Ritual abuse: A definition

This paper presents a brief definition of ritual abuse, drawn from a process of conversation and reflection between practitioners and academics of various kinds. The authors' aim has been to work towards a definition which is clear and concise in its expression, yet very broad in its range of application. The definition itself therefore concentrates on distilling out the essence of ritual abuse from the cases known to us, and avoids making any assumptions about motivation, effect, type of belief system or symbolic network, number of people involved, etc.; indeed, anything which might unnecessarily rule out an empirical instance from consideration. In effect, we have assumed that we do not know the full range of instances which might be termed ritual abuse, and so have resisted the temptation of universalizing the details of concrete cases known to us. In this way, we hope that we have come up with a theoretical definition which might allow us to recognize empirical instances which do not conform to our expectations based on past experience. We have, however, included some observations based on the experience of the group. These detail what we believe to be common aspects of ritual abuse as it has so far been identified in cases of which we are aware. The observations do not form part of the definition proper, but should aid the recognition of ritual abuse, if read together with it.