As a child, I was raised to die, tortured to death in the name of Jesus,
and I was one of the lucky ones and should be thankful for that.
Throughout history, groups known as cults
have led ordinary people to believe unbelievable things.
NEWSREADER: Manson is the mystical leader of the hippie cult suspected
of killing Sharon Tate, and at least six other people.
The world watched as a compound in Waco, Texas,
burst into flames, while cult leader David Koresh became infamous.
NEWSREADER: It's a whole spectrum of criminal activity.
In 1978, more than 900 people committed mass suicide
at the order of their leader, the Reverend Jim Jones.
People always think cult members are very gullible people.
That they're stupid
That they're looking to fill a hole in their life.
And that's absolutely not the case.
Today there are countless cults
across the globe, but it's hard to know how many
because most people might not even know they're in a cult.
I want to understand what a cult really is.
And what compels people to join them?
I began in France, I'd heard as many as 500
potentially dangerous religious sects had cropped up during the pandemic.
I was on my way to meet Sylvania D'Souza,
a lawyer who recently published an article on the growing phenomenon.
I wanted to learn why the figures were so high.
Defining what a cult actually is is problematic.
Not all cults are religious, and not all new religions are cults.
A healthy religion first of all,
is not going to have you worshiping this person right in front of you.
Also, a healthy religion is not going to shun you if you leave, and
I think shunning is one of the really main characteristics of a culted group.
Most researchers agree that as a loose definition, a cult is a group
or movement with a shared commitment to an idea thing or a person.
They exist along a continuum of influence so you can have
a healthy ethical cult that you know what you're getting into and
you're free to question and you're free to leave without threat
or all the way to authoritarian cults of many types and sizes.
And you have to be controlled through fear and guilt, and
all your information is controlled as well to make you dependent and obedient.
And controlling the group's sources of information is
how many leaders manipulate their members.
This was one tactic used by leader David Berg,
who created the cult 'Children of God'. Former members have accused the group
of child sexual abuse, physical abuse and exploitation.
Verity Carter was born into the group and spent most of her childhood inside it.
One of the biggest barriers we have to getting justice from the cult
is the fact that I don't know the real names of most of the people that abused me.
I didn't know the locations I was in for the majority of my childhood
for security reasons, we weren't allowed to know our own address.
So not even all the cult members knew other cult members names or locations?
In most cases they went by their cult name.
They never used surnames. He [David Berg] created an environment
where his followers were completely dependent on him.
They gave up everything they had.
We didn't even have any personal possessions.
You feel that if you're going to leave this environment,
you'll not only be sacrificing everything you know and have ever known,
you'll also have no resources to fall back on.
Anyone can fall prey to a cult or a coercive controlled environment
which, to be honest, is what it is.
Most social scientists agree
that these destructive groups share key characteristics.
The leader, of course, is very important,
is usually regarded as charismatic. So what does that mean?
Charisma is actually a social relationship.
It's not something inherent in the individual.
Charisma is a trait that we attribute to the person, right?
So once you have deemed someone 'charismatic',
at least in this context, then that person has power
over you because it's a power imbalance, right?
You've decided that that person is special.
That person is better than you.
The other quality they need, and this is often overlooked,
but authoritarianism, they have to be bullies.
So we get these charismatic bully figures who really have
their own psychological need to control others.
When people think of brainwashing, I think they think of some movie
where there's bright lights and things that kind of trick someone
into kind of a as zoning out into this weird place.
But it's not like that at all. It's really a process
of taking advantage of a person's desire to have meaning in their life.
And before you know it, your whole persona has changed.
And also the way that you think has changed.
Cults exploit people, and it's important
to remember these are kind of what we call total listing systems,
they engulf all of a person's life.
So really, all elements of a person's life end up getting exploited.
In my cult, there were microphones and cameras installed in people's rooms
so that even while you were in your room trying to relax,
don't say the wrong thing because it'll come back to you later.
And many, many cults involve that level of surveillance.
Cults need an enemy.
An enemy serves as a mining force in the community,
And this enemy can take many forms.
Katie was born into a communist cult and spent 30 years of her life in captivity.
The leader was her father, Aravinda Balakrishnan,
who died in prison in 2022.
He told his members that the enemy was an invisible machine called Jackie.
So this machine was meant to be an invisible mind control machine
which knew what we were thinking.
I was responsible for all the natural disasters in the world
and basically controlled everything that existed.
So did he use Jackie as a way to control the group?
Definitely, yes.
He used to say things like if you left, Jackie would punish you,
might even kill you. Even when I was very small,
I hated the tension in the house.
It was terrifying.
Both Katy and Verity were born into cults.
But what about those who aren't? Why do people join cults?
Nobody deliberately wants to join a cult.
They join a community they believe is going to give them some kind of benefit.
And often they believe that it will benefit the community at large - the wider world.
The message of the cult or the cult leader,
it has to resonate with the person, right?
When people are at vulnerable moments in their lives,
they're kind of open to hearing some solutions right?
And being vulnerable is not a mental illness. It's not something negative.
It's something that we all experience.
And then at that moment, if someone comes along with an interesting message
or someone invites you to something, you're more likely to say yes.
One has to understand there's deception,
whether overt lying or withholding vital information
or distorting it to make it palatable for people.
In my experience is just started all over meeting with people over coffee
and not knowing that I was getting drawn into a cult.
That's the crazy thing about it, it could easily happen to anyone
if they are not educated enough on what cults are.
More than two thirds of people who join cults are recruited by a friend,
a family member or a coworker.
And cults are skilled at knowing who to target.
Built like a pyramid scheme, earlier members recruit in newer ones.
After that, we would invite them to this retreat centre in the woods.
We would try to keep them separate so that they wouldn't talk to each other
and think critically together to convince each other out of it.
Do as much as we could to try to keep them away
from going back to their own life.
Once in the cults,
members are subjected to indoctrination, which can take different forms,
and this level of coercive control is strengthened with guilt, shame and fear.
So leaving might mean leaving behind your family, going out in the world
with no money and some groups go after people.
So there's going to be so many factors working on you that makes
it really, really difficult to leave.
Since escaping the group,
Katy has built a new life for herself and is studying for her university degree.
for her university degree.
I wasn't allowed even to go to school,
I kind of didn't know whether I would ever be able to do it.
Well, I have and I'm chuffed about that.
It's one of the hardest things I think that the people will ever do
in their lives is leave a culted group.
It's only after I'd left Shincheonji
that I began realising what had happened to me.
I remember it being so hard for me to even say the word cult.
I came from an environment where I was worthless.
I was nothing. I wasn't going to achieve anything.
I wasn't even going to grow into adulthood.
Just getting up every day and proving them wrong is a massive achievement.
I'm not who I was born to be, and I'm proud of that.
At the end of the day, we all want simple answers to complex questions.
A promise made by many destructive groups.
But as cults continue to reappear in unpredictable forms,
checking for warning signs is more important now than ever before.