legal

Allegations of multi-perpetrator and multi-victim sexual abuse emerged to public awareness in the early 1980s contemporaneously with the denials of the accused and their supporters. Multi-perpetrator sexual offenses are typically more sadistic than solo offenses and organized sexual abuse is no exception. Adults and children with histories of organized abuse have described lives marked by torturous and sometimes ritualistic sexual abuse arranged by family members and other caregivers and authority figures. It is widely acknowledged, at least in theory, that sexual abuse can take severe forms, but when disclosures of such abuse occur, they are routinely subject to contestation and challenge. People accused of organized, sadistic or ritualistic abuse have protested that their accusers are liars and fantasists, or else innocents led astray by overly zealous investigators. This was an argument that many journalists and academics have found more convincing than the testimony of alleged victims.

— Michael Salter

All I wanted to do was hide away from the world, but I still had a role to play. I had to be 'Girl A' - the key witness in the trial that finally saw my abusers locked up. Girl A - the girl in the newspaper stories who had been through the most hideous experience imaginable. When I read those stories, I felt like I was reading about somebody else, another girl who was subjected to the depths of human depravity. But it wasn't. It was about me. I am Girl A.

— Girl A

And that’s the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that’s done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system. And that a person who goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him and therefore society can turn its conscious off and look to other things and other times. And that’s the terrible thing about these past trials that they have this aura of legitimacy an aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their deaths through a legal system then through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich, legal, Sacco and Vanzetti, quite legal, the Haymarket defendants, legal, the hundreds of rape trials throughout the south where black men were condemned to death all legal, Jesus legal, Socrates legal and that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretext.

— William M. Kunstler

And to fight this beast of wrong is what I intend to do. To do otherwise is to sidestep this rabid injustice.

— John-Talmage Mathis

As a hedge against possible failure to prove adultery, this alleged “that for a period of time from 1901 and continuing thereafter he [had] kept up and continued an undue, improper, indecorous and licentious association and intimacy with a woman, named Mabel Cochrane, many years his junior, and of questionable character and immoral habits.”[i] Furthermore, Nina accused James of “bestowing upon and receiving marked and improper attention” beginning in the fall of 1901, “indulging in undue and improper familiarity and intimacy” with Mabel Cochrane.

— Jean Elson

As mandatory reporting laws and community awareness drove an increase its child protection investigations throughout the 1980s, some children began to disclose premeditated, sadistic and organized abuse by their parents, relatives and other caregivers such as priests and teachers (Heckler 1988). Adults in psychotherapy described similar experiences. The dichotomies that had previously associated organized abuse with the dangerous, external ‘Other’ had been breached, and the incendiary debate that followed is an illustration of the depth of the collective desire to see them restored. Campbell (1988) noted the paradox that, whilst journalists and politicians often demand that the authorities respond more decisively in response to a ‘crisis’ of sexual abuse, the action that is taken is then subsequently construed as a ‘crisis’. There has been a particularly pronounced tendency of the public reception to allegations of organized abuse. The removal of children from their parents due to disclosures of organized abuse, the provision of mental health care to survivors of organized abuse, police investigations of allegations of organized abuse and the prosecution of alleged perpetrators of organized abuse have all generated their own controversies. These were disagreements that were cloaked in the vocabulary of science and objectivity but nonetheless were played out in sensationalized fashion on prime-time television, glossy news magazines and populist books, drawing textual analysis. The role of therapy and social work in the construction of testimony of abuse and trauma. In particular, has come under sustained postmodern attack. Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organized abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Show alter 1997) and the colonization of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organized abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualization or explanation.

— Michael Salter

A will can save one’s family from being put into a quagmire pit of legal conundrum, in case of death (which may even be untimely).

— Henrietta Newton Martin

Belief is a wonderful way to pass the time until the facts come in.

— Carl R White

But nothing in my previous work had prepared me for the experience of reinvestigating Cleveland. It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County Council in the three short months of the summer of 1987. (p18)The key to resolving the puzzle of Cleveland was the children. What had actually happened to them? Had they been abused - or had the pediatricians and social workers (as public opinion held) been over-zealous and plain wrong? Curiously — particularly given its high profile, year-long sittings and £5 million cost — this was the one central issue never addressed by the Butler-Loss judicial testimony and sifting of internal evidence, the inquiry's remit did not require it to answer the main question. Ten years after the crisis, my colleagues and I set about reconstructing the records of the 121 children at its heart to determine exactly what had happened to them... (p19)Eventually, though, we did assemble the data given to the Butler-Loss Inquiry. This divided into two categories: the confidential material, presented in camera, and the transcripts of public sessions of the hearings. Putting the two together we assembled our own database on the children each identified only by the code-letters assigned to them by Butler-Loss. When it was finished, this database told a startlingly different story from the public myth. In every case there was some prime fade evidence to suggest the possibility of abuse. Far from the media fiction of parents taking their children to Middlesbrough General Hospital for a tummy ache or a sore thumb and suddenly being presented with a diagnosis of child sexual abuse, the true story was of families known to social services for months or years, histories of physical and sexual abuse of siblings and of prior discussions with parents about these concerns. In several of the cases the children themselves had made detailed disclosures of abuse; many of the pre-verbal children displayed severe emotional or behavioral symptoms consistent with sexual abuse. There were even some families in which a convicted sex offender had moved in with mother and children. (p20)

— Sue Richardson

Change cannot and will not happen overnight. But the intent to evolve will produce opportunities for growth.

— Robin D. Hart