DAWN WATSON: Growing up, I believed that the
way to express God’s love is through sexuality. So, as children, as you learn to brush your
teeth, we learnt to have sex.
DAWN WATSON: We lived in big communities that were closed. We didn’t have access to the
outside world. From since a small girl, I learned that anything that was outside of
our community was of the devil, was really bad.
DAWN WATSON: The Children of God, and it started
with a man called David Brandt Berg. He had a lot of darkness inside him.
DAWN WATSON: As women, the way that we can
express our love, is to serve men which represent God, our bodies and our sexuality.
DAWN WATSON: I remember till today, reading
and seeing pictures of women naked on a cross, saying, ‘Sacrifice yourself for the love
of God and for the people around you’. So, I learned about it and I understood that maybe
one day I would have to do it.
DAWN WATSON: It was very interesting to me growing up and listening to all of these things
because that’s all I knew. A lot of the women and mothers truly believed that they
were bringing their children into the best possible environment.
DAWN WATSON: Truly believed that the children
were being very well cared for because a lot of the times, the women were not taking care
of their own children, they were always with uncles and aunties and many of the abuses
that I lived were always in a very quiet, you know, don’t say, don’t tell anyone.
Oh, it’s nap time, now it’s time, you know, to rest.
DAWN WATSON: Nothing was done with aggression.
Everything was done in the name of love. Let me show God’s love to you, let me, I’m
loving you. So, it was really hard to identify that what they were doing was bad.
DAWN WATSON: I always looked at men and the
uncles of the community as danger, as I want to be as far away as I can from them.
DAWN WATSON: I always had a very questioning
mind and I always got a lot of spankings for that. We had like a spanking room that I was
always in and out of. I got so much spankings that my whole legs was bruised and I remember
going to my mom and saying, ‘Is this love?’ Because they would spank us and say, ‘This
is God’s love’. I was born into a structure where even my faith, even the only thing I
could run to, to believe in was the abuser. You know, even Jesus desired me as a woman.
I finally got to a point of my life where I needed a way out. I desperately said, ‘You
know what, if the outside world is a terrible place, if God is going to judge me and kill
me and I’m going to go to hell -- I really don’t care.’
DAWN WATSON: I left the cult when I was 13
years old, opening the window and jumping out from that closed home that we were in.
I jumped from house to house, especially ex-members; people that had left already and then had
their little homes. They would accept me and I would jump from place to place that where
people that had left the community. So, it felt familiar but at the same time I still
had to interact with people from the outside world. They would talk about television series
or, you know, just normal things that were happening in Brazil and I had no idea. I was,
literally, felt like an alien in this world that I couldn’t connect to anything that
people were talking about. So I think that feeling began to make me feel like, ‘I don’t
belong anywhere.’ I thought, you know, ‘I knew I didn’t belong in the cult anymore.
I didn’t want to be there anymore.’ But, also society, I didn’t feel welcomed. I
didn’t feel like I was part of it.
DAWN WATSON: At 15, I experienced a rape in one of the houses that I was staying at. And
I felt, ‘Okay, now I have no hope,’ and I just felt, like, ‘I want to check out.
I am done.’ I tried suicide many times and it was a very dark moment of my life. I was
15 years old and, you know, had gone through pain in the community. I left the community
and it was in that moment where I called up my mom and finally understood that she had
found the strength to get out of the community. She had, you know, she was able to leave and
I was able to come home and that feeling of, ‘Okay, now we can start again. We can begin
to construct a new life and I am not alone in this.’ And I think from that day on I
felt, like, my life wasn’t in vain and that yes, I had a lot of baggages of pain but I
also did have something special in me that could help me heal all that pain and, also,
help me help others.
DAWN WATSON: For many years having to understand that what had happened was something wrong
took me a long time to link the dots. As, you know, this was rape. No, this was abuse.
Before, I couldn’t even identify that that was rape and that was abuse.
DAWN WATSON: I started to receive e-mails
and messages. So many women had gone through experiences of abuse and rape that never had
the courage to actually talk about it and I felt this is something huge not only here
in Brazil but everywhere.
DAWN WATSON: So, I decided to open up my own NGO where we began to create an awareness
and a platform where we can share with each other. The more that we can open up and feel
like we are a family, we are in this together, it gives you a sense of, ‘I can, I am okay.
I will be okay, you know. I don’t have to go through this alone.’
WOMAN: Realising that you’ve spent your
life living to the pleasures of some perverted, manipulative, megalomaniac leader. So, it
was sad. But at the same time, I mean, what happens, happens. The best I can do is learn from it.
WOMAN: She has been my dearest friend. I am so happy for her, for all her things she has
achieved and what she is doing to help other people.
WOMAN: Most of us were never able to express
that, never able to say it to anyone.
WOMAN: She is helping so many people who have been through so much.
WOMAN: I think it is the best thing she can do.
DAWN WATSON: It’s really important this process of breaking the silence so that we
can start our healing path and that there is nothing shameful about your story. We all
have ours. Nowadays I can truly talk about it and, and just own up, ‘Yes, that’s
where I have been. This is where I grew up.’
DAWN WATSON: It is my story. It is my truth.