and media sympathy, the notion that memories of child sexual abuse are particularly untrustworthy became taken-for-granted “common sense”. One of the recurring characteristics of the application of false memory research – whether in courts, in the media, or in the community at large – is that it is most often deployed against the powerless and in the interests of the powerful. Once it was successfully mobilised against women complaining of child sexual abuse, the concept of false memories was also available to dismiss other forms of testimony that challenge the status quo.

For instance, in the late 1990s, Australia began to openly acknowledge the history of the Stolen Generations, in which an estimated one third of Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families from 1910 – 1970 as part of an explicitly genocidal state program (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997). In response, a group of journalists rallied against the testimony of survivors, who they accused of false memories (Tatz, 2001). When two survivors of the Stolen Generation attempted to sue the Australian state (Cubillo and Gunner v the Commonwealth of Australia), the logic of false memories featured centrally in the judicial determination that their removal was lawful (Cunneen & Grix, 2003). In Cubillo, O’Laughlin J stated:

I am also concerned that they [the complainants] have unconsciously engaged in exercises of reconstruction, based, not on what they knew at the time, but on what they have convinced themselves must have happened or what others may have told them.

Consistently, and persistently, theories of false memories have been aptly available for the exculpation of the wealthy and the powerful.  This point is illustrated by a brief overview of some of the cases where prominent false memory researcher Professor Elizabeth Loftus has appeared: in the defence of a Bosnian-Croation soldier for aiding and abetting the rape of a Muslim woman, to exculpate a senior aide to then-Vice President Dick Cheney for misleading investigators regarding the leak of the name of a CIA operative, to question the credibility of Professor Christine Blasey-Ford when she complained about an alleged sexual assault as a teenager by current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh , for the defence team of the convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein and now for accused child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

Most recently, in Australia, allegations of false memories were revived when it emerged that a woman known only as “Kate” (who, sadly, died by suicide in 2019) claimed to have been sexual assaulted by the now-serving Australian politician Christian Porter when they were both teenagers (MItchell, McPhee, & Evans, 2021).  Porter, like Kavanaugh, vigorously denied the allegation. There was no court case but instead a journalist speculated that Kate suffered from “recovered memories”, on the basis that she had apparently read Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score prior to her allegations becoming public knowledge (Hardaker, 2021). By this logic, merely reading a book that mentions child sexual abuse could be the trigger for a false allegation; never mind that Kate diarised the alleged assault while still a teenager, or that she had described the incident to friends decades prior to reading van der Kolk.

In a sign of how much has changed since the 1990s, the response to this argument was not agreement but outrage. This outrage was evident across social media but also from within journalism itself. The media outlet who ran the original piece quickly assigned another journalist to cover the story from a more sympathetic angle, while Australian media outlets ran multiple pieces rebutting the false memory proposition. One journalist wrote about his own diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder and its impact on his capacity to recall traumatic events and correctly label them as harmful (Morton, 2021).

Undoubtedly, the emergence of the false memory movement three decades ago had a negative effect on professional and social understandings of trauma and dissociation. However, it also provoked researchers, practitioners, survivors and advocates to redouble their efforts to develop the evidence base for trauma therapy. Reinders and Veltman’s editorial this year in the British Journal of Psychiatry laid out the cumulative neurobiological evidence for the trauma model of DID. The diagnosis that the FMSF insisted, a quarter century ago, was a passing fad with no scientific foundation is now out of the shadows  (Reinders & Veltman, 2021). Meanwhile, the forms of betrayal, abuse and violation that false memory syndrome sought to explain away as mere confabulations are now recurrent features of media and policy commentary. Multiple criminal cases and public inquiries have substantiated the seriousness of child sexual abuse and exploitation, institutional tendencies towards denial and cover-up, and the inadequacies of current policy response.

The FSMF closed with a whimper rather than a bang. The American branch had been inactive for many years, with almost half of their advisory board deceased, and many of those still alive in their 80s and 90s. The new generation of mental health professionals may never have heard their name, or merely see them as an historical curiosity. But their legacy persists in ongoing media, academic, legal, and community scepticism.  

References

Becker‐Blease, K., & Freyd, J. J. (2017). Additional questions about the applicability of “false memory” research. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 31(1), 34-36.

Blizard, R. A., & Shaw, M. J. J. o. C. C. (2019). Lost-in-the-mall: False memory or false defense? , 1-22.

Brewin, C. R., & Andrews, B. (2017). Creating Memories for False Autobiographical Events in Childhood: A Systematic Review. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 31(1), 2-23. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.3220

Brewin, C. R., & Andrews, B. (2017). False memories of childhood abuse. The Psychologist, 30, 48-52.

Calof, D. (1998). Notes from a practice under siege: Harassment, defamation and intimidation in the name of science. Ethics & Behavior, 8, 161–187.

Cheit, R. (2014). The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cunneen, C., & Grix, J. (2003). The limitations of litigation in stolen generations cases: Institute of Criminology, University of Sydney.

Freyd, J., & Quina, K. (2000). Feminist ethics in the practice of science: The contested memory controversy as an example. In M. Brabeck (Ed.), Practicing feminist ethics in psychology (pp. 101–124). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

Gaarder, E. (2000). Gender politics: The focus on women in the memory debates. Journal of child sexual abuse, 9(1), 91–106.

Hardaker, D. (2021, March 5). Here’s one for an independent inquiry: did recovered memories target Christian Porter? Crikey, pp. https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/2003/2005/christian-porter-recovered-memories/.

Hechler, D. (1988). The battle and the backlash: The child sexual abuse war. Lexington, Massachusetts; Toronto: Lexington Books.

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. (1997). Bringing them home: Report of the national inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. Retrieved from

Kitzinger, J. (2004). Framing abuse: Media influence and public understanding of sexual violence against children. London; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press.

Mindlin, J. E. (1990). Child Sexual Abuse and Criminal Statutes of Limitation: A Model for Reform. Wash. L. Rev., 65, 189.

MItchell, G., McPhee, S., & Evans, M. (2021, June 24). Christian Porter rape allegation documents revealed. Sydney Morning Herald, pp. https://www.smh.com.au/national/christian-porter-rape-allegation-documents-revealed-20210624-p20215844m.html.

Morton, R. (2021, March 6 - 12). Why our media and politics fail trauma survivors. The Saturday Paper, pp. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/opinion/topic/2021/2003/2010/why-our-media-and-politics-fail-trauma-survivors/161535780011237.

Pope, K. S. (1996). Memory, abuse and science: Questioning claims about the false memory syndrome epidemic. American Psychologist, 51, 957–974.

Reinders, A. A., & Veltman, D. J. (2021). Dissociative identity disorder: out of the shadows at last? The British Journal of Psychiatry, 219(2), 413-414.

Salter, A. (1998). Confessions of  Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learnt. Ethics & Behavior, 8(2), 115–124.

Salter, M. (2017). Organized child sexual abuse in the media. In N. Rafter & M. Brown (Eds.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Crime, Media and Popular Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tatz, C. (2001). Confronting Australian genocide. Aboriginal history, 25, 16-36.

‘You never forget the knock at the door’: why families of child sex abuse material offenders need more help

www.shutterstock.com

Michael Salter, UNSW and Delanie Woodlock, UNSW

Child sexual abuse material is widely available online, thanks to technological progress and a lack of effective action by internet companies and governments.

Last year, authorities in the United States received a record-breaking 21.7 million reports of child abuse material.

This year, similar reports to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner were the highest ever recorded, and arrests and charges by the Australian Federal Police for child sexual exploitation offences increased by almost 70%.

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Read more: What's in a name? Online child abuse material is not 'pornography'

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In the recently launched national strategy to prevent and respond to child sexual abuse, the federal government committed A$24.1 million to enhance the Commonwealth’s capacity to investigate and prosecute child sexual abusers, with additional funds targeting offenders who use technology to exploit children.

As arrest figures swell, so do the numbers of partners and families of people charged with these offences. Up to 65% of offenders in treatment have an intimate partner and up to 47% have at least one child, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology.

The partners, families and children of offenders have been described as “secondary victims”. However, this group is not well recognised or supported, despite their significant needs for psychological and practical help.

Our study

In 2020, we conducted an evaluation of PartnerSPEAK, a non-governmnet organisation in Victoria providing peer support and advocacy for the (non-offending) family members of people who access child sex abuse material.

With growing arrests for child sex abuse material, more families are being caught up in the fallout of this abuse. www.shutterstock.com

This is the only specialist support service in Australia.

As part of the study, we surveyed 53 PartnerSPEAK clients and interviewed seven clients. This provided important insights into the needs of this often ignored group.

‘The knock on the door’

For 83% of our research participants, the person in their life who accessed child abuse material was a partner or ex-partner. For others, the offender was a parent, child or sibling. Most of these offenders had viewed or accessed abuse material, but some had also committed other offences, including sexually abusing children and producing and distributing material.

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Read more: New research shows parents are major producers of child sexual abuse material

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Needless to say, the discovery of a loved one’s offending was life-changing, bewildering and profoundly traumatic. One interviewee discovered her partner’s offending when the police came to search their house:

[…] something you’re never going to forget or put out of your mind, is the knock on the door […] The way they [the police] presented and when they spoke to me initially, I had no idea. And then when they said the warrant was for – I thought it was for fraud, initially, I just couldn’t put the two together. And the fear was that they would label me the same, as colluding with him.

This quote also highlights the intersecting crises that begin with the discovery of a partner’s offending. This includes the shock of investigation, and the potentially ruinous implication that she may be a co-offender.

Where to turn to?

For the majority of participants, the discovery of the offending was the beginning of a frightening journey. This included police investigations into their partner and home life, while managing the emotional and practical fallout of separating in sudden and shocking circumstances.

Participants felt as though they were judged by others in the community for their partner’s behaviour. They spoke of feeling isolated, even if friends tried to help, they had no “frame of reference”.

A lot of my friends – because it’s uncharted territory for many of my peer group – just didn’t get what I was going through […] I didn’t want a pity party, but I wanted to talk to other people that have had similar experiences to me.

Other interviewees also spoke of the difficulty of working out what to do next and how to get help.

We all have that confusion and hurt and dire need to look after our children. And where to from here, what do I do next? […] There are lots of things that initially you don’t even think of for yourself because you’re so worried about your children and where you’re going to live and what you’re going to do.

The similarities with domestic and family violence

Our study showed a significant overlap with domestic and family violence. In interviews, participants described their relationships with the child sex abuse material offender as characterised by control, secrecy and domestic abuse.

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Read more: Does the government's new national plan to combat child sexual abuse go far enough?

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This could include physical assault but also financial abuse and coercive control. One interviewee described how difficult it was to leave the relationship:

I did not know how controlling a marriage I was in until I went to try and open a bank account […] I was hysterical. I was in the car just screaming in fear. And you go, where is this fear coming from? I don’t understand.

At present, child sex abuse material offending is not recognised as a form of abuse against the non-offending partner, despite associated patterns of manipulation and control, as well as physical violence in some cases.

Many women did not identify they had been in an abusive relationship until after the child abuse offending came to light, and did not know where to turn to for assistance with housing, child support or paid leave to attend court matters.

Our recommendations

As the number of non-offending partners and family members of child sex abuse offenders continues to grow, our study made three key recommendations:

1. Specialist support for non-offending partners and families of child sex offenders needs to be properly funded and nationally available. The recent national strategy has set aside A$10.2 million for the next four years for just such a support service. This is a good start but mainstream services also need to build their capacity to support this group.

2. Child abuse material offending represents an area in which domestic and family violence services could expand their current offerings, including by clearly identifying themselves as points of contact for non-offending partners.

3. There is a clear need for public education and awareness raising about the scale and impacts of child abuse material. Our interviewees often felt misunderstood and isolated, which obviously has a big impact on their ability to move on with their lives.

Christian Jones contributed to the research study in this piece.

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For support or advice about someone you know using online child sexual abuse material, you can contact PartnerSPEAK.org.au or call the PartnerSPEAK Peerline 1300 590 589.

The Blue Knot Foundation provides telephone counselling for survivors of childhood trauma on 1300 657 380.

If this article has raised any issues for you, please contact 1800 RESPECT through their national counselling hotline 1800 737 732. If you believe you are in immediate danger call 000.

Michael Salter, Scientia Associate Professor of Criminology, UNSW and Delanie Woodlock, , UNSW

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

QAnon and cultural spectacles of child sexual exploitation

This paper was delivered at the online symposium Researching Representations of Child Sexual Abuse in Contemporary Culture, hosted by UCD Dublin on May 26.

This paper frames QAnon as the latest example of the cultural ‘spectacularisation’ of child sexual exploitation. When I refer to ‘spectacularisation’, I’m drawing on thinkers like Debord (1998) and Baudrillard (1988), and referring to a mode of representation in which social phenomena are rendered primarily in the registers of fiction and fantasy. In this process, they lose connection to facts outside the spectacle. By way of introduction, QAnon is a right wing conspiracy theory which positions Donald Trump as a messianic figure appointed by God to the US presidency. According to QAnon, Trump’s primary purpose and goal as president was to defeat the Satan worshipping paedophile cabal supposedly driving the Democratic political party and controlling liberal politics on a global scale. In the wake of Trump’s electoral defeat, journalistic and academic attempts to analyse and understand QAnon have frequently drawn parallels with the so-called “satanic panic” of the 1980s, with the suggestion that QAnon is the latest iteration of a conservative moral panic over child sexual abuse (e.g. Caldwell, Shapiro, Jarenwattananon, & Venkat, 2021; Vrzal, 2020). I want to complicate that analysis by pointing to long-standing silences and gaps in public discourse on child sexual exploitation. The mass media and academia have struggled to generate a coherent framework of analysis and discussion of complex child sexual abuse cases. In the early 1990s, journalists and academics fell into conspiracy theories of their own making in their widespread promulgation of the claim that sexual exploitation allegations were the product of “false memories” and “moral panic” (Salter, 2013). Such conspiracy theories have delegitimised journalistic and academic inquiry into child sexual exploitation, and I argue that QAnon is the latest iteration of epistemic failures to constitute allegations of child sexual exploitation as meaningful and actionable.  

Public discourse and child sexual exploitation

QAnon sits at the intersection of three key forces: 1) increasingly online and reactionary right wing politics, 2) long standing evangelical Christian conspiracy theories, and 3) expanding public awareness of child sexual exploitation. I turn to this third force to set the backdrop for the emergence of QAnon.

The issue of child sexual exploitation emerged forcefully to public awareness in the early 1970s with a landmark case in the United States, where a number of teenaged boys were abducted and murdered. During the subsequent investigation, it became apparent that some the boys had been exploited in sexual images and videos before their deaths. Outcry around the case contributed to a campaign of law reform to protect children vulnerable to exploitation, and to criminalise the production of what was then called “child pornography” (Shouvlin, 1981), with most Western jurisdictions passing similar legislation by the early 1980s. These reforms coincided with increased recognition and reporting of child sexual abuse as a whole.

As criminal justice and child protection responses to child sexual abuse and exploitation began to scale up in the 1980s, conflicts emerged between the state, mass media and academic understandings of the problem. For some sociologists and historians of sexuality, law reform efforts focused on child sexual abuse and child pornography represented a victory for conservative and reactionary forces. Sex researcher Weeks (1981) described the criminalisation of child pornography in the United Kingdom as the product of “moral panic”. A range of other scholars and commentators described expanded child protection efforts as a censorious “witch hunt” (Hechler, 1988) . This label was appended to a number of high-profile child sexual abuse cases, particularly where exploitation and the manufacture of child sexual abuse material was alleged.

During the 1990s, this sentiment would be enshrined in “false memory” and “moral panic” discourses that spanned the mass media and academia. It was widely alleged that child protection workers and psychologists were implanting false memories of bizarre sexual abuse in their clients (Ofshe & Watters, 1996), while communities, authorities and institutions were deemed to be over-reacting to the threat of sexual abuse (Jenkins, 1992). Content analysis of news coverage in the United Kingdom and United States demonstrates a dramatic shift in media attention from the early-to-mid 1990s away from child sexual abuse as a social problem, to the threat of false allegations (Beckett, 1996; Kitzinger, 2004). In academia, the arts and humanities disciplines played a leading role in characterising public concern about child sexual abuse as exaggerated and irrational, particularly where groups or networks of abusers were described.

As the internet became popularized in the late 1990s, the digital evidence of a significant online community of sexual offenders began to undermine the confidence of advocates of the sceptical position (Jenkins, 2001). This position was further challenged by rolling clergy abuse scandals, which vividly illustrated the complicity and passivity of institutional authorities in the face of child sexual abuse allegations. The contemporary situation is paradoxical, in which theories of false memories and moral panic continue to circulate alongside the very same allegations of sexual exploitation that they claim to debunk (Salter, 2017). Despite cyclical attempts to deny its existence, sexual exploitation has never gone away, but rather its victims and those who work with them have been pushed to the margins, where they continue to encounter significant challenges in their efforts to access health care or criminal justice (Salter, 2017). These challenges include the persistence of a sceptical view of allegations of sexual exploitation in the community and across a range of sectors. It should, perhaps, be no surprise that sexual exploitation has been woven into conspiracy culture, where journalistic and academic reluctance to engage with the challenges of sexual exploitation have been interpreted in sinister ways, and gaps in public understanding have been filled by less-than-credible sources.   

Pizzagate and Qanon

QAnon can be described in multiple ways. Since the Enlightenment, some evangelical Protestant communities have intuited the presence of a satanic cabal behind the securalisation of the nation state (McKenzie-McHarg, 2014), and to a certain extent, QAnon is simply the contemporary reassertion of this clumsy attempt to explain away the forces of modernisation. The kinetic spread and appeal of QAnon is also attributable to the structure of social media, where millions of users have elaborated upon the QAnon mythos in a kind of collective fictional authorship (Zuckerman, 2019). It’s also important to situate QAnon within the broader context of the covid-19 pandemic, with a rapid escalation in QAnon social media activity linked to the paranoid milieu of lockdowns and related anxieties.

However I want to focus here on the origins of QAnon in the 2016 US presidential campaign. The then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her husband and former president Bill Clinton have long been dogged by various rumours of malfeasance promoted by right wing interests. These rumours were only further amplified when it emerged that Bill Clinton was an acquaintance of now-deceased billionaire and child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and had repeatedly flown with Epstein on his private jet. In November 2016, Clinton’s connections with Epstein were the subject of significant discussion on the infamous imageboard 4chan, a well known online forum for far right, reactionary and pro-Trump politics (Tuters, Jokubauskaitė, & Bach, 2018).

During this period, the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign director John Podesta were hacked and released by Wikileaks. As 4chan users scoured the emails, they noted references from Podesta to “cheese pizza” (Tuters et al., 2018). Cheese pizza is coded slang on 4chan for “child pornography”, since they share the acronym CP. In the darker depths of the internet, child sexual abuse material is sometimes referred to in coded terms using the pizza emoji. This superficial similarity prompted some 4chan users to conclude that not only did the Clintons have links to Epstein but that they were also involved in child trafficking.  4chan users would go on to suggest that Hillary Clinton was involved in satanic rituals on the basis of an email to Podesta from his brother about performance artist Marina Abramovich, whose avant-garde “Spirit Cooking” performances include occult overtones and cooking with bodily fluids (Tuters et al., 2018).

These 4chan discussions established the basic narrative conventions of what came to be known as “Pizzagate”: the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was involved in child trafficking and satanic rituals. As the “Pizzagate” narrative migrated to social media, it took on increasingly poly-vocal and schizoid forms. The Trump campaign actively monitored and courted Pizzagate, with high profile Trump supporters and campaign members expressed sympathy for Pizzagate, including Erik Prince (brother of Trumps’ secretary of education Betsy DeVos and founder of military contractor Blackwater) and Michael Flynn Jnr (the son of Michael Flynn, advisor to Donald Trump).

The Pizzagate conspiracy experienced a significant boost in October 2017. On 4chan, an anonymous user named “Q” claimed to be a highly placed official in the Trump administration with so-called “Q clearance”, which is a US government term referring to permission to access top secret classified material. In a series of over 3000 posts, first on 4chan and later on the related site 8chan,  Q claimed that Pizzagate was in fact true, and that Trump was implementing a secretive military coup that involved the clandestine trial and conviction of political opponents such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for egregious offences against children amongst other crimes. Q actively encouraged followers to elaborate upon his posts, which often took the form of obtuse questions and admonishments to “connect the dots” and “expand your thinking”. QAnon became a major social media phenomenon, with an internal Facebook analysis in 2020 identifying thousands of QAnon related Facebook communities with millions of users (Sen & Zadrozny, 2020).

While the precise number of QAnon adherents is unclear, the movement became a significant cultural and political force. In early 2019, an e-book collectively authored by QAnon supporters peaked at #2 on Amazon’s list of best selling books. At least two dozen US Congressional candidates who espoused QAnon-related beliefs appeared on ballots during the 2020 US presidential election, with Marjorie Taylor Green elected in Georgia while running openly as a Q adherent. On his social media feed, Trump repeatedly promoted QAnon-related accounts in the final weeks of his presidency and refused to disavow the movement when asked a question about QAnon at a press conference. Following Trump’s loss to Biden, there have been no posts on 8chan from ‘Q’ since early December 2020, although QAnon adherents featured prominently in the riots in Washington on January 6 this year.

Reflections

What distinguishes QAnon from Pizzagate, and perhaps what explains the expanded popularity and reach of QAnon, was its increasingly general and vague gestures towards child protection. While Pizzagate was a clearly partisan movement focused on accusing progressive figures of paedophilia, the scope of QAnon expanded over time to theorise a broader, global crisis of child sexual exploitation. “Save The Children” was a major catch cry of QAnon and indeed prompted a number of QAnon marches through 2020. The child protection organisation Save The Children reported significant frustration with the apparent hijacking of their name, while an anti-trafficking services has described being inundated with calls from well-meaning QAnon supporters reporting entirely fictional cases of child sex trafficking based on nothing more than social media scuttlebutt. The persistent and emotional focus of QAnon on child trafficking and protection led to its widespread adoption well beyond the normal bounds of conspiracy culture, including throughout the so-called ‘wellness community’, dominated by yoga and dieting gurus on Instagram.

 This heightened concern about imaginary allegations of child sexual abuse, as well as copioius references to satanism and rituals, have prompted many to draw an easy link between QAnon and the so-called “satanic panics” of the 1980s and 1990s. However this argument, while appealing in its simplicity, may only be reproducing the very problem that it seeks to explain. The fact that QAnon’s formulation of sexual exploitation had no clear reference to any actual case of child abuse is in fact what distinguishes it from the so-called “satanic panics” and “witch hunts” of the 1980s and 1990s. These labels have been attributed by sceptical journalists and academics to real child protection cases, albeit contested ones. Not only did these so-called “moral panics” include actual child abuse complaints, but these complaints were supported by forensic and other evidence of child sexual assault. As Ross Cheit (2014) has painstakingly documented in his book The Witch-Hunt Narrative, some of the complainant children in high-profile cases such as the McMartin preschool case in the United States had anogenital injuries that established sexual assault to a medical certainty. And yet this case is the cornerstone of academic and media claims about the existence of a so-called “satanic panic”.

For that reason alone, we should be cautious about simplistic comparisons between QAnon and earlier allegations of sexual exploitation. In fact, I would suggest that the more apt comparison is between QAnon and certain persistent claims of “moral panic”, since neither is amenable or sensitised to actual evidence of child maltreatment. This comparison is, I think, historically useful in explaining the conditions into which QAnon emerged. You’ll recall that the seeds of QAnon lay in online speculation about the relationship between Epstein and Clinton. In the wake of #MeToo, and the sensational circumstances of Epstein’s death, there is now widespread interrogation of Epstein’s peculiar links with rich and powerful men. However, this was not the case at the time of the 2016 presidential election, leaving a vacuum of public understanding that right-wing conspiracy theorists were eager to fill. I would suggest that the lack of media attention at the time was at least in part due to the ongoing legacies of scepticism regarding such allegations, and that the viral nature of Pizzagate and QAnon is indicative of a public appetite for an explanatory framework as to how a billionaire child trafficker became a confidante of a former US president.

It’s also relevant to note the role of 4chan speculation about coded references to child pornography in Clinton campaign emails. While this speculation was clearly bizarre and in bad faith, the problem of child sexual abuse material has also been almost wholly ignored in the media until recently. Reports of child pornography have been increasing annually by 50% for two decades (Bursztein et al., 2019), and this exponential increase has received substantive media coverage only over the last 18 months, at which point annual notifications for child pornography have peaked at more than 90 million per year. Current epidemic levels of child sexual abuse material cannot be disentangled from decades-long patterns of media disinterest and subsequent government inaction, which be traced back to the misplaced beliefs of the 1980s and 1990s that claims of widespread child pornography production were nothing more than panic and hysteria.

In conclusion, Pizzagate and then QAnon took root and came to flourish in the gaps and spaces left behind by respectable mainstream discourse, where serious inquiry into child sexual exploitation has been actively discouraged. There are many lessons, I think, to learn from QAnon, but the endurance of moral panics over child sexual abuse is not one of them. Instead, I think we should be interrogating how we continue to generate imaginary spectacles of child sexual exploitation – either as a conspiracy of Satanists, or a conspiracy of therapists manufacturing false allegations – while at the same time we seem incapable of acknowledging and engaging with the severity of organised sexual violence in the lives of some children.

 Bibliography

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Beckett, K. (1996). Culture and the politics of signification: The case of child sexual abuse. Social Problems, 43(1), 57–76.

Bursztein, E., Clarke, E., DeLaune, M., Elifff, D. M., Hsu, N., Olson, L., Shehan, J., Thakur, M., Thomas, K., & Bright, T. (2019). Rethinking the detection of child sexual abuse imagery on the Internet. Paper presented at the The World Wide Web Conference.

Caldwell, N., Shapiro, A., Jarenwattananon, P., & Venkat, M. (2021, May 18). America's Satanic Panic Returns — This Time Through QAnon. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2021/2005/2018/997559036/americas-satanic-panic-returns-this-time-through-qanon.       

Cheit, R. (2014). The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Debord, G. (1998). Comments on the society of the spectacle. London: Verso.

Hechler, D. (1988). The battle and the backlash: The child sexual abuse war. Lexington, Massachusetts; Toronto: Lexington Books.

Jenkins, P. (1992). Intimate enemies: Moral panics in contemporary Great Britain: Transaction Publishers.

Jenkins, P. (2001). Beyond tolerance: Child pornography on the Internet: NYU Press.

Kitzinger, J. (2004). Framing abuse: Media influence and public understanding of sexual violence against children. London; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press.

McKenzie-McHarg, A. (2014). The transfer of anti-illuminati conspiracy theories to the United States in the late eighteenth century. In Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East (pp. 231-250): De Gruyter.

Ofshe, R., & Watters, E. (1996). Making monsters: False memories, psychotherapy, and sexual hysteria. California: University of California Press.

Salter, M. (2013). Organised Sexual Abuse. London: Glasshouse/Routledge.           

Salter, M. (2017). Organized abuse in adulthood: survivor and professional perspectives. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 18(3), 441-453.

Salter, M. (2017). Organized child sexual abuse in the media. In N. Rafter & M. Brown (Eds.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Crime, Media and Popular Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sen, A., & Zadrozny, B. (2020, August 11). QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show. NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/qanon-groups-have-millions-members-facebook-documents-show-n1236317.   

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3 trauma takes the media gets wrong

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Meera Atkinson, University of Notre Dame Australia and Michael Salter, UNSW

Originating in the medical sciences, where it referred to physical injury, the term “trauma” is now often used in popular and scholarly discussion to refer to psychological injury. While large-scale mental health surveys consistently find sexual assault is a major risk factor for traumatic illness, it’s often assumed pre-existing mental illness is the cause of the allegation itself.

Arguments around the truthfulness of assault claims can hinge on stereotypical portrayals of people living with mental illness as untrustworthy witnesses to their own experience.

The recent sexual assault allegation against Attorney-General Christian Porter, which he has strenuously denied, has been accompanied by speculative commentary relating to memory and the mental health of Porter’s now deceased accuser. Some journalists have pointed to her mental health status in a manner designed to raise questions about her account, and to suggest her allegation was a post-hoc confabulation.

The complainant’s bipolar diagnosis, her seeking mental health care, her fragmented journal entries, and her accessing a book on the neuroscience of trauma have been emphasised as evidence she invented her account or was suffering from so-called “repressed” or “recovered” memories.

This type of argument reflects longstanding myths that prevail within journalism and the community about trauma, memory and mental illness. Below, we tackle three key misunderstandings.

1. Trauma and bipolar disorder aren’t mutually exclusive

Apparent links in media commentary between a bipolar diagnosis and false allegations of sexual assault reflect a misunderstanding of the diagnosis.

People with bipolar disorder experience significant fluctuations in mood, including low depressive states and active “manic” states. A range of studies have found childhood trauma increases the risk of developing bipolar disorders, and contributes to the severity and complexity of symptoms, including earlier age of onset, and increased suicidal ideation and substance abuse. One clinical study of bipolar patients found they were significantly more likely to report sexual assault in childhood or adulthood than patients with a depressive illness. This evidence suggests sexual assault is a risk factor for developing bipolar, and people with a bipolar diagnosis may be more vulnerable to sexual assault.

Bipolar has been somewhat overlooked in research into the relationship between sexual assault and mental illness, and these findings underscore the need for further exploration.

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Read more: What is bipolar disorder, the condition Kanye West lives with?

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2. “Recovered memory therapy” doesn’t exist

The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk authored a bestselling book, The Body Keeps Score. This book was noted in the journal of Porter’s alleged victim. Media commentators have repeatedly reported it as controversial.

Within the field of trauma studies, this book is not considered controversial and is not associated with “repressed” or “recovered” memory theories or practices. Furthermore, “recovered memory therapy” is a fallacy.

“Recovered memory therapy” is a pejorative term invented in the early 1990s to describe trauma therapy. People who use the term claim a significant number of therapists use improper techniques designed to “recover” forgotten or repressed memories of sexual abuse, which creates “false memories” and false allegations. However, there is no therapy called “recovered memory therapy”, and the term has been described by trauma experts as a form of disinformation created by advocates of people accused of sexual offences.

In 2004, the Victorian health regulator initiated an inquiry into “recovered memory therapy” (RMT) at the urging of “false memory” activists. The inquiry concluded “reports of the practice of RMT are often based on speculation” and “there is no reliable evidence for the practice of RMT” in the state. The inquiry demonstrates how inflated claims of RMT have been advanced in Australia despite a lack of evidence.

Since the early 1990s, “best practice” trauma therapy has focused on establishing emotional and physical safety, processing and narrating experiences of trauma, and moving forward from abuse and violence.

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Read more: Dissociative identity disorder exists and is the result of childhood trauma

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3. Memory error and journalling are not necessarily evidence of false allegations

Some coverage has focused on specific details of the victim’s allegation with the implication that any discrepancy of detail invalidates the claims.

Details matter in establishing the legitimacy of claims. But recent evidence on the neuroscience of memory demands a rethink of public and legal understanding of memory. According to researchers from the United States, memory is commonly perceived as “akin to a video recorder”. But, they argue, memory is fundamentally “imperfect and is susceptible to distortion and loss”. They conclude “there needs to be greater education and awareness of memory processes in judicial settings and in daily life”.

Dori Laub, eminent Israeli-American psychiatrist and Yale University Professor, recalled a woman describing her experience at Auschwitz for the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale in his famous essay on witnessing. The woman said four chimneys exploded and went up in flames during the Auschwitz uprising. When he presented this interview at a cross-disciplinary conference, historians pronounced her recollection incorrect; only one chimney had blown. Her memory was fallible, unreliable, and therefore inadmissible.

Laub, the psychoanalyst who interviewed the woman for the video, disagreed. He said: “The woman was testifying not to the number of the chimneys blown up, but to something else, something more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence.” Accuracy regarding the number, he maintained, “mattered less than the occurrence” and therefore, the woman’s testimony stood as “historical truth” despite her factual error.

The private journal entries of Porter’s alleged victim have been exhibited by some journalists as lacking coherence, and a reference to her initially overlooking the assault in the hope of marrying Porter has been foregrounded. Many sexually assaulted people know their abuser. Being bonded to an assailant to any degree can increase the common traumatic shock symptoms of denial and minimisation.

Journalling is often less than coherent. It’s not intended to be read but to help process highly complex personal experiences. Many women relate to these messy journal entries.

Media coverage has been integral to driving social change and highlighting the plight of victims and survivors of sexual violence.

However, the media also harbours entrenched cultures of resistance to developments in trauma science, reflecting personal and professional biases as well as common attitudes and misunderstandings in the community.

Commentary reinforcing existing stigmatisation of traumatic and mental health conditions negatively affects a significant proportion of the Australian population.

Journalists should consult professionals with trauma expertise and people living with mental illness when reporting on sensitive issues such as the impact of trauma on memory, according to best practice guidelines. Trauma and mental health are public health issues, and people with media platforms have a responsibility to get it right.

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Read more: Evidence shows mental illness isn't a reason to doubt women survivors

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Meera Atkinson, Adjunct Lecturer in Writing, University of Notre Dame Australia and Michael Salter, Scientia Associate Professor of Criminology, UNSW

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.