Sex cults like Nxivm exist in the UK too – I grew up in one and trained for Armageddon before escaping at 15

The British countryside, for me, would become the backdrop to atrocities that happened in the name of “new” religion

I News First Person, UK/July 6, 2021

By Bexy Cameron

The first time we ran from the police, I was eight years old. Our commune took flight, under darkness, fearful that “the law” had found out where we lived.

We were somewhere about an hour outside of London. Maybe it was Hertfordshire, maybe Kent; our communities were so secretive that we kids were not allowed to know our addresses. But the British countryside, for me, would become the backdrop to atrocities that happened in the name of “new” religion.

I grew up in a cult. A sex cult, as it’s infamously known – the Children of God, now rebranded as The Family International. When people hear this, they usually imagine it was in the dusty plains of the Nevada desert, a compound in an Alabaman forest, or a Tennessee bunker housing feral children. We tend to think of cults as an American thing, perhaps believing that Britons are less susceptible, maybe more sensible.

But no, I grew up in communes right here in the UK: in hidden farmhouses on the outskirts of Wales, secluded buildings on the edges of Hampshire, and once in a terraced house in Hendon, north-west London. It was the only world I knew but somehow I understood that what was happening was not right. From the age of 10, I told myself that if I could get out, I would tell people about what happened there.

I escaped at 15, leaving my parents and my 11 siblings behind, and now live a life that I never dared dream was possible. I’m an adult with free will, I’m a writer and director, and every day I feel grateful for the freedoms that we all have the right to expect.

It can seem sinister to think of cults hidden in plain sight. But “new religious movements” are more common in this country than most people realise – there have been more than 800 of them operating here in recent decades. They exist in places like Hertfordshire, Inverness, Sussex, Devon and Northampton – a list that sounds more like a series run-down of Escape to the Country than the locations of secretive sects.
Because of the mystery that surrounds cults, precise numbers are hard to pin down. Lots of movements operate underground, some refuse to reveal their membership numbers or exaggerate them, and many gloss over their high turnover rates.

There is a broad spectrum of sects and new religious movements, but the one thing that unites them is that they despise the term “cult”. Still, the average Briton is probably a lot closer to “them” – the seekers, the ideologists, the harmless spiritualists and the revolutionaries – than they realise. A few doors down and a simple leap of faith away.

There are the imported groups like the Iskcon – the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, better known as the Hare Krishnas, a Hindu sect made famous by The Beatles. And there are the homegrown ones, like the Findhorn Foundation, a registered charity based in an ecovillage in northern Scotland, “where everyday life is guided by the inner voice of spirit”.

Whether Findhorn is a cult or not is open to debate. Ewan Morrison, a writer who stayed there in 2012, concluded that it was “a benign middle-aged spiritual community with an obsessive focus on its own language and rules. But the cult-think and the lack of children made my blood run cold”.

There are some that sound like a bit of fun (The Raelians, best summed up as the world’s largest UFO religion) and others that tell you to kill your family pets if they get in the way of God’s work (The Exclusive Brethren, an evangelical Protestant Christian church that seeks to separate followers from other people). Sometimes horrific stories emerge – like that of Stephen Orchard, a member of the Jesus Army who was found decapitated in 1978, less than a mile away from their Northamptonshire headquarters, after saying that he was considering leaving. The Baptist sect faced allegations of rapes, “brainwashing” and the beating of young children in 2019, and has since closed.

There was also the Lambeth slavery case of 2013, when three women were rescued from a commune in south London after being imprisoned by The Workers’ Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought. Its leader, Aravindan Balakrishnan – aka Comrade Bala – was sentenced to 23 years in prison.
Some groups have died out because all the young people have left, after seeing that life was possible “outside”. My cult has dwindled from 25,000 to just 1,000 or so around the world, after an exodus of young people like me.

But others, such as the International Church of Christ (ICC), seem to be sweeping up the youth of today. Operating on university campuses, the ICC is a family of churches spread across 155 nations that believe in salvation through Christ – although one ex-member once described them as responsible for “mental rape”.

Fleeing and following

I grew up in a time when fear of cults was perhaps at its highest. The tragedy of the 1993 siege of a compound in Waco, Texas – resulting in the deaths of 76 Branch Davidians, including 25 children and two pregnant women – had shocked the world. So, too, had the suicides (or were they actually murders?) of 53 members of the Solar Temple in Switzerland. Headlines screamed of bizarre sexual practices, blasphemous beliefs, kidnapping, deception, broken families and child abuse.

As a result, we were prepared with “flee-bags” – packs of essentials in case the press tracked us down and we had to go to ground. I remember being shoved into the backs of vans, car chases through cities, and winters spent lying low in the Welsh countryside. But then a time came when we had to come out of hiding. Our group couldn’t run any more. So, when I was 12, we moved into a village outside Leicester – all 100 of us. Imagine finally finishing your extension on your terraced house and then the Children of God move into your cul-de-sac. Nothing brings Zoopla ratings down quite like a cult in the neighbourhood.

By the time we moved to this village, I had spent years in teenage camps across the UK where our group was attempting to turn us kids into an army fit to fight in the Armageddon. Children were being beaten, locked in isolation and exorcised. Aged 10, I was forced to be silent for a whole year. My group was clearly extreme. Most are nothing like this. But where does the leap from religious community to a full-blown cult running a teenage Armageddon army camp happen – and who are the people caught up in them?

A few years ago I flew to San Francisco, bought a truck and started a journey into the underbelly of religious cults in the US. I wanted not only to find out why people join, but also to hear about the experiences of children who are born into these worlds, just like I was. In hindsight, it was a potentially dangerous and traumatising mission for anyone to take on, but especially for someone with my history and experience.
This American road trip – which I’ve written about in my new book, Cult Following – taught me something just as relevant in the UK: about what makes people believe in something enough to give up their entire lives to follow it. Sometimes in an instant.

Many people imagine cult members to be typically unstable, homeless, addicts or on the spectrum. Perhaps this provides comfort that there is a separation between us and them and that we could never do that. It builds a barrier between us and the crazies in white robes singing, chanting or muttering to gods we’ve never heard of. The reality is that they are predominantly middle-class, educated people like my parents. Yes, they met on a psychiatric ward, but that’s because they were both studying medicine rather than being under the hospital’s care. My dad joined first. My mum went to “rescue” him. Both of their recruitments happened within hours of meeting the group – decisions that happened so quickly but last until this day. Recruitment happens in so many ways – through literature, through bands and music, on university campuses, on high streets, But the feelings that people describe seem to be universal: of enlightenment, of transformation, or as my parents put it, of “coming home”.

Membership of alternative groups is rising fast, especially among women and those aged over 35. In 2015, the folk singer Laura Marling opened up about feeling lost and getting into “a fairly odd, specific kind of transcendental yoga”, saying: “I was pretty close to joining a cult.” It struck me at the time that if this 31-year-old woman from Berkshire could be saying this, anyone could. Is it easier to fall under their influence now? New religious movements are moving from geodomes to video calls.

We live in an online world where our beliefs are expanding and overlapping – where you can spend 20 minutes in meditation channelling aliens, before jumping on to a virtual “past-lives-clearing”, or go from attending a yoga nidra breathwork session to an online seance with one of the many magical occult “WitchTok” groups.

Look at how many people in the UK believe in conspiracy theories propagated by the baseless US phenomenon of QAnon. A survey in October found that 29 per cent thought there was “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together”. QAnon does not have physical communes and isn’t based in spiritual practice, but take it from me that these are certainly cult-like beliefs.

Seeking solutions

After we arrived in that Midlands village when I was 12, we came out of hiding to face the press. News vans and reporters camped outside of our commune for weeks on end. But once the media interest had died down, the local teenagers still sat there smoking rollies, waiting for something “cultie” to happen. They would shout “sex-cult girl” every time I went to our food barn.

I would look beyond the gate at them in their denim jackets and then back at myself, ashamed. Sometimes scared, mainly intrigued. I would dream of the world beyond those gates even though I feared it. Perhaps those teenagers and I were both looking through the same distorted glass, unable to focus on a true picture of either the outside world or the one I was living in, even though it was close enough to touch.

I remain fascinated by cults. They can represent so much of what we fear in humankind: the horrors that come when we put beliefs above basic human rights, when we use “God” as an excuse to treat followers like animals, when sex and power corrupt ordinary people, and when children become casualties.

Cults in the news

Children of God was established in the 1960s by an evangelical preacher, David Berg. Based around the idea that God was love and love was sex, its followers lived communally and shared partners. The actors Joaquin Phoenix and Rose McGowan (above) spent parts of their childhoods as members with their families. Numerous cases of rape, incest and paedophilia have emerged from the cult. Last year a “house shepherd”, Derek Lincoln, was sentenced in Glasgow to 11 and a half years in prison for the rape of two girls.

Colin Batley, a self-appointed “high priest” of a “black magic sex cult” in Kidwelly, South Wales, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2011 and told he may never be released, for a series of rapes and other crimes. His wife, Elaine, and two other women were also jailed for their part.

The Smallville actress Allison Mack was sentenced to three years in prison in the US last week for her role in the Nxivm sex cult.

But within these groups we can also recognise ourselves: our basic human need to find connections, to have purpose, to find “our people”, to have meaning in life.

Those needs are universal. Joining a group can take away many of the things we worry about, like paying bills, taxes, supporting ourselves and finding a career. It is a pretty intoxicating idea, which is why I can understand elements of why people join a cult. Even with my past, I am open minded to the positives that spirituality can bring. I have seen groups that do it well as well as others that cause damage.

So when does a group become a cult? For me, it comes down to what is a matter of individual choice and what is exploitative. What is the intention behind a group’s beliefs? Does it come from a place of compassion or of elitism? Is it about being separate from the world or in communion with it? And do the beliefs uphold human rights or batter against them?

Now I can gladly say that I have joined my last cult. I have packed up my van and returned to the safety of my home in London. My search to resolve the unanswered questions left by my childhood is now over. The solutions, as many people find for their own problems, lay with understanding – and confronting – my parents. They remain in their cult and are no longer in the UK. But the answers I needed were closer to home than I could have imagined.

‘Cult Following: My Escape and Return to the Children of God’ by Bexy Cameron is published by Manilla Press.

To see more documents/articles regarding this group/organization/subject click here.