Defining organized sexual abuse

Abstract

AbstractThe label ‘organized abuse’ is widely used but without an agreed meaning. An agreed definition would improve communication among practitioners and make it easier to compare the results of different pieces of research. Items classified together must possess at least one feature in common: in the case of organized abuse this is that they all involve more than one perpetrator. Some types of case for which the label ‘organized’ has been used, like those that concern children's sexual abuse in an institution or that include allegations of a ritual context, do not fulfil even this initial criterion. Some cases of institutional or ritual abuse may also be cases of organized abuse but the terms are not synonymous with each other. Domestic cases, where all the perpetrators and the victims are members of a single household, are also sufficiently unlike the paradigmatic case of organized abuse for them to be excluded from the category. The recognition that exclusion is as necessary to rigorous definition as inclusion requires making explicit what definitions are and what they are for.