DR. BRUCE PERRY ~ CHILDREN IN CULTS ~ wACO 1993
Tigger
from getting to computers and google.a.r.s. Between a nine day period
from March 9 or 10, 2002 to March 18, 2002
From: boobook...@webtv.net (Tigger) Group:
alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Re: DR. BRUCE PERRY ~ CHILDREN IN CULTS ~ Waco 1993 (was
A TOUCH OF...
Date: Sun, Mar 10, 2002, 3:01pm Organization: WebTV
Subscriber
CHILDREN IN CULTS FACE MYRIAD PROBLEMS PSYCHIATRIST SAYS
CAN NEWS, December, 1993
"What is wrong with a culture that, when it knows that 50 children or
more are being isolated, physically assaulted, probably sexually abused,
certainly coerced, certainly not getting appropriate education....has no
mechanism by which it can intervene; but if (a group) can convert one
semi-automatic weapon to an automatic weapon, it can stage an armed
assault?
The question may have been rhetorical, but for Dr. Bruce Perry, it was
also personal. The question grew out of Perry's experience treating the
mental an emotional problems of 21 children who had been released from
the Branch Davidian Compound near Waco, Texas, before its fiery tragic
end last April. Perry posed the question at the beginning of his keynote
speech at last month's Cult Awareness Network national conference.
Perry is a research professor of child psychiatry at Baylor College of
Medicine in Houston. He directed a team of 12 mental health experts who
treated the Davidian children. About 80 people, 17 of them children, are
believed to have died in a fire cult members set after the FBI poured
tear gas into the compound to try to force them out.
Perry's central message was that children in cults suffer in many ways,
by having distorted images of themselves and the outside world to
abnormal brain development. Perry said research shows that traumatic
experiences "actually change the physiology of the brain", resulting in
mental or emotional problems that can dog a cult-raised child well into
adulthood.
He saw glaring examples of the distorted thought patterns and behavior
that cult-raised children suffer from, by living with, observing and
treating the child survivors of the Branch Davidian cult.
"The first thing we saw was that in the absence of structure, the
children organized themselves as life in the compound was like," Perry
said.
Boys and girls formed separate groups, each group had a leader who spoke
for and made decisions for the other children in their group; many
children drew pictures of Koresh as God; others included doodlings that
said, "David is God".
For the first few weeks after their release, the children, who were
being kept in a home run by the Waco Methodist Church, also showed
physical signs of the mental stress they were feeling. For instance,
even at rest, their heart rates were about 120 beats a minute, 30 to 50
percent faster than normal.
"These kids were terrorized," Perry said. The reason for their terror:
they had been taught that everyone outside the cult was evil and likely
to hurt or kill them. The assault on the compound reinforced that
teaching, Perry said.
As time passed, Perry and his team also learned of the depth of the
"malignant stores" children had been taught about personal
relationships. Koresh routinely broke up couples and split families,
making himself the father figure for the entire cult. Children referred
to Koresh as their father. Most thought of their parents as adult
members of the cult and treated siblings as friends or acquaintances.
This was vividly brought home by pictures Perry asked children to draw.
When asked to draw pictures of their family, the children usually drew
pictures of random groups of cult members or of Koresh, even though they
were not related to him.
Some children even lacked that vague idea of a family.
Their distorted views of family life led to a distorted view of
themselves as individuals, a fact that also became apparent in the
pictures they drew, Perry said. When asked to draw a self portrait, most
children could manage to draw only tiny, primitive figure, often placed
far into a corner of a full sheet of paper.
Their sense of self was so distorted that the children found it nearly
impossible to think or act independently, Perry said.
"They did everything as a group," he said.
Even seemingly simple tasks, such as deciding whether to eat a plain
peanut butter sandwich or one with jelly for lunch, was at first an
impossible task. The boys' group leader and the girls' group leader made
such decisions for their respective groups.
Yet the children were by no means stupid. Perry said children could
quote whole pages of scripture, but didn't know what a quarter was. Some
children were fascinated by a toilet because they had ever seen one
until arriving at the Methodist home. The Davidian Compound had no
running water.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the harm child cult members
suffer, according to Perry, is that they "have nothing to go back to."
Cult life, thought and behavior, are all they know. By contrast, a
person who joins a cult as a teenager or young adult, presumably has led
a conventional life and so can return to those more normal ways of
thinking, acting and feeling upon leaving the group, he said.
Still, Perry said, there is hope for children raised in cults. He said
that if it is true that bad experiences can shape an individual, i is
also true that good experiences can do the same.
"I'm an optimist," Perry said. Knowing that positive experiences can
improve a person's life, such experiences can help child cult members
overcome their early life experiences after they leave the destructive
group.
Mame
I wonder what kind of responses one would get if one asked children brought
up as Scientologists to tell about God.
The Scientology kids I cared for who had just come out of Sea Org (mothers
on leave or working on land) were infants or toddlers who would be in their
30's now. I wonder how they have fared. I wonder if any of them are
Scientologists. I wonder what their relationship with their mothers is
like. I can only think of two (out of over a dozen) who had fathers that
were more than sperm donors and they were both divorced from the mothers.
These last few decades haven't been very child-centered in the general
population and maybe sub-cultures such as Scientology mirror many of these
social problems. Maybe some get magnified and others get diminished based
on the character of the sub-culture. I never knew a Scientology mother to
do drugs or booze or leave her kids home alone. But the neglect some of
these kids endured while in the Sea Org through no choice of their own was
heartbreaking.
This is a pretty rich field of uncharted(?) research for sociology.
Tigger
Hi Mame,
I agree with you. Someone should research the children of Scientology,
but I doubt it if would be possible.
Some are scientologists themselves. Others, who have escaped the mind
bending cult, have lost family and friends and just want to forget that
part of their lives, others are afraid of COS harassment if they speak
out. And some get harassed by critics when/if they speak out and try to
understand what happened to them.
One young person came to a.r.s. and saw a man and woman, who are now
touted as honest, ethical, caring ex-scientologists, who, when he was a
child, were mean, vindictive, lying OSA/SO power hungry, manipulatve
control freaks. And he saw one of them continuing the same behavior as
critics.
Children who are brought up in the SEA ORG, are not brought up in a
stable, loving or even safe environment. And for many, it is
psychologically damaging. Look at David Miscavige, who was auditing
adults at the age of 12. If he had not been brought up in a cult
invented and operated by a power, money hungry madman, might he have
become something other than the madman's clone?
Even children of publiic scientologists can be hurt, because of the
scientologist's total or nearly total concentration on him/herself and
"What Ron Says".
Tigger