Here be Dragons: Researching the Unbelievable, Hearing the Unthinkable. A Feminist Sociologist in Uncharted Territory

This paper describes a number of ways in which the dominant societal response to allegations of ritual abuse as untrue - as being produced by a combination of ‘moral panic’ and ‘false memories’ - impacted on research conducted with women and men who identified themselves as survivors of such abuse. (In Britain the research conducted by Jean La Fontaine and the press coverage it received is taken to exemplify this response.)The author's research was based on life history interviews conducted with 14 adults aged between 19 and 58 (11 women and 3 men). This is a reflexive, feminist account of knowledge production that endeavours to make visible the specific social and political context that shaped the researcher's engagement with ethical and epistemological issues, the selection of interviewees, structure of interviews, the questions and answers of the research interviews, and the interpretation of ‘data’. The collision between the lived experience of the researcher, that of her informants, and the ‘discourse of disbelief’ surrounding the subject of ritual abuse, is understood as crucially determining of the research knowledge produced. Attention is given to the disembedding process by which research moves from specific, emotional and embodied encounters to academic articles, and the implications for belief/disbelief in this process.