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Group psychological abuse refers to groups where methods of psychological abuse are frequently or systematically used on their members. Such abuse would be practices that treat the members as objects one is free to manipulate instead of respecting their autonomy, human rights, identity and dignity.

Psychological abuse refers to practices that, simply stated, treat a person as an object to be manipulated and used, rather than as a subject whose mind, autonomy, identity, and dignity are to be honored.

Such groups can be whole countries, applying psychological coercion on their population like the People's Republic of China or North Korea, or political, commercial, or religious groups.

Some scholars in the wake of Robert Lifton or Margaret Singer have associated group psychological abuse with brainwashing or mind control and with cults. The concepts to have similarities and overlap in some places, but they are not identical.

Group Psychological Abuse in Usenet

The unmoderated Usenet news groups, widely accessible by way of Google Groups and other ISPs, are living laboratories of group psychological abuse. Renown for its cyberstalking gangs, which stalk, defame, and disrupt persons who voice unconventional wisdom or complaints on the Web, the unmoderated Usenet news groups offer hobby-hungry hatemongerers a headquarters from which to remain untraceably anonymous, form strategic alliances with other masked parties, and make victims feel they are living under an imminent threat long after fleeing the news groups.

Gang abuse is a particularly pernicious form of abuse in which the morality of the individual abuser is further diluted in technological anonymity and group consciousness. Social psychologists who examine the phenomenon closely invoke the concepts of deindividuation, social facilitation, and groupthink to explain how gang stalking is similar to other manifestations of collective behavior & repression in history (e.g. Soviet Communism, Abu Ghraib, Holocaust, McCarthyism, Inquisition, Salem Witch Trials).

Perpetrated under the benign auspices of "kook-hunting in the public interest" (see Alt.usenet.kooks, the abusers create for themselves illusions of watchdog authority, a faux office through which they ostensibly safeguard the world from irrational views, self-promotion, and arrogance.

What also makes these gangs dangerous is the division of labor among abusers with a wide range of skill sets. Members of the gang operating out of sci.psychology.psychotherapy, for example, have engaged in hacking, identity theft, and impersonation to menace their victims, even going as far as to recruit Usenetters from other news groups in the stalking and drag the family members of victims into the defamation. Gang members with criminal and/or psychiatric histories are called on to instill fear, and propaganda specialists and professional shills create and spam-advertise networks of search optimized Web-based dossiers. The dossiers and their dissemination throughout Usenet's news group and Web-based forums are designed to manipulate public perception of victims such that the results of a Google search on the victim's name will be front-loaded with false and unflattering information.

References

• Chambers, W., Langone, M., Dole, A., & Grice, J. (1994). The Group Psychological Abuse Scale: A measure of the varieties of cultic abuse. CSJ, 11(1), 88-117.

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