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Summary
A hard truth sits at the center of our talk with Dr. Michael Salter: organized child sexual abuse isn’t rare, and it doesn’t look like the stereotypes. We trace how digital evidence exposed collaborative offending once dismissed as myth, why high-profile cases shifted public imagination, and how policy still falls short. As Michael shares his origin story—from a student house to a career shaped by proximity to a survivor—we look at what it takes to see clearly when our instincts urge us to look away.
We dig into the data: many offenders are educated, partnered, and well networked, which helps explain why investigations stall and why appeals succeed. Michael makes the case for treating child sexual abuse as organized crime, mapping networks, resourcing disruption, and balancing the prosecutorial emphasis between online offenses and the complex, lower-conviction offline cases inside families. We talk about collective dissociation—how communities normalize visible distress without asking the harder questions—and why naming specific harms like incest, multigenerational abuse, and the targeting of foster youth is essential for real protection.
You’ll hear concrete steps for systems and for all of us: specialized units trained for very young victims, survivor-centered services that understand dissociation and complex trauma, and a commitment to protect low-status children with the same urgency as those who are more visible. The message is clear and actionable: policy moves when people do. If this conversation sparks you, share it with someone who needs to hear it, subscribe for more evidence-led healing conversations, and leave a review to help others find the show.
Learn more about Michael's work at: https://www.organisedabuse.com/
Chapters
0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
1:44 Sponsor: SimplePractice Offer
3:18 Michael’s Path Into Organized Abuse Research
6:00 Internet Evidence And Public Awareness Shift
8:30 Policy Gaps And Organized Crime Lens
11:00 Offender Profiles And Prosecution Challenges
14:40 Collective Dissociation And Naming Harm
18:27 Forms Of Organized And Online Abuse
22:20 Integration Across Therapy, Law, And Finance
25:45 Resource Drift And Competing Priorities
27:45 Reporting Dynamics And Therapist Readiness
31:20 DARVO, Power, And Survivor Perseverance
35:05 Holding Hope And Public Windows Of Tolerance
38:10 Shame‑Sensitive, Dignity‑Affirming Practices
42:15 Royal Commission: Designing For Dignity
47:00 Navigating Punitive Systems Together
49:15 Learning, Resources, And Practitioner Support
51:20 Global Coordination And Upcoming Work
53:20 Where To Connect And Sources Of Hope
56:30 Closing, Listener Invitation, And Credits
Full Transcript
Welcome back to the How We Can Heal podcast. Today, our guest is Dr. Michael Salter, a leading criminologist and professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. His work cuts to the heart of some of the most challenging issues in criminology and social policy, from organized child sexual abuse and gender-based violence to complex trauma and technologically facilitated abuse. He's the author of two books, Organized Sexual Abuse and Crime, Justice and Social Media. And he's published over 60 influential papers that bridge academic theory and real-world impact. Dr. Salter has also served in leadership roles across national and international bodies. That's where we met. And he sits on editorial boards for journals, including Child Abuse Review and the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation. As director of the East Asia and Pacific Hub of Childlight, he conducts research and partnerships with governments, civil society organizations, and survivor advocates to produce actionable insights and inform interventions into child sexual abuse. Our conversation today focuses on how systems, technology, and societal structures can shape both harm and healing. It's a conversation grounded in research, compassion, and a deep drive for healing and positive change. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Michael Salter to the show.
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Welcome to the How We Can Heal podcast. Michael Salter, great to have you here.
Great to be with you, Lisa.
So, how'd you get into this work? How'd you become a criminologist specializing in organized abuse?
It's a great question. It definitely wasn't part of the plan. Um, so probably in the late 90s, I went to uni, the university college, didn't really know what I wanted to be when I grew up, had a few vague plans. Um, but I moved into a share house with like a really cheap, like low-rent chairhouse with a couple of people, uh, including a young woman that I'll call Sarah. Uh, and so living with Sarah was the first time I was exposed to just really quite profound trauma symptoms. Um so she had the bedroom next to me, and so I could hear her flashbacks. Living with her meant that, you know, I could see the issues that she had with eating and what I would now sort of recognize as quite dissociative episodes. And we sort of became friends over a period of years, and she let me into her life and her life story, which included organized sadistic and ritual abuse in childhood. And I'd sort of grown up in the 90s and just reading sort of false memory type articles. So I'd always been taught um growing up that actually these things don't happen and this is all false, but it emerged she was still being abused at the time, which is pretty common, particularly for female survivors of organized abuse, that the abuse doesn't necessarily stop when they're children. Uh, there was also a number of newspaper articles in the early 2000s that had a lot of details that Sarah had shared with me confidentially. Um, and that's when I became aware that there was a much larger context and there had been a lot of systemic failures by police and authorities to investigate. So that's really what triggered me to go back to school, do my PhD on organized child sexual abuse, and start to fill in the gaps and understand, you know, how is it possible that we can live in countries like the United States or Australia and these really awful things can happen to children without anybody doing all that much to stop it, actually.
Yeah, and we both know that that continues and is happening today as we speak. I'm curious if you can share any even seemingly small win for the field for advocates like you that you've seen come to light in recent years.
Look, I'm actually really optimistic. So much has changed in the last 20 years that I've been
doing this work. Uh, and I think there's a few reasons for that. One is the internet. Uh, and so when I started doing this work in 2005, the idea that sex offenders would collaborate to abuse children, the idea that sex offenders were quite sadistic or quite bizarre, you know, these were almost considered to be urban legends. Uh, but unfortunately, the digital evidence is very straightforward about the propensity of child sex offenders to collaborate, um, their interest in quite sadistic and bizarre forms of sexual abuse. It's just undeniable. So the internet's made that really clear. Um, and at the same time, we've had these very high-profile cases, Jeffrey Epstein being just one of many, but you know, we had Jimmy Savile in the UK. Um, we've had similar sorts of uh revelations here in Australia, where we've had very well substantiated cases of um priests, for example, and clergy collaborating in the abuse of children over quite a long period of time. Uh, and so the public imagination and understanding of what's possible in the field of child sexual abuse has expanded considerably. What we haven't had is a commensurate shift in public policy, a commensurate shift in law enforcement, prioritization, and really understanding child sexual abuse as a form of organized crime that requires targeted intervention and disruption. So I think we're at that tipping point, but we just haven't seen our governments and our states engage with the seriousness that this issue deserves.
What do you think we need for that to happen?
Who um child sexual abuse is a really interesting paradox because, on one hand, everybody tells you that it's really serious and there's nothing more serious than the abuse of children, and so you hear that all the time. But frankly, at a political level, it's really easy to de-prioritize child sexual abuse. Um, when you investigate it, it makes a lot of trouble. It's really hard to investigate, it's quite hard to prosecute. Um, it annoys a range of people, particularly the offenders. We have conducted the world's largest perpetration prevalence study. So we surveyed 5,000 men, uh, including 1,500 men in the US, um, about their sexual interest in children
and the sexual abuse of children. Um, and across all of the jurisdictions that we've surveyed, the our findings are really clear, which is that men who abuse children, men who have a sexual interest in children, actually socioeconomically are doing better than your average man. So they're higher income, they're better educated, they're more likely to be partnered or married, they've got stronger social support, social networks. Uh, so this is really unusual. Like if if we're looking at domestic violence, if we're looking at car theft, then often there's a spectrum of offenders, but generally they tend to be a bit more disordered, mentally ill, behaviorally dysregulated. Child sex offenders, it includes a cohort of men like that. But one of the reasons why it's hard to investigate and prosecute child sexual abuse is because we have a disproportionate uh cohort of middle and upper class offenders who are superficially quite pro-social. Something we also found in our data is that half of men who abuse children have a friend who also abuses children. So these men are quite well networked. And the reason why I'm outlining this is just you start to see the social and political reasons why investigating child sexual abuse stirs up so many problems for government. And so at the moment where they are investigating and prioritizing child sexual abuse, it's often in the online space because it's very visible and there's a lot of digital evidence. It's quite easy to prosecute. Like set conviction rates for online offenses is about 95%. But for offline offenses, especially child sexual abuse in the family, especially if you've got a really young victim, like a child at two or three or four who's disclosing, if you don't have medical evidence and if you don't have photographic evidence, conviction rates are low and appeal rates are high. So it really requires states to do a big rethink about our whole systemic approach to child sexual abuse. And ultimately that is a matter of political will. So what is it going to take? It's gonna take us. It's actually gonna take us, it's gonna take the trauma sector, but it's gonna take the public to demand better than the systems than we have.
Yeah. And it's coming up against the structures of power that you're outlining. And also, I often think about just collective dissociation.
And I mean that in a way of how do people cope with really awful news or images or right, even the photographic evidence you're speaking of, like that can be another uh intrusion and something really hard for um parents to want to see or to see. And so this sense that we need to accept collectively that this is true and turn toward it, right? Like we have to look at it, which we all have our ways of managing things that feel like too much. And some form of dissociation is a really common way of managing that. So, do you have any thoughts just about I'm just calling it a collective dissociation or a desire to dismiss or you know, do that later, or just not prioritize it? Do you have any recommendations to sort of do that centering of, hey, let's keep this in our consciousness collectively as we work towards change?
It's such a great point. I think dissociation and collective dissociation is a critical kind of leverage point here for how these forms of abuse are able to replicate uh almost like a virus, um, both kind of laterally throughout the community, but as we know, often intergenerationally within families, we're often seeing, and when it comes to quite severe sexual violence against children, we're often seeing this passage through generations within families as well. But we can't see what we can't name. And if we're not talking about organized child sexual abuse, if we're not talking about incest, if we are not talking about sadistic sadistic abuse, if it's not even within the realm of possibility that it might be happening to a child, then we we literally can't see it.
Yeah.
But I think naming these things and in a funny way, normalizing is not a good word, but accepting that this is a really difficult aspect of human nature. Common. Common, it's much more common. And one of the dissociative mechanisms at work here, it was really interesting when I met Sarah because her trauma symptoms were so acute. Um, and I I remember talking to one of my housemates um who'd lived with her for much longer, and this was early on um in my stay with Sarah, and saying, like, she doesn't sleep. Like she's up all night. Like I can hear, I can hear her having nightmares all night. And they just said to me, Oh, yeah, she's been like that the whole time. You know, she's been like that for years. Um, I then found out like through her childhood, there'd been these really acute hospitalizations, there'd been interventions from authority, really strange things that nobody ever, it was just the tip of the iceberg, nobody wanted to look under and see the rest of the iceberg. And so one of the issues, I think, is this collective dissociation, collective culpability. Once we sit back and once we acknowledge that this is possible, we may well have to then confront the fact that things have happened in the past where we haven't intervened, we haven't stepped forward. Um, and it's a big ask, you know. I asking a few questions of Sarah changed my whole life. Um, there's a lot of people that have, you know, their own families, their own kids, their mortgages to pay. They don't want to get dragged into a big, challenging problem. But because our states and our law enforcement
and our authorities are not holding this issue, often it's other citizens that have to intervene.
Yeah. So you mentioned being able to see it. What are common types of organized or extreme abuse? What are some of the categories that you see being a professional in this space?
There are a couple of different forms. Um, the cohort of victims that is the most help seeking, so they become most visible, particularly in the mental health sector, uh, is often the victim of like middle class uh organized abuse. So uh often that's transgenerational. There might be a pattern through the family of sexual abuse within the family that often initiates quite early. Um, it's quite prolonged, tends to target girls, but will include boys. Uh and that victim cohort, from a dissociative point of view, they're often quite structured because there was a lot of rules at home. So, you know, you're like this at home, you do certain things at home, but then you go to school, and you know, you have to behave in a certain way at school. So often this group is the group that we're seeing, um, generally female in the context of mental health care. Um, they're also a group that struggles to afford mental health care, but they're more likely to have the money for it. Um, there's then sort of more disorganized, organized abuse in kind of like working class families. There might be drug economies, there might be other sorts of adult sex work, where the child may then get caught up in being sold in exchange for drugs, entering into so-called sex work as a minor, again, much more disorganized, much more criminal, much more visible to the criminal justice system. Um, a pattern that we've seen in the states in Australia is also groups of men in the community who target, particularly kids in the foster system or out-of-home care.
Yeah.
That's a very particular form of sexual exploitation, often understood in the states as trafficking. There's been some really high-profile cases in the UK of this form of abuse. And these men can abuse quite large numbers of kids. Um, it happens here in Australia, uh, and we've really struggled to get the states or the federal government to respond to it because this group of children are so low status, frankly. Uh, in Australia, often Aboriginal kids as well. And so it's interesting where some kids are treated as much more valuable than other children, frankly.
Yeah.
Um, we've then got sort of the online space, and unfortunately, we have, you know, encrypted services like Tor, so the so-called dark web. We have encrypted social media apps like Telegram or WhatsApp that facilitate offenders to find one another, share abuse material, coordinate the abuse of children and the sale of children. And this is happening on a massive global scale now. And this is something that governments, I think, are stepping up to the challenge whereby the private sector and the technology sector's been allowed to provide services to child sex offenders for 25 years. Governments are now starting to understand they need to regulate that. But we have a bit of a challenge, frankly, in the United States now with the really close uh alliance between the Trump administration and the technology sector, which has really stymied
the regulatory moves that we meet that we need in the US, where a lot of the technology companies are, um, and also the focus in the states on the border has actually pulled quite a lot of resources from Homeland Security where they'd previously been prioritizing child sexual abuse. A lot of those resources are now being pushed towards the immigration raids and immigration efforts. So uh the online space, I think we had been moving in a really positive direction, but uh that's there's some challenges now. Yeah.
It just makes me think about with any kind of dissociation or any kind of I don't want to see that, how easy it is to recenter resources or to take resources away from this really important issue by having some other issue that someone proclaims is more important or makes a lot of buzz around. I mean, you think about the way that governments across the world and in the US right now, we're spending our time, our money, our collective attention in the news. It's pulled in so many directions because there's there's so much happening. And that can decenter us as viewers, as you know, therapists watching the news, as people in the world from hey, this is a really important ongoing issue that massively impacts people's lives and massively impacts uh communities across generations. So have you seen anything that can help um bring attention back? I think that's a large part of the work you're doing now, right? In terms of traveling around and collaborating with law enforcement and giving keynote talks. Like, what do you see that that does help pull people's attention back to this issue? Or how can we um rally around resources being rightfully given to this space?
We need much better integration between the different sectors that are addressing organized abuse and child exploitation. So there's so much expertise in the trauma space. I mean, I really think, in my view, that trauma therapists really are the experts on organized child abuse and frankly see the worst of the material. Um but at the same time, law enforcement is then looking at this elephant from a different angle. Um, and there's been no integration between the two. Um, to give you an example, um, the Interpol database holds all of the known child sexual abuse material. The majority of the children in that database have not been identified, probably about 60%. I mean, as you know, in the for trauma therapists, they then regularly have adult survivors saying I was photographed as a child. And yet there's been no bridge built from law enforcement to the mental health sector to say, well, you've got someone saying they were victimized. We've got an entire database of unknown victims. Maybe, you know, maybe you should integrate these two and see what would come out of it. Um, the other missing piece is actually the financial sector. So um, as a lot of child sexual abuse has gone online, banks and payment systems are now there's a lot of transactions related to child sexual abuse that's running through banks and payment rails. Uh, and the The financial sector now needs to be bought into the sphere of child protection. So we're in the 21st century. Child sexual abuse has taken on different forms than it took on in 1960. And yet our response to child sexual abuse still dates is still pretty similar to what it was like in 1960. So, you
know, I think that there is a systemic redesign that we that we need. And part of it is really shining daylight on the policing of child sexual abuse. It's about being sometimes a critical friend of government and law enforcement. And where we see resources being pulled out of our space, which is happening in Australia, we had a horrific mass killing, which is very rare in Australia, but we had a massacre about a month ago here in Sydney, where two men went to a Jewish celebration and killed 12 Jewish people. And what we've seen, even in four weeks, is a significant deprioritization of child sexual exploitation because counterterrorism is now a key policy focus. Those are the sorts of things that we need to say, you know what, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. And one of these issues should not be deprioritized for the other.
Yeah. Yeah, they're both very important. So let's talk a little more just about the dynamics around this, right? And how it impacts mental health professionals, how it impacts the people who are are or aren't in treatment, who are survivors of extreme or organized abuse. What do you see happen? You mentioned the Epstein files earlier. What do you see happen in people in power, I'll just say, when there's a report of abuse? And what are some of the dynamics we can really track and map in response to these types of reports?
Generally, what we find, I think for trauma therapists, a pretty common presentation will be an adult survivor recounting very serious offenses as a child. They may or may not still be being victimized. And I think that's a really important question for therapists. And particularly for highly dissociative clients, it can be unclear because they can be having flashbacks or they can be having parts that are that are reporting current abuse, but actually they're they're reporting prior abuse, but the part is still living kind of in the moment. So, or they can be reporting current abuse or both. Some of the abuse is is happening externally in the real world, some of it's happening internally in the inner world of the client. So, you know, this is a really challenging space. And I think for therapists.
They can also be point reporting no abuse and have a part to still managing it.
Yes. 100%. All of this might be going on. And so I think there is that space of, and again, I'm not a therapist, so please take this, but but working through the reality testing piece.
Yeah.
I think sometimes I've I've seen therapists where there is, um, particularly early on, if it's a first is the first time they're working with an organized abuse client, there can be like a premature move to engage with law enforcement, uh, premature um urge to report. We've also seen therapists. I think this is really understandable, but a problematic dynamic where there's a decision to go public with the details of the client's abuse. So we've seen
like podcasts where there are therapists and clients and they are reporting names and dates of abuse, for example, because the mental health practitioner is just really struggling with what's being what's being disclosed.
Yeah.
So finding that that context yourself where you can sit back, you've got good supervision, you've got people that are helping hold you and hold your response to the material so that you can then hold the survivor as they try and figure out um what's what's going on. Um it's not to say that engaging law enforcement is not the right thing to do, but it's then about making a strategic approach, like walking down to your local police station and speaking to uh somebody with no training or no background, it's probably not gonna go very well. It might. Um, so there's a whole set of doors you've got to walk through, frankly, before an investigation even opens.
Yeah.
Um, and I think something that everyone needs to accept is that if we're reporting abuse from decades ago, it's really hard to investigate and prosecute.
Yeah.
And sometimes one of the reasons why law enforcement's not that interested in following these cases up is because they've tried before and they haven't gotten a good result. Um, nonetheless, you know, I think we're in a funny point at the moment where some of the old defense mechanisms have been worn away. I think Me Too actually had quite a big impact. Um, I think the Jeffrey Epstein scenario has also really been a good cautionary tale. I think the some of the lessons that we've learned about clergy abuse have really taught us that institutions can be really complicit. But when push comes to sharve, that it the system is conservative. Due process is on the side of the accused, it's not on the side of the victim.
And the instinct of institutions is always self-preservation. Um and so for therapists, I think for survivors, when people want to come forward and make a complaint or a report, I think we have to be really smart about it. Um and when I started this work in the late 90s, we had a network in Australia called Whistleblowers Australia. And it was a network of whistleblowers, and there was a manual on how to blow a whistle and what it was like to be a whistleblower. And it was actually one of the best things I did was I went to some of their meetings and I read a manual. Nice. And it just it just said expect retaliation. You know, it said, these are the traps to fall into, you know, when you blow the whistle. Do not be naive. Expect the institutions to turn on you. Like you've got to do all of that work first. Yeah. And I think that can be hard for survivors, I think it can be hard for therapists, because to be honest, we just want a white knight to get on a horse and come in and rescue us. Um unfortunately, we have to be our own white knights at the moment.
And there's so many layers to what you're describing because there's actually when somebody does want to report something, the implications of that and the level of I'll just call it readiness for that. Like, are is someone ready for being cross-examined? Is someone ready for photos to be shared? Is someone ready to have these memories brought up at a time and place that they don't ultimately control? And to be asked about that or to know it's happening, right? Or to know that it's being shared. Then there's the response of the institutions, which can be denial, minimization, more red tape, Darvo, straight out, you know, deny, attack, reverse, victim, and offender. We had Jennifer Fred on the podcast to talk about that. So, and then I'm also aware of things that are happening in large scale in the news, those can also be really triggering and upsetting for someone who's in therapy trying to work on these things. So there's just so many layers of the institutional presence in even a one-on-one therapy session for someone who's who's trying to heal, right? Trying to heal from the significant harm that this type of abuse causes. So it can be a lot, right? I think it's easy to understand and empathize with people just being like, whoa, oh, I don't know. Like, what can I do here? I don't even know what I can do. I think one thing we can do is see these dynamics more clearly, right? So is there anything, it might just be what's happening in the news today, but anything that you see that's like, oh, this is how you know people are doing the bait and switch or they're doing Darvo, or when someone is actually standing up and holding someone accountable, what are some of the common responses you see? I'm thinking of particularly public cases, as I know you're familiar with those. Anything you can share along those lines?
We had a funny time, I think, where some of the kind of hegemonic justifications for inequality have fallen away. And people are just talking about brute power now. And some
people are rich, some people are powerful, some people are in control, and some people are small and vulnerable and have few resources. And I think it's a scary time where some of the justifications for inequality have sort of fallen, have fallen away. Um but DAVO really is the classic sort of bait and switch that says um, I by accusing me, you are victimizing me. Um and our criminal justice system really permits that. It's structured to enable that kind of defense. Um, I think, particularly in organized abuse, we learn when organized abuse taken place in the family, we learn so much about attachment because the attachment of a child to a parent is so primordial and so fundamental. And I think this is the most difficult sort of accusation to make in in public. Um, in a couple of months here in Australia, but it will be released globally, is the documentary I Am Jenny. Uh, and it's about a woman here in Australia with dissociative identity disorder who really campaigned for about 15 years uh to bring her father to justice. It tells the story for that tells the full story for the first time, um, but it includes the fact that um we didn't realize previously he'd been prosecuted for the abuse of her sister in the United Kingdom. Uh and she testified, uh, she gave testimony there. And then many years later, even though she'd been making these multiple complaints, um, he was finally charged here in Australia for his abuse of her. Um, but even in that case where he there was extensive medical evidence, he'd previously been convicted of the abuse of her sister. Um, it was such an open and shut case. He still pled not guilty. Um, you know, there was still the accusation that she was lying. Um, there was an attempt to use her mental health condition against her. She has DID. Um, now you and I both know that, you know, DID is evidence of extensive early childhood traumatization. And so it's an interesting case study of sometimes the extent to which survivors have to be their own advocates, and over many many years. Um and I was speaking to a survivor yesterday about, and in fact, a survivor here in Australia who prosecuted two of her offenders, uh, and they did go to prison. Um, but what a fighter she's had to be over 20 years.
Yeah.
And so I think that that self-advocacy and that willingness and that that inability of some survivors to back down. Like they cannot back down some survivors. And that's where we do sit, that perseverance is really necessary to cut through. Yeah.
Yeah. And some people have that in their in their stars, right? It's in their chart. And some people don't, right? And I think it's important to honor both, right? I've definitely worked with people who are like, I just I'm not gonna do that ever. It's just not an important way for me to invest my energy. It would, it would just waste me of all that's essential. And other people who feel like it's really important and can keep pushing on. And I think acknowledging Darval, like you said, with the whistleblower manual, being able to just expect this is what's gonna happen and being, I don't want to say braced for that because there's so much somatic work that we try to do to like acknowledge bracing and you know, work with it, work through it, but but be aware and have some sort of protection in place
to be able to lean into that and to know. I think for some the folks I know who do have that fire to fight, there's such a deep sense of purpose in it. And it goes beyond just a simple cognitive decision. Like it, they really feel like this is a spiritual assignment. This is like deep within my life purpose and DNA. So I just want to honor that whole spectrum that people can fall in, or folks in there like, I want to, but I don't know. And there's so much in the middle of that. It's such a process. And it makes me think too of like, what can therapists, folks like me, who sit with people who've been through these things, hear the ins and outs of it, see the dynamics, watch the news, get frustrated. Um, are there any things that you've seen that mental health professionals who have this knowledge can really do to advocate directly within their communities, outside of the one-on-one dynamic in the office?
I think we've seen a really, I think, significant accumulation of evidence and wisdom about how to work effectively with this client group. I think continuing to provide that support as a therapeutic community, because where I see therapists often slip, and you know, I did this in my own sort of journey is like falling into the world of the survivor and falling into the hopelessness and the darkness that that they carry because of what they've been through. And so having that therapeutic community that can help us to understand counter-transference. Like I'm feeling hopeless because the survivor feels hopeless. You know, I'm feeling nihilistic because they're feeling nihilistic, like they're communicating something to me. You know, I think our job is always, always, always to hold hope for when the survivor can't. You know, we are the people that hold that hope. And I think that's also true for the community. For the therapists who came really early to this work in the 70s, 80s, 90s, you know, incredible practitioners. I think also practitioners that just were so traumatized by what they were coming across. And sometimes our instinct in advocacy is to talk about the worst things we've ever heard from a client. You know, ritual abuse is a really good example of this. We have to be aware that, like normal people to use uh not a great term, but people who are not in this field of work, they can't, there's some things they can tolerate. There's a lot of things they can't. That's just a fact. And we need to work with windows of tolerance, not only for clients, but actually in our public conversations as well.
Yes.
And I find that a challenge, you know, because there's aspects to the abuse that I think we do need to find ways to acknowledge publicly because it does signal to the survivors that it's okay to talk about this. But at the same
time, it risks turning people off, it risks shutting people down. And I encounter those dissociative reflexes in my work all the time when bystanders forget things I've told them, forget the sort of work that I do, or misremember things because they really can't hold the material.
Yeah.
So thinking about that window of tolerance, thinking about how we build a kind of a structure of understanding so that when we're talking to normal people, when we're talking to people outside our field, they don't feel hopeless. They don't feel overwhelmed. Yeah.
Yeah. And that's why I wanted to open with like, what's the progress? What's good? What's going on? And there is a lot of progress in terms of general awareness and advocacy and tracking online. You know, there's there's movement towards more accountability, there's movement towards processes that uh are more dignity-affirming, right? Where survivors can report things and hopefully be less re-traumatized in that process, right? Hopefully that can evolve because that's not the best state of things. But as we continue in that direction, I'm also wondering if you can highlight organizational, um, like I'm thinking of maybe universities that get reports of sexual abuse or um professional organizations, like you know, you and I have both worked on and you receive a complaint or something. Thankfully, we don't get these types of much. But what are some of the systemic things, the institutional things that you see that end up harming survivors when they're reporting that even like a really well-meaning organization might be doing actively or passively?
Some of the work that we did in the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation was, you know, we've talked about trauma-informed care for a long time, but starting to shift that to think about shame-sensitive practice because really one of the core emotional components of trauma, especially complex trauma, trauma related to sexual violence, is shame and degradation. So when we're working with the victim or a survivor of sexual violence, this is someone who carries a lot of shame and is also highly shame-sensitive and is often anticipating being shamed. They expect other people to shame them. So if we think about institutional responses to wrongdoing, often it's highly bureaucratic. Often it's shaped by due process, often it's shaped by risk mitigation because the institution is actually legally culpable from the accused if there is a breach of due process for the person who's been accused in whatever way. And it means that the victim historically has gotten the short end of the stick. So, how do we design reporting processes that are shame-sensitive, that understand that we're dealing with someone who's been shamed, who expects to be shamed, who can experience shame even though we might not think that we're engaging in a shaming sort of way? Um, and so understanding the burden of shame that they're carrying and also there's structural forms of shame. There's forms of shame that come about because of gender inequality, they come about because of racial inequality, they come about because certain, you know, because of discriminatory social structures that also lead to a higher vulnerability and burden of shame that someone's carrying. So if what we do instead is think about our institutions and our reporting pathways and so on, how do we how do we communicate to people their inherent dignity? How do we treat people as bearers
of inherent value? They're not just a number, they're not just another complaint. They're someone who's important. And even if we can't proceed with their complaint, or if there's not enough evidence, or if you know, there's still a bureaucracy around this, but nonetheless, all of the ways in which we're holding that person and communicating to that person is really respectful. Yeah. Um and where there is a rupture because someone is um, you know, really shame-sensitive and they do experience shame, how do we repair? Um, I think that's really where we need to see institutional responses evolving to. And there's a justice component to that. The survivor who I was speaking to yesterday, where two of her offenders didn't end up in prison. But one of the things that she talks about as being really transformative was there was a detective, a police officer, and the way he treated her during the investigation. Yeah, she'd never been treated like that before. She she grew up in the foster system, like the foster care system. She'd been homeless for periods of time. She'd been, you know, all sorts of things. But then this police officer just treated her like a human being. Yeah. You know, and that that, you know, 10, 20 years later, that's the thing that stays with her, is how well she was treated.
Yeah. I wanted to ask you about examples of institutional courage. And my mind kind of goes different places there, but this is this is one, right? And this is one that's very specific to each person as a human being in their role. So I think when we're thinking about institutional courage, we think, okay, well, what about the bureaucratic processes and how can we organize those? And I absolutely want to hear examples of when that goes well. But I think it's helpful for us to also remember that any one person treating another person with dignity and practicing that shame sensitivity can make a massive impact. You know, so it's not just the how and the what, you know, it's it's the humanity that's showing up in response to someone reporting something really atrocious, something really harmful.
We actually, with a PhD student of mine, we conducted research with survivors of child sexual abuse who had reported their abuse to our Royal Commission. So we had a massive public inquiry here in Australia called a Royal Commission over about five years. It's one of the largest in the world. Its budget was about a third of a billion dollars. And we had 8,000 survivors come forward to report their abuse one-to-one in a private session with one of the commissioners. And what happened with the private sessions was uh so there were eight commissioners, part of the Royal Commission, they're very august, important people. Uh, and so under the legislation, they have particular particular obligations about how they're treated. So there's public servants who their job is to look after commissioners and kings and queens and presidents. So these public servants set up the commissioners' offices and then they didn't have anything to do for a while. So the commissioners got them to set up the protocol for the private sessions. And what was happening was the survivors, these survivors who grew up in out-of-home care, grew up in orphanages, were sexually abused, just had these really terrible childhoods and were so trepidatious about coming forward to report their abuse. But what was happening was they were getting like these invitations to the private sessions on these gorgeous invitation cards. And then they're like a taxi would come to the door, and the taxi driver had been trained, was a trauma-informed taxi driver.
And we were just want to celebrate that right there.
And then was and then they were driving to a five-star hotel, and then they were coming to the front door, and there was a butler that was saying, Do you want sparkling mineral water or still we've got some scones for you? And the survivors that we interviewed said to us more than once, I was treated like a queen. I was treated like a king. And so we were doing these interviews, and and I then ended up doing an interview with the policy manager who explained how this all came to be. But the survivors testified, they told their story, and the telling was really important. But also what was really important was how they felt. They felt so important. And the way that the Royal Commission was set up was, you know, there was a call center that they would call to arrange all of this. But when they called, they had a caseworker. They had the same person. And so maybe their date for testimony would
be set at a certain time, and they would say, Oh, I can't come that day because, you know, my first grandchild's been born that day. And then the next time they called, they'd speak to the same person who would say, Congratulations on the birth. They would remember all of the details. They'd never been treated like this before. And this was one of the things that really stayed with them, and it was part of the therapeutic effect of the Royal Commission, was many years later, feeling important, feeling valued, having the commissioner, like a really important person, personally take their testimony and thank them. And then they were sent these thank you cards that were personally signed by the commissioner. And multiple survivors talked about licking their finger and testing the signature to see if it was a real ink or if it was a stamp.
Yeah, yeah. They want to know, did you actually take the time to write your name?
And so there was something really powerful about this that, you know, we we are now talking and doing some training in the ISSTD and here in Australia on shame-sensitive practice, but dignity-affirming care. How do we tell people that they matter to us? Oh, yeah. Because that's that's what like trauma gives people this embodied sense of their devaluation and their unimportance. And it's why it's so hard to shift shame therapeutically is because you feel it in your gut. But dignity is the same. You know, we don't need to just tell people that they're important, but we need to show them and give them a feeling of mattering.
Oh, yeah.
And we can do that in lots of ways.
It doesn't have to be fancy scond and but even something as straightforward as a consistent person assigned to support you, caseworker, whatever that is. I mean, I'm thinking as you're talking about something that's a totally different world, but being a self-employed person, running a business and going on maternity leave, and then, oh, well, I need to get my disability for while I'm taking six months off of work, right? Like I don't have an employer that's paying my maternity leave. So I had to go directly through the state of California and I'm a relatively well-educated
person. And the forms were like confusing and overwhelming. And then I have to go and I'm postpartum at the time and I haven't slept. And then I have to show up in an office. I'm like, if I have disability, why do I have to show up in an office and go to the fourth floor and sit in a chair for 45 minutes until my name is called? And then, you know, even longer if you're waiting to speak a different language. I'm like looking around the room and just thinking, okay, this is a time-limited thing for me. You know, it's that's just this six months and had to go to the office maybe three times, which is way too many. But these are people in the room who have to come here regularly to up to make an update to something that was like a bureaucratic mistake on the back end, right? And it's like just to get the measly 10% of your pay or whatever it is they're giving you. And it's so demoralizing. Like I remember just being like, oh, this takes so much energy and trying to reframe, okay, I just have to go to this office, I just have to sit in this chair. It's okay. But when you're already in a place of any kind of physical, emotional challenge, and then you have to do more on top of that to tell your story, advocate for yourself. And even if they would just have the same person every time it's like, how old's your baby? Great to see you again, would have made a big difference for him, it was always someone different. You're always a number, write a number at the top of the form, remember your number. Like all of that can end up feeling just chipping away at your sense of humanity, right? And and chipping away at any type of energy to continue to move forward. And so it's a it's a very different example, but similar systemic challenges that we face in terms of bureaucracy, in terms of really dehumanization that happens in that process. Like you become a number, not a person. And no one's thinking, are you gonna have trouble climbing the stairs? And no one's thinking, are you gonna have trouble getting into the office in downtown San Francisco during business hours? So for someone to roll out a trauma-informed taxi cab and have sparkling or still water and send a thank you note, like that's
that's what someone would do for someone they really valued. And so they're communicating that value in a very tangible felt way.
And we have to be honest that you know, the systems, these sorts of systems are often designed to be punitive. It's not a coincidence that they're demoralizing because they're disincentivizing people from using them. If you're in the top, you know, income bracket and you were applying for a tax exemption on capital gains, believe me, you're not going to your local billionaire's not traping down to the tax office to sit there for 40 minutes to say, do you mind if I don't pay $20 million on my tax bill this year? He doesn't have to do that. But we have to do these things. And so it's also acknowledging sometimes the systems that we are operating in as practitioners have this element or this edge to them. And how do we ally ourselves sometimes with the client or with the survivor to try and overcome those aspects of the system that we do not control, but we need to recognize because they wear us down as well. If we're if we're practicing within them, there's an element that where they wear us down and they can also wear the client down. So in other work, we've looked at this sort of shared resilience that emerges in trauma work because often trauma survivors have had to their whole lives navigate and to some extent resist these sorts of systems. But we often find trauma workers are also navigating and resisting and finding their ways around these systems. Um, and the kind of a shared admiration sometimes between client and worker as you figure out how you're gonna make it work between the two of you.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for everything you've shared. Um I feel like there's so much depth
to your work, and it's so important to so many children that I just I always feel I feel this responsibility with every guest I have, like, oh, I want to get the best out of it. So might have to have you back on another time just to continue the conversation because it's such an important one. But how can people listening learn more? I mean, I'm assuming most folks listening have heard of organized abuse before, that if they're making it to this point in the episode, it's not the first time. But what might be an approachable start to dive into this world and the literature there?
It's a great question. Uh over 10 years ago, now I wrote a book called Organized Sexual Abuse in 2012, really based on interviews with victims and survivors. I think probably a little bit dated now, particularly in the online uh space. Um, but it really sort of collected people's narratives and stories about what had happened to them here in Australia over the preceding decades. I think we've now got really excellent resources at places like the ISSTD around understanding the psychological dynamics of abuse, but also the dynamics that interplay between client and therapist. And so I think also finding experienced practitioners that have been able to flourish in this work over a period of time. I do think it's easy to feel overwhelmed, especially if it's your first client or the first survivor that you're working with. Finding someone who's been able to do this work well and flourish in the work and enjoy the work really sets us up for success and sustainable practice with this really important group of victims and survivors.
Yeah. What's coming up next for you? Any projects, engagements, speaking?
Yeah, we've got, I think it's interesting, there is a real global sort of movement now around how do we come together as a global community? And so certainly in my region in Southeast Asia, the United Nations, so UNICEF, UNODC, really looking at coordinating work around how do we stop the financial flows associated with child sexual abuse? How do we support our region, not just Australia, but Southeast Asia, the Pacific? We've also then got a large conference actually in the Vatican in June, which is really intended to bring together diverse expertise in child sexual abuse, therapeutic, criminological, legal. That sense of we're in the 21st century, we need a 21st century response to child sexual abuse. I think that's becoming really urgent and exciting. Yeah. See that momentum.
Nice. How can people connect with you? Your website is organizedabuse.com with an S for organized for those in the States.
Yes, that's right. Yes. Yeah, organizedabuse.com is where I try to collate my work around organized abuse. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm also on X slash Twitter, but it's um such
a cesspool. So probably LinkedIn is the best place to find it.
A little noisier there, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Last question for you. What brings you hope?
Honestly, it's the people. It's the survivors who I meet who just come through what they've been through. They find their own sense of justice, they find their own sense of a meaningful life. It's the it's the people who do this work. Um, you know, yeah, that that's what really gets me out of bed is I just meet the most amazing people, including yourself, Lisa. Um, and you just I don't think there's any brighter example of the human spirit than what than the people that you meet doing this work.
Yeah, yeah. They really want to stand up for what's true and help protect people from harm and after harm happens when it has and does, just to be there in it. Absolutely. Help people heal. Thank you for taking the time to come on here and share some of your work. And I encourage folks to go to organized withinsobuse.com to learn more and uh share this episode. Thanks, Michael.
Thanks so much.
You made it to the end of the episode. Thanks for listening all the way through. Now that you've been listening for a while, I'd love to hear back from you. What's an idea or a story from this episode that sticks with you as we wrap up? Or what's one small thing you can do today to choose a step in the direction of healing or growth? Share your answers and what's been healing for you in the comments below on YouTube, on Instagram at how we can heal, or send me a message at info at how we can heal.com. Also check out howwecanheal.com for free resources, trainings, and the full transcript of each show. If you're listening and loving the show, please leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you're listening right now. If you're watching on YouTube, click the buttons to like and subscribe, and keep sharing the show with anyone it could benefit. Before we wrap today, I want to be clear that this podcast isn't offering prescriptions, it's not advice, nor is it any kind of mental health treatment or diagnosis. Your decisions are in your hands, and I encourage you to consult with any healthcare professionals you may need to support you through your unique path of healing. In addition, everyone's opinion here is their own, and opinions can change. Guests share their thoughts, not that of the host or sponsors. I'd like to thank our guest today again, and everyone who helps support this podcast directly and indirectly. Alex, thanks for taking care of the babe and the fur babes while I record. Last and never least, I'd like to send some love to my big brother Matt, who passed away in 2002. He wrote this music, and it makes my heart so very happy to share it with you here. Till next time.
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