Even after the Brixton ‘slavery’ case, cults aren’t taken very seriously. We interviewed a cult ‘survivor’ who thinks academics and politicians failing to act
Last week, police discovered in Lambeth what has been described as a Maoist slavery cult which had kept three women imprisoned against their will in an old Victorian building masquerading as a bookshop for over thirty years. The building was home to the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, a cult with around 25 members, led by 73-year-old Aravindan Balakrishnan (known as Comrade Bala) and his wife Chanda. During the 1970s Balakrishnan had been part of the Communist Party of England, but finding their stance insufficiently hard-line for his own brand of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology, broke away and formed his own group in 1974 which believed that Brixton was soon to be liberated by the Red Army. Until last week, nobody would have guessed that a bookshop could have been HQ for a modern-day Maoist cult with such extreme ideological views, nor indeed that such an instance of alleged enforced enslavement of vulnerable individuals may not stand alone or, frighteningly, that the cult problem in the UK might be more insidious than most people realise.
Ian Haworth, director of the Cult Information Centre, believes that there are between 500 and 1,000 cults in Britain, an estimate for which he is often criticised by his colleagues for being too conservative. Ian is himself a cult survivor. In the late 70s, Haworth became a member of PSI Mind Development Institute Ltd in the hope that they would help kick his smoking habit. He had been promised that, within four days, he would have successfully quit smoking. Within four days, however, Haworth had given all his money to the Institute and, at the age of 31, was forced quit his business. Haworth escaped two and a half weeks later, thanks to the efforts of a journalist who was investigating the cult at around the same time. Upon reading the journalist’s article, Haworth recounts how it was as if the wool had been pulled from his eyes. To this day, Haworth still lives with the memory of this ordeal and is still trying to make sense of his experience. “They catered themselves to each person,” he reveals. “If I was a journalist, they would have said they could help me to be more creative. If I was a politician, they would have taught me how to be a better public speaker. As it so happens, I was a smoker.” It took him a full 11 months to recover, during which time he suffered many of what he considers to be “recovery time symptoms”, including hallucinations, delusions, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Ian Haworth’s case, like those who suffered at the hands of Balakrishnan’s Mao-worship cult, is not unique. In Britain today there are many tales of organisations taking advantage of members, and even more of cult survivors who have come out of the woodwork to tell their stories. One such organisation, the Somerset-based Self Realization Meditation Healing Centre, is run by Judy Denton (who has assumed the pseudonym Mata Yogananda Mahasaya Dharma) and is responsible for manipulating members to part with hundreds of thousands of pounds. In June of this year, Lee Thompson, the self-styled head of a sadomasochistic sex cult, was convicted for forcing one of his ‘followers’, against her will, to have sex with another man and was once seen parading his girlfriend around on a leash in Darlington town centre. Last year Laura Wilson spoke of her experience growing up in London in the 70s as part of the School of Economic Science, an organisation which demanded severance from the modern world, and imposed on its members a strict regimen which prohibited, amongst other things, television and music which post-dated Mozart. The darker side of this phenomenon is that such organisations can, in certain cases, inflict on their members sexual abuse and degradation. One such example is Michael Lyons, the self-styled guru Mohan Singh,who was convicted for the rape of one woman and sexual assault of another in 2010. In 2011, Colin Batley was exposed as the ruler of a “sick little kingdom” in an unassuming Welsh cul-de-sac, in which he and his followers systematically forced children into satanic sex orgies. He was jailed for 11 years.
The sheer number and variety of such organisations, and the divergence in their beliefs and their teachings, is testament to their persuasive ability to win people over to their causes. Most of us know of Scientology and its monetarily-incentivised cosmic beliefs, for example, but its influence should not be ignored or overlooked – it has three bases in London alone. For Haworth, the root of the cult problem in Britain lies in the refusal of academic and government institutions to recognise that cults and their methods of recruitment are in fact an issue. “The problem,” he suggests, “is that not everybody in our field in Britain sings from the same hymn sheet.” The debate is dominated by semantics, often boiling down to an inability to clearly define the problem from a neutral perspective. Where Haworth suggests we are seeing related instances of mind control and psychological manipulation, others believe it is only the freedom of the individual to make the choice as to what they believe in and whose teachings they wish to follow.
The government-funded Information Network Focus On Religious Movements, based at the London School of Economics, denies that there is a cult problem and argues against the suggestion that mind control is used in recruiting members to their organisations. For Professor Barker and her team, there are no grounds to suspect mind control is used to recruit people to such “new religious movements”. While Professor Barker and her colleagues consistently refute the plausibility of mind control, Haworth and his associates accuse them of being cult-apologists, who regularly have cult members from the the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Unification Church and the Children of God in attendance at their seminars. While the cult landscape is mostly silent, it seems there are individual pockets of vociferous and quite vocal dissent against the conventional wisdom.
Do recent revelations suggest that we are dealing with a problem right here in the UK in 2013? Although there are clear instances of people speaking about their experiences as cult members, and many more who believe that they practice brainwashing, mind control and other unsavoury psychological methods, the majority of people in Britain won’t be losing any sleep over the thought of losing loved ones to a cult and don’t seem to take the problem seriously. But, why is this the case? Haworth looks toward France as an example of how to make positive steps towards dealing with the cult problem, where the introduction of the About-Picard law in 2001 allows for cults to be prosecuted in cases of mental manipulation. Since its introduction, there have been a handful of successful prosecutions, including one against a doomsday cult leader who coerced his followers to commit suicide. There are, however, currently no plans to introduce a similar law in Britain.
Haworth contends that, up until now, it has been the failure of academics and politicians alike to give any weight to the problem of cults and, more importantly, their methods. Unlike the 1970s, cults are now “hiding in plain sight”, according to Haworth, who even says that the 7/7 bombers were manipulated into performing their heinous acts by clandestine methods which are extremely close to those employed by organisations widely recognised as cults. What we need, he suggests, is a real effort to define the cult problem in the UK, an effort that has been severely lacking thus far.
Consider this: in 1979 Steve Rayner was studying for a PhD at Oxford University, where he is now a professor. His thesis, dealing with radical left-wing groups in the UK in the 1970s, focused in part on Balakrishnan’s group and concluded that their views were “profoundly detached from reality” and was the “clearest case of far-left millenarianism which I have encountered”. The leaders, he wrote, had a “superior ability to manipulate other members” and preyed on the weak and vulnerable. Rayner recognised the threat posed by Balakrishnan’s group over 30 years ago and, until last week, had presumed that the organisation had “sunk without a trace”. His conclusions, however, had been particularly clear.
Was there any way to avert the actions inspired by Balakrishnan’s aberrant Maoist ideas and, if so, how many cases of coercion and manipulation by esoteric cultic groups could have been and can be prevented in the future?
Featured image: Flickr. Inset image: rogueshollow via Flickr
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