ChatGPT is causing a rise in reports of organized ritual abuse, UK experts said, as survivors of “satanic” sexual violence use the artificial intelligence tool as therapy.
Police say organized ritual abuse and “witchcraft, spirit possession and spiritual abuse” (WSPRA) against children is largely underreported in the UK. There is no modern charge that specifically covers it, but that type of crime is classified as sexual abuse, violence and neglect that involve ritual elements – sometimes inspired by Satanism, fascism or esoteric religious beliefs – to control victims.
Perpetrators include abusive families and networks, human traffickers, online gangs and pedophile rings.
There have been 14 criminal cases in the UK since 1982 in which ritual sexual abuse practices were recognised. However, 2025 research by clinical psychologist Dr. Elly Hanson found that convictions reflected the “tip of the iceberg.”
Experts are currently providing training to police forces, in an initiative led by the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), which has created a specialized working group.
Gabrielle Shaw, chief executive of the National Association of People Abused as Children (Napac), said there had been a “sustained increase” in reports of ritual abuse received over the past 18 months, with an increasing number of people saying AI had forced them to report it.
Shaw said: “Over the last six months to a year, we’ve had people contact the Napac support line saying, ‘ChatGPT was recommended to me’. People are using AI, ChatGPT as a form of therapy and exploration. There are mixed feelings about it, but if it’s a route to support, it’s got to be a good thing.
“Normally we would see increases in calls on days that have significant supernatural or religious connotations, but this is not an increase, it is a sustained increase. There is increasing awareness about crime and where you can get support…Satanism comes up quite a bit.”
NPCC, Napac and the Hydrant policing programme, which supports forces across the country with child protection, commissioned a review from Hanson last year and launched a WSPRA briefing for practitioners this month.
Last year, members of a pedophile ring in Scotland, who posed as witches and wizards, were jailed for sexual offences.
Shaw said that of 36,700 calls to NAPAC over nine years, 1,310 mentioned organized ritual abuse. He said the crime could be “intergenerational in nature” and while the perpetrators were predominantly men, survivors named “grandmothers and aunts” as perpetrators.
Richard Fewkes, director of the Hydrant Programme, said the fact that ritual elements sounded “fantastic” had contributed to the justice gap.
He added: “We need to improve the whole system to address it – it’s out there, it exists and it’s not actually reported (to the police)… we’ve known that for many, many years.”
Hanson said victims were growing up in “regimes of cruelty” but that the truth was being “lost between” a “discourse of disbelief” on the one hand and “fictions of conspiracy” on the other.
He added: “We’re not seeing this abuse happening in certain cultures and not others. This is something we’re seeing happening within white, often privileged, British families. It doesn’t fit any stereotypes about where it might happen.”
