I know little about this home. The information came mainly from CA. She is quite a surly girl. For a long time she seemed to wish to remain aloof from these proceedings and was unwilling to offer any help. Finally she did give evidence. I am totally satisfied that there was no undue prompting by the Plaintiff to cause this. There was a ring of truth about her evidence which has made it impossible for me to discard it or to ignore it. She was at this home when a young teenager aged 13 or thereabouts. She was put in charge of the toddlers whose mothers were away on family business. About half of the mothers seemed to have been absent. CA reported seeing very young children suffer corporal punishment. She spoke of a child of only 18 months who had been bruised by her mother "Oxford" S. She is married to WA, the father of S, and, I note a little apprehensively, she appears prone to apply the rod quite unstintingly.
CA gave evidence that during her time at this home there was a mother who beat her children with a spoon on one side of which was a happy face and a sad face on the other. This evidence troubles me. The pictorial message which it conveys is that after the unhappy beating the victim must accept a happy face because he must accept that it was done in love. It illustrates the power of the Law of Love to induce a self delusion that otherwise unacceptable conduct can be cloaked with acceptability by asserting - even believing - that it is done in love. I have little doubt that that is how NT herself felt when she was party to the beating of a 7 year old girl with a switch some time in about 1991 whilst at the home in Coggershall.
There is, therefore, evidence of young children being unduly punished in recent times in England. It was worse for the teenagers.
The Family decided to run a school at Wantage. Those in charge were JD and ED who came from the Philippines and undoubtedly imported ideas from the Jumbo. PF and SF and RM and MM had come from the Oxford Home. Mary Malaysia, also from the Philippines, joined later. The school ran from about March 1989 until the lease expired at the end of the year. I remind myself that the School Vision was published in August 1988 and the Victor Programmes had started early in 1989. I find that the following were features of the school at Wantage:-
1. Secrecy: The address of the school was Selah so that many
parents were not aware where their children were and could not visit them. A degree of censorship was imposed through correspondence being read.
2. Silence Restriction: This device was extensively used. A
number of the children suffered this indignity. It was an indignity because the children had a sign or badge which they had to display upon which was written words to the effect, "Don't talk to me, I am on silence restriction." The restriction was not absolute. The children were able to answer the adults but their talking to their peers was discouraged. I do not find that it was rigorously enforced and I have no doubt that it did not prevent all conversation. It was still an excessive punishment. GK and SW were on silence on and off for three months or so. AM, NS, SC and EV also suffered.
3. Isolation: The last named quartet were also put on a
special programme which involved their being separated from others in order that they might in isolation read the Mo Letters and write their Open Heart Reports. SD acknowledged that it was a form of Victor Programme the like of which he had experienced in the Jumbo.
4. Open Heart Reports: These were extensively used in an
oppressive way not merely genuinely to ascertain what, if anything, troubled the children from time to time but as a means of control. VP was eloquent in her condemnation. She explained that she was made to feel guilty if she did not confess; she complained that her right to privacy of her own thoughts was invaded and she said that it was only when she was in bed that she could think what she wished.
5. Bubble-Bursting Sessions: Because pride and worldliness
were such serious thoughts, the steps taken to eradicate them were extreme. There was an occasion when EP and SC were publicly mocked, disparaged and humiliated, the former because of his interest in map-making and the latter for his interests in wildlife and his desire to go down the Amazon.
There was a worse event. The children had been required to report on each other in their Open Heart Reports. They had to identify those of their peers who had the greatest spiritual problems. Since the list of demerits clearly identified those who were constantly in trouble, those were the ones identified by the others as the foolish ones. On a certain day the school was told there was to be no breakfast, but they were to fast, to read the Mo letters and write their reactions. The leaders looked solemn and an air of tension grew. The school then assembled. AM, NS, SC and EV were seated apart. The leaders denounced them as being full of the devil. The leaders read the Open Heart Reports of the other children (which were meant to be confidential) revealing, therefore, how the other children had identified these four. There was much shouting at them to break their spirit and much praying and much attempting to exorcise the devil out of them. The shepherds called on the other children and asked why the four should not be punished. Emotions ran so high that most were in tears. The quartet were eventually led away. Their hair was cut. Much time was spent at the hearing to try to establish whether their hair was shaved or merely shortened. I find the latter. It did not much matter, because the purpose of the haircut was not to improve their looks but to humiliate them, to mark them out as examples and to punish them. The boys were taken off and beaten. All children present were demeaned by this wholly unnecessary excessive bullying tirade. Its emotional intensity was unacceptable.
6. Corporal Punishment. I am in no doubt at all that this was excessively applied. AM was bruised from above the knees to his lower spine following the haircutting incident. His mother MM denied that her son was bruised. I am in no doubt that he was. NS and SC were also beaten. They were beaten with a paddle. SD was asked by his father to make it. It is the same sort of implement that is used throughout The Family. The paddle had become a feature of English Family life as well. Another boy regularly beaten was GK. He was 14. His crime was bed-wetting. There was a total failure within The Family to appreciate that this boy was a seriously emotionally disturbed child who had undergone some appalling experiences in his childhood. He had witnessed and was clearly still suffering from his brother's drowning. SF did not appear to know this. No attempt was made to treat him for emotional damage evidenced by his enuresis. Instead he was punished for it. Without doubt he was ill treated by The Family.
7. Callisthenics: This involved running and some form of "squat walking" in laps around two trees about a football pitch apart. For some this was a difficult, painful task. It was the punishment imposed for achieving a lower level of demerit marks. The demerit system and the increasing levels of punishment was again an importation from the Jumbo.
8. Emotional Pressure: The pressure to conform was great. There was, for example, an occasion when they had to read of the difficulties that Davidito was having. They all had to pray for Father David in his struggles to cope with Davidito's failure. It became so intense that most of them were in tears.
When Wantage closed down, the school moved to Burnt Farm in Hertfordshire. The same team were in charge. The P children did not rejoin the school and I do not have as much evidence about its activities. I have no reason to believe that life did not continue much as it had done at Wantage. The most important incident relates to a boy SM. He was a most unhappy teenager 14 years old. He was thought by many to have the failing of being "self righteous" and to have "spiritual problems." He was made particularly unhappy in March 1990 by his mother being sent away to Eastern Europe on missionary work. His father was in Russia. He was not the only child who was separated from his parents. Many of the parents were working in Eastern Europe. In September 1990 SM was in trouble of some kind. His privileges were withdrawn and he was not allowed to watch television. He ran away and was apprehended by the police at Ramsgate trying to catch the ferry to see his mother in Switzerland or wheresoever she was. He could give no address for her. He was reluctant to reveal much about his personal circumstances. The following day his mother arrived. SM did not seem surprised or express any emotion upon seeing her despite her absence for more than 7 months. She would not reveal her address. She was equivocal about her involvement in "missionary work". The minutes of the Social Services Department have been produced to me and they recorded that:
"SM ... presents physically as being tired, pale, drawn, slightly anaemic in appearance and psychologically as emotionally flat, .... acting inappropriately when reuniting with mother or examining reasons for leaving Burnt Farm, presents as bland, blank, programmed, (guarded, inhibited responses to questions, reluctant to communicate, reluctant to disagree with mother.)
Enquiries were made at Burnt Farm. RM allowed the Social Services Department into a room which was described in the minutes as:-
"Cold and comfortless. The furniture was very shabby and the room was dominated by a huge high-tech TV and video. RM denied any knowledge of an organisation called Heavens Magic or the Children of God but they did say they were missionaries. No evidence of crucifixes or other religious artifacts and no evidence of the presence of children other than some child size wellington boots in the hallway. No toys, comics, bicycles etc."
The local authority made enquiries which led them to the anti-cult organisations and VJ was introduced to SM. SM denied recognizing any Mo letters etc. but he made obviously knowledgeable references to the material to prove the point he sought to make that the cult was being persecuted by the Social Services Department. SM was allowed to leave on 29th September 1990.
Several features of this episode cause me real concern:-
1. This boy was made unhappy for reasons among others that he missed his parents. No sufficient awareness of this fact, still less contrition was shown by those in charge.
2. He lied about his knowledge and involvement with The Children of God/The Family. He was clearly troubled about "persecution."
3. More importantly RM lied to the authorities.
4. This boy ran away at about 5.30 am. He was known to be missing. The Family's own efforts to find him were unsuccessful. Alarmingly, they did not report him missing to the police.
I am driven to conclude that this incident shows the practice of "Deceivers yet True" in action. The Family clearly had their "flee-bags" packed and they disappeared. It does not instil confidence and it requires me to scrutinise carefully the evidence of real, genuine and lasting change.
The period I am now concerned with is the end of 1991. The adults in charge seem to have been MM, Caleb, to some extent RM, Paul and Mary Malaysia. KA and AM were the teen shepherds.
I am quite satisfied that a Victor Programme was run from this home. Mary Malaysia was in charge but she was acting under the control of the National Child Care Shepherdess Heidi, SPM's wife. MM knew what was happening although she was more concerned with the ordinary running of the household. MM was an unreliable witness. In her Affidavit she dealt with discipline in the teen schools, as being:-
"Administered by the teachers and where parents were present (as they occasionally were) by the parents. Corporal punishment occasionally was used but very rarely and always with the basic premise of The Family that punishment must never be administered in anger: its purpose is for the person punished to understand what they had done wrong and why it was wrong."
That was a far cry from what was happening at Tewkesbury. There the children were regularly beaten and at times beaten by AM, himself a teenager. KA, a Family witness, told me that branches were cut from trees and used until they broke. That caused them to look for another implement. They found a riding crop. AM sought Mary Malaysia's permission to use it. Mary Malaysia sought Heidi's permission according to KA and it was granted. AM then beat S4, the son of a home shepherd, for too many demerits. He broke the skin on his backside. The boy bled from it and was bruised by it. It was a vicious attack. It was authorised from the very top of The Family in this country. It was known that it took place. The stoutest efforts have been made by The Family to cover it up. This particular incident cried out for full explanation. The obvious person to explain what had happened and what had gone wrong was Heidi. No reason was given to me why she should not have been called. I draw adverse conclusions from the failure to call her.
There was also a home for a number of children at Rugby where RB and VB and MA and LA were in charge. They gave evidence to me and I can accept that in many respects this was a happy home. It was a pity, perhaps, that they did not allow the visiting Australians to film their home but rather chose to maximise the physical attractiveness of Tewkesbury by engaging in the pretence to which I referred much earlier. I can, however, readily understand that teenagers would have responded warmly to this adult team. Although strident in their defence of The Family they nonetheless made a good impression on me in many respects. VB's mediterranean temperament led her to some emotional exchanges with me but that same energy was well harnessed in her interactions with the young people with whom she had to deal. I cannot recall a bad word said against her and she seems to have been a most respected figure. Dare I say it in this case, but it would seem that she "loved" the children and they may well have loved her. Her husband RB, though possessed of British phlegm which made him more reserved than his wife, was nonetheless an enthusiastic member of the team. He got on well with the teenagers, and I have little doubt that they had exciting times with him. There was a lot to do in their ministry and the children had a lot of fun doing it. MA and LA were also impressive witnesses. MA had all the savoir faire that one would expect of The Family's public relations officer. He deployed his charm quite effortlessly and although there is a tough side to his character, I would imagine he earned not only the respect but also the affection of the children he was looking after. His wife LA seemed prepared to go much further than any other witness in her willingness to see The Family move much further towards acceptance. Enlightened though this couple appeared to be, their son KA had a vicious streak in him and in the exercise of his duties as teen shepherd, he wielded the stick with more enthusiasm than judgment, and his storm trooper-mentality alarmed me.
I am satisfied that generally and comparatively speaking life at Rugby was happy for the children living there. It was not all entirely acceptable. KA admits that he was on silence restriction in about February 1991 for some six weeks. He must have found the punishment effective because he made large silence restriction signs to hang about the neck of M1 and MS. He put M1 on silence after he had, as teen shepherd, tried to deal with M1's "spiritual problems" which he sought to cure by intensive shepherding, the Word, and counselling. It was a contemporary and rival, N1 who complained via LA to VB about MS whose punishment was then to be placed on silence restriction. I have no doubt that in the early stages MS would have tried to ignore the restriction as much as she thought she could get away with it. Not to report in the Open Heart Reports anything which "needed work on" showed self righteousness which became punishable. There were also some paddlings which cause concern. J4 paddled JA without even consulting the boy's father before doing it. It was a bad beating which caused some bleeding and bruising. Life at Rugby was, therefore, not all sweetness and light.
Then Mary Malaysia descended on the instruction of Heidi to run another Victor Programme. This was brutally conducted. The demerit system led to regular and frequent paddlings. The paddle was made by J4 and kept in his room. KA, S5, S6 and J2 were beaten and according to CA, J2 and S6 were bruised. KA in turn beat M1 and KA gave evidence that he reported the matter to VB and RB and that M1's parents agreed that the boy needed the hiding. He got it. LA seemed unwilling to admit this. I am in no doubt that CA was paddled three times and in her case the implement was a cane and what she described as "an elastic switch". EM conceded that she had been beaten.
I have been sorely troubled by the punishments meted out to MS. She is a pert young lady with a certain steely determination. I have no doubt that she caused The Family great concern. She had her sexual relationship with the 19 year old C1 and was defiant in her allegation that C1 was having an affair with her mother. Then she had a sexual relationship with a fellow teen DM. In The Family's eyes, she was a troublemaker with enormous spiritual problems of lying, self-righteousness, worldliness and every other sin in the calendar. In other circles this might have amounted to no more than a high degree of adolescent rebellion. Mary Malaysia punished her among for other things her sexual promiscuity knowing full well from information confided by the girl herself how cruelly abused she had been throughout her childhood. It was appallingly insensitive retribution. On one occasion Mary Malaysia paddled her as VB corroborated. On another occasion VB, who has I suspect even now, real affection for this characterful girl, beat her with a "bendy twig" and administered the stipulated punishment of "ten swats". MS would not yield and VB felt compelled to beat her again though I am sure a part of her was revolted by the ferocity of the attack which frustration at MS's stubbornness provoked. They both ended up in tears. VB asserts that it was done with a loving heart and that the punishment was accepted to have been administered in love. I dare say it was viewed in that way by both VB and MS. In my judgment, however, love cannot excuse twenty strokes which cause bruising. On another occasion VB could not bring herself to administer the punishment and delegated that task to N1 who was a rival of MS's for DM's affections. Because MS wished to continue her sexual relationship with DM, he was chosen to cut the branch from the tree which was used to beat her. She gave a graphic account of one of these occasions. She refused to agree to be beaten by Mary. Mary sent VB to call for RB, her husband. Mary threatened that RB would have to hold her down. To his credit he refused to have any part in anything of that kind. Instead he began to counsel her to accept the punishment which was due to her for her rebellious attitude. The threat was uttered that if she did not accept that punishment it would be a mark of such serious rebellion against the group that they would be compelled to expel her and send her to her grandparents with whom she had lost all contact. MS had grown up on the Traumatic Testimonies and had a fear of the system whose frightening ways had been emphasised in the literature. "God's Vomit" was a letter found in her little suitcase of Family literature and I was in no doubt at all that she entertained some deeply ingrained fear that God killed backsliders. One can but imagine how this young lady must have been struck with terrifying foreboding some months ago when she learnt that her friend and fellow backslider, who left The Family as she did, had recently been murdered. At Rugby the fear of the unknown system was greater than the pain of a beating, so MS submitted to Mary. She beat her so hard with the stick cut by DM that MS's buttocks were cut and her knickers covered with blood.
This was an utterly disgraceful incident. The injustice to a victim of sex abuse being harshly punished for lesser sexual misconduct, the humiliation of having her partner in that escapade having to cut the stick that was used to wound her, the duress used to extract consent to the beating and the self- deluding justification that all was done in love, all that excites my total condemnation.
That was not the end of it. MS was put into isolation. Every morning she was sent to a caravan in the grounds of the home where she was left alone apart from visits by some of the adults, especially VB. She was expected to read the Word. In fact she spent a good deal of the time filing her fingernails and brushing her hair which must have served only to confirm the impression of her inordinate vanity and sinfulness. She took exercise by walking the fields by herself or by digging in the garden. This was originally set as a form of physical punishment but MS preferred it to the caravan and so she did it. Her meals were brought to her, but not always. She was allowed to return to the house in time only to bathe or wash before lights out. She was by now in such disgrace and was so conscious of the fact that N1 would get her into serious trouble that now she did not dare to break the silence restriction which had been imposed upon her. This regime lasted for about 7 weeks. It was intolerable.
Others were put in isolation. CA was sent to her room for 3 months "intensive care" and M2 was likewise punished for 3 weeks. Silence restriction imposed on those in intensive care was much more rigorously enforced than the silence restriction under which MS had been placed for months on end or the silence restrictions imposed on CA, J2, J3 and M1.
