Part One
In Victoria, a parliamentary inquiry is uncovering evidence from hundreds of survivors harmed within cults and high-control groups operating as legitimate community organisations. Registered charities, religious institutions, and health practices form the public face of many of these groups. A striking pattern across testimony is that organisational legitimacy has functioned to reduce external scrutiny by regulators and service systems, enabling harmful practices to continue without effective safeguarding. Alongside hundreds of written submissions the inquiry received 317 responses to its online survey.
Among these, 94.9% reported psychological harm such as indoctrination, pressure to remain, or fear of punishment. 85.8% reported personal restrictions including surveillance, financial control, or barriers to medical care. 52.4% reported physical harm, including physical violence or sexual abuse, child abuse or neglect, or sleep deprivation.1
These figures give numerical shape to what survivors have long described: the slow erosion of freedom, intimacy, and trust, and the reshaping of their experience of reality, language and self.
Many have described difficulty communicating their experiences to outsiders. One participant wrote:
“It’s hard to explain to people who’ve never been through something like this. The effects don’t stop the moment you walk out”
(Parliament of Victoria, 2025)
This difficulty in articulating the experience is not unique to Victorian survivors or to the present moment; it is a continuation of a long struggle of former members of cults to render their story into a form that’s understandable to those who want to help them recover.
It’s hard to explain when people don’t know how to listen. Survivors of modern-era cults have been explaining fluently for almost 70 years2. The knowledge produced by survivors and scholars is extensive and rich in insight. A scan of available literature reveals an abundance – over 19,000 books, articles, theses, reports, and audiovisual works on cults, religious trauma, spiritual abuse, and new religious movements.3
Yet recognition remains only partial. After seven decades of research, the issue is not the absence of data or description. What remains unresolved is how this knowledge is received.
A wide variety of labels have been applied to people who leave or speak about high-control groups – reflecting the competing truth-claims and power relations among a professional class of psychologists, sociologists, religious scholars, lawyers, criminologists, media, and police:
victim survivor cultist apostate heretic believer convert member adherent disciple follower joiner defector dropout ex-member de-converter dissident whistleblower escapee complainant witness informant offender brainwashed mind-controlled de-programmed traumatised fanatic extremist radical lost-sheep prodigal seeker A label that is rarely applied, is expert. Yes, for the ex-member it’s hard to explain. But for professionals, it is hard to listen.
In the context of cults and high-control groups, hearing survivors as experts means recognising their lived experience is not simply a narrative of suffering but a legitimate source of knowledge. It marks their testimony as something that can shed light on patterns that remain otherwise unseen. When this recognition is denied, and authority is granted only to established professional voices, survivor accounts are filtered through categories that cannot capture their depth or complexity. Under these conditions, neither recovery nor accountability can take root.
Listening, in this context, is more than a courtesy. It is a form of epistemic justice (Fricker, 2007). It requires a willingness to suspend inherited stereotypes, to hear experience that does not follow familiar scripts, and to accept that survivors may be describing dynamics that existing categories have not yet learned to name.
The Victorian Inquiry marks a turning point, by positioning survivor experience as a primary source of knowledge rather than supplementary testimony. Through trauma-informed submission pathways, public and private hearings, an anonymous survey, and explicit recognition of experiential expertise, the Inquiry is giving voice to insights indispensable for understanding how these groups operate.
For seventy years, survivors have described harms that remained visible but unrecognisable, producing knowledge that travelled widely but rarely influenced public policy.
These harms have proved resistant to change not because they are unknowable, but because they have not been listened to from where they are lived. As the Victorian Inquiry demonstrates, when dialogue begins at the margins rather than the centre, insights long obscured come into view, and new avenues for action become possible.
Footnotes
- Underlying data is available on the Parliament of Victoria’s website: https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/cofg-questionnaire-insights ↩︎
- Early published analyses of coercive persuasion and high-control groups began emerging in the mid-twentieth century. Foundational works include Biderman’s (1957) analysis of interrogation pressures applied to Korean War POWs, and two Cold War monographs which became core texts for later cultic-studies models: Lifton’s (1961) Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism and Schein’s (1961) Coercive Persuasion. Practitioner accounts expanded in the 1970s and early 1980s, including Singer’s (1979) clinical analyses of post-cult recovery. The field broadened through works such as Langone’s (1993) psychoeducational frameworks and Winnell’s (1995) articulation of Religious Trauma Syndrome. A major theoretical development came with Lalich’s (2004) structural and relational model of bounded choice, explaining voluntary-yet-constrained commitment within charismatic groups. Contemporary scholarship continues this trajectory through clinical, sociological, and survivor-informed work, including Jenkinson’s (2013) practice based work, Hassan’s (2018) influence-continuum model, Stein’s (2017) attachment-based analysis, and Feliciano’s (2023) application of coercive-control theory to cultic contexts. Along with many other publications, these contributions reflect more than seventy years of survivor testimony, clinical insight, and scholarly engagement with coercion in high-control groups. ↩︎
- Search conducted in the University of Canberra Library database using the terms cult, cults, “high-control groups”, “religious trauma”, “religious abuse”, “spiritual abuse”, and “new religious movements”, limited to English-language materials published between 1970 and 2025 and filtered by the subject tags Psychiatry, Psychology, Sociology, Social Sciences, Religion, and Cults. ↩︎
References
Biderman, A. D. (1957). Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War.
Feliciano, Sarah E. (2023). An Application of the Coercive Control Framework to Cults. CUNY Academic Works.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford Academic.
Hassan, S. (2018). Combating cult mind control (3rd ed.). Freedom of Mind Press.
Jenkinson, Gillie. (2013). Working with Cult Survivors. BACP Therapy Today Magazine. 18-22.
Lalich, J. (2004). Bounded choice: True believers and charismatic cults. University of California Press.
Langone, M. D. (1993). Recovery from cults: Help for victims of psychological and spiritual abuse. W W Norton & Co.
Lifton, R. J. (1961). Thought reform and the psychology of totalism: A study of “brainwashing” in China. W. W. Norton & Company.
Parliament of Victoria. (2025). Inquiry into the recruitment and impacts of cults and organised fringe groups. Legislative Assembly Legal and Social Issues Committee. https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/cofg
Schein, E. H. (1961). Coercive persuasion: A socio-psychological analysis of the brainwashing of American civilian prisoners by the Chinese Communists. W. W. Norton.
Singer, M. T. (1979). Coming out of the cults. Psychology Today.
Stein, A. (2017). Terror, love and brainwashing: Attachment in cults and totalitarian systems. Routledge.
Winell, M. (2011) Religious Trauma Syndrome (Series of 3 articles), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Today, Vol. 39, Issue 2, May 2011, Vol. 39, Issue 3, September 2011, Vol. 39, Issue 4, November 2011. British Association of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies, London. Reprinted at Journey Free website: https://www.journeyfree.org/rts/
Patrick McIvor 