Dr. Sarah Nelson – The Discourse of Disbelief
The 2020 Online Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference, August 8 – 9, 2020.
“The Discourse of Disbelief”
Sarah Nelson MA PhD, Universities of Edinburgh and Dundee
Judith Herman: “In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens”.
Carolyn Spring: “Denial of the DID syndrome is part of the syndrome, and so the hardest battle is for us to believe it ourselves.”
In this presentation I want to make some reflections on belief and disbelief in ritual abuse, and on why backlash theories such as satanic panic and false memory syndrome were so readily believed and are still potent, despite their numerous flaws. But I also want to interconnect the disbelief by outsiders including professionals, many media and public with the disbelief and doubts of survivors themselves, thinking about the interplay and mutual strengthening which has long taken place. I think that is perhaps a neglected aspect of the discourse of disbelief, yet it is important and relevant.
I go on to discuss the example of interplay of disbelief between survivors themselves and these outsiders in dissociative identify disorder, formerly multiple personality disorder, a condition strongly linked to the experience of the profound trauma of ritual abuse in childhood. I ask whether and how far this circle can be broken in working against ritual abuse in future.
To quote Kate Richardson: “One of the more common experiences that unites survivors of child abuse is that of having one’s abusive history denied, disbelieved or minimised… for survivors of ritual abuse, whose abusive experiences have routinely been classified as ‘false memories’ and for whom validating and informed professional support is sparse, this silence has been particularly deafening”.
Despite the at least partial debunking of ‘false memory’, the discourse of disbelief, it seems, has not evaporated, despite survivors continuing to present themselves across various professional and medical environments.
Ritual abuse, and in particular satanist ritual abuse, was framed as a ‘moral panic’, driven by the influence of evangelical Christians and the malpractice of social workers. Most press coverage at the time (late 1980’s-early 1990s) failed to reflect these complexities, and cases were invariably painted in the media as baseless witch‐hunts against innocent parents.
The Scottish journalist Torcuil Crichton repeated the myth about ‘satanic panic’ which he had been told during the Orkney child abuse case (1991-92): “South Ronaldsay (Orkney) is where the ritual sexual abuse theory leapt from the pages of social work journals and entered the popular lexicon of the nation. … A psychiatrist Roland Summit’s controversial idea was that organised, ritualistic abuse of children was happening everywhere. … it was out there, and all social workers had to do was go and find it. And they did so with a passion of a zealot rooting out evil. The idea crossed the Atlantic gaining professional credibility as it spread like wildfire.”
On demonic wings, presumably!
Flaws in satanic panic theory
In my book (Nelson, 2016), I describe numerous flaws in satanic panic theory which had to be either unnoticed or ignored. In summary:
• There WAS no widespread panic – most professionals and lay people remained unaware of these disclosures and behaviours. Only a small, often isolated minority of police, psychiatrists and counsellors, journalists, child protection professionals and foster parents had encountered them, and most of their own colleagues were sceptical of their belief.
• Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that professionals and random feminists pursued satanic abuse theory with passion or zeal.
That anyone would actually want to find it, or would be pleased and zealous in pursuit, was bitterly laughable. Even for people experienced in working with CSA, it was the worst, most disorienting and traumatising knowledge in the world, challenging all your beliefs and your assumptions about human beings. Ritual abuse cases also brought many professionals considerable fears for their personal safety.
• The scapegoats and folk devils in classic moral panic theory (Cohen, 2002) should have been the accused adults. Instead they have been the professionals who took children into care, and/or publicly professed a belief that ritual abuse existed.
• Another essential feature of ‘moral panics’ in classic sociological theory is that these are promoted, carried and encouraged by the media. But most media, after a brief flurry of salacious interest, became not supportive but hostile in their coverage of ritual abuse. Most media have supported accused parents and adults with standing in their communities.
• The verbal disclosures, actions and behaviours of children and adults abused in ritual settings were so baffling, so esoteric and so unlike content previously heard that it would be incredibly difficult or impossible generate these words, actions and behaviour through pressured interviewing techniques by, for instance social workers. It was in fact the foster parents of children taken into care in both Nottingham (England) and Orkney (Scotland), not professionals, who produced by far the most evidence of children’s bizarre statements, drawings and actions. These were ordinary people who were baffled and disturbed by what they witnessed and heard from the children placed in their care.
• People, including journalists, lost their critical faculties. For instance, on Orkney claims were spread that one ‘born-again’ Christian basic grade social worker, CF, influenced Orkney and Strathclyde social work departments and police into jointly carrying out the dawn raids on four families with children. This was implied too in BBC Scotland TV’s ludicrous ‘faction’ drama Flowers of the Forest (BBC2, 1996). Both ignored the simple fact that a basic grade social worker had no power, influence or status to achieve this far-reaching joint action by police and social workers, which was authorised from top level!
Flaws in false memory syndrome theory
‘Satanic panic’ theory has an interconnection with the false memory movement. For Michael Salter, the rhetorical importance for false memory syndrome of ‘satanic ritual abuse’, and the chance this gave to ridicule allegations of CSA, is shown by the term being found in 140 of 144 newsletters of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (Salter, 2013). FMS has been one of the most influential backlash theories of recent decades. Uncritically promoted through most media for many years, it is still propounded today, even though the FMSF recently collapsed (see French, 2014).
• FMS was invented in the early 1990s, as a new psychiatric condition, by accused adults, mainly middle-class professional men whose adult children had accused them, sometimes after recovering memories. That in itself should have attracted the strongest critical scrutiny. Do we normally accept the theories of people accused of the very crimes they dismiss? I don’t think so!
• The alcoholic FMSF founder Peter Freyd had no qualifications or expertise on memory, trauma or psychology, while his daughter Jennifer was a respected professor of psychology. (Freyd, 1996)
• There was no scientific basis for false memory syndrome, no studies confirming it, yet there were numerous studies confirming that traumatic amnesia could occur, not just in sexual abuse but for instance in conflict trauma, and in concentration camp experiences.
• False memories of sexual abuse were allegedly put into the heads of gullible, mentally unwell women by therapists, using dubious techniques, unreasonable pressures or even brainwashing, though the techniques were not specified. These women supposedly found it comforting to blame their mental ill health, their troubles or inadequacies on the explanation of sexual abuse in childhood. However, disclosing sexual abuse is not easy or comforting at all. The experience of CSA exposes people to social stigma, shame, disbelief, deeply confused loyalties, the pain of betrayal, often by people they loved and trusted most, and possible court cases where they may be vilified and dismissed. Hence many survivors take decades to disclose, while others never do so. Instead, Harvey and Herman (1994) suggest that recovering memories is so agonising that survivors hold on to denial for as long as possible.
• Many of the accusers had retained memories of their abuse, or corroboration of their abuse, long before they went to a therapist at all.
Why were these fabrications so tempting to believe, so relatively easy for abusers and their support lobbies to erect them, and for them to remain potent?
Uncomfortable to learn about or believe
Learning about this subject makes many people uncomfortable and distressed, especially (and understandably) the idea of trusted parents and carers sexually abusing young children or inflicting extreme cruelties. Theories which reassure that this is untrue are thus very tempting to seize upon.
“It is as though we don’t want to believe it, and so every bit of evidence that is presented to us, no matter how convincing, is then filtered out through the fine mesh of our beliefs and doubts. With this kind of internal pressure to disbelieve all evidence, our objectivity and reasoning capacities are then not open to allow us to carefully listen, consider and weigh what we hear from both sides”. (Whitfield, 2001)
“Organised abuse highlights the potential of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse”. (Salter, 2013)
Yet if child and adult survivors find the courage to tell us, then we must find the courage to listen with an open mind, and challenge our own beliefs, if their accounts suggest that it is time to do so.
Historic prejudices against child and adult victims
Historic legacies of often strongly prejudiced assumptions against children and women in particular have influenced many people towards ready acceptance of backlash theories. There have been powerful reservoirs of prejudice against children, with their long history of being disbelieved in sexual abuse, as ready liars and ready fantasisers, and even as instigators and encouragers of sexual acts.
Into the mix has gone the strong historic tradition of prejudice about alleged hysteria, malice and emotionalism in adult women; along with doubts about the credibility of male survivors who have committed offences or misused drugs in reaction to their abuse trauma.
‘It’s against common sense’
Elements of ritual abuse in particular can appear to defy ‘common sense’ Thus in ritual abuse, if children say people have died and returned to life, that a tiger was in the room, or that they flew across the ceiling, this is easy to dismiss – unless you know such sincere childish beliefs can be instilled through drugging, sensory deprivation and conjuring tricks.
Secondly, the effects of childhood sexual trauma such as traumatic amnesia and severe dissociative disorders appear to defy ‘common sense’. Backlash proponents met ready agreement if they asked: “surely, people could not possibly forget shocking life experiences and suddenly remember at age 35? Someone must have put these ideas into their heads? And multiple personalities – are you having a laugh?” Only a minority of professionals working with trauma were familiar with the complexity of the human brain, well documented over many decades in relation to battlefield, torture and concentration camp experiences.
Religion and mind control concepts alien, unimportant or dismissed as cinema fantasy
Kate Richardson describes how mind control and brainwashing appeared at odds with the available empirical evidence – these terms have been at best heavily contested and regarded as overly simplistic. Mind control has been viewed by some psychologists as science fiction. Bodily pain and abject horror, of the tangibility of death and extreme violence, are both experientially and conceptually alien to most members of late‐modern western societies (which is not to say the British and American authorities have not committed torture at times: just that their governments and most of their citizens don’t acknowledge it). Stories of torture, infanticide and human sacrifice are largely confined to fiction, or dismissed and displaced to ‘zones of fear’ overseas. Accounts of RA thus seem bizarre and alien.
Another factor in the perceived (in)credibility of ritual abuse accounts may be that perpetrators appear heavily influenced by religion, when most Western societies are characterised by secularism among the majority. Aside from simple racist motivations, the relative visibility of the faith of immigrant ‘others’ may explain why crimes linked to ‘their’ faith and belief appear not to have been met with the same disbelief that has hindered efforts to support survivors of ritual abuse.
Unpalatable class and political aspects
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw many more professional middle-class people accused, when previously known defendants in ‘incest’ cases were typically the working class or rural poor. For professional people including editors and journalists, these were decent, educated ‘people like us’, with whom they could readily identify, a very unsettling situation and one I personally witnessed when a journalist.
For strong believers in traditional, patriarchal family values, the FMS lobby appealed to a powerful ideal: close loving families, cruelly shattered by baffling, false allegations. Political liberals and libertarians in their turn have long worried that state intrusion into the private sphere undermines civil liberties: they frequently hold, too, optimistic beliefs about the sexual free agency of younger teenagers, which underplay the role of coercion. The theory that claims of widespread CSA simply constitute a ‘moral panic’ or ‘witch hunt’ has thus been very appealing to liberals and progressives. Finally, allegations could readily be seen as an attack on alternative spiritualities, such as paganism.
As a result… A whole series of factors congealed to fog many intelligent people’s critical sense. The crucial point was ignored that those adults were accused of serious crimes, thus there was a strong possibility of special pleading.
Effects on survivors
What this whole discourse of disbelief did to survivors of ritual abuse was to make them further increase their own doubts about whether these extraordinary, sadistic, horrifying, organised acts had happened to them. We say “further increase” just because it has been such a common experience, due to the extreme severity of their abuse. Traumatic amnesia has been very common, and thus so many people have been recovering very splintered, partial and confusing memories later in their lives. Some memories are fairly complete, but others are a mere patchwork of disjointed and terrifying images, ones which nobody would wish to believe could be true, and which usually involved centrally those very people who should have cared most for them. RA is after all based on lies, it promotes lies and survivors already exist in a world of lies; many have had serious mental ill health for much of their lives: why should they trust that they are not simply mad and mistaken?
Marjorie Orr for instance (Orr, 1995) who so meticulously collected misrepresentations of false memory and their factual counter-arguments, described from survivors how these claims of false memory, especially emanating and being publicised by their own families – how these claims only made them doubt further their own reality and caused some to retract, some publicly in the full glare of the media. In this sense many perhaps most survivors of RA have been party, as unwittingly as could be, to the whole narrative of disbelief around what they suffered. That sounds an odd thing to say, but it is illustrative only of the use and abuse of power, a monstrous power and monstrous imbalance of power, which is such a feature of this form of organised abuse.
Belief and disbelief in dissociative identity disorder
Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID, previously known as multiple personality disorder, is a condition associated with very severe and prolonged childhood trauma: in particular with a history of ritual organised abuse. It is no coincidence therefore that it has been rubbished so much. The ISSTD suggest that someone can spend between 5 and 12 years in the mental health system before receiving a correct diagnosis, and Brand et al (2009) suggest that on average people receive 3-4 previous diagnoses before gaining a correct one…if they do at all.
A very sensitive exploration of belief and disbelief among survivors with DID, and how this interlocks and interconnects with belief and disbelief among sceptics, professionals and public, both about DID and about ritual abuse itself, comes from Carolyn Spring and Karen Johnson:
Carolyn Spring: “It is fantastical – the switching between personalities, and the abuse we suffered as children, is often so far beyond people’s imagination that it seems that it cannot, must not be real. And yet it is. Just because something doesn’t seem real doesn’t mean that it isn’t:” She considers many historical instances: e.g. the world couldn’t possibly be round; smoking couldn’t cause lung cancer; climate change is nonsense. (And my beloved Aberdeen FC couldn’t possibly win two European trophies!!)
DID, like ritual abuse itself, has been very much the subject of disinformation and mythmaking in order to foster disbelief among professionals and public. One frequent argument is that it is ‘iatrogenic’ – caused by the therapist, planting the suggestion of ‘multiple personalities’, so that people develop the symptoms expected of them.
Spring|: “I know a lot of people with DID, and a lot of them struggle to believe that they have it. They struggle to believe that they had a traumatic history, and they struggle to believe that the plethora of symptoms which plague their lives…are anything other than a sign that they are intrinsically ‘bad’ or hopelessly ‘mad’ …
“When people start writing articles in newspapers, magazines and blogs claiming that it doesn’t even exist, it is deeply distressing to us. On the one hand, we would like nothing more than to discover that we don’t have DID, don’t have multiple personalities; don’t have a horrific history of childhood trauma or neglect. On the other hand, we would be terrified: If this label, weird and incomprehensible though at times it is, doesn’t describe what is going on for us in our daily lives, what on earth is wrong with us? And if we just think we have parts or alters (or whatever other term we prefer to use), when actually they aren’t real and they have just been created by the therapist who was supposed to be helping us … then what hope is there for recovery…and if the people who are supposed to be helping are actually the ones causing the problem in the first place?”
There is no doubt that the book and especially the film Sybil brought Multiple Personality Disorder into public consciousness. But it provided a skewed representation of what dissociative identity disorder actually is – a caricature that it is very difficult for survivors to escape. I (SN) have seen representations on crime programmes where people conspicuously switching continually and, of course the answer revealed is that they are faking it. Yet Richard Kluft and other’s research finding suggested only about 6 % of known survivors make their DID obvious on an ongoing basis (Kluft, 2009).
The sceptics’ arguments, as with satanic panic and false memory, fall down in several places. As the ISSTD points out, DID is not just a phenomenon of wealthy Western countries: prevalence studies have been internationally carried out. It is cultural understanding and beliefs around dissociative experiences which affect interpretation and therefore prevalence scores – for example, if ‘possession states’ are believed to be supernatural, rather than dissociative.
Where the iatrogenic argument immediately falls down in Carolyn’s case is that she had severe dissociative symptoms and mental breakdowns, she lost time and was suicidal, many years before she first sat in a therapist’s room. Similarly, most people accused of false memory encouraged by therapists had some recollections of, or corroboration for, CSA long before they went into counselling. Alters also came out in counselling despite Carolyn’s efforts to conceal them. Clients try to conceal it, rather than flaunt it.
“Many of us hate our diagnosis, are deeply ashamed of it, and don’t want anyone else to know about it…there remain people in my ‘normal life’ whom I don’t want to tell, and from whom I still hide. Similarly, Karen Johnson writes “For most of us, we feel huge shame at having ‘parts’ and do our best to hide them, letting them ‘out’ as little as possible, and only then in the safety and privacy of a therapy room or at home”.
Carolyn again: “ I would go home and beat myself up for lying and making it all up, and yet with a deeply anxious sense that I wasn’t, and that it was true, and that I knew it was”…a new therapist confirmed that she had DID “and she seemed so nonchalant about it, as if I’d asked her if I had brown hair, that somehow some of the shame receded, but I still recoiled inside with that awful sense that I couldn’t get away from facing that reality any more”.
A growing body of research in the neuroscientific field suggests that DID does unquestionably exist. A large number of brain imaging studies using various neuroimaging techniques, including structural magnetic resonance imaging (SMRI), positron emission tomography (PET scan) and blood flow studies in the brain suggest this. There have been rigorous, larger-scale studies such as Vermetten et al (2006) which basically suggest that there are differences in the brains of people with dissociative identity disorder compared to others.
However, Spring’s conviction is still that despite these scientific studies, people who choose not to believe will continue to do so…just as many politicians do, after all, on a much wider scale, about climate change in the face of any or all evidence.
Carolyn Spring concludes: “If we could get away from the Sybil stereotypes, it might help, but the sad thing is that we suffered disbelief and denial as children and this is re-enacted for us in so many contexts again as adults. It is distressing enough to suffer from dissociative identity disorder as it is, without the added weight of people not believing that it even exists. I am reassured that rates for ‘false’ DID are no higher than for any other psychiatric diagnosis. I am also reassured that …. bodies such as the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation have produced guidelines for treating dissociative identity disorder – there are lots of people who take this condition seriously nowadays.
“But perhaps, as I say on training days, ‘denial of the syndrome is part of the syndrome’, and so the hardest battle is for us to believe it ourselves.”
The future
What hope is there for the future that the discourse of disbelief might be undermined in respect of ritual abuse? Kate Richardson, in her paper Dissecting Disbelief: Possible Reasons for the Denial of the Existence of Ritual Abuse in the UK notes that both Goodwin (1994) and Salter raise concerns that the influence of cult literature on ritual abuse discourse has resulted in an obfuscation of the relationship between ritual abuse and other more recognised forms of child abuse. In particular, that links among RA, production of child pornography and commercial sexual exploitation have been severed, with the more ‘bizarre’ elements of survivor’s narratives moved into the foreground. And indeed we could say the connections with political torture, rape and sexual tortures in war and other atrocities have been severed, and need reconnecting.
I agree with all that – – to promote understanding of a spectrum of sadistic and often unspeakable behaviours which humans are clearly capable of. Although one has to admit realistically that most people shrink from thinking about those things either -but perhaps among some key groups of professionals including importantly the police, one could work on fostering that understanding.
But I’m not sure I agree that understanding of cults as an important aspect of satanist abuse is necessarily unhelpful. In the sense that I have often said to people, “you believe X and Y cults exist- you’ve read about them- you don’t assume you have to believe any of the things they preach, yet with satanist cults you somehow seem to think that believing they exist equates to believing their own obnoxious beliefs”. It might simply you to catch someone one day and rescue children if for instance you know which dates in the calendar they might be slightly more visible. Also, given that religious fervour and deep commitment is now alien as Richardson says to most white British people from a Christian background, leading to further disbelief in RA, understanding of cults does bring with it an understanding that for some people it underpins heir whole life and behaviour.
Again I am not sure if it is actually the most physically revolting, obscene and extreme aspects of SRA which need to be played down in order to reduce disbelief in SRA in particular. When I think of what I found hardest to deal with after the initial shock at the nausea- inducing acts was other things – like how individuals could be two completely different people (well of course you eventually realise dissociation is responsible for this and can explain this to others) or like how they concealed things things or got rid of things and disposed of bodies- very practical questions.
It was talking to survivors about conjuring tricks, about hiding paraphernalia in plain sight in churches or castles, about placing low level members of the cult as mortuary attendants or gravediggers and highly placed ones strategically in police or caring professions in one case head of customs at a major port) that began to make sense in practical terms.
But I’m not sure we can ever force people to confront the likes of SRA and the overturning of our most treasured assumptions and beliefs, including religious beliefs about the nature of the world and of human beings, and the limits of their behaviour towards children. It is deeply and profoundly shocking and has continued to impact on all of us who have walked unknowingly into the reality of it.
Where I do strongly disagree with Kate in her paper comes from her feeling that the media and sceptical academic publications have successfully ‘historicised’ ritual abuse. Even in practical child protection texts, she says, the “now‐irrelevant” cases of Cleveland, Orkney, Rochdale and Nottingham are summoned to construct ritual abuse as an isolated period of hysteria confined to the early 1990s. It is necessary therefore, she says, that these cases are consigned to history and that a new conversation about ritual abuse brings to the fore recent research and convictions, which demonstrate that ritual abuse is still both a pertinent and legitimate problem, despite its disappearance from the public eye.
I agree with the second part of that sentence, but because such notorious cases dominate misperception and myth making in the UK I actually think it is tremendously important that breakthroughs might be made in any of these past cases, or at least that reassessment is properly and fully publicised. Cleveland has indeed been reassessed and publicly so on TV documentaries but this still remains obscured. I have reassessed Orkney thoroughly 3 years ago in my book (Nelson 2016 ch 3) yet very little publicity indeed has been given to it. But I think that is work which it is continually important to do, and that we must correct untruths each time they happen- however tedious and frustrating the effort may be. I always email in when I read nonsense about the Orkney case even on the BBC’s own news website. I also think the continuing effort to find any breakthrough and to correct untruths is important in itself, because why should we allow lies to continue to the detriment not only of many children then, but of the adults they now are?
Another essential part of the battle we are in is I think to stand by survivors in doing anything which assists them to build the strength and self- esteem and self- belief that they themselves can break into this cycle of disbelief, which feeds upon and strengthens its power to undermine.
That is not about those endless calls to speak out and break the silence, which they have already been doing for decades. It is about being able to speak out with the strength and conviction and knowledge – and without the doubts – that what happened to them and others was real.
(ends)
References and other useful reading
BBC 2, Drama (1996) ‘Flowers of the Forest’, Director Michael Whyte, 26 October.
Brand, B., Classen, C., Lanius, R., Loewenstein, R., McNary, S., Pain, C., & Putnam, F. (2009). “A naturalistic study of dissociative identity disorder and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified patients treated by community clinicians”, Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 1(3), 205.
Campbell, B. (1998) Unofficial Secrets – Child Sexual Abuse: The Cleveland Case, London: Virago. A new edition is expected soon.
Channel 4 (1997) Unspeakable Truths: The Death of Childhood, produced by Tim Tate, broadcast 27 May.
Cheit, R. (2014) The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children, New York: Oxford University Press.
Clyde J. (1992) The Report of the Inquiry into the Removal of Children from Orkney in February 1991. Edinburgh: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
Cohen, S. (2002) Folk Devils And Moral Panics: The Creation Of The Mods And Rockers, 3rd edition, New York: Psychology Press
Crichton, Torcuil (2001) ‘Orkney: 10 years after’, Sunday Herald, 25 January.
Donaldson, L. and O’Brien, S. (1995) ‘Press coverage of the Cleveland child sexual abuse enquiry: a source of public enlightenment?’, Journal of Public Health Medicine, 17(1): 70–6.
French, C. (2014) ‘Satanic child abuse claims are almost certainly based on false memories’, Guardian, 18 November.
Freyd, J. (1996) Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Goodwin, J. (1993) ‘Sadistic abuse: Definition, recognition, and treatment’, Dissociation, 6(2/3): 181–7.
Harvey, M. R., & Herman, J. L. (1994). Amnesia, partial amnesia and delayed recall among survivors of childhood trauma. Consciousness and Cognition, 3, 295–306.
Herman, J.L. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York: Basic Books
Johnson, Karen: https://information.pods-online.org.uk/the-problem-of-prevalence-how-common-is-did/
Kitzinger, J. (2000) Media templates: Patterns of association and the reconstruction of meaning over time, Media Culture and Society 22(1): 61‐84.
Kluft, R. P. (2009). A clinician’s understanding of dissociation: fragments of an acquaintance. In P. F. Dell & J. A. O’Neil (Eds.), Dissociation and the dissociative disorders: DSM-V and beyond (pp. 599–624). New York, NY: Routledge.
Matthew, L. (2002) Where Angels Fear: Ritual Abuse in Scotland, Dundee: Young Women’s Centre Trading Ltd.
Matthew, L. (2005) Behind Enemy Lines, Dundee: Young Women’s Centre Trading Ltd.
Mollon, P. (1996) Multiple Selves, Multiple Voices: Working with Trauma, Violation and Dissociation, Chichester: John Wiley.
Morton, J., Andrews, B., Bekerian, D., Brewin, C., Davies, G. and Mollon, P. (1995) ‘Recovered memories: The report of the working party of the British Psychological Society’.
Orr , M. (1995) ‘False Memory’ Syndrome, Self & Society, 23 (3) 24-27 .
Pezdek, K. & Banks W. (eds) The recovered memory/false memory debate, San Diego, CA: Academic Press, pp.373–92.
Nelson, S. (2016) Tackling Child Sexual Abuse: Radical approaches to prevention, protection and support, Bristol: Policy Press.
Salter, M. (2013) Organised Abuse, London & New York: Routledge.
Schreiber, F. (2009) Sybil, reissue edition, New York: Grand Central Publishing. Original published in 1973.
Richardson K (2015) Dissecting disbelief: Possible reasons for the denial of the existence of ritual abuse in the United Kingdom, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 4(2): 77‐93.
Scott, S. (2001) The Politics and Experience of Ritual Abuse: Beyond Disbelief, Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Sinason, V. (ed) (1994) Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse, New York: Routledge
Spring, Carolyn: https://information.pods-online.org.uk/pseudogenic-iatrogenic-or-traumagenic-how-do-we-know-that-did-is-real/
Vermetten, E. Schmahl C. Lindner S,.Loewenstein R. and Bremner J. (2006) Hippocampal and amygdalar volumes in dissociative identity disorder, Am J Psychiatry, 163(4):630-6.
Whitfield, C. (2001) ‘The “false memory” defense: Using disinformation and junk science in and out of court’, Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 9(304): 53–78
Williams, A. and Amris, K. (2007) ‘Chronic Pain in Survivors of Torture’, Pain, 15(7).
Sarah.Nelson@ed.ac.uk.
