The evidence is sparse and the conclusions are incomplete and imperfect. The most - or I suspect more accurately, the least - I can confidently find is this:-
I am completely satisfied that he was obsessed with sex and that he became a perverted man who recklessly corrupted his flock and did many of them serious damage which he made no attempt to redress and for which he never admitted any personal responsibility. Hypocritically he did not practice what he preached, that confession and repentance are good for the soul. Now he is dead. May the Lord have mercy on his soul. There will be many who will not mourn his passing. KJ is no doubt among that large number. He did not live long enough to read her indictment of him as she gave evidence. Those of us who heard it, those of us whose hearts are not frozen by prejudice, whose ears are not deaf to things they do not wish to hear and whose eyes are not blind to genuine tears, we will remember that young woman breaking down in the witness box and through her sobs crying out:-
"If it's changed so much, how can it have changed? This all started with David Berg. He's the one who decided it all. It's all his prophecy, so how can he suddenly change it all. Is he saying it's all wrong, saying that he made a mistake? Where's all this counselling being given to the victims he's made? Has he done anything to help to stop the suffering that has happened and is just going to keep going on because you suffer it all your life. How can it have changed? It's changed on the outside so that we don't persecute them. It hasn't changed his heart. It hasn't changed his mind. It's just made things more covered up, more secretive, that's all. He hasn't said sorry for any of the things he started in the first place. He hasn't done anything to correct them to make them right. How can you say it's changed? People are still suffering for what he's done to us. It'll be with me for the rest of my life, I know that. Every decision I make, everything I do. I still have phobias, phobias about men. Where's all the help. If you do wrong to someone or thousands of people, you should help if you really believe in your heart that you've done wrong and I don't believe he does."
I make no apology for repeating and adopting this passionate declamation.
She has been at Berg's side throughout all of this. She did not initiate it but for a long time participated in the excesses and saw her own son abused and harmed. I believe that she in her heart of hearts knows just how wrong the propagation of these freedoms were. MB fairly observed that Maria was not likely to have been able to have stopped the sexual relationship Berg was promoting between MB and Davidito and MB also said she felt that Maria was not happy with what Grandpa was doing to her. I am also satisfied that Maria does lead the determined effort that has been made to stop these practices. I believe that her expressions of regret are genuine, though belated and insufficient.
She stands condemned by her upbringing of Davidito and Techi and her own daughter Davida and she was a party to the abuses which took place within the Berg household. She remains notwithstanding all of that, a highly respected and influential childcare officer. I have no confidence in her.
I find he was corrupted by the sexual freedoms his revered leader offered him. MB spoke of Amsterdam being in bed with Maria while she was in bed with Grandpa. I had no reason to doubt it. Sated with sex, the ordinary inhibitions and the social taboos broke down, as Dr Cameron explained they would, and there is evidence that Amsterdam "shared" with MB and A1.
MB did not complain about him and I have therefore no evidence as to his involvement.
There is hearsay evidence from MB that A1 said she had had sex with him. It is insufficient for me to find that against him.
I cannot recall evidence against him.
His own daughter with understandable reluctance complained that he abused her as I find he did. He also abused MB. Music with Meaning was a particularly corrupt and corrupting organisation. He played a central part in it.
He Was another member of the Music with Meaning team. He corrupted and abused the young girls who were part of the singing and dancing troupe. What troubles me gravely is that he is now the European Shepherd and S is subject to his controlling influences - or the lack of them.
She is another childcare expert who was prepared to encourage the teenagers in her charge in Japan to have sexual intercourse, some of them for the first time. It was she who belatedly woke up to the fact that she was promoting promiscuity. She did not appear to grasp the irony of contrast between that behaviour and her proudly proclaiming that she had brought up her own daughter to be a chaste young woman.
There is, therefore, overwhelming evidence that the high leadership within The Family has been guilty of child sexual abuse. That must concern this Court.
It would be wrong, however, not to record, with equal emphasis, that there is no evidence whatever that there is anyone in authority at the Ward's home or nationally has himself or herself been guilty of sexual abuse. I find that they were not party to any of those excesses. They had read My Little Fish but could not believe that such sexual contact was appropriate. In the MAs case, they robustly rejected the invitation for their child to share with another. There never has been even a suggestion that NT herself has committed any indecency. The acquittal of this young mother and those close to her occupies this lonely paragraph in a very long judgment, but the acquittal will remain prominent in my mind when I come to balance the risks of harm to S.
With a sigh of relief, I turn from sex abuse to the other no less important and perhaps more important issues in the case.
The Plaintiff's case was that The Family so strongly believe in the healing power of prayer, that they are neglectful of the need for proper medical treatment; that because they too frequently believe that illness is a punishment for sinfulness, they are intolerant of those who suffer physical or mental disability.
The Family do not deny their belief in healing by faith. They assert it. They are fully justified in doing so. It is an established tenet of Christian belief. I am much less certain of the theological justification for the apparent correlation between illness and sin, nor do I intend to enter into that debate. For the purpose of this judgment it is sufficient for me to express my concern about the effect on children of such passages as I find in "True Comix" clearly designed to be read by young children which told them:-
"But sometimes if we're really being bad or foolish and doing things we know are wrong, the Lord may take away His protection and let us get hurt or sick as punishment for being so naughty. Sometimes that's why we get sick, because the Lord is spanking us for being naughty. When we're sick we should pray and ask the Lord why. If we have been bad or naughty, if we are really sorry, he forgives us and heals us.... Sometimes maybe you'll be sick even when you weren't bad and did nothing wrong. Maybe God let you get sick to show you he can heal you like he did with the blind man in the Bible."
The drawings showed a young girl in bed with measles or chicken pox apparently thinking she had been naughty because the picture showed that God had her over his knee, her trousers but not her panties down and He was spanking her on the bottom. The Family seemed oblivious of the dangers in such messages. The danger was that the messages were taken literally and to extremes. In an organisation where strong faith and unquestioning obedience were drummed into all, young and old, extreme reactions were inevitably likely to follow. This is seen in the sad story of Shuly.
This girl was a deeply committed member of the group. Some of her letters to the leadership have been published and are before me, others are not. She contracted Lupus, a debilitating disease. She wrote to Berg asking for permission to read "System" books against which Berg had so vehemently railed in such letters as "You are What you Read." I am told by the girl's mother SP, that the letter was published with the footnote from Berg hoping Shuly would be healed but suggesting that perhaps Lupus provided the answer for her. What did that mean? SPM provided this explanation in his Affidavit:-
"Having diagnosed the problem, I have no doubt that the disciple would be encouraged to pray for healing and to try to discover through prayer the cause of what it is, what the meaning is. Sometimes illness can lead people to greater faith and to examine their heart to see what, if any, message there is in their situation. We believe that illness can have a spiritual dimension to it."
In the result this seriously ill child was led to the belief that God was spanking her and inflicting a terminal disease upon her as a punishment for her reading the sort of books which, if her rights as an intelligent young person enjoyed any respect at all, would have been freely and unquestioningly available to her. As she faced death, she lived with the terror that her faith was so weak that she had lost God's protection, was unworthy of healing and rightly condemned to eternal damnation. This was emotional abuse to an intolerable degree. Her mother on one occasion found her in a state of shock because she had been reading a Mo letter not placed before me, "When the Incurable become Unbearable" which suggested that those with incurable disease should be placed in homes so that the missionaries could go on unimpeded by such a handicap. Of the same tenor was the "Rotten Apples":-
"We must remember that if there is a retarded or deformed, chronically sick or handicapped child, a queer child or baby born in a family, there is usually something wrong with the mother or father that God is chastening them for and either trying to teach them a lesson or simply punish them for their past or present sins. It's certainly not the child's fault. ... We cannot allow one handicapped soldier to drag down the whole army, nor one rotten apple to spoil the whole barrel full. The problem has either to be cured or The Family delivered from it. ... (The mother) should confess and repent of her sins which caused it, acknowledge it and ask for deliverance, and then the whole Family should pray desperately for the deliverance of the child so that at least its spirit changes from a bad spirit to a good one; or I would suggest that perhaps both should be separated from The Family and certainly from a family with other children in which the retarded child could be a bad influence or even a danger. ... Let's lay aside every weight and these fruits of sin that do so easily beset us and let us run the race and not sit down spending our full time taking care of a bunch of handicapped who will never be able to truly serve the Lord as well as we! Don't let the devil deceive and side track you into something less than the best."
I well understand that that is not the whole story. Not all cases received that extreme treatment. In 1991, which is 10 years after Rotten Apples, letters were published by a mother, Marianne, concerning her Downes Syndrome baby whose two years of life in her mother's care touched and inspired many.
Other contradictions abound. When Flirty Fishing was most enthusiastically pursued, it had as its consequence, inevitably, that many of the women contracted venereal disease. It was almost enough to persuade Berg to cry a halt to that profitable enterprise. He did not. Instead he wrote the scurrilous paper suggesting that Christ might have contracted a venereal disease from Mary Magdalene, who had been a known prostitute, and that just as He suffered for our sins, so the FFing girls were similarly afflicted because of the sins of the men they were trying to save. Venereal disease was, accordingly, a part of the continuing sacrifice they had to make. Maria "had something three times just in the space of about three months". Their solution was:-
"We pray immediately of course, but we also go to the doctor to get him to do whatever he can to help clear it up."
There was, therefore, no embargo on seeking medical help but there was often some reluctance to do seek it to the detriment of the patient. There were examples of that in the evidence before me. JG in Romania in about 1992, had a boil on his face which became so badly infected that he became seriously ill. His requests for a doctor to attend or for his being taken to hospital were refused. Prayer was the only cure offered. He was told that he must have some serious spiritual problem for God to be so harshly dealing with him. He was not healed. He was taken to hospital eventually, but not before time. For this young man, that did not sustain his faith: it destroyed it.
AB was in Argentina in 1990, and fell acutely ill. The letters she had been assigned to read did not gain for her the requisite "victory". For the shepherds who cared for her that was an indication that she needed a sharp warning and needed to confess whatever terrible sin she was hiding. She was regarded as "rebellious" because she did not wish to eat. She was told Oplexicon, one of Satan's archangels, was living in her. She was barely 17 years old at the time and she was terrified. After many days of high fever and delirium she was finally taken to hospital and received emergency surgery which saved her life, but did not save her fallopian tubes. She was the victim of cruel neglect and those who had charge of her in the absence of her parents treated her with callous disregard for her welfare.
How did that happen? The answer is one which sends a shiver of apprehension down my spine. The answer is that her shepherds were conforming with the standards set by the leadership and were following their example. For them, AB was another MB. AB was ill in January 1990. In December 1989, the first issue of the new "Teen Specials" featuring a "Traumatic Testimony" was published as a warning to teenagers who like AB were:
"Wilfully yielding to the same spiritual sins that she (MB) yielded to such as extreme pride, self- righteousness, self-exultation and harsh criticism of others ... You can wind up in a living hell on earth like MB has experienced even within The Family if you yield to the Devil and his doubtful destructive and damning devices".
That letter was accompanied by "The last State" describing, as I shall do in a moment, how The Family dealt with MB and how her grandfather told her:
"You think .... you can invite these little devils to play around and cause trouble and all the rest but you can't stop, I want to tell you right now, not without suffering for it, not without paying for it! ... Those little dirty demons you've been inviting in to play around with and talk to you are not going to get away with it any more. Because they're going to lose their happy home in you, one way or the other."
What so concerns me is that here is another example of the letters influencing the conduct of the members and causing irreparable damage.
The treatment meted out to MB is so appalling that no one except perhaps DR had the gall to tempt to defend it. Mr Barton, labouring under the tremendous difficulty of coming so late into the case, did his best to cross examine MB and challenge her account of what had happened to her. The documents produced very much later in the case confirmed her evidence - indeed satisfied me that her evidence was restrained and understated rather than exaggerated. The letters are "The Last State" and the "Dangers of Demonism" published in March and July 1987. MB, born in June 1972, was invited to her grandfather's compound in December 1983, aged 11, left there in August 1987, aged 15 and left The Family for the United States in November 1990 aged 18. Sara wrote in "The Last State" letters:-
"How unbelievably good MB was in her overall behaviour, attitudes and even in spirit. There is no more extreme example we could use as an almost, nearly "perfect" child - the "best" we'd ever seen! We hardly could find any fault with her at all as MB was outwardly so very sweet, well behaved, submissive, yielded, very wise, very spiritual, mature and responsible and cooperative, just a real angel. Usually, when having to use such severe disciplinary measures as mentioned in the above letter, you're dealing with some incorrigible, defiant and rebellious teen terror or criminal, but this is not so in MB's case. She was always known and considered to be a very sweet and good girl."
Apparently her problem was being "seemingly too good". Sara recounted that it was not until they began to require a written daily report from the teens that they noted in MB's "Lesson and Trials" section that she repeatedly wrote "I need more love so I won't criticise others," or "I'm praying for more respect for my leadership."
Who could blame the girl for lacking respect for a man so revered by others when she knew from her personal knowledge that he was foul mouthed, drank too much and sexually abused her. For this she was brutally punished. Her crime was to have yielded to Satan. That led to a time of two months when she had five major exorcisms performed over her. She was subjected to total immersion in the Word, full-time, with top leadership "reading aloud along with her to keep her mind and mouth and eyes and ears occupied and for a constant infilling of the Holy Spirit." They prayed over her, even fifty times a day. She was 14 years old! She told me in her evidence that nearly ever word uttered by Berg was tape recorded. I thought at the time that it seemed rather fanciful. "The Last State" letter GN278 written in August 1987, seems to be a transcript of recorded conversations and it constitutes a verbatim account of one of the exchanges between this vulnerable teenage girl and her grandfather. I am not surprised that the letter describes it as "the heaviest "strong meat" ever to be (published) and shared with our entire Family". The verbatim account was set out on 19 closely typed pages of which the following give the flavour:-
"Dad had been counselling some of The Family for several hours about being merciful and not being too hard on MB, and he called her in to gently try to talk to her and try to help her. But the Lord himself was obviously very upset with her as we were all soon to see!"
Then follows this account of the exorcism and I will quote the paragraph numbers to give some idea of its duration:-
"(29) MB comes in and Dad greets her with a loving kiss and embrace. "Praise the Lord, Honey, How are you? Bless and help her, Lord, as we talk to her about her problems, in Jesus' name. TYL" (Then, in a very loud voice:) "Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" (Dad breaks into strong tongues for one full minute as he grabs MB with both hands and violently shakes her with every phrase that he shouts it!).
(30) Get out of here, Devil! Get out of her in Jesus' name! Get out of here! In the name of Jesus, get out of her! Hallelujah! In Jesus' name! I rebuke you, Satan! Look at me! Get out of there! (Slaps her face) Get out of there!...
(31) Do you hear me? (slaps) (MB: Yes sir!) Do you hear me? (MB: Yes sir!) Do you hear me? (MB: Yes sir!) Do you hear me? (MB: Yes sir!) Do you understand what I am talking about? (MB: Yes sir) That's what you're going to get if this thing comes back again! (Dad pushes MB into her chair.)
(32) I have heard too much of this thing! (Dad is gasping for breath with each phrase.)
(33) Do you know what they do with people in insane asylums that have devils and demons? Of course they don't call it that...
(35) God is angry! He is angry with you! I mean he is really angry! The power of God's spirit curse that devil and curse you for allowing him in...
(36) I've never put up with anything like this ever from the very first beginning of this Family, from my own first children, I have beaten them with the rod, I have beaten them until they cry for mercy...
(37) From now on I'm going to knock the devil out of you if I have to...
(38) How can you my own granddaughter suppose to be one of my saved children, how could you invite Satan in and put curses on others, send little devils to other people? I don't ever want to hear about that again! (Slaps MB's face) Is that clear? (MB: Yes sir!)...
(39) Tonight you're going to go without your supper and you're going to fast and pray and pray with somebody every hour of the day and night until you get delivered and you don't let those god damn dirty slimy evil little things back into your mind! Is that clear? (Face to face with MB) (MB: Yes sir!) Or do I have to come over there and beat the devil out of you? huh! (MB: No)...
(42) From now on you're going to suffer corporal punishment! ...
(47) Your grandmother was insane, did you know that? I have just been giving them a long history of your background so they could have a little more sympathy and mercy on you and understand you came from a very seriously bad background. (Clears throat and spits.) Same to you, devil! Spit in his face! Do you want me to spit in your face? If you manifest any more of these signs of devilry, I'm not only going to spit in your face, I'm going to hit you in your face!
(48) Has anybody ever punished you like that before? (MB: Yes) Who? (MB: "Uncle Peter".) (Peter Amsterdam: I spanked her once real hard.) Well, she undoubtedly needed it! (Maria: It wasn't anything like what you just gave her though.) When was this? (Peter: When we had prayer for her a while back.)
(49) I have a rod here, will you please bring it to me.. You see this? Pass it to her, let her feel it. I want you to feel this, how heavy it is. (Face to face with MB again.) That is a rod!
(50) I am going to take this rod to you and I am going to beat you with it the next time any of this stuff comes up.
(52) Do you want me to help you know what you're going to get? Come here, I'll let you feel it just one time. Bend over. (Spanks her!) Did you feel that? Well next time your buttocks are going to be bare and you're going to really feel it!
(53) You're dangerous you're going to go stark raving mad and do something terrible if you keep playing around with those devils.
(55) Your mother Shula's insane... Your father Aaron was insane! If it hadn't been for the Lord, he would have jumped off the cliff a long time before that...
(58) Do you want to be sane? (MB: Yes!)
(64) If you can't resist (the devil) then get rid of him yourself, wake up somebody that's with you and tell them to pray with you. And if they have to use a rod to beat him out of you, fine, you've got my permission. (Sara: Yes sir I'll do it!) If you've got to slap her to wake her up and get her out of that kind of spirit, slap her! Slap her good! Knock her around! Let her have it! ...
(74) Now get out, you damn devil, and leave her alone, or I'm going to whack the daylights out of her! (She cries.) Thank God that's the first time I think I've seen tears! Are you sorry? (MB: Yes sir!) But if you're not sorry, I'm going to make you sorry!...
(81) You think you're going to make it up there (in the system) somehow? The only way you could make it is to be a whore, that's all! You wouldn't even be an FFer, you wouldn't even be doing it for God, you'd just be doing it for a living. You'd probably end up on drugs - a drug demon possessed, alcoholic, diseased whore and soon dead! Now is that what you want? (MB: No sir!)...
(88) I don't know whether these here have ever seen me this angry before, and I'm sure you've never seen me this angry before, but there are some others who have! There are some others I have knocked around and slapped down for being so full of the devil and playing around with Satan and toying with demons! I kicked some of them out of The Family...
(90) You're dirty, you're filthy, you stink! Your self righteousness pride stinks worst of all, like stinking dirty menstruous rags! ... And we're not going to stand the stench of it any more, is that clear?
(93) We have spent too many hours putting up with this problem, too many days, too many weeks, too many months.
(106) As far as I'm concerned your father Aaron died failing God. ... Do you want to die like that knowing you failed God and you disobeyed and hurt your family, your grandfather your father your foster father all of us? (MB: No sir!).
(113) I was practically screaming in tongues, I think I'm hoarse from it now.
(114) The Lord took hold of her head" (referring to the events set out in para. 29) "and yanked it around and back and forth and side ways to side ways by my hands until I was afraid I was going to yank her head off or break her neck! God was so angry... And then I hauled off and slapped her I don't know how many times tonight, hard, right? (MB: Yes sir!) And hit you....
(145) If you go back into that foolishness again, these folks have got my permission to slap you around and knock you around, if they have to knock you out to get rid of that! Because you have got to want to get rid of it, and if it takes a good beating up to make you want to get rid of it, then we're going to beat you up!...
(170) My God, MB, how could you think you could get way with it? How could you not fear God? How did you think you could get away from the wrath of God? I represent God to you... He nearly yanked your head off here! That was the Lord! I didn't plan that, I had no idea. I'm almost horrified to think back at what happened, but it was God! You heard the voice of the Lord bawling you and those dirty little demons out and threatening to take your head off if you didn't stop it!
(183) The last resort we now have is to beat you with the rod until it really hurts and you don't want it any more! Right? (MB: Yes sir!) But if that doesn't work then what can we do? We can't kill you, that's God's business. We'll have to get rid of you. Now that's the facts.
(185) Nobody want's to sleep with you, they're actually afraid of you because you've been under the control of the Devil...
(186) So we can't trust you any more not even after all this tonight...
(188) Now that's the picture I got while we were praying, that they're going to restrain you. We're going to punish you! You're not going to get away with this. God has put us here as parents to punish you when you do evil and you've been doing the vilest kind of evil, the worst kind of sin.
(189) I suggest you tie her to the bed.
(190) Make sure she goes to the toilet the very last thing. I don't care if you wet the bed, dear, your hands are going to be tied to the sides of that bed at night when the others are trying to sleep. Are you willing to submit to that? (MB: Yes!) If you have cotton or cloth ropes, that's the best thing.
(191) Think of it, you've gotten to the state where nobody can trust you and they're afraid you might do them or yourself harm! You the great MB who was a great singer and so vaunted in her pride, in her talent, her singing and world famous has gotten so full of the Devil we have to tie her down at night and threaten to beat her up in the daytime if she doesn't behave.
(194) If beating doesn't get the hell out of you, you're going to get the hell out of here: I want you to memorise that. (MB: If beating you doesn't get the hell out of you, you're going to get the hell out of here!)
(196) So for a peaceful night's rest I suggest you tie her hands to the bed... Don't tie it so tight she can't move, just tight enough that she can't reach herself and she can't squirm out of it.
(197) This is the first time we've ever done that that I know of, but that's the picture God gave me, and if I follow God's pictures, ..., it never fails.
(198) So your first punishment was what God gave you tonight, and what I gave you, a good slapping around to knock that hell out of you, and just gave you one lick and felt like giving you more with this stick! And if we have any more trouble, you're going to get more of it, from anyone of these here that are authorised to do it.
(197) She's not to be alone at any time from now on. Someone is to be with her at all times who is big and strong and spiritual enough that you just absolutely knock it out of her.
(206) My God help her to realise how awful and how horrible this is, that she can never ever again claim any kind of righteousness of herself. She has been one of the most wicked persons we have ever had in this Family, one of the most evil one of the most dangerous so that we have to tie her up at night to make sure she doesn't do anybody any damage. We have to divorce her from our quarters, from our arms, from our children, and put her in virtual incarceration at least at night. She has to have a guard with her all day long to make sure that she behaves until we are sure she is cured.
(215) If you don't get rid of those demons ...... you may have to get whipped in bed caned in bed.
(243) I love you sweetheart. Goodnight."
I regard this as vicious treatment of a vulnerable child. Saying, "I love you sweetheart", does not redress the wrong done to her. She was physically ill-treated; and she was emotionally ill-treated; she was put in fear; she was humiliated; her self-esteem was denigrated. Maria and Peter stood by and watched it happen and approved of what was happening. They showed little more sensitivity and insight than their at times demented leader. I cannot accept that this was, in any sense at all, a cure for the emotional problems from which the child was undoubtedly suffering. The Traumatic Testimony letter gave The Family's diagnosis of her problem:-
"You're going to go completely nuts. In fact they say you've already gone completely nuts, you're already insane, totally non compos mentis! Totally incapacitated and mentally not sane at all."
About a year later MB was sent to the detention camp in Macau. It is not now disputed that she did there suffer a complete mental breakdown and that she required but did not at first receive appropriate psychiatric help. Eventually after tribulations which I shall later set out, she was finally sent for proper treatment. From there she was sent back to the United States in America. She again broke down and underwent more psychiatric treatment. Unfortunately I do not have full medical reports on her condition.
Doctor Cameron, a Consultant Child Psychiatrist, gave evidence to me. He told me, and I accept, that the treatment meted out to MB was totally unacceptable. This was a child caught in the conflict between what she saw and what had happened to her, which she knew to be wrong but which she had been taught to accept as right. Disillusioned and depressed, she doubted. If, as happened to MB, a significant cause of a mental or nervous breakdown is the feeling that one is lacking in trust or faith, and the treatment prescribed is to hammer home what a worthless sinner one is, then the treatment enhances the self- doubt, and the very treatment itself becomes damaging and psychologically disabling. This is an extract from MB's own evidence as I noted it:-
"I upset them when 13/14 because I began to realise grandfather was a hypocrite who made rules for people which were not necessary for him. He would write one thing one day the opposite the next because God was changing. He was very contradictory. He was a chronic alcoholic. It was very confusing. When he was sick he would drink and call different women in for sexual relations or sexual comfort. It was very difficult to respect this man when he was so drunk. I now look back at his writings as the ravings of a drunk madman. Another thing that upset me at 14 was that I was losing my faith in the group and in the prophet - all the things I believed in. I had violent pictures and images and they said that showed I was listening to Satan. They would say that Satan and demons were attacking me. I do not know if it was my imagination but I was seeing demons. In bed I would get out terrified because I thought the spirits would attack me sexually. I would try to cover myself up. I would confess to Sara, my stepfather, Faithy and others because I was afraid of Satan and wanted to be right with God and wanted the group's approval. They would slap me. Later they gathered the leadership together, pulled my pants down and spanked me publicly which was humiliating because these people were important to me. Six months later when my grandfather was told, he commanded them to beat me with his rod whenever I had violent thoughts or saw monsters.... Many times they would beat me, they took my head and beat it against the wall and bruised me. I was helpless and knew nothing else. My stepfather spanked me with his hands. It all felt like torture and once I fainted, throwing up. They said I was throwing up demons. The exorcising terrified me".
Later I was able to compare that description with The Family's description of MB in Macau taken from her Traumatic Testimony:-
"This is the story of MB, who made a conscious effort to entertain the Devil and his lies and whose former fascination for evil has now left her spiritually and mentally handicapped. Of course, Dad and others warned her time and time again that the Devil was going to drive her insane if she didn't make a positive stand against the lies of the enemy and stop yielding to the devilry she was so fascinated with as you can read in the letters the "Last State" and "Its up to You". The prophetic warnings of those letters have been fulfilled as is proven in the following pitiful and revealing report written by MB's present shepherds" (in December 1989). "What started out as a little mind-game developed into absolute obsession and eventually resulted in a very unstable, feeble and virtually insane mind. ... She cannot take any kind of stressful situation and is very easily scared and affected by any attacks of the Enemy. ... She is definitely feeble-minded as Grandpa said. It's hard for her to concentrate, and she has a hard time making sense when she talks and often is unable to finish a sentence that she has started. She cannot take care of herself like a normal person, spiritually or even in many ways physically. ... She still gets seriously attacked with bad violent pictures sometimes... May this be a warning to others who feel they can dabble with the Enemy! MB thought it was just a little disobedience and that she was only being a little bit rebellious and only wanted to do that for a little while. But the effects in her life are long lasting and so extensive that it will probably take a lifetime to undo the damage and for her to gain lasting victories over the things that hinder and negatively affect her. MB can still work, she does her daily jobs but she is not normal. It takes MB a lot longer to do things than normal people. She is making progress but we have to work with her daily on this because she isn't "all there" sometimes, when we give her instructions, we have to repeat them over and over again. How different from the very clever, sharp and quick witted girl she once was. She now does not really understand the first time or the second time or in many cases the third time. It is very sad! She isn't sharp, she is very dull and doesn't have all her wits about her. She spaces out often in classes, it's very difficult for her to tune in. MB is still sick, she is still recovering from the extensive damage that the Enemy has done to her. She has developed some strange mannerisms. For example when she is nervous or begins to get negative thoughts from the Enemy, she starts picking her hair out, to the point that she even has a bald spot! She scrapes her lip with her fingernail in a weird nervous fashion and other times begins to uncontrollably scratch herself almost like a monkey. She often has black bags under her eyes from worry. So much worrying causes her to have stomach problems which in turn cause her to have very bad breath. She doesn't sleep well, her sleep is often interrupted because she is unable to relax ... So as you can see from this report, MB still has very serious problems, and in the system's eyes she would be considered insane and without a doubt she would be locked up in a mental institution. Thank the Lord for the love and mercy of God and Grandpa who have allowed her to be in one of our Family homes where she can partake of God's spirit which has been slowly cleansing her from these inroads of the enemy which she brought upon herself."
There is an affidavit from KG, who did not attend for cross examination, who takes up the sad story.
"After our daily taking care of the said MB for 3½ years, rather than improving and normalising as we had so hoped, regrettably she regressed into a sad state of hysteria, and frenzy, to the point that she had to be daily spoon-fed her meals - only to have her wilfully regurgitate her food after hours of struggling to help her eat. She began to have no control over her bladder and bowel movements and became incontinent. She was pulling her hair out by the handful, laying all over the house, on tables etc. and would frequently disrobe in public. She began running around the house threatening to harm myself or my husband if we failed to control her in any way, throwing articles of clothing out of the window and screaming profanities at the top of her lungs. This extreme display of insanity was causing hours and hours of our time and care to the point that we finally had make a decision to have her committed into the care of the Macau Government Centro Mental Hospital. This was on or about September or October 1990."
I have perhaps dealt with MB at inordinate length. I do so because of the central role she plays not only in The Family's past but in its present. For The Family to gain the respectability which they now appear to seek, they must acknowledge that what David Berg did to his granddaughter was wrong, not just a mistake, but inexcusably wrong. They must atone for their treatment of her which I find to have been barbaric and cruel.
My duty now is to set aside that sense of revulsion and concentrate on S and his medical care. I am totally satisfied that in the care of his mother he has received all appropriate medical attention. He was born in hospital and his mother duly registered him with general practitioners both in London and in the country. The health visitors visit. He has been immunised. When he needs medical care, he gets it. Mother herself took ill during the course of the trial and immediately sought medical help for herself. None of the members of The Family who are close to S gave any hint of their unwillingness to seek proper medical attention. There was no evidence of any extreme belief in illness being God's punishment. There was no evidence of any extreme belief that prayer was the only relief against being ill. S has been properly cared for, and I have total confidence in this mother to continue properly to care for him and I fear no medical neglect at her hands.
Mother and the community at the Ward's home may receive a clean bill of health but The Family's history leaves me with festering doubts about the organisation and its order of medical priorities and accordingly I must take into account some risk to S if he were to be separated from his mother and fall into the wrong hands.
Berg's early aspirations for the movement were set out in his letter "New Bottles" in June 1973. He remarked:-
"Do you realise we are now producing another generation. A new more revolutionary generation? They are going to be I hope the purest generation of all, totally revolutionary from the very beginning. The little ones being born will never have known anything but our kind of life! I'm hoping that these little children are going to be really pure revolutionaries from birth, and so far it looks like they are! Your children will be totally revolutionary, never knowing what churchianity and system jobs and education are like!"
To achieve that ideal it was, of course, necessary carefully to control what was poured into these new bottles. That degree of control was imposed, for example, by the letter "You are what you read" in August 1978. The text books Berg "had to wade through" in college were denounced as "ridiculous", "full of the lies and distortions of men":-
"Those books are written with the demonic satanic wisdom of the Devil himself! Cunningly devised to deceive you and lead you astray and twist you spiritually to where you don't know what is true. ... Nearly everything you have to know is in the Bible, except perhaps current events, recent revelations and a few other things."
In August 1978 he returned to the theme in "Book Burning - You are What You Read" and informed the members that:-
"I don't want to hear that anybody in this outfit is reading anything but your Bible or the Letters or some books that you have been assigned to read for a good purpose."
By 1985, The Family were having to get to know the fruits of their education policies. In the "History of The Family" produced by SPM, WS wrote:
"Many of the couples who had married during the early years of the Children of God era had adolescent children and, as is natural at that age, those young teenagers were encountering serious questions about life and the world around them as they searched for their identities and that, of course, held new challenges for Family parents."
The Searcher's mission discovered a large number of disillusioned teenagers for whom the Teen Training Camp was held in Mexico in 1986 when:
"These young people were challenged to renew their relationship with the Lord, and to give their lives to him again. ... Many of them chose to become teen missionaries and obtain permission from their parents to move on to the mission fields of Latin America after the TTC".
Following the Mexico TTC, similar teen training camps were held in other major mission fields, primarily in South America and the Far East. At the Japan TTC they had "desperate prayer and laying on of hands for deliverance and prayed individually" for each of a number specific requests including:-
"Against system influenced through books,
Against the influence of system schools"
In August 1988 Berg had "the School Vision" which was "God's answer to our child crisis." By then the Heavenly City School had begun to operate from Tateyama in Japan. This example of a large school for the education of the children was attractive. As Berg acknowledged:-
"The education of our children is already getting to be a monumental thing, a desperate need, really, because most of our parents don't feel very qualified to teach their children. They never had much education or any degrees or any of that sort of thing, and they don't really feel qualified. I guess that most of them feel like they really haven't done too good a job on their kids when they've had to be so busy doing other things, the Lord's work, therefore their kids haven't really gotten a very good education... So I think a lot of parents, although they'd miss them, would really feel relieved that their kids were at least going to get a thorough education in the subjects that we consider important - not a broad public school type of education, but a really serious Family education in the 3 R's, plus Bible. ... Just educating our children for the Lord's work has become one of our major ministries. We're not just educating them for the sake of education. We simply want to give them enough education so they'll be able to face without fear any worldling, and have sufficient knowledge not to be ashamed of their ignorance, and to at least a better comprehension of the world than most of the systemites have now. As I've often said, they certainly need to know how to read and write and figure, and then have a general grasp of world history. I think we've given them a pretty good grasp of world history just from Bible history and prophecy. Education of our children for the Lord's service is becoming a serious emergency. ... Remember, we are not training just for now till the Lord comes, what little time we have left here, we're training for the future. ... We have had so many children now, they've almost become our biggest job! And properly to take care of them and train them - the best and most potential disciples we could possibly have - is a very important job and ministry... They could, in time, win a lot more souls and train a lot more workers than if we just kept on winning disciples."
Berg was recognising that the large proportion of children in The Family was presenting them with a crisis. Were they to use the children to be out on the streets with the parents selling tapes and posters - which neglected their training (he did not like to use the word "education") - or were they to recognise that caring for this large mass of children was more important than having everyone on the streets witnessing? It was a challenging question to which The Family responded by tending either to open schools or to gather the children from several homes together to form a school home. The Family's educational curriculum was strengthened by the introduction of a new uniform Home Schooling Programme. The children were marked and assessed and records kept of their progress and this had the great advantage of enabling children to move from home to home, indeed from country to country whilst still maintaining uniformity of approach.
Bringing teenage children together inevitably led to some of the disaffected sowing the seeds of dissension. To contain it, The Family established a series of "Victor Programmes", about which I must later deal specifically.
The problems being experienced by the young continued to demand much of The Family's attention. In 1990, Maria had to acknowledge "the trials and difficulties" that her 11 year old daughter Techi had been going through and these together with "the keys to helping her overcome them" were published in the "Techi Series." As things got worse and worse with Techi, Maria began to feel:-
"The whole Family is now in a very similar stage with their Jetts and teens. You may have been able to commit the care of your children to other teachers, helpers and overseers, and in many cases, you've virtually had to do that in order to fulfil the different ministries to which the Lord has called you. And in some cases you're still not going to be able to spend very much time with your children because for the Lord's work's sake you have to either be apart from them or devote most of your time and energies to other responsibilities and ministries."
Her response to the dilemma was:-
"If we want to avoid having all our Jetts and teens becoming dissatisfied, confused and rebellious "problem cases", I think we're going to have to re-evaluate our entire structure, and consider re-vamping and overhauling our entire present method of handling them! In fact it might be time to have a big revolution in all of our homes and schools."
In April 1991, Peter Amsterdam wrote the new "Back to the Basic Home Requirements". So far as education was concerned, "Scholastics" in The Family terminology, the compulsory requirement for Jetts and teens was a minimum of 12 hours of scholastics each week though only 6 hours would be required for teens who were up to par scholastically for their age. He added "teens 16 years of age or older, who are doing fairly well scholastically, are no longer required to have scholastics, but could possibly use the 6 hours weekly for ministry training."
1992 saw the beginning of what The Family regarded as "unprecedented persecution". It caused them publicly to state their position and policy on education. Their belief was that:-
"Education is primarily the process of learning to apply God's work to help us more fully understand the purposes of God in life and appreciate Him and the wonders of His creation."
The Bible is central to the children's education and it forms the cornerstone of their curriculum. Their educational objective is:-
"To foster total dedication to God and Christian discipleship in all of our children while helping them to acquire the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to lead happy and productive fulfilling lives in His service. ... We would view any attempt to impose totally secular values and secular perspectives on our children as a serious disregard for our spiritual belief and an infringement of our religious rights, aimed at destroying our religion, as well as placing our children in serious moral danger."
They believe that true education should not be confused with simply acquiring knowledge:
"The Bible warns us that worldly wisdom and knowledge are not only considered foolishness to God, but are not able to deliver or transform the human spirit; in fact, they do not even bring happiness to a man at all.... The most essential, meaningful and rewarding education one can receive in life is obtained through a prayerful study of God's word and by letting Jesus and the Holy Spirit dwell in him and instruct him and lead him into all truth, knowledge and understanding. ... We translate this (a Godly education) into practical terms by providing our children with a multi-faceted education: Christian and ministerial training, practical vocational training, scholastics, physical and social developments. Our Christian ministry and cooperative life style help provide an ideal home-based learning environment in which to accomplish these educational objective."
The changes suggested by the DTR did not wholly achieve that. By January 1993, it had come to Maria's attention that a number of the teens and young adults still had legitimate concerns about The Family, especially regarding the role they had to play in it. The "Personal Encouragement Revolution" (the PER) was published in June. The Summit 93 proposed changes to the DTR scholastical requirements. It defined scholastics as mainly referring to formal assigned study time in three R's and the three G's. This was reduced from 12 to 8 hours a week. The junior teens were to have a minimum of 4 hours of scholastic study plus 4 hours of vocational/ministry study, down from 12 hours a week, but junior teens (ages 14 and 15) who were up to par scholastically and senior teens (ages 16 and 17) were required to have a minimum of 4 hours study time a week (vocational/ministry study and/or scholastic, as chosen by the teen).
In his letter to me, Peter Amsterdam expanded upon The Family's educational philosophy. He told me that in January 1994, Maria convened a meeting of a number of WS and CRO educational representatives who made a number of recommendations to enhance the educational content in the children's lives and to "facilitate participation in local national secondary education examinations", to "research the possibility of taking outside training in subjects they need help in" and generally, to "make greater use of local educational opportunities," and to "be as supportive and accommodating as possible of our children's individual desires for special training." He said:-
"This is a massive undertaking and it will take time and a great deal of financing to fulfil these goals, but senior leadership is committed to implementing the above measures."
