Demystifying ritual abuse - insights by self-identified victims and health care professionals

ABSTRACT

Empirical evidence on organized and ritual child sexual abuse (ORA), that is, organized child sexual abuse with an ideological framework, is rare and definitions of the term “ritual” are often vague or inhomogeneous. The aim of the current study is to analyze contents, purposes and acts of violence in ORA.

In a project of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in Germany, 165 adults who identified themselves as ORA victims as well as 174 health care professionals who supported ORA victims were recruited via various sources and completed anonymous online surveys.

Both samples report experiences with ideological frameworks in organized child sexual abuse contexts at the same ratio (88%). Ideologies are mostly perceived as a means to facilitate violent acts (e.g. commercial sexual exploitation). Positive correlations between the manifestation of ideologies and all violent acts suggest that organized and ritual perpetrator groups use the same violent strategies, but ritual or ideological groups, in which perpetrators are more often family members, use them to a greater extent.

A modified narrative of “ritual abuse” as a (pseudo-)ideological, domestic and more violent subtype of organized child sexual abuse could enhance the credibility and visibility of ORA in science as well as in society.

KEYWORDS:

• Child sexual abuse
• organized abuse
• ritual abuse

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Ann-Kathrin Kraus, Laura Pietras, Samantha Schröder, and the reviewers for their support.

Disclosure Statement

The funding body had no role in the design of the study, data collection, analysis, or interpretation of the data. The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Statement of Ethics

Subjects have given their digital informed consent. The trial was approved by the ethics committee of the Federal Chamber of Psychotherapists Hamburg and conducted in compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association, 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (UKASK: Unabhängige Kommission zur Aufarbeitung Sexuellen Kindesmissbrauchs) in Germany [UAK-1612/30].