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Abstract
Organised abuse is an uncommon form of child abuse however it has been one of the most controversial issues in debates over child abuse, memory and the law. Throughout the 1990s, adults disclosing organised abuse, and the professionals who supported them, became the subject of frequent ad hominem attacks in the popular and academic press. Whilst this controversy has largely faded away, its legacy is such that empirical data on multi-perpetrator and organised sexual offences against children remains obscured, and the development of evidence-based policy and practice in relation to organised abuse has been disrupted.
This thesis documents and analyses accounts of organised abuse from twenty one adult survivors in order to develop a deeper understanding of the range of circumstances and contexts in which organised abuse arises and the forms of abuse to which children are subjected in organised contexts. I draw from a range of feminist and critical masculinity theorists to consider how organised abuse contributes to and crafts relations between men, women and children, and how such profoundly abusive relations emerge out of everyday institutions such as the family and school.
Within the sexual subcultures of abusive groups, the structured powerlessness of children signifies them as potential objects of exchange between men who seek to affirm masculine domination, and accrue status and prestige, through shared performances of control, transgression and sexual violence. Whilst the violence of these performances can reach extraordinary heights, the control mechanisms through which children are subjugated to organised abuse rest upon the socially legitimised power of their abusers, who are usually parents, relatives or other authority figures. Since the practices of power through which children are entrapped in organised abuse are normative and widespread, organised abuse is rarely detected in the circumstances in which it arises. Nonetheless, this study has brought to tight multiple intervention points through which organised abuse can be disrupted and the harms of organised abuse ameliorated, and identifies a number of opportunities for intervention.