Ros Hodgkins

 

Phone: 0423 332 766
Email: info@cifs.org.au

Ros Hodgkins

It is my pleasure to talk about an amazing lady, Ros Hodgkins.

She is a Nurse, mother and grandmother, an educator, and an advocate for those who have been affected by groups.

For thirty years, Ros's compassionate and empathetic nature has supported families and those harmed by groups.

Ros has tirelessly served as president of CIFS, Cult Information, and Family Support.

CIFS is a non-profit association founded in 1996 by parents whose children were recruited into cults.

Through her leadership, CIFS:

Has grown to be at the forefront internationally in offering support and information to people affected by cults and cultic relationships.

She has encouraged former members, friends, and families to work together to increase awareness and educate the public regarding the potential dangers of cult involvement.

Through her work, CIFS provides ongoing support meetings and annual workshops to educate and support one another.

I want to personally thank Ros for endless hours dedicated to human liberty, freedom of thought, and family connections.

Ros is one of a kind.

The Cult Specialist: Ian Haworth hangs up the Cult Information Centre's hotline for the last time

Paul Jones
The Skeptic
November 20, 2023

Paul Jones is a Shanghai-based wannabe journalist trying to combine writing with his special subject of high-control groups, including cults, multi-level marketing schemes, and problematic coaching programmes/relationships. His brief stint in the Korean Christian group, Shincheonji, made him want to help former and current cult members, and their families, and contribute something to the field of cult education. His articles on Chinese community architecture and Shanghai’s boxing gyms have appeared in the British Council’s ChinaNow magazine, and That’s Magazine.

After forty-five years educating the public about the danger of cults, the Cult Information Centre’s, Ian Haworth, 76, stopped taking phone calls in August this year, but before he disconnected the phone, he agreed to condense four-and-a-half decades of experience into two long-distance telephone conversations.

Ian answers the phone on the third ring, but — despite trading emails for a few weeks leading up to our conversation — it takes him a moment to remember who I am.

“I wasn’t sure which Paul it was.” I ask him if he regularly speaks to a lot of Pauls. “Well, anything’s possible in this field,” he says.

He opens our conversation with a caveat: “You can hit me with anything you want to. It could be personal or otherwise because I don’t have to answer and I’ll be very straightforward with you.”

Despite the disclaimer, Haworth is happy to talk and punctuates his observations and recollections with jokes, anecdotes, and original metaphors that require a mental double-take to keep up.

“Nobody in the right mind would try and do this sort of work for 45 years,” he says as he gives a candid window into the fascinating, often unbelievable, often tragic world of cults.

Not an Expert

An Internet search for information on people working in what is sometimes called the anti-cult field yields the term “cult expert,” which refers to a person (often a former cult member) who raises public awareness about the issue and provides specialised exit-counselling for people leaving cults.

Haworth, however, doesn’t feel comfortable with the title, “I’m a cult specialist. Whether or not somebody wants to see me as an expert is up to them.”

He simplifies his role even further, “I have wanted to be, over the years, available to talk things through with people that want to talk about something to do with cults – whoever they are. And I’ve tried to do that.”

While he might not consider himself an expert, Haworth’s work has seen him in the lecture theatres of universities and schools across North America and the UK, appear in TV and radio interviews, and inside courtrooms to provide expert witness testimony, or—as I learn a little later—on the receiving end of libel suits levelled against him by the groups he’s trying to protect the public from.

His book Cults: A Practical Guide is currently in its fourth edition, and he’s helped found non-profit organisations and charities across North America, the UK, and Europe to help educate the public and support former cult members and families who’ve lost loved ones to cults.

Since 1987, Haworth has been the general secretary of the London-based Cult Information Centre (CIC), one of the few UK-based non-profit organisations set up to help educate and support the public.

In the last few years, Haworth has stopped giving so many talks. “I had to just slow down a bit because I was suffering from O.L.D,” he pauses and then adds, “Sorry, that’s my attempt at humour again.”

Regardless of how he sees his role in the last forty-five years, Haworth has been one of the few on the frontline fighting to protect the public from cults.

From Bolton to Canada

Born in Bolton in 1947 to a family of “farmers on both sides,” Haworth moved to Leyland, Lancashire when he was young, where he grew up on his family’s poultry farm. Back then, according to Haworth, a cult meant nothing more to him than the name for a young horse.

Unsure about his future career options, the young Haworth first dabbled in engineering before settling on business. After a three-month university trip to the US in 1969 and a stint washing dishes in a resort hotel in Connecticut, which Haworth describes as “the best holiday of my life,” he moved to the US. Then, in 1972, a twenty-five-year-old Haworth, concerned about America’s ongoing war in Vietnam and the possibility of being drafted, headed to Toronto, Canada, where he worked for electronics and telecoms companies in various roles, and was a buyer of the first sub-$100 calculators on the market.

Reflecting on his professional ambitions at the time, Haworth says he had absolutely no idea what he wanted to do with his life – but that would all change in the space of a few days when he signed up for a course that promised to help him stop smoking.

“The only time I was convinced that I knew what I had to do,” he says, “Was when I escaped from the cult.”

Encountering the Group

Toronto, 1978, and Haworth – a heavy smoker of seven years – is seeking professional help to quit, and is considering his options. He sees an advertisement for a $220, five-week course boasting a 70% success rate. Researching things a bit more, he encounters another company offering a similar thing; however, this one comes with a money-back guarantee.

“What could be wrong with that?” he recalls thinking, “Well, everything, as it turns out.”

A motel near the Toronto Pearson International Airport provided the venue for the course. Haworth attended on a Thursday evening along with forty other participants – some of whom hoped to see changes in their professional lives or practices; some wanted a more personal transformation. No matter what they were individually seeking, they were all there to improve some aspect of their personality or life, and whatever that was, this course, and the group behind it, promised to deliver.

The opening evening’s session on that Thursday night went on well into the early hours of the following morning. Exhausted and operating on very little sleep, Haworth went to work the next day. Instead of returning home to rest once his workday had finished, he was expected to attend the course again for another evening session.

From the beginning, the group established clear rules to prevent the participants from interacting too much with each other, or questioning what was happening. According to Haworth, everything was “…there to inhibit us from questioning and checking things out.”

The group’s activities were tightly controlled, and designed to force changes in the participants’ behaviour and thinking. Haworth remembers the days well:

We were hypnotised, 16 times in the four-day course without knowing it once. We didn’t eat the normal sorts of food that we would normally eat. Nor did we eat the food as often as we would normally eat it, or at the same time. And the chairs in the room were set up in such a way to work against us.

The intense, long days and nights filled with relentless group activities and controlled toilet breaks, combined with sleep deprivation and hypnosis had a powerful, heady effect on Haworth, “One of the results of being hypnotised, even a few times, never mind, 16, is that you’ll feel good. You’re hungry, you’re exhausted, but you feel good.”

This continued over a few days – that’s all it took. The group’s techniques were so effective that by Saturday afternoon, Haworth hadn’t been for his usual cigarette during the allotted break.

“I was theirs hook, line, and sinker by Saturday midday,” Haworth remembers, “Two evenings, one morning, and I was gone.”

However, he doesn’t attribute this break in his old habit to the course’s efficacy in delivering on its promise, but rather the creation of a new identity — one that belongs to the group, “I quit being me because they turned me into someone else who didn’t smoke,” Haworth tells me.

In their 1994 paper, Pseudo-Identity and the Treatment of Personality Change in Victims of Captivity and Cults, psychiatrists Louis J. West and Paul R. Martin explored how cults use destabilising techniques to disrupt people’s senses of self and cause dramatic changes in their personality and behaviour:

Cases of pseudo-identity observed among cult victims are often very clear-cut, classic examples of transformation through deliberately contrived situational forces of a normal individual’s personality into that of a ‘different person’.

The sudden shifts in Haworth’s behaviour began to concern the people who knew him best; neither his girlfriend nor his roommate could understand what had happened during the space of a weekend that could turn somebody they knew so well into a person they hardly recognised.

He also handed in his notice at work. His boss, noticing the changes in his personality and sensing that something wasn’t quite right, didn’t immediately process the request, “She knew something was wrong, she couldn’t explain it, but she knew I was in trouble,” he says.

The group’s meetings and activities quickly took over all of Haworth’s free time, whether it was fundraising, recruiting people on the streets, or attending courses and meetings, “I was just doing whatever they told me to do,” Haworth explains.

Monday evenings, he’d be attending top-up meetings; Wednesdays, he’d be handling new recruits and getting them to sign up for courses. The group, in a short space of time, had learned that Haworth was a former competitive swimmer, so they arranged for him to teach disabled children to swim at the local hospital on Tuesdays to help boost the group’s image and profile within the community.

He even tried recruiting the people closest to him. One of these people was Haworth’s neighbour. “A very dear neighbour who, like everyone else, I tried to recruit,” he admits.

This neighbour called him one day to tell him the group he’d been non-stop talking about for the past week was in today’s newspaper and invited him to the lobby of their building to receive a copy. Eager to see what good things the press were saying, he immediately returned to his own apartment and opened the newspaper, expecting the article to be full of effusive praise for the group—but what he found was anything but.

Dejection and disbelief replaced excitement – Haworth “fell apart at the seams” as he read horror stories of one former member in a psychiatric unit, and other recent ones in psychiatric care.

The message in the article was unambiguous: This was a cult, and people needed to stay well away.

A shocked Haworth took the article to the group’s leadership, where his questions were met with a tirade about the ethnicity of the journalist. “Why don’t you go away,” they told him, “And come back when you’re feeling better?”

Haworth did leave, but instead of ignoring the article as propaganda or bad press, he decided to call the journalist behind the piece. A forty-five-minute telephone conversation later, the journalist invited Haworth to his office to see the information he had about the group that, but — for legal reasons — couldn’t print.

Haworth wasted no time and immediately jumped on a train, arriving at the newspaper office. The journalist left Haworth alone in the back office with all of his research. A shocked Haworth emerged an hour later, “This is far worse than what you said in the article!” he said to the journalist, who nodded, “Yes, my boy. That’s lawyers for you.”

Persistent influence

Despite the course only lasting a few days, and Haworth only being in the group for two-and-a-half weeks, the techniques used against him had lingering effects.

It was six months before he began to notice certain aspects of his original personality returning, “As time goes by, the cult personality is eroded away, till it no longer exists,” he says.

His desire to smoke returned; however, this was a welcome sign that things were beginning to change, “And when it got to the point after six months where I wanted to smoke again. I was actually happy, because I knew that was normal.”

It was a few months before other aspects of his suppressed, authentic personality began to re-emerge. Again, he—and this time the people closest to him—took this as a positive sign that he was returning to his former self; although, Haworth’s not so sure his friends were happy to see all of his previous traits reinstated:

“After eleven months, my typical painful sense of humour came back as well, and that’s when I knew I was really the old me again. I was back to telling jokes that would make people say, ‘Oh no, Ian” No. Why?’ Come up with a new material please!’” Haworth laughs.

Haworth continued to attend the group’s meetings to warn others, a very dangerous move, he admits, as he could have easily been sucked back in. During this time, he convinced six other members to leave, but the seventh alerted the leadership to Haworth’s activities, and the jig was up—after that, he never attended another meeting or saw any of the group’s leadership again.

After leaving the group, Haworth returned to his former place of work to ask if he could rescind his request and have his old job back. His boss removed the letter of resignation from the drawer in her desk and tore it up in front of him.

Haworth resumed smoking but managed to quit a few years later, this time on his own terms—without the help of anyone or any course.

The World Gets Introduced to Brainwashing.

Berkeley, California, 1974. Charles Manson, the notorious drifter-criminal, and mastermind behind the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders that terrified Hollywood and brought California’s counterculture movement to a bloody close, is three years into a life sentence (commuted in 1972 from the original death penalty sentence).

The highly-televised public trials that once captivated audiences in the US and internationally, and dominated all the nightly news channels, have been replaced by a more pressing national issue—the latest developments about Nixon and the Watergate scandal.

However, Manson is still an unresolved issue in the minds of the American people, psychologists, and the media. Nobody understands or has a definitive answer for how a thirty-six-year-old, 5”2 man, with a slightly above average IQ of 109 could have so much power over a group of middle-class, educated, idealistic young people—known to him as the Family—to have them murder on his command.

Three years after Manson’s sentencing, and 370 miles north of Los Angeles, in the city of Berkeley, the same issues of control, complicity, and coercion, would again be part of the national debate.

On February 4, 1974, the far-left militant group the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, then 19, and subjected her to threats and acts of psychological torture (including being locked in a cupboard for weeks) that would, according to some psychologists at the time, constitute to “brainwashing”.

Hearst would go on to be an active participant in the SLA’s bank robberies, and images from CCTV footage from one raid show her shouldering a M1 carbine semi-automatic rifle and yelling at customers, “Up, up, up against the wall, motherfuckers!”

Hearst wasn’t present in the SLA’s hideout when a gun battle with police left six members of the group dead, along with its leader, but she was apprehended shortly afterwards after two failed attempts to kill law enforcement with homemade explosives.

In her testimony, Hearst claims she was coerced and manipulated into participating in the SLA’s activities, and the few psychologists at the time who understood the effects of mind control and thought reform (often known as “brainwashing”) validated her claims.

But doctors on the prosecution’s side described Hearst as “a rebel in search of a cause” and very much in control of her actions, and with no brainwashing defence to help her in the courtrooms, Hearst received a hefty thirty-five-year sentence.

However, an incident five years later would bring the dangers of cults and mind control to international attention. On November 19th, 1979, television media aerial helicopters circle over a 3,800-acre agricultural settlement in Guyana. Strewn around the central structure, the bodies of 918 women, children and men lie face down in the verdant grass. Motionless multi-generational families have their arms draped over one another in one final act of domestic affection; some even have pillows beneath their heads.

On the orders of their leader, the reverend Jim Jones, members of the People’s Temple queued up to consume a cyanide-laced drink in what Jones described as an “act of revolutionary suicide” against the tyranny of the US government.

Parents waited in line, holding their children in their arms as they queued patiently to receive their fatal doses—mothers and fathers squirted syringes into their children’s mouths before ingesting their own.

The event would be the largest death of US citizens before 9/11, and would be known then on as the Jonestown Massacre.

In the wake of Jonestown, American actor John Wayne was one of many vocal supporters of the incarcerated Hearst, and instrumental in the shift in public option about her complicity in the SLA’s crimes:

It seems quite odd to me that the American people have immediately accepted the fact that one man can brainwash 900 human beings into mass suicide, but will not accept the fact that a ruthless group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, could brainwash a little girl by torture, degradation and confinement.

With the tragedy at Jonestown, Hearst’s sentence was commuted to 22 months by then-President Jimmy Carter. She would later receive a full pardon by US President Bill Clinton on January 20, 2001—his last day in office.

And with Jonestown, cults became an international phenomenon and concern.

Haworth remembers the sequence of events very well:

The course started in September, I escaped in October and what happened in November of 1978? Well, Jonestown occurred, of course, in Guyana. The massacre in Jonestown.

One evening, the radio hosts of Canadian radio station CHFI-FM were discussing the tragedy, and—like the rest of the world— were trying to unpack and understand how a single man could get 918 people to not only commit suicide at his behest but kill their children on his command as well.

The hosts discussed whether they should be concerned about such a tragedy happening in Canada and open the phone lines to their audiences for comment.

The phone rings, and the caller is connected. “Yes,” says Haworth, now live on air.

And for the next few moments, the hosts and anybody tuned in on the drive home that evening, listened to Haworth tell his story about the dangers of mind control and cults.

Haworth’s knowledge of a burgeoning topic of interest led to him being invited for a longer interview, which then caught the attention of other media outlets, “I was doing media interviews from that point on,” he recalls.

Council on Mind Abuse (COMA)

Haworth’s first organisation was (the now defunct) Council on Mind Abuse (COMA), which he set up the year after his exit from his group and was the first of its kind in Canada.

COMA would provide the template for Haworth’s UK-based organisation, the CIC, eight years later. His goal in 1979 was to “Warn the public in general. It was to help families. It was to help ex-cult members. It was to help the police. It was to help researchers. It was to help anybody and everybody that was interested in looking at cults.”

He sold all his insurance policies, pooled his finances, and began to give talks and interviews around Canada to educate the public about his personal experiences and the danger of cults. The talks saw him standing in front of high school and first-year university students, members of the Jewish women’s league, and the congregations of local churches.

“I was doing 200 lectures a year,” Haworth says, “It was not unusual, unfortunately, for me to be doing two talks in a day and occasionally three: one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening.”

In the beginning, he paid for his own petrol and overheads, but as the work and the demand picked up, he realised that if he wanted to continue, he would need to start charging a fee. The dollar price tag attached to the ticket only piqued people’s interest further, and each night, more people would come to see Haworth speak about the dangers of cults, “So then it started to balance out financially,” he says, “I could just about stay afloat.”

From its very inception, COMA and its members had the attention of lobbyist groups connected to and funded by the groups Haworth was trying to warn the public about. The purpose of these lobbyist groups, says Haworth, is “to criticise the critics.”

A few weeks after COMA’s launch, Haworth learned about a meeting at a Canadian hotel about him and his organisation’s activities. He knew nothing about it, and getting the information last minute, he took a car to the location. A panel of academics from a group calling itself the Canadians for the Protection of Religious Liberties (CPRL) had called a press conference in the back function room of the hotel and were preparing to address an audience of journalists.

Haworth arrived five minutes late, and as he entered the room, all cameras, microphones, and lights turned on him.

He introduced himself to the audience as the subject of the meeting; however, out of respect to the CPRL, who had hired the room, he agreed to wait in the corridor and respond to any allegations when the CPRL had finished their address.

Exiting the room, he closed the door just enough so he could hear what was happening inside.

With the proceedings underway, a religious affairs editor for a national newspaper stood up and asked the panel—in a very thick Irish accent, Haworth recalls—if they [the CPRL] were possibly affiliated or connected with any groups that might be considered cults.

The panel looked at each other. “There are none of us here associated with any group that’s been formed in the last 100 years,” replied one CPRL representative.

The editor checked his notebook. “Ah. That’s very interesting,” he said and then asked why a well-known cult (infamous still to this day for ruthlessly going after their critics) was down on the hotel’s records as having paid the CPRL’s bill for the press conference.

Throughout the 1980s, COMA operated out of a secret location and would receive between 100-150 calls a week from members of the public who wanted information. Haworth left the organisation in 1987, but trouble with funding and protracted libel suits with two well-known groups forced COMA to declare bankruptcy and officially close on March 1st, 1992.

A Wing Mirror on Each Shoulder

Haworth is no stranger to the lengths cults will go to discredit or silence anyone bringing negative attention to their activities and practices. The CIC’s website does not list an office address for security reasons, and a company specialising in secure post boxes manages its private PO Box address.

“It isn’t a field people queue up to get into because, if you do, you’re not going to make much of any money and you’re going to get smeared,” he tells me, “And, if you did work all the hours they wanted you to work, then you wouldn’t last very long.”

During our conversations, Haworth uses the word “cult” and the “cult phenomenon” to describe the field at large, but avoids it entirely when describing any individual or collective of individuals.

When we discuss the 418 who starved to death in Kenya when Good News International Ministries pastor, Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, told his followers to begin a deadly fast in preparation to “meet Jesus,” or Smallville’s Allison Mack’s recent release from prison after she was named a co-conspirator in NXIVM founder Keith Ranieri’s sex trafficking and forced labour charges, Haworth avoids the term cult entirely, preferring instead to refer them as “groups” or “groups of concern.”

A defensive tactic, which is “common sense for people in our field,” according to Haworth, who describes how some of his hyper-vigilant colleagues—concerned about the lengths some cults will go to silence or cause problems for their critics—conduct their work with “a wing mirror on each shoulder.”

To illustrate his point, he begins a story about how a friend, an outspoken critic of one group, had the Canadian police call to inform her that they had disturbing photographs in their possession.

These photos showed four men parading around her hometown carrying a coffin. Her name was written in big letters on the wooden lid.

Members of a group under scrutiny or receiving negative press may use intimidation tactics to get a person from speaking out against them, but if the group in question has resources and money on its side, then a libel case can be costly even if you manage to win, “If their lawyer is better than yours, and if they’ve got more money than you, tough. And in addition, you can tell the truth and win, and lose a fortune,” Haworth points out.

When asked if the threats and harassment ever had him reconsidering his position in the field, he’s quick to respond, “I wouldn’t see the point in that,” he says, “It’s not something I want, or I look forward to, but it’s something I anticipated when I started off in the field. It’s just life in the big city when you’re dealing with cults.”

He recounts one incident with his characteristic sense of humour, “I had a phone call from a guy who told me my end was near. And I guess that was a bit ambiguous,” he pauses for a second, “It could have meant I was short.”

While he might not welcome the harassment, the attention he gets means that he’s doing something right and “If you’re not doing something worthwhile, you’re not going to get the flak. So, the more flak I got, the more it convinced me that, oh well, something must be working.”

Mind Control

“When most people think of cults, they only think of religious cults,” Haworth explains, “It’s [also] nice to think that there’s a problem elsewhere, like California rather than here.”

There’s also the misconception that only the down-and-out, the mentally ill, and the disenfranchised members of society end up in cults. In reality, cults are looking for the opposite type of person, “They think there must be something wrong with someone that finishes up in a cult in the first place. It’s the blame the victim syndrome,” Haworth adds.

During his own time in a group, he remembers the instructions given to him during his recruiting drives, “When I was recruiting, I was told to stay away from ‘space cadets’, that was the technical terminology used.”

Highly educated students or graduates from prestigious universities like Oxbridge, he says, are high-risk targets for recruitment.

American cult expert Steve Hassan’s website Freedom of Mind defines undue influence (another term for mind control) as “any act of persuasion that overcomes the free will and judgment of another person. People can be unduly influenced by deception, flattery, trickery, coercion, hypnosis, and other techniques.”

The CIC website lists 26 different mind control techniques: hypnosis, limitation of food, and sleep deprivation are all part of the list.

Groups do not need to use all twenty-six techniques to erode a person’s autonomy and encourage compliance; instead, a combination might be used depending on the group, as some people are more receptive to some techniques than others.

“All that varies from one cult to another in terms of the methodology is which combination of techniques that particular group uses,” Haworth describes, “Trance induction, for example, is extremely powerful and if someone is being induced into a trance state through chanting or through hypnosis, then you can do just whatever you want with that person.”

Other experts or specialists may have a different way of identifying the presence of mind control, but Haworth prefers to take a non-academic approach to keep things understandable as “Some criteria are difficult to get your head round. It’s not plain English for me, but then again, I’m from the north of England.”

Psychological Coercion

When asked to define the danger these groups and their leaders pose to the public, Haworth needs little time to think over his answer, “A complete loss of free will, a loss of the ability to think and use logic, which most of us take for granted… And until you see that happen in someone, it’s hard to imagine what that can be like.”

He compares what happens in cults to a type of slavery, but unlike the laws that protect people from being physically trafficked, there’s nothing to protect people from psychological coercion, “What cults have been doing is a form of slavery for decades. And not one of the slavery laws has ever been applied and can’t be applied when dealing with cults.”

Only within the last decade have laws been passed to protect people from coercive and controlling behaviours. The issue is proving the presence of psychological coercion. “It’s not illegal to psychologically coerce people,” Haworth points out.

Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 makes it an offence to use controlling or coercive behaviours and, if found guilty, carries a maximum penalty of a five-year prison sentence. The law, however, only applies when people are personally connected, which means only in the context of family or relatives, or being in a relationship (intimate, married, or civil partnership). There’s another misconception that a person joins freely and can leave on the same terms.

The signature block at the end of each of Haworth’s emails contains a warning of sorts. It reads, “People don’t join Cults…they are recruited.”

While people may be attracted to cults by their own will, a series of techniques will be used against them to erode their autonomy: keeping them within the group, carrying out orders without question, and behaving in ways that go against their best interests.

“If you get a judge that understands what a cult is, boy you’ve done well.” Haworth gives the example of a family member trying to access their family after they’ve been shunned or lost contact with their loved ones, which is, unfortunately, a frequent occurrence when people are involved with cults.

The judge may say to a desperate husband trying to contact his wife, “‘Please, Sir. Are you trying to tell me that your spouse is a cult member? How ridiculous! Your spouse is a very intelligent person.’ So, this person is equating intelligence with sussing out of cult ahead of time and being less likely to be recruited. It’s actually just the opposite.”

If it’s not illegal to set up a cult and psychologically coerce people into working for free, handing over their belongings and finances, and excommunicating their friends and family, then one of the best defences someone has in ensuring they’re not recruited is to research the group thoroughly before making any type of commitment.

“If it’s that good, then there must be a ton of information available ahead of time. Check it out thoroughly. If it’s okay, you should be able to Google it and find a lot of good news online. But Google it, in case it’s a cult,” recommends Haworth, “because if it is, there may well be some horror stories online.”

He adds, “More people will check out a second-hand car than a course that might ruin their lives.”

Role Change

I scheduled another phone call with Haworth, and we exchanged emails in the week leading up to our next conversation.

“Never heard of you,” he tells me with a laugh when I inform him who is calling.

Today will be the last time Haworth answers the phone at the CIC.

We’re discussing his involvement in the Canadian group when he suddenly stops me mid-question because he’s remembered something. It sounds as if he’s about to say, “If I have one regret,” but he self-corrects, and asks me if I remember the story about his Canadian neighbour who gave him the newspaper article about the group he was involved in all those years ago.

I should have gone back to her to say thank you so much. Maybe bought a bunch of flowers or something. But I never saw her again. She left the country and went to live elsewhere. So that’s a little regret that I have, that I could ever thank her for being so kind to give me the newspaper article… She said [the article] was great, because [from] her perspective it was, because she was worried about me.

I ask if anything shocks or surprises him after all this time. Haworth needs no time to think over his answer:

It’s not what shocks me, it’s what upsets me. It upsets me that the government still doesn’t understand how cults work and aren’t doing anything to protect British citizens. And because of that British money is going down the drain into these groups. British corporations are less productive than they could be. The National Health Service is hit with more patients.

Haworth’s previously jocular tone is absent:

It upsets me that the legal system is, by and large, completely unaware of how cults operate and how undue influence should be applied in civil cases. It upsets me that the police haven’t been trained in this area. It upsets me every time the phone rings and someone else has been lost to a cult.

But not every phone call is just another horror story, another desperate parent or spouse seeking advice about how to get their loved ones back.

Sometimes, it’s a person who’s escaped from a group, or it’s people recently reunited with their family members, and they want to wish Haworth a happy Christmas:

It makes my day when I get a call from somebody who says they’ve just managed to escape even if they’re at the beginning of the withdrawal period, which is an awful time to go through. I’ll say, ‘Hey, thanks very much, you’ve made my day, you really have’. And it’s such great news because most of the time it’s another person grieving the loss of someone to one of these groups.

But even after forty-five years in the field and everything he’s seen, Haworth is not considering today as the start of a type of retirement.

The phone calls at the CIC will stop after today, but Haworth has no intentions of leaving the field. Instead, he’ll be focusing more on maintaining the CIC’s online presence, writing on the topic, and recording the occasional podcast, “I’m going behind the scenes,” he explains, “I’ll still be out there and trying to warn people but doing it through writing rather than in person on the phone.”

“And,” he tells me, “My wife will come first.”

Author’s Note: The names of any cults or groups Mr Haworth has personally been involved with, or encountered in the courtrooms, have been omitted from the following article.

If you, or anybody you know, have been affected by anything mentioned in this article and would like more information or support, please visit one of the following websites:

The International Cultic Studies Association – https://www.icsahome.com/



https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2023/11/the-cult-specialist-ian-haworth-hangs-up-the-cult-information-centres-hotline-for-the-last-time/

What is a Cult, What you Need to Know

The Psychology of Cults

Radio National – All in the Mind

If you sign up to a weekend personal development workshop, you don’t really expect to emerge 10 years later a shadow of your former emotional self. What sets many groups apart from what we regard as cults is a range of powerful psychological techniques which can be difficult to see through—particularly if you are at a vulnerable time of your life. We hear the story of one woman’s escape from a cult and some insights into those persuasive techniques

December 2, 2012

Are you messed up?

No sir.
Are you more jumpy that you were before?
No sir.
And how are you sleeping?
I sleep just fine sir.
When you sleep do you have nightmares?

Lynne Malcolm: A scene from the powerful recent film The Master. It depicts the disturbing relationship between a psychologically damaged war veteran and the leader of a cult called The Cause. Lynne Malcolm with you and on All in the Mind today, the psychology of cults

In a minute we’ll meet an Australian woman who emerged from ten intense years in a personal development group a shell of her former self.

Louise Samways is a practising psychologist and author of the book Dangerous Persuaders. I asked her how she defines a cult.

Louise Samways: I think one of the difficulties is that people often get into endless discussions about what a cult is and miss the point. The real issue are the techniques that are being used to try and change people’s belief systems or persuade them of a particular way of being. And that occurs not just in cults but it also occurs in sales, it occurs in politics, it occurs in churches, it’s new age you know groups, therapy groups, there’s all kinds of environments in our community where those techniques are used. But the difficulty comes when those techniques are being used without you being aware of what’s happening and you become much more vulnerable to whatever that person or that particular group would like you to believe about yourself, or about the world around you.

Lynne Malcolm: So we’ll come to those techniques in a minute but at their worst in any of these groups how damaging are they?

Louise Samways: Oh they are life threatening. One of the difficulties is, because people are participating without informed consent or proper screening, the people who are already vulnerable to psychotic episode or extremely depressed, these techniques can sort of take the lid of Pandora’s Box and leave people in a very vulnerable state surrounded by people who do not know how to contain the situation. So yes, there’s definitely been people who have become psychotic as a result of involvement in some of these groups and their techniques, and quite a lot of people who are recorded to have suicided after being unable to cope, particularly when they leave the groups.

Lynne Malcolm: Just before her 40th birthday Annette Stephens accepted an invitation to go along to a two-day personal development workshop. Here she reflects on her first day there.

Annette Stephens: I was in front of a group of people, so emotional that I just broke down. I was crying, I was screaming, and at the end of that time the leader of the group, Ken Dyers, said to the group to help me, and I think at that point I just reached out to him and when I stopped crying everyone came up and gave me a hug and it just all felt quite right at the time.

Lynne Malcolm: Annette Stephens admits that she was unhappy at the time and was looking for a better direction in her life. But she didn’t realise what a strong hold the group called Kenja would have over her life, and that her devotion to the group would cause her to leave her young teenage children.

Kenja was set up in the early 80s by the late Ken Dyers and his partner Jan Hamilton. They described their aim as empowering individuals to help them be in charge of their own destiny. Here’s Annette Stephens with her early impression of the group leader Ken Dyers.

Annette Stephens: When I met Ken he was 60 and at that stage he was still a very dynamic man and he just seemed to have answers. Plus, he was charismatic, he did have that capacity to have a group of people in front of him and hold their attention. He might have been using techniques that the people involved didn’t know about but they certainly worked. I was riveted to him, it was not unlike falling in love, that kind of instant crush, not so much wanting a relationship with him, because I didn’t, but it was as much...this man represented some kind of new pathway and it was the ideas as much as the man that I found attractive.

Lynne Malcolm: Being a member of Kenja involved participation in a range of intense sessions and activities including what they called Klowning. It was was run by Jan Hamilton.

Annette Stephens: Klowning was based on the idea that we are not who we think we are. So in Klowning we would don a hat and odd clothes and with a clown nose on we were able to be vulnerable and able to find out the really human part of us. Jan had been running these classes along with acting, and Ken Dyers was at the same time running these processing sessions from his home and the two were combined.

Lynne Malcolm: So tell me about processing. There’s a whole language that goes with this group, isn’t there, and processing is one thing that you would go through. Describe the processing session.

Annette Stephens: They consisted of two people sitting opposite each other silently looking at the other person’s eye and the recipient in session was able to have a look at the experiences and emotions and things in their life that they had not fully come to terms with, and that were unconsciously stopping them from being who they wanted to be. It was very emotional.

Lynne Malcolm: And you describe some sessions where the processee was naked.

Annette Stephens: Yes, every session that I did with Ken I was naked. Of course, you see, as a Kenjan I saw it quite differently to how I see it now. As a Kenjan, you know, Ken would say to us that nudity has no significance other than what you give it, and if you think that this is in any way inappropriate that’s your dirty mind.

Lynne Malcolm: And what about wall-walking, what’s that?

Annette Stephens: The processing sessions are hypnosis, and wall-walking is I think a self-hypnosis because it was based on detaching. We believed that we were detaching from one’s body as a spirit, and in wall-walking we would literally walk from one wall in a room to the other side of the room and detach. I describe it as being similar to an exorcism because it was that feeling of something being dragged out of the body. And once that had finished there was this calmness and then something else would come up.

Lynne Malcolm: Annette Stephens. Psychologist Louise Samways became interested in the psychological techniques used by many cult-like groups and she points out that they have quite a history.

Louise Samways: Originally a lot of these techniques grew out of research done by the CIA and the KGB after the Second World War in trying to understand how Hitler was able to persuade a whole population to a particular way of thinking and particular behaviour, and that research got out into the wider community. A lot of people like Ron Hubbard used a lot of these techniques in his organisation and then a lot of people who had been in Scientology then drifted out of that and developed their own particular groups. And then the techniques really just sort of spread like wildfire. They were taken up a lot by particular new age groups and have been used for a long time by all kinds of religions. I mean because we are social animals, these are ways of getting people to sort of comply and to feel connected and to do as they’re told and stick with a group and make the group stronger. So we’re sort of wired to some extent to be responsive to these techniques, it’s just that now they’ve got a lot more sophisticated because of the research that’s been done.

Lynne Malcolm: So what are these psychological techniques which have such persuasive powers?

Louise Samways: Well basically what all the techniques are trying to do is to put your left-brain critical thinking on hold so that other belief systems, or other ideas, are able to pass by that critical filter straight into more where your emotional right-brain is more likely to sort of accept them uncritically. So the techniques can be all kinds of techniques which focus attention and they are very similar to what happens when you induce hypnotic states. Hypnotic states are nothing magical but in fact natural hypnotic states occur on a regular basis if we allow them to, about every two hours during the day. There’s a natural down time when our left-brain sort of quietens and our right-brain and our body is able to do a bit of a tune-up of physical processes like blood-pressure and heart-rate and cortisol levels. So it’s a natural rhythm that we have to let ourselves drift into this sort of what we call a dissociative state, and then we come out of it again. Well that’s what these techniques do; they induce that natural state of dissociation. Most people that experience this...is driving somewhere, getting there and thinking gee whiz I hope I didn’t run over somebody, I couldn’t even remember getting here. A sort of day-dreamy sort of natural state which is very pleasant. So when people use techniques that are going to help induce this state it’s not something you’re necessarily going to resist if you don’t realise that perhaps there is an ulterior motive.

Lynne Malcolm: Louise Samways says that part of inducing this hypnotic state is giving the person something to help them focus their attention.

Louise Samways: It can be a symbol like in a church, it might be the altar that you’re focusing your attention on, and particular rhythms of speech also tend to induce that state. Music is one way of doing it as well, starting to put you in a situation where you lose track of time, you don’t have clocks on the walls and often when people get involved in these groups and they are subjected to these techniques they often can’t even recall very clearly what actually happened. You’re trying to induce a state of feeling good basically, and these states do create all kinds of chemicals to sort of flow through your body and your mind and do make you feel good. So people can start to get addicted to the process as well. Then there’s a social, there becomes a whole lot of social factors that want you to feel you’re part of the group, that you don’t want to stand out, you don’t want to be seen as different or questioning.

Lynne Malcolm: There’s often a charismatic leader, how does that leader take control?

Louise Samways: Well they often take on the role of being the person who’s going to say whether your behaviour was right or wrong. And the more rules that an organisation creates, the more they control you, effectively. It’s very interesting studying some of the gurus or the charismatic figures you say you often find that they are often people who have actually started out with very good intentions and just find they have this natural ability to attract people to them, or because they may be good listeners, people feel that they’ve got something to offer. And so there’s a subtle social process that can occur between the person who finds that people are naturally drawn to them and then the adoration or adulation that they begin to get from those people. Then they start to believe, oh yes, I am special, you know I do have special powers, I do have a special gift. And you often then find that it’s actually alongside them or behind them that there’s another character who perhaps has got another agenda who can see how this can be manipulated and this can be used. So it’s not necessarily the public front of the organisation, not always, sometimes the public front’s the problem as well. But one of the reasons they are so seductive is because they often truly believe what they are saying. And because they really believe that, they don’t give out signals to you, the non-verbal signals that they are conning you. But that doesn’t mean to say that there isn’t an organisation behind them or a particular person, sometimes a wife or a husband or somebody close to them, that is pulling the strings.

Lynne Malcolm: Psychologist Louise Samways.

You’re with All in the Mind on RN, Radio Australia and online. We’re exploring the persuasive techniques often used by cults. Annette Stephens joined the Kenja group when her children were 13 and 15, so they were basically without their mother for a significant part of their growing up years. Interestingly Annette’s grandparents became followers of the Exclusive Brethren group when she was a child and subsequently rejected Annette’s parents for being non-believers, so the hurt that can be associated with groups like these was not completely foreign to her. Even so, she found it incredibly hard to leave Kenja, but a number of things started to trouble her.

Annette Stephens: Gosh I had a list.

Lynne Malcolm: There was a young teenage girl who appeared to be a favourite of Ken’s, what happened to her?

Annette Stephens: Yes, she came to Sydney with her family when she was 10. We were told that she was the embodiment of love and she was the future of Kenja and this young woman ended up processing with Ken for inordinately long times including weekends, she would stay there at weekends. I started to become concerned about this, I started to query Ken. There were both little things and big things: little things like the counsellor had instructed us to keep the door open but we kept it permanently locked so there was only one exit. And one really big thing was I had been there for 10 years and it was becoming quite clear to me that I was a failure; I had no money, I had no career, I had no relationship with my family.

Lynne Malcolm: You were no happier than when you started?

Annette Stephens: I started to hallucinate. I believed that I was floating; I was walking around streets talking out loud to myself completely unaware of it. I had deteriorated really quite considerably.

Lynne Malcolm: After a couple of attempts Annette Stephens did manage to leave the Kenja group once and for all. Her mother looked after her until she was strong enough to seek professional help. It then emerged that part of the reason she was so vulnerable to the influences of Kenja was that she’d been sexually abused as a child and though she didn’t have clear memories of the incident she’s always had a deep sense of unease about her childhood. By 2005 the leader of Kenja, Ken Dyers, was facing 22 charges of sexual assault on two 12-year-old girls. Before they were heard in court he took his own life.

Ros Hodgkins first became aware of the unhealthy hold that some groups can have over people when she became worried about the group her daughter had become involved with.

Ros Hodgkins: We lived in the country so she moved to Sydney and was looking for a church to belong to, she was also looking for friends I guess, and she became involved with what looked on the outside to be a conventional Christian church. But we soon found out that it was operating exactly as cults do; it was controlling and soon Emma became totally entrenched and in the end they were able to convince her to cut all ties with family who were questioning of course some of the things that were taking place and the control that was over her. And that then began a journey for me and our family as well to learn all we could about the phenomena of cults and how they did recruit.

Lynne Malcolm: So how long did she remain in the cult and what was her behaviour like?

Ros Hodgkins: Well her personality definitely changed, and we soon learned too that there were two sort of personalities when people go into these types of groups. They have the personality they were but it becomes almost layered by the group norm for the personality that the group leader presents, and that’s when we really realised that we had to do something to help her—also see that she was being controlled, manipulated and coerced to live a life the way the group wanted her to live. After two years our daughter was totally entrenched, she’d left her job, she had become a full-time worker in the church, and we did go ahead with what is called an intervention or exit counselling, which was remarkably successful. And our daughter then left that group and she then continued to help other people.

Lynne Malcolm: Ros Hodgkins now runs the Cult Information and Family Support service in NSW. They offer counselling and support to people who need help to adjust to their lives after leaving cult-like groups.

So what advice would Ros Hodgkins give to family members or friends if they believed their loved one is starting to get caught up in an unhealthy relationship with a group?

Ros Hodgkins: The first thing would certainly be to staying as connected as they can to find out all they can about the group, not to push further their loved-one away by saying look it’s a cult, because often they’ll get the warning that your family members will be against this but aren’t you willing to make your own decisions and not listen to family members or friends—this is something that’s so important to you. So I think that’s the big thing, that they are able to stay in contact, learn all they can about the group and continue to just ask questions to try and find our more, so that person will still think about what they are now believing in without being I guess fearful of being criticised. And then to find perhaps former members that they can talk to and understand more. It’s a very difficult thing but there is more information now on the internet and that’s how we can support families by just being there for them and helping them to perhaps get connected and stay connected, no matter what, so they know there is someone outside the group when they do want to leave, or when they get kicked out, or when something happens and they can feel that they have that support.

Lynne Malcolm: But there are some positive things about some groups and it’s likely that some people live happier lives being part of some groups than they would on their own.

Louise Samways: Look I think you’ve actually hit on a very important point there. A lot of the times that people start to talk about these groups it’s all negative. What we have to confront as a community, that these groups are often filling desperate needs in people that are not being filled by the way we now live. 

The way we are now is very isolating, people are often expected to work very long hours, or have very long commutes. More and more families are living apart, so we do not live in a community that is kind to people or respects people. So anybody really is vulnerable, it’s not just, you know, the weak-willed, it’s anybody at a particular time in their life, and particularly if they’re isolated from family and friends.

Some of the factors that are most important in human wellbeing are a sense of connectedness and a sense of control over your life now and in the future. So what often these organisations do is offer a whole list of very simple rules, if you just follow these rules then you’ll feel okay. If you just remove yourself from that world and you just mix with us everything will be okay. So they often offer a sort of a way of getting back some feeling of control. Of course that’s artificial because in getting that sort of superficial sense of control you are often giving up control of your life in other ways. But often that’s a trade-off that people are prepared to pay when the rest of their life just feels like it’s chaos that they have no control over.

Lynne Malcolm: In her practice psychologist Louise Samways has offered counselling to people who’ve been emotionally damaged after their experience in a cult. What’s her approach?

Louise Samways: One of the things that I’ve found is most helpful for people is for them to, if they can, describe some of the techniques, not necessarily the abuse that may have occurred, and then to help them understand that they were involved in quite a deliberate psychological process. And that doesn’t mean that they’re weak or stupid, but it’s often more about the fact that they were participating without adequate information. So in other words you validate their humanity and the fact that it’s not necessarily all their fault. At the same time there does come a point where it often is helpful for them to look at why they were vulnerable to the group. What was making them vulnerable, what was missing? Because that’s often the answer for them in terms of recovery, is to address what was missing before and helping them create a life now that is healthier and more balanced and does meet all their needs as a human being.

Lynne Malcolm: So what controls are in place to ensure that personal development groups or other groups are sufficiently qualified, to avoid causing emotional damage like this?

Louise Samways: Oh virtually none, virtually none. It’s buyer beware. People have to be aware of the techniques that are being used...the greatest concern of course is people who grow up in these organisations and really are trapped, and for those that grow up and then start to rebel as teenagers or as young adults and leave, it is very, very difficult because that’s been their reality. It’s not an area that Australia and America in particular have really wanted to go there.

Lynne Malcolm: So what changes would you like to see put in place to both warn people of the dangers but also help people out of these groups that are stuck there.

Louise Samways: Well I think the first thing is that there needs to be more appropriate recognition by the courts and by particularly the Family Law Court and we need education of the legal profession and I think the professional organisations, particularly the professional health organisations need to be more pro-active in first of all educating themselves about what these issues are and then making it very clear in their code of ethics of these different professional groups how the codes of ethics dovetail with belief systems. Where I think where people are not registered health professionals and are just anybody who sets up an organisation, I think they need to be as accountable as health professionals and I think that again needs to be reflected in law.

I mean in many ways I think this royal commission, because it is so broad it will be interesting to see whether some of the practices that occur you know in church groups, not for profit groups, NGOs come to light in terms of how pervasive it is and it may be that this royal commission does begin to highlight that because it is so pervasive that there does need to be a greater addressing of this in the law, so people have redress that is just as fast as what happens if it was a health professional who did the wrong thing by them. And not hide behind the fact of their religion or whatever. The issue is have they been subjected to a psychological process to manipulate their beliefs about themselves or the world around them, or to accept behaviour towards themselves which is inappropriate without informed consent.

Lynne Malcolm: Psychologist Louise Samways. And her book Dangerous Persuaders: an expose of gurus, personal development courses and cults and how they operate is available as a download online and we’ll link to that from the

All in the Mind website.

The Kenja group is still operating in Sydney under Jan Hamilton Dyers. And Annette Stephens has written about her experiences in and out of the Kenja cult in her book called The Good Little Girl and it’s put out by Big Sky Publishing.

So what effect has it had to actually write this book, it’s 20 years down the track and you’ve been able to tell your story, what impact has that had on your life and your sense of wellbeing?

Annette Stephens: When I first started to write about Kenja of course it was going to be the book that gave you 101 reasons why you should never get involved in Kenja. By the time I'd finished and was writing the book a long time had passed and I found it far more emotional writing about myself than about Kenja. It has helped me put a timeline together, you know, see things from a distance and I think it has enabled me to understand a great deal. In terms of my life it’s allowed me to move on. As I say, I am one of the lucky ones.

Lynne Malcolm: Just finally, how is your daughter now?

Ros Hodgkins: Well our daughter is wonderful—after the first year she was helping people who were caught up in cults, she’s also a member of Cult Information and Family Support and always very happy to talk to those people who’ve come out of groups and to share her story, which is wonderful because there are many success stories, there are many people who have come out and who are doing well and are helping others. And I guess that’s what it’s all about, to be able to continue to help people and to have an understanding of what they have gone through and what they do go through when they exit a cult.

Lynne Malcolm: Ros Hodgkins, head of the Cult Information and Family Support service in NSW. Head to the All in the Mind website for information and links related to today’s program. That’s abc.net.au/radionational and select the program in the list. You can catch up with past All in the Mind programs from there too and join the All in the Mind conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/the-psychology-of-cults/4392444#transcript