25 Feb 2011

Novelist describes how she survived childhood of abuse and neglect growing up in The Family International, aka, Children of God



Star-Telegram    Texas    March 7, 2011

Taylor Stevens, author of 'The Informationist,' has intriguing story to tell

BY DAVID MARTINDALE | Special to the Star-Telegram



Taylor Stevens, a promising first-time novelist from Dallas, always had a fertile imagination.

She just wasn't allowed to use it.

She was 14 when she wrote her first short stories. Instead of being encouraged and praised for her precociousness, she says, her notebooks were confiscated and burned. She was told she was a witch and "full of devils," and she recalls being put in solitary confinement and held without food.

Then she was admonished never to write again -- "or it's going to be much worse next time."

Stevens, who was born into a religious group known as the Children of God, didn't write anything for the next two decades.

Which is a shame, because the voice of a talented storyteller was suppressed for a very long time.

Stevens' debut novel, The Informationist, goes on sale Tuesday (Crown Publishers, $23). It's an international thriller featuring a most unusual hero.



Vanessa "Michael" Munroe deals in information. She travels around the globe, immersing herself in different cultures for months at a time, and comes back with info that no one else is capable of gathering, info that government agencies, powerful corporations and private clients pay dearly to possess.

Munroe is fluent in dozens of languages. Skilled in a variety of martial-arts techniques and handy with a knife, she's like a finely tuned weapon. And thanks to her androgynous physique, she's a master of disguise, a chameleon who can become a bewitching femme fatale one day, yet pass as a man the next.

In The Informationist, the first in a series of at least three books, Munroe is hired by a millionaire businessman to find his daughter. The girl went missing four years earlier in central Africa, a corner of the world that Munroe knows well from her tortured childhood there.

Stevens' remarkable life story is like something out of the pages of a thriller.

As a child in the Children of God, now known as The Family International, she lived all over the world, spending time in Germany, Mexico, France, Japan and Africa. [see Related Articles links below]

She was separated from her parents and siblings for months at a time, she says, and forced to end her education at age 12. In lieu of schooling, she was put to work caring for the other children, cleaning and cooking for commune members, and begging for money on the street.

It was a life, she says, "that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy."

She was 29 and married, with one child and a baby on the way, when she and her husband, still living in Africa, finally found the courage to break free from the only life she had ever known.

They chose to come to America, she says, "because at least there our lack of money and education and job skills might be surmountable if we had the drive and determination to do something about it."

They settled in the north Dallas area because she was vaguely familiar with the city from having lived here briefly years earlier, "whereas the rest of the United States was just a big question mark."

Breaking away from the Children of God, Stevens says, is something much easier said than done.

"The cult went through many phases in its history," she says. "There was a time when, if you said you wanted to leave, they would literally lock you in a closet and try to cast the demons out of you. I have friends who escaped in the middle of the night with their passports and 20 bucks and that was it.

"By the time my cutting ties came around, it wasn't quite as bad. You could leave. But if you did, they cut you off immediately. You became the enemy, essentially. So it was like you knew that by leaving, you were leaving everything. Also, your entire life you were told that if you do leave, horrible things are going to happen to you, that 'God will spit you out of his mouth,' that you're going to become the equivalent of his vomit, because you've turned your back on God.

"So leaving is much more than just moving to another city. You're basically violating everything you've ever been told because you believe in your heart that there has to be something better than this."

Stevens has lived in North Texas, raising her two children, for the past eight years.

Her passion for writing was reawakened while reading Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne trilogy.

"I had tried reading more 'literary' books, like The Bonfire of the Vanities, but I found I was just naturally drawn to the thriller genre," she says. "And I was just blown away by the way Robert Ludlum would take me away to all these foreign locations, like Hong Kong and China in The Bourne Supremacy. I loved soaking up everything about these foreign cultures and I thought, 'I wish I could do that.'

"Then it occurred to me. 'Wait a minute. I've lived in places even more exotic than this. I could write about them. And, besides, I always wanted to write.'"

So she started, knowing at first only that she wanted to write something about Africa. Michael Munroe and the mission to find the missing girl came later.

It certainly wasn't always easy. With only a sixth-grade education and having grown up with no access to books other than what the Children of God approved, Stevens had a number of literary obstacles to overcome. She sometimes wondered whether she was trying to reach for something beyond her grasp.

Then again, given the changes she already had made in her life, fear of failing as a novelist wasn't the least bit scary.

"The fact that I couldn't punctuate when I started writing, the fact that I relied heavily on spell check to be able to form coherent sentences, the fact that I really had no idea what I was doing, none of that seemed to be much of an issue," she says. "I was like, 'Yeah, well, I've been through worse.'"

Stevens already has completed the second book in the series and is working on a third.

Her personal saga of reinventing herself, of overcoming the myriad obstacles laid before her, is nothing short of inspiring.

Yet all she really hopes to accomplish with The Informationist is to entertain readers.

"I hope that people feel it is worth their money and their time, which is even more valuable than money," she says. "I have no desire to make a political statement or to educate. It's like, if you enjoy it, that's awesome. That's enough for me."

In fact, Stevens was tempted when preparing her author bio not to be so forthcoming about her anguished past. If people fixated on her personal life, she reasoned, they might not focus enough on the book.

"I could have invented a past for myself," she says. "But growing up, we lied to the outside world about us all the time and I vowed I was never going to do that again. I hated it so much. So the idea of making something up was just repugnant to me. This is who I am and this is where I came from.

"But what I hope ultimately matters most to people is the fact that I can tell a good story."

This article was found at:

http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/03/04/2897121/taylor-stevens-author-of-the-informationist.html#tvg

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Vogue Magazine - March 2011 edition, page 272

Nobody’s Child

by Rebecca Johnson



Have you ever noticed how similar most writers’ biographies sound? “Author X lives in Boston with her husband and two children.” Or Brooklyn. Or Seattle. When Taylor Stevens’s first novel, The Informationist, a fast-paced thriller partly set in Africa, with best-seller written all over it, is published this month, the back flap will read, “Taylor Stevens was born into a religious cult and raised all over the world before breaking free of the movement.” It has been almost ten years since Stevens, a 38-year-old mother of two living in Texas, escaped that life, but whenever she looks at that sentence, a feeling of dread comes over her. “We never called it a cult when I was growing up,” she explains. “We were told that we were chosen by God to be special.”

God, at least according to the cult’s founder, David Berg, did not want his followers to have jobs, maintain a nuclear family, or stay too long in one place. His philosophy, developed in Huntington Beach, California, in the late sixties, blended apocalyptic Christianity with a hippie-inspired “If it feels good, do it” ethos. Members were encouraged to change sexual partners whenever they liked and eschew birth control. In the 40-odd years of the cult’s existence, approximately 35,000 people have filtered though its network; over 13,000 of those were children who, like Stevens, were born into it. Allegations of adult sexual contact with children in the early years were rampant, and by the time of Berg’s death, in 1994, he was wanted by Interpol for inciting sexual abuse against children.

For Stevens, growing up in the Children of God (as the cult was initially known) meant a nomadic existence. By the time she was three, she had lived in California, Florida, Georgia, Colorado, and Texas. By fourteen, she had lived in Mexico, Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, Japan, and South Korea. It may sound like a cosmopolitan life, but “home” was often a trailer parked in a camp with fellow disciples. The younger members of the Children of God rarely mixed with the local populace, except to solicit donations on the street, and attended school only sporadically. When they did, they were carefully counseled on what to say. “We lived a double life,” says Stevens. “Even as a child, I knew not to talk about what went on.”

Within the communes, children were required to do the bulk of the work—cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children not much younger than themselves. Privacy and personal property did not exist. At one point, in Osaka, Japan, Stevens remembers, she shared a closet-size bedroom with six people and a bathroom with 20. Her “most prized possession” as a child was a tiny microcassette recorder she would hold to her ears at night, listening to a tape of Greek classical music when she craved some diversion.

In order to create the “family” of the cult, Berg believed it was necessary to obliterate the parent-child bonds that most of us take for granted. Stevens was twelve when she was first separated from her parents and four siblings. “That was when my education and what little childhood I’d had ended completely,” she says. “Like a pawn, I was moved from place to place by the leaders’ whims, sometimes living in the same location as one of my parents or a sibling, other times not. At fifteen I went an entire winter begging on the streets of Osaka, walking through the snow with the only pair of shoes I owned: summer sandals. No one cared. I belonged to the cult, and I was nobody’s child.” Stevens had no idea that the parent-child relationship should be any other way. “That was all that I knew,” she says.

Like the other children in the cult, Stevens was taught the rudiments of reading, but books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, music, and movies were forbidden—she kept the volume on her recorder as low as possible. (In the beginning, Children of God practiced an extreme version of Christianity that still allowed children books like The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis, which Stevens read and loved. As Berg became more paranoid and autocratic, all books were banned, except a few that probably should have been, like Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs.“We were a Christian cult,” Stevens notes wryly, “but everywhere you went, people were constantly asking, ‘What’s your sign?’ ”) To this day she has only a scattershot sixth-grade-level education. “If we stayed anywhere long enough for compulsory-education laws to catch up with us, we’d go to school,” she says. “Our prophet’s words were the only education we needed, he said.”

It’s hard to imagine a worse childhood. Indeed, many of the children born into the Children of God eventually crashed and burned. The actor River Phoenix, who died of a drug overdose at 23, was brought up in the cult (though his family later left). And it was a national story a few years ago when Berg’s stepson and heir apparent killed his former nanny and himself in revenge for the sexual abuse he suffered.

By contrast, Taylor Stevens seems a model of mental health. Now divorced from the husband she met in the cult, she is raising her two daughters outside Dallas and is at work on the third volume of the Informationist series. In person, she is mature, emotionally open, and even capable of cracking the occasional joke about her bizarre earlier life. Indeed, as awful as the cult experience was, Stevens believes it did somehow give her the kind of ambition that made it possible for her to flourish in spite of her past. “From the day we were born,” she says, “we were told that we were special and that we were better than other people. If you believe you’re going to rule the world and then you get out there and find out that you are just a nobody, you think, No! This can’t be! It drives you to succeed. Or it drives you to failure. There’s not a lot of in between among us survivors.”

With her natural warmth and intelligence, Stevens was adept at raising money by begging on the streets. “I’m not proud of it,” she says. “But I have always had the ability to interact with people. I am hypersensitive to facial expressions, body language. That’s what a lot of sales is—having a rapport, making a connection. If people like you, they will give you money.” She never said the money would support “the Family,” as the cult was then known, and lying to people on a daily basis was killing her. “It was humiliating,” she says. “I am not a dishonest person. But I felt I had no choice. If I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t have had a roof over my head.” Even what they called the organization kept changing. “One year we might be called Helping Hands; the next year it might be Family Focus or Family Missionaries,” she says. “If the word family appeared in it, you could be pretty certain it was part of the Family.”

In the late nineties “the Family” went through one of its periodic upheavals. In order to keep too many members from defecting (turnover was always high), people were given a choice about where to go. Yearning to actually make a difference in the world, Stevens, who was 24 at the time, chose Africa. She started out in Kenya but, partly to put herself at a greater remove from cult leaders, ended up in Equatorial Guinea, where she and other cult members set up a nonprofit, brought in educational and medical supplies, and—in a country where “a fresh-felled tree was the equivalent of Home Depot”—built school desks for thousands of children.

By then, she was married to a European man with whom she worked well but didn’t necessarily have the greatest romantic chemistry. “We were the only two members of a similar age in the area,” she observes. “As I like to say, did Adam really have a choice about Eve?” Equatorial Guinea turned out to be one of the least hospitable places in the world to work. “I think I was almost as traumatized by Africa as I was by being raised in a cult. Everything that could go wrong there was guaranteed to go wrong. It was two and a half years of banging my head against the wall, fighting gossip, corruption, the elements.” Unless you wanted to go to prison, complaining publicly was not an option.

Stevens estimates that during her 20s, when most writers are reading voraciously and puzzling out their own voice, she read fewer than ten books. But she also experienced firsthand what it’s like to live under a corrupt military dictatorship, details that raise her book from a typical girl-extraordinaire thriller (it’s easy to imagine Angelina Jolie in the title role) to an authentic tale of life inside a dysfunctional African nation. Her writing about the daily petty corruption that wears a society down rings true because it is. “All I really had to do was change the names,” she admits. Most writers would kill for that kind of material, but Stevens’s initial motivation for going to Africa was simply to get herself off the streets.

Being far away from the cult did, however, give Stevens enough distance to realize that she did not have to live the rest of her life in its shadow. She had one daughter and another one on the way when she decided that her children would never experience the kind of degradation she had lived through. Once they made their decision, Stevens and her husband spent the next year and a half secretly plotting their exit, well aware that entering the real world at the age of nearly 30 would not be easy. Stevens had been working since the age of seven, when her parents sent her out on the street, but she had no work history and had never paid taxes, applied for credit, or owned or rented any real estate. They officially left the cult in Germany, where her husband was able to get a job, and they found their own place to live. “I will never forget how elated I felt the first morning I woke up in our own small apartment, finally free of the eyes that had been watching and judging me my entire life,” Stevens says. “Going to the grocery store, buying clothes, scheduling a doctor’s appointment—all the ordinary things most adults take for granted—were frightening and novel experiences for me.” Even worse was the fear that dogged her every move. “I spent my whole life being told that something awful would happen to me if I ever left the cult,” she says. “Every day I waited for that disaster to happen.” It would take years before the fear eventually went away.

Even though her husband was European, the two eventually chose to settle in America. “This country is still the land of opportunity,” she says. “Especially if you haven’t followed a traditional path.” Financially, however, it was a struggle to survive, and Stevens began to look for ways to make money that would not require her to put her children in day care. For a while, she sold Mary Kay products at the mall. She was a natural. “If anybody got close to me, they were going to hear from me,” she says. But soliciting strangers to buy mascara was a little too close to her past for comfort.

Stevens began browsing neighborhood garage sales looking for things to buy and sell on eBay. One thing people like to sell cheap is books. Especially paperback thrillers. One day, Stevens was reading one of the books she was reselling. It was something by Robert Ludlum. Her life would never be the same. “When I first read it, I thought, Oh, my God,” she says. “I got so pulled into these worlds. I thought it was the most amazing story I had ever read. Most of the reading I had done in the cult was so simplistic and condescending, but here was this complex story that felt so deep by comparison.” She went from being somebody who read barely anything to a voracious reader of entire series. John Sandford, Iris Johansen. Anybody but Stephen King—too gruesome. Or Tom Wolfe. “Where’s the story?” Somewhere along the way, she realized that writing a thriller was something she wanted to do.

“I didn’t care about publication,” she says. “I just wanted to say that I had written a book. I was 35 years old at the time, and I really felt like a nobody who was home alone with the kids all day and had no education.” By then, she had lived in the world long enough to realize how things worked. If you had the will, the discipline, and an Internet connection, you could make almost anything happen. People often ask if Vanessa Munroe, the main character in The Informationist, who can get whatever information she needs from anyone or anything, is based on her. Not really, she answers, except that they both know what it’s like to be an outsider, and they both know how to teach themselves things. Stevens took courses in marketing, accounting, and business law. How hard could it be to write a thriller? While the kids napped or slept at night, she wrote.

She was halfway through the book when she realized that writing was actually kind of hard. She threw out everything she had written, bought a few books on how to write, and started again. “It didn’t matter how hard it was,” she says. “I knew if I wanted to do it, I could.”

As she readies herself for publication of the book this month, Stevens knows that people are going to be asking questions about her past. A few months ago, when her publisher held a lunch at a midtown Manhattan restaurant for Stevens to meet with members of the media, she was so busy answering questions about the cult, she never got a chance to eat a bite. Inevitably, the questions seem to revolve around her relationship with her family now and the sexual aspects of the cult. Both questions pain her.

Stevens’s mother was eighteen when she joined, her father 23, and they were matched, Stevens believes, for the simple reason that they were both Jewish. Whenever she asked her parents why they had made the decision, their answers were maddeningly vague: “ ‘I don’t know,’ my mother would shrug. ‘They were just there, and I went with them.’ ” She currently has no relationship with her father, partly because he continues to identify with the cult, but she and her mother (her parents are divorced) have been slowly working to rebuild their bond. “I still crave the love any child feels for her mother,” Stevens says, “and I do feel that she has worked hard to make up for the decisions of her youth. The family ties were severed at a young age, but those were ties I always wanted and reached toward, and even though the past can’t be undone, together we work toward establishing the relationship we could have had.”

Becoming a mother changed things for Stevens. “It wasn’t until I started having children of my own, comparing their growth and development . . . to what I had experienced comparatively at those ages, that I grasped the true horrors of what I had lived through,” she says. While she is not averse to giving hugs and kisses, Stevens, who grew up for the most part without that kind of parental affection, admits she is not “a ‘let’s get down on the floor and play,’ ‘Oh, you skinned your knee; you poor thing’ kind of mom.” She takes pride in the fact that she has fostered independence in her daughters. “My girls are extremely self-sufficient within their little worlds,” she says. At the same time, she finds the contrast between her experience as a parent and her experience as a child nothing short of baffling. As she says, “I can’t comprehend how so many of the parents in the cult could have set aside such a powerful instinct.”

Her response to questions about the sexual aspects of the cult is always the same: No comment. “I am not in denial about what happened,” she says, “but I don’t think it’s anyone’s business. Just because people want to know doesn’t mean they have a right to know. Ultimately, if I answered, people would have their curiosity satisfied, but my children and I would have to live with the fallout for the rest of our lives.” (In other words, her maternal instinct seems to be working just fine.) Anybody who wants to know more about life in the cult will have to wait for the second volume of The Informationist, which deals exclusively with the topic. Writing that book put many of Stevens’s demons to bed, hopefully forever. “I could get all the revenge I wanted and not have to worry about how things really worked out for people,” she says. “It was great.”


This article was found at:


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10 comments:

  1. The news reports about the Children of God, aka The Family International that I've archived in the comments sections on this blog started in chronological order on this page:
    https://religiouschildabuse.blogspot.com/p/family-international.html

    When that comment section was full, I continued in the comments section on this page:
    http://religiouschildabuse.blogspot.com/2011/03/denied-education-in-family.html

    This comment section is also now full, so I will continue adding articles to this page you are currently on:
    http://religiouschildabuse.blogspot.com/2011/02/novelist-describes-how-she-survived.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Letter from an ex-cult member

    By: Ma. Ceres P. Doyo, Philippine Daily Inquirer February 2, 2024

    Titled “Human Face,” (as approved by the late editor in chief Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc), this column hopes to give a human face and voice to issues of concern, hence this letter from a reader. I wrote back to ask if I could use his letter and he said yes. We sometimes wonder where our column pieces end up and about the people who read them. We never know unless they write us and when they do, there is something important they want to express. One reader, years ago, led me to embark on a groundbreaking series.

    Here is the letter I received three days ago:

    “I read your recent article ‘Quiboloy’s ‘pastorals’ for sexploitation?’ (1/26/2024). This sentence in your article caught my attention:

    “‘Religious affairs are among my journalistic beats—papal visits, family feud in the Iglesia ni Cristo, El Shaddai, Caryana, Children of God, assassinated members of the clergy, militant church women, cult-like movements, sexual abuses by clerics, among many.’

    “That’s because I am a survivor of the Children of God (COG) cult. I was among the first members to go to the Philippines in the early 1970s and helped set up the first COG communes there. I tell my story of my time in the Philippines in my recently published memoir: ‘Misguided: My Jesus Freak Life in a Doomsday Cult.’

    “After those early years, in the 1980s the Children of God had many members in the Philippines and recruited many Filipinos to join it. For several years, the founder and leader of that cult, David Berg, lived secretly in the Philippines, and members there had a ministry specifically targeting the Philippines military. In the late 1980s, the Philippine government ordered all Children of God members to leave the country. Most of them went to Japan, to a large cult compound where I was living at the time.

    “I had joined that cult in Canada in 1972 when I was 16. After I escaped that cult in 1991 while in Japan, I returned to Canada, went to university, and eventually became a lawyer. Today, I am an advocate for cult survivors and appeared in the five-part documentary series ‘Children of the Cult.’ I have heard many tragic stories from people who were born and raised in the cult, the second generation, who had horrific experiences in cult compounds in the Philippines.

    “Given your journalistic interest in this subject I thought I would let you know about my book and my experiences in the Philippines in the event you want to explore further that topic of the Children of God’s history in your country. Sincerely, Perry Bulwer.”

    I looked up Bulwer’s book in Amazon and there he was on the cover, a teenager strumming a guitar and flashing a broad smile. I prefer a hard copy instead of the e-book version but I can share, for now, what is in the Amazon website. There is also an interview with Bulwer that is available online. I will be watching “Children of the Cult.”

    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  3. So here is a look into “Misguided.” It should be instructive for those recovering from their traumatic experiences in “doomsday cults” such as COG. Also for Filipinos (some I knew personally) who were/are in search of some spiritual stimulation and had been drawn to cult-like movements that promised to fulfill their yearnings—to belong, among them.

    COG was known as “The Family” described as “a millenarian doomsday sex cult under the sway of charismatic leader, David Berg” who preached around the world. COG was among the cults that came to be in the 1960s and 1970s.

    In 1972, Bulwer dropped out of high school to join COG. “Bulwer takes the reader on an extraordinary trip through the world of biblical literalism, fundamentalist end-time fantasies, paranormal spirituality, evangelical extremism, ritual abuse, and liberally interpreted Biblical teachings that were used to justify licentious sexual doctrines, evangelical prostitution, and child sexual abuse.” Berg claimed that God had spoken through him (sounds familiar?), he predicted America’s destruction, the Antichrist’s coming in 1985, and Jesus’ second coming in 1993. Berg died in 1994 before the long arm of the law got to him.

    But Bulwer’s account must be riveting in itself, how he escaped COG’s fearsome control for more than two decades. He did get back to Canada to start all over, pursue an education and, later, law studies. He helps survivors of cult abuse, those traumatized and trying to pick up the pieces of their lives.

    What is a cult? Definitions and types vary, but at the center of it all is a leader, outwardly charismatic perhaps, who draws people to his/her teachings, people who leave all and follow. Not all cults are religious types, by the way. I have the authoritative book “Cults in Our Midst: the Hidden Menace in Our Everyday Lives” by Margaret Thaler Singer with Janja Lalich, a cult survivor. It explores how cults operate, why people join and end messed up.

    Bulwer’s own first-hand account about his “Jesus freak life” should be a page-turner.

    https://opinion.inquirer.net/170523/letter-from-an-ex-cult-member

    ReplyDelete
  4. [Note: the following article was published in Portuguese. This is the FireFox browser's English translation.]

    "I was born in a sect"

    Three women who grew up in The Family were isolated and abused – and only now understand what happened.

    by Heloísa Barrense From UOL, in São Paulo January 15, 2024 Part One of Three

    "I was born in a sect. My parents were 17 and 18 when they joined The Family. For them, these movements were interesting, because they were inspired by the revolution of Jesus. A half hippie thing of the time, of life change and social structure, with a strong musical issue. They had a band, they all played the guitar and sang.”

    Alyssa Veiga, now 28, was the youngest of seven children and grew up in the sect founded by Californian David Berg in 1968 at the height of the counterculture. She spent her childhood between Mexico and Rio de Janeiro until she saw, at the age of 3, a house that belonged to her grandmother being transformed into a "home".

    Not any home, but a "home" for up to 35 people linked to the group The Family - which was previously called the Children of God and who would later become The Family International.

    It took years for her to discover that there was, on the other side of the walls of the community, a very different society than she knew. It was at age 14 that she stepped into a school for the first time. And it took another decade for her to be able to understand the violence she was subjected to.

    But she wasn't alone.

    It was in one of these homes, in Santa Catarina, that lived the parents of Andressa and Priscilla Zgoda, two other women of the sect, who are now 32 and 29 years old, respectively.

    They did not know each other at the time and lived miles away, but they now realized, adults, that they lived similar experiences of isolation and sexual abuse.

    Like Alyssa’s parents, the parents of the Zgoda sisters saw in the sect an opportunity to connect with God in a moment “mire hippies, very Christian,” they say.

    They believed in all that promise of life involving holiness without a traditional method. To this day they do not call it a sect,” explains Priscila.

    What only today can three women understand more clearly is that the religious group sought a "spiritual revolution before the apocalypse" and, for this, associated God with sex.

    Family International said the organizational structure was dismantled in 2010 and now functions as an online network of about 1,300 people, with a zero-tolerance policy with violence since 1986. It is opposed to child abuse “in any form, whether physical, sexual, educational or emotional.”

    In common, Alyssa, Andressa and Priscila had a rigorous routine, isolated from life in society and marked by extreme ideologies.

    The group, for example, was against vaccines and medical care, forced all studies to be done at home, with donated books and without chronological or pedagogical order, prohibited TV and imposed English as the predominant language.

    From childhood, they remember the moment of devotion, the biblical prayer and the readings of the doctrines contained in the Letters of Mo — the Moses David David, pseudonym of the leader David Berg, who died in 1994.

    From the age of 8, memories of the trips to the streets with other children appear to ask for donation, sell CDs or participate in corals. The children only left the community to "preach the word".

    "It was two or three times in the entire childhood that I remember having had contact with relatives. Once, I fell from the bunk and broke my arm. I was only taken to the hospital 24 hours later, in a lot of pain, because the leaders said that God was going to heal me. Or they said it was nothing. They did that to everyone.” - Priscila Zgoda, who spent the first 15 years
    jumping from home to home

    After spending years studying confined, the orientation was to go to the street to apply what they had learned in the booklets, especially one of the religious teachings of Berg's letters: the "flirty fishing".
    continued below

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  5. That is, they seduced to sexually attract outsiders to the sect and raise funds for the community — part of the amount raised was sent directly to leaders, often in other countries.

    The tactic was demonstrated in the handouts, including sexual images of children, denounced a report of Fantástico, TV Globo, 1978, which had access to the material of the time.

    "We lived in mansions, and someone got a discount on the rent flirting with the owner. When I got older, at about 12 years old, the speech was, ‘You need to give your soul to do this. It must flirt with men to win souls to Christ. You have to smile, pretend you are in love.” - Andressa Zgoda

    Although they tell that they never knew where they were or what they did with this money, there was bonus for ennered followers.

    "This contact with sex was a common thing. We had books with drawings of sex and we saw very sexy people all the time. But I knew I wasn't comfortable with the situation and questioned why they did it. Then we heard about someone who was excommunicated, another who was abused. It was a very severe education, of physical punishments, which left scarred. I remember asking some things to the leaders and they said that my questioning was the devil’s frame.” - Priscila Zgoda

    When Alyssa first stepped into a school, she realized that the life she led was “not normal” and that that context of hypersexualization was conditional on the “normalization of many things wrong.”

    "It was an idea of ‘God is love, and love is sex." - Alyssa Veiga

    The community used sexual relations to express devotion to God. In other words, sex was “God’s thing” and did not spare children abuse in the name of faith.

    There was no talk of consent or repressing violence. On the contrary, any questioning was misregarded and considered “abodiated in the body,” they report.

    It was this, they believe, that prevented them from perceiving the abuses they were suffering.

    "Everyone was a victim of pedophilia. I can not even count how many times they were, because it was in daily life, in our home. The adults came out of the bath and let the towel fall on the floor. The elders grabbed, passed by, made jokes. At 7 years old, I heard comments like 'you're going to grow up and look hot'. But she had to be polite. Every teenager I met without exception was abused.” - Alyssa

    Now, adults and out of isolation, they can name the practices: rape of vulnerable (having carnal conjunction or practicing another libidinous act with a child under 14 years of age).

    "It took us to a [suggested] room. I did it in a way that did not have penetration, so as not to leave traces, with his wife [of a member, in charge of taking care of the children] consenting. In fact, she kind of kidnapped us. I didn’t understand what was happening, whether it was right or wrong. He said it was a dream and that if I told my parents, they would abandon me. So he pretended that nothing happened.” - Priscilla

    Andressa remembers the same man—and others. “I was between 10 and 11 years old, he didn’t get touched me, but he masturbated in front of me while his wife and I slept in bed,” she says.

    Alyssa has clear memories of similar abuse by four people.

    At 7, she was also raped by the person responsible for the children of the community and by a teenager, about 16. Then, at 12, she remembers a 22-year-old man and an older man who lived in the same house as she was 5 to 13.

    "He was our caregiver: I organized our routines and, when I arrived in activity or stayed home without my parents, he had more access. Everything was placed as affection, I didn’t understand that I was being molested.” - Alyssa

    see the links and photos embedded in this article at:

    https://noticias.uol.com.br/reportagens-especiais/nasci-em-uma-seita-mulheres-isoladas-foram-abusadas-pela-a-familia/#page10

    read Part Two in the comments below

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  6. [Note: the following article was published in Portuguese. This is the FireFox browser's English translation.]

    "Waking up screaming"

    Teenagers who have left the sect The Family suffer to overcome trauma and adapt to the outside world

    by Heloísa Barrense From Universa, in São Paulo January 15, 2024 Part Two of Three

    "I had a nightmare reliving everything. I would wake up screaming, crying and always keep imagining many scenes that I had gone through.” - Andressa Zgoda

    Alyssa Veiga and sisters Andressa and Priscilla Zgoda have grown up in different locations, but have a common history. They lived in "lars" of the sect The Family, divided by dozens of people, with very little access to the world beyond the walls, and did not know that they were part of a sect when the group disintegrated. They followed a religious doctrine that preached sex, including with children, as a way of rapprochement with God in the face of the impending apocalypse.

    It was a mysterious religious organization that arrived in Brazil in the midst of the military dictatorship. A report of the Diário de Pernambuco, in 1975, reported the arrival of the group. The text of the time said that the movement, started with David Berg in the United States, began to spread to cities in the Northeast after a Brazilian couple joined.

    “[Seight] was a completely forbidden word. I’ve started using it in the last few years,” says Alyssa, now 28. “We had on the tip of our tongue the justification that we were a missionary group without a physical church that believed in the gospel. It was all very geared so that we defended ourselves against accusations and we had many explanations to deviate from the questions.”

    Despite serious denunciations over decades, the end happened only in the 2000s. And it was at this moment that many young people saw themselves disoriented and loose in the midst of a society they knew little.

    Alyssa, Andressa and Priscila were between 14 and 15 years old when the rules began to be relaxed and a new world opened up.

    “It was no longer a closed community, we had a little bit more contact with the world. So I asked to leave [the sect] because we had no right to study. Our books always came from donations, with no material sequence. It was what I had available, I had never studied correctly until then," recalls Priscila, now 29.

    In the last years of the group, their mother managed to get their daughters to stop being part of the congregation —Priscila, to study, and Andressa to live with her father in Rio.

    “He always hit header with a lot of information and wanted to leave. There came a time when I couldn’t accept it anymore,” says Andressa, now 32.

    That’s when they realized they would have to “start from scratch.” That is, to take supplementary to have a diploma of basic education, then enter the school to have high school and thus have some knowledge to get a job and support themselves.

    "I remember going to the mall many times just to sit down and see how people acted, how they interacted, what they did. I felt completely outside the house. I didn’t have the same references, and until today, when they say something is from my time, I don’t know what they’re talking about.” - Priscilla

    Alyssa also says that he had to "relearn everything." When she finally entered high school after years of studying at home, she realized that she was different from other people in many things—not just in what she learned from school content.

    "It was heavy and confusing to get to high school, a culture shock. It was a complete stranger and had to invent answers to some questions: 'From what school did you come from? Why do you speak English so well?' I had colleagues from the sect who accompanied me in this and everyone suffered, no one wanted to be weird. We didn’t know how to make friends and we had to keep many secrets.”

    Then came the great discovery: "I found out that families weren't hurt. I thought everyone had been raped.” - Alyssa
    continued below

    ReplyDelete
  7. Family International said the organizational structure was dismantled in 2010 and now functions as an online network of about 1,300 people, with a zero-tolerance policy with violence since 1986. It is opposed to child abuse “in any form, whether physical, sexual, educational or emotional.”

    When they had access to the internet, they could also find other information that until then was hidden.

    “I started learning about sects, watching documentaries, and that’s when I realized they had lied to me. We couldn’t do this kind of research [before] because I was against the group, and I never felt safe to open the conversation with my biological family,” recalls Alyssa.

    Outside of confinement, it was also not easy to understand the limits and process what had happened. A year after leaving the group, she had depression. And at 16, he tried to kill himself — the suicide among young victims of The Children of God, as the Family was called before, was documented in HBO’s “Children of God: Lost and Found,” by HBO’s director, who also grew up in the sect in Brazil.

    "I went through a lot of harassment after leaving the group, lowered my head and normalized absurd things. In therapy, I was able to have the confidence to st udy, talk about what I lived and say that I was raped. It’s been a long process to get this brainwashing, my mind didn’t work. I learned to talk no, to react and to allow me to have negative emotions. And a force was born to know what had happened.” - Alyssa

    Today, she is a teacher and singer and believes she has found her healing in the art. Although it has circulated through various fields of spirituality, it avoids places that ask for restrictions, "because it is a trigger". “It is the beginning of an independence, of a life that is not in the shadow of the sect. I was lucky enough to seek help, to survive. I am fighting for my life.”

    “The culture of rape and pedophilia and religious manipulation exist inside and outside the sect, and we need to fight, talk and unite.”

    Already Priscilla was 15 years old when she began to research more about the behaviors of The Family. The revolt she felt, she says, still causes discomfort to her parents. Her mother struggles to accept what the sect did as a criminal and still tries to see the positive side of the group, while her father feels ashamed.

    "I was horrified and very angry, because we entered into it without being able to choose. It is one of the biggest regrets of my father, who constantly apologizes and says that he hoped that everything was a project of God, that would save lives. I had to forgive them and see them with other eyes, but it wasn’t easy. There is nothing that justifies everything that was done, it was a very painful process for everyone.” - Priscilla

    It also explains the impacts that the abuses have had on their faith.

    “When I entered a church, I almost had a panic attack. I just wanted to get out there with a desire to vomit and desperate. I’ve tried to go to other places of religiosity, but there’s always a mistrust that someone is benefiting from it.”

    “We see John of God and other leaders accused of crimes, so it is very difficult to say that it only happened in the Family. It happens everywhere. I’ve seen so much bad thing being done in the name of God that I’m still very blocked.”

    Andressa bears the pain of not being able to support her sister from violence and brainwashing in childhood, but today, the mother of a girl, tries his best to protect her. “I’m very afraid of what might happen to her. I know I couldn't do that with my sister. But if I had spoken at the time, I don’t know if they would believe it.”

    see the links and photos embedded in this article at:

    https://www.uol.com.br/universa/reportagens-especiais/acordava-gritando-quem-saiu-da-seita-a-familia-sofre-para-se-adaptar/#page7

    read Part Three of this series below

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  8. [Note: the following article was published in Portuguese. This is the FireFox browser's English translation.]

    'I reported who raped me'

    Women Who Growed in the sita Família Can't Punish Abusers: 'Think Like Crazy'

    by Heloísa Barrense From Universa, in São Paulo January 15, 2024 Part Three of Three

    “I started playing on the internet about the sect, I saw a lot of videos and documentaries. I saw everything that happened inside and understood that it was not normal. I understood that I had been a victim of abuse,” says the Curitiba Priscila Zgoda, now 29 years old.

    After living 15 years isolated in the religious community The Family, formerly known as the Children of God, she was determined to report to the police the recurring rapes she suffered throughout her childhood and youth. I was 19 years old, there were four away from the sect and finally began to understand what lived.

    In parallel, the same process of "care the file" happened with her sister, Andressa, now 32 years old: "We began to be ashamed and afraid, thinking that the problem was us and being threatened. When I left the sect and decided to leave everything behind, I felt I needed to talk to someone, to see if it was not something in my head. That was when I found out that my sister was also abused. I felt guilty, as if I could have avoided it. And then I found out that it had happened to more people."

    It was at that time the first attempt to bring the cases to the authorities. Priscila found other victims, gathered the testimonies and sought the Jacarepaguá Women’s Police Station, in Rio, where he lives. Soon came the frustration.

    “Unfortunately it didn’t do anything, nobody can do anything about it,” he says.

    The man denounced had a face, his name and a friend of their father. He kept in touch with his family even after the group ended.

    But in the case of other abusers, the allegations do not go because there is not even basic information. Members used biblical names, different from those of baptism, which makes it difficult to make a report of occurrence. After the group was over, it became even more difficult to identify people.

    Like Andressa and Priscila, Alyssa Veiga, 28, also remembers being raped recurrently by men from the sect from very young and until she was a teenager. And, like them, feels unmotivated to denounce the violence experienced in the home where he lived, in Rio de Janeiro: "When I talked to people about it, I was taken as crazy. It takes away the strength.”

    When he finally sought the police in Rio, Priscila had to undergo psychological follow-up and physical examinations, even after reporting that the abuse occurred years ago, without leaving any trace.

    “It was a difficult and very slow process. I changed the delegate, and they called me to depose all over again. They even asked me for a very humiliating examination of the IML [Medical Legal Institute] and I did not understand, because the abuse happened when I was a child, "explains.

    continued below

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  9. According to lawyer Ana Paula Braga, a specialist in such cases, the law provides that any crime that can leave traces must be subjected to examination of a body of crime, but does not talk about crimes that occurred many years before and even rapes that do not involve penetration. “It is even institutional violence to force women to undergo such an invasive examination just because it is a legal requirement,” he told UOL.

    For Priscila, reliving violence repeatedly left sequelae.

    "Having to keep talking the same things again, without any sensitivity to the victim, is very boring and emotionally difficult. It was a very cold thing. I had depression at the time. And today, after ten years, after all they have done, nothing has gone forward and no one gives satisfaction. It is very frustrating.” - Priscila Zgoda

    The process, on the other hand, helped her talk more openly about what had happened, which had repercusated between victims of several cities.

    “I started to advertise on Facebook groups and to former members. Other victims saw his face [the man they accuse of abuse] and the complaint was increasing,” he explains. “He came to live with [the leader of the sect, the American] David Berg and rode a lot between the homes. I believe where he went he left victims.”

    Upon learning of the abuses, their father felt "very betrayed" by the one who was considered a trusted man and decided to support his daughters in court. In response, he was prosecuted for defamation by the accused.

    "The most that happened was that. It was the only time he had an audience and I met him in person. But the case was shelved. So what remains is to make noise on TikTok, on Instagram... so that abuse is seen. If you don’t go to court, let us talk about how many people you have suffered.” - Priscilla

    This was not the first time the sect has been investigated, nor the first time the investigations had little scope.

    The children of God began in 1968 in the United States. The first journalistic records of the religious movement in Brazil took place in 1975. Three years later, two reporters pretended to be a couple interested in joining the group to try to show what was happening in the "lar" to which so few had access.

    Clodomir Broxado and Mary Fontes, from the Flávio Cavalcanti program, in the Tupi Network, visited several times a house in Rio, until he suggested to the members to take care of Mary. She then spent a week at the scene and described what she saw in a text published in 1978: she clashed with the mixture of religion and sex.

    "Men change women when they want to and they do not object: there is usually mutual consent in this exchange. Women are proselyted by almost nothing and accept to participate in 'programs', attend motels and commit to sustain the colonies. Finally, they seek to attract new elements through sex.”

    continued below

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  10. In addition to prostitution, the news pointed to problems with the IRS, with suspicious money movements abroad. That same year, the Civil Police of Pernambuco opened an investigation to investigate the actions of the group.

    At the time, detained in an apartment in Recife with obscene materials, the members of the sect confirmed that 11% of the money raised in Brazil was sent abroad, clandestinely. The amount was sent to Rio, an employee of the U.S. embassy in Brazil received and passed on to "Father David", the nickname of founder David Berg.

    None of this was enough to contain the performance of the group, which continued to exist. In 2004, it changed its name to The Family International, a self-titled “online Christian work dedicated to spreading the message of God’s love, present in nearly 80 countries.”

    The following year, another scandal involved the founders of the group. Ricky Rodriguez, Berg’s son, killed one of his childhood sex offenders, who was his nanny, and then committed suicide at the age of 29. He said his own father molested him and used him to illustrate the group’s books.

    “That’s when many started waking up,” Alyssa says.

    In other countries, there have been trials and convictions of members of the sect for rape. Berg’s own granddaughters Bergdenounced the rapes they suffered in the sect. American actor River Phoenix also went public to say that he was raped at the age of 4 while living in the community. In 1993, he died of a drug overdose.

    But here in Brazil there are no records of any convictions.

    To UOL, the Civil Police of Rio de Janeiro said that the investigation of the complaint of Priscila is ongoing. And the Public Ministry informed that the proceedings were sent in June this year to the Prosecutor’s Office and will be analyzed.

    The Civil Police of Pernambuco did not locate the files related to the sect. The deputy in charge, Djair Lopes, died. The Federal Police did not respond to possible convictions of those involved.

    And the Court of Justice of Pernambuco reported that possibly the records are shelved and, as there is a lack of information about the names of the parties and the stick in which it was processed, it was not possible to locate the documents.

    Family International said the organizational structure was dismantled in 2010 and now functions as an online network of about 1,300 people, with a zero-tolerance policy with violence since 1986. It is opposed to child abuse “in any form, whether physical, sexual, educational or emotional.”

    “Courts around the world that conducted exhaustive investigations of more than 600 children in the early 1990s concluded that they were not exposed to any kind of abuse or neglect and were satisfied with the quality of their education,” he said.

    The community confirms cases in which “minors have been exposed to inappropriate sexual behavior.” "This was resolved in 1986, when any contact of a sexual nature between an adult and a minor was officially prohibited and subsequently in 1989 declared excommunicable."

    The group said it had issued official apologise on several occasions to all members or former members "who were injured in some way during their affiliation."

    see the links and photos embedded in this article at:

    https://www.uol.com.br/universa/reportagens-especiais/denunciei-quem-me-estuprou-seita-a-familia-e-alvo-de-investigacao-mas-nao-adianta/#page9

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