Children of God cult exposed: Nightmares caused by bizarre and cruel practices
What started as a group for doomsday hippies morphed into a haven for pedophilia where children were exposed to heinous sexual acts. WATCH THE DOCO
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Amy’s nightmares were filled with violence – but so were her days.
The bad dreams started when she was five. She’d feel herself hovering above her bed, in the room she shared with dozens of other children, not able to tell how high she was from the ground.
Today she knows she was disassociating, detaching from a life of absolute control where children were underfed, brutally punished and placed on a “sex roster”.
Amy was raised in one of the world’s most heinous cults – a sadistic organisation where children were raised to be soldiers of God, marching towards a prophesied early death while suffering years of sexual abuse.
Today, she and people like her face an ongoing battle for justice, with nobody ever prosecuted for the terrible acts committed against Australian children over many years.
At a home in the Gold Coast hinterland, a group of friends gather to share a platter of cheeses and antipasto on a timber deck overlooking the rainforest.
But it’s not a social gathering. It’s a support group.
Everyone here was born into The Children of God.
Also called The Family, or The Family International, this “new religious movement” was started in California in 1968 by a failed preacher named David Berg.
DOOMSDAY HIPPIES JOIN SEX CULT
Initially a group of born-again hippies who believed the end of the world was coming, the group would morph over time to become an authoritarian order and a haven for pedophilia.
“I had a little sister who was a baby,” Amy recalled.
“My mum was still breastfeeding. She was attractive, so they would send her out to do all of the public facing things and she’d be out all day.
“My little sister would be screaming for her and she wouldn’t feed because she wanted her mum and she would get beaten because she was constantly screaming for us.
“And you’d want to step in and help her and you couldn’t. And I have a lot of memories of my siblings over the years of hearing them crying and being really abused and not being able to kind of step in.
“It’s probably one of the most difficult memories, hearing those things (children being beaten) and sometimes some of the kids would offer to take those beatings for other kids.”
Members lived communally – often in houses of up to 100 people, most of them children. In Australia, those houses were mostly in Melbourne and Sydney, although many children were moved to communes in India. Over time, and as more and more of the second generation were born, the cult adapted and morphed.
KIDS ENDURE PERVERTED SOCIAL EXPERIMENT
Children were given no exposure to the outside world. No proper education. No television, no books (other than those of religion), no friends.
They were abused, beaten and starved, raised without love or affection, raised to perform seductive strip teases as little children.
Berg wanted children raised with no sexual inhibitions. They were taught that their bodies were for the pleasure of others.
But this social experiment was a failure. These children knew, even without anyone ever telling them, that this use of their bodies was wrong.
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Amy was born into the cult in the late 1970s. Her dad was a musician and her mother was very young.
“They brought in a rule that anybody could discipline anyone’s children and they could do that from the age of six months old,” Amy said.
“There was a lot of beating, there was a lot of sexual abuse.”
When she was about five, her pregnant mother, who was still breastfeeding a baby, was evicted from the cult.
She’d been struggling with the “free love” policies, with her husband’s interest in another woman.
“So, from one day to the next, she was no longer allowed to see us,” Amy said. Her mother would instead loiter in places she knew her children would be taken to “witness” and collect money.
“And there would be a really big emotional us running to her and us all crying and us all getting pulled apart from her and her leaving in tears,” she said.
Amy’s mother would remain excommunicated for a year and would spend that time living with another woman who had been exiled along with her Down’s syndrome child.
SEX ROSTER FOR CHILDREN
The Children of God believed in the healing powers of Jesus. Any medical affliction, any disability, even a baby crying, was a punishment from God and a sign of evil.
Many children raised in the cult would suffer lifelong complications because of a lack of medical care.
At age six, Amy was moved to a cult home in Melbourne with her father and new stepmother.
“That home in Melbourne that I was in was extremely sexually abusive,” she said.
“So there was a roster on the wall. The kids had to take turns sleeping with members of the opposite sex weekly.”
Sex rosters were commonplace in Children of God households. The roster would dictate who each person was to have sex with each night.
Amy was put on the roster as a six-year-old girl, expected to “give” her body to other children.
“The adults were also abusing the children and they would put on shows, they would be very intentionally over the top in performing sexual acts in front of the children in every home that I was in,” she said.
“When they forced us to sleep with other children … they would come in and encourage (it) and if we weren’t interested in doing that, (they would) kind of shame us.
“At one point I think I’d said to the (house) leader’s son that I was sick. I had a cold (and) I didn’t want to make him sick.
“I just didn’t want to do that (have sex). And he told his father and his father called me in and he called me … a selfish little bitch because I didn’t want to sleep with his son. And I think at that age, I had no idea what that meant. I just knew it was a really bad word. We weren’t allowed to say it.”
POLICE RAID TWO COMMUNES
In May of 1992, police raided Children of God homes in Sydney and Melbourne.
According to those we interviewed, the children had all been well-versed in what to say should authorities come calling. They’d been drilled on it and taught to be terrified of outsiders.
Eventually, the children were given back. No charges were laid.
It’s something that hurts them all, still to this day. Despite years of physical and sexual abuse, of coercive control, nobody was prosecuted. There was no justice.
“My family was completely destroyed,” Amy said.
“And they did this to so many families and they’ve gotten away with it.
“They (The Children of God) still exist and they’ve never taken responsibility. They have a very empty cut and paste, kind of like, we didn’t really know what was going on, but we’re sorry if you got hurt, it was just a few bad apples type apology that they sent out, which is absolutely not good enough.”
CULT SURVIVORS SUPPORT GROUP
The importance of this Queensland-based support group, established by Children of God survivors advocate and psychologist Maria Esguerra, cannot be measured. Nobody could possibly understand what this upbringing was like outside of those who lived it.
The outside world has been a struggle. Many did not survive the abuses of their past. Maria later sends us an emailed montage of former cult members who have taken their own lives. She calls it a suicide epidemic and says there is a desperate need for specialised mental health support for survivors.
“Australia was probably one of the biggest epicentres for The Children of God,” Maria said.
“It was against the rules to use contraception, so a lot of families grew very fast. And there were a lot of practices around (partner) sharing.
“And so there were huge families, really quickly. A lot of the time it would be five, six, seven families living together with their eight, nine, 10 children.”
Maria said it was not uncommon for a suburban house to be hiding 100 to 150 people.
“Some time around the late 1980s to early 90s … children might be put into homes and communes without their parents. It was quite institutionalised. It might look like bunk beds or triple bunk beds with two double stacks. Very close quarters (with) absolutely no privacy.
“It was almost like a military camp in the sense that every single home had the exact same schedule.”
SEX USED TO RECRUIT
Maria said that included time to read the cult’s “propaganda-like” material before heading out to conduct fundraising activities.
The Children of God also became infamous for Berg’s “flirty fishing” directive. Attractive women were sent out to recruit new members using their bodies. They were to have sex with men to entice them in. This resulted in a lot more children.
“It really was religious prostitution. There were a lot of sexual boundaries that were crossed and a lot of hyper-sexual things,” Maria said.
“I think (Berg) was trying to say God’s only law is love and trying to create this environment where anything could be done with no rules.
“And unfortunately there were tens of thousands of people and children who were impacted by some of his beliefs.
“But the psychological abuse is really something I think that people have suffered the most.”
When “Rosie” was four or five years old, a little boy in children’s bible class was slapped so hard by an adult it made his face bleed.
Rosie had been raised never to question, that she was a “soldier” whose only role in life would be to die for Jesus, but the brutality of the little boy’s punishment made her exclaim: “That’s not fair!”
“He came at me,” she said of the adult who’d delivered the slap, “shoved a whole bar of soap in my mouth.”
She recounts this story calmly. It was hardly the worst thing that happened in her 27 years in The Children of God.
Rosie now lives in Queensland, but as a child of the Children of God, she lived in many places. She speaks on the condition of anonymity, not wanting to give her real name or reveal any places where she lived in cult communes. She has done nothing wrong, but fears her background might harm her career.
Rosie was born into the cult at a time when it was going through a period of change.
The Children of God went through various rebrand attempts, changing their name to The Family following allegations of child sexual abuse.
Her parents had been hippies, enticed by the singing and dancing, by the sense of love and belonging.
But eventually they became “leaders”, with responsibilities that kept them away from their children for long periods.
This meant she was raised in homes with dozens of other children by adults who were not her parents.
“I slept in rooms of ten to 20 kids,” she said.
“We would have these trundle beds that would pull out with two kids on each bed.”
They generally lived in four-bedroom rental homes, tucked into suburbia. Landlords would not be aware that the home they believed was rented to a family of four was really a commune filled with dozens of children.
KIDS TOLD END OF THE WORLD WAS COMING
Later, The Family set up “schools” – houses where up to 100 children lived and received an “education”.
If authorities or outsiders came to check on the group’s homeschooling efforts, they had mock lessons memorised.
“I didn’t know anything about Jupiter, but I had an answer to give when they asked how many moons does Jupiter have,” Rosie said.
The “show” classes would be small. Only five or six children, dressed up in special dresses with their hair done.
“It was not reality,” she said.
Reality was very little food. Next to no exercise. Hours of memorising bible passages or reading literature prepared by Berg.
It was living in a cramped room with supervisors – generally a couple who would have sex in front of the children. It was being exposed to adult group sex and told to have “sexual play” with other children. It was brutal, violent discipline, or forced periods of silence. It was being raised with the knowledge that the world would soon end, that they would not live past childhood, that their bodies were not their own, but were there for others to use.
It’s a theme discussed at the support group meeting – that weird feeling that they should be dead, that they weren’t supposed to have lived past childhood.
“I believed, even at five or six years old, that I would be martyred, potentially any time,” Rosie said.
“I could either be burned at the stake, given to lions … tortured for my faith.
“It was in our publications, in our kids publications, it was discussed … every day.”
Having been born in an era where the cult had been accused of pedophilia and child abuse, Rosie was not subjected to sexual abuse until she was older.
By then, Berg had released a document banning “full sex” until a child turned 16.
As her 16th birthday approached, she said she felt the males of her household “circling”.
She was raped soon after, when one attacked her in the bathroom.
“When I was in The Family, my body was not my own. I was just used for sex. I have not one sexual abuse story – I have hundreds of sexual abuse stories,” she said.
COMMUNES BROKEN UP BUT CULT ENDURES
When she was 27, The Family dissolved its communes but its people continued to follow Berg’s teachings in an online capacity.
Rosie would do this too, even moving into her own, smaller, cult household with relatives and handing over part of her income to The Family.
It was not until the coronavirus pandemic that she began to understand what she’d lived through.
“All the emotions, the depression and PTSD,” she said.
“I went to therapy for the first time in my life.
“I didn’t know anything about myself. I didn’t realise I was gay.
“I’m gay. I didn’t know that in The Family.”
David Berg died in 1994. Leadership of the cult was taken over by his then-wife, Karen Zerby. The Family International, as it is known today, still exists in some capacity.
Maria believes more needs to be done to help those who escaped.
They need specialised mental health care. They need justice.
She thinks coercive control legislation should be broadened to prosecute leaders of extremist groups, those who use religion to control, influence and isolate their members.
There is much healing to be done between the adults who chose a life of “free love” with the Children of God and the generation who were born into it. The children of the Children of God, the children who’d had no choice.
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HISTORIC COMPENSATION PAYOUT
Australian survivors of The Children of God are asking for justice, as a woman born into the group has become the first to receive a historic compensation payout.
The woman, born into the cult, is the first of potentially hundreds of people to access the funds after the group was added to the National Redress Scheme, set up as a result of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Currently the funding is only available to people who were abused in New South Wales but survivors want it expanded to cover the entire country.
Many children were raised in communal homes often separated from their parents.
They were kept away from society, told the end of the world was coming, were not given appropriate schooling or medical care and were, sexually abused and forced to watch adults having sex.
Many children were sent overseas to places like India or the Philippines where they were used as free labour, forced to beg for money and sexually assaulted.
Many survivors want to see the cult’s Australian hierarchy investigated by police, including whether the movement of children overseas amounted to human trafficking.
The Sunday Mail met with a group people who were born into the sect after their parents joined – including some who were involved in police raids in the 1990s when authorities attempted to rescue them.
Cult survivor Joe Dageforde said he was raised to believe the world would end in 1993.
“I was only ever going to make it to 18 … that was as old as I was ever going to get,” he said.
“There were skits, actual acted-out skits of ways that people were possibly going to die – being fed to lions … and being frozen in a lake, that kind of thing.”
Mr Dageforde said he had lived in 52 houses by the time he was 12 and spent four years in India.
“There were rules for absolutely everything and you could get anything from a little swat to … just getting flogged. And there’s plenty of instances where I had to wear long pants in summer when we went out busking because I had bruises and marks all up and down my legs,” he said.
He agreed sexual abuse was rife and that children were forced to have sexual interactions with other children.
“That hypersexuality … I think it’s extremely important to understand that it was systemic,” Mr Dageforde said.
“It was not a random abusive person. It wasn’t just letting kids naturally find each other through it. It was a very set up, purposeful, intentional child sexual abuse situation on mass.”
Survivors have revealed the cult had a rule that children could be physically disciplined from the age of six months. They said they witnessed babies being beaten.
Psychologist Maria Esguerra, who formed the support group for Children of God/The Family International survivors, said many suicides had happened as a result of the trauma inflicted on children.
“What a lot of people need to realise is that the most horrific stories are the ones not being told,” she said.
“There’s a lot of trauma and shame.”
She said many survivors needed complex mental health support or had ongoing health issues from not receiving medical treatment in their youth.
“I’ve heard horrific stories of people dying, not being able to access medical support at all, (including) cancer that could be quite easily treated with very high survival rates,” Ms Esguerra said.
“(There were also cases of) babies or children with serious disabilities passing away and not getting any care or support.
“These children should have had an education, they should have been safe, they should have had medical care and protection.
“But because these groups are so secretive, and they used religion as a cloak, they got away with it.”
Ms Esguerra said the religious rights of parents should never trump the human rights of children.
“Any justice is just going to make such a difference,” she said, adding justice was complex for many because it could implicate their parents.
“It feels like, why is there no justice but I feel like none of us know where to go.”
A spokesperson from the Department of Social Services, which manages the redress scheme, said The Family International was “declared” in December, 2022, with the Commonwealth and NSW Governments acting as funders of last resort
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