Raphael Aron took his first call from a cult survivor in the 1970s during a psychology placement with a crisis hotline. It was the “old days” of cults, he says, when headlines were dominated by Charles Manson, Jonestown and the abduction of Patty Hearst. Closer to home, the Children of God and the Family, led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, were gaining notoriety.
But Aron says Australia’s cults problem is now “more real than it’s ever been”, telling a Victorian parliamentary inquiry this week that there have been several “tragic outcomes”. These include the death of eight-year-old Elizabeth Struhs in Queensland in 2022.
Elizabeth, who had diabetes, died an agonising death after being denied insulin by a small conservative Christian sect known as the Saints. Fourteen members of the Saints, including Elizabeth’s parents, her brother and the group’s leader, were found guilty of her manslaughter in January.
Aron says it’s time for “something to be done” about cults as “the situation continues to spiral” and he is not alone in his concerns. Survivors and experts painted a disturbing picture of “high-control” groups operating in Victoria over two days of hearings this week at the inquiry into the recruitment methods and impacts of cults and organised fringe groups.
For many people, the inquiry is “the first opportunity to speak out about their experiences with coercive high-control groups – be it reflecting on their own involvement or sharing the experiences of someone close to them”, says Ella George, a state MP and chair of the committee overseeing the inquiry.
The committee says it is not targeting religious groups or their beliefs but rather the methods they use to attract and retain members – and whether those practices amount to coercion that should be criminalised.
So far, the answer to this question has been anything but straightforward.
Psychological harm
Aron, the director of Cult Consulting Australia, has been working with cult survivors and their family members for decades.
He told the inquiry the firm was receiving an increase in calls about Christian-based “fundamentalist cults”, although he is also concerned about multi-level marketing schemes and “cults of one” – therapists, healers and psychics who exert harmful control over others under the guise of helping them.
A key difference between modern cults and those of the past, Aron says, is that they’re better disguised: “They don’t look so ‘cult-y’.”
Tore Klevjer, who leads Cult Information and Family Support, shares this view.
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“It has changed over the years from the Jonestown days and the mega-cults,” he told the inquiry. “In some ways, cultic groups work through society and eventually become acceptable to the point where we think they’re just an organised religion, which is a danger.
“They tend to have gotten a lot smaller and more insidious.”
Klevjer founded Cult Information and Family Support, which receives hundreds of requests for support a year, in 1996, a decade after he left the Children of God. He says people are turning to cults as the world grows more complex: “Cults provide simple answers to complex problems.”
The inquiry heard that Covid-19 created a perfect storm of fear, uncertainty and isolation that led to a boom in cult activity.
“Cults created a sort of a safe haven for people who didn’t know what was going to happen next,” Aron says. Cults that prophesied that the world was soon coming to an end also “suddenly had some credibility” amid pandemic panic, he says.
A survey of more than 300 cult survivors, conducted by the inquiry, found that most (63.4%) were drawn in through family connections, while others were approached at schools, train stations, church services, yoga classes and retreats.
“No one joins a cult – you’re recruited or join a community that turns out [to be] something more,” one respondent wrote.
The survey found 95% of respondents had suffered psychological harm while 52.4% had experienced physical harm. More than half were surveilled, financially controlled or restricted from accessing education or medical care. Nearly a third had experienced violence or sexual abuse.
‘People learn to monitor every thought’
One group repeatedly raised by witnesses was the Shincheonji church.
“We’ve never received as many inquiries as we have about any group as we have in relation to Shincheonji,” Aron told the inquiry.
Originating in South Korea, the group operates in cities across Australia, including on university campuses, which Aron described as a “fertile recruiting ground”. He claims the group used rooms at RMIT University in Melbourne to create “an air of legitimacy”.
An RMIT spokesperson told Guardian Australia the university “counsels and cautions students about unsolicited groups recruiting near campus” and that support services are available for students year-round.
Klevjer called Shincheonji “an exception” among today’s cults, as they openly and aggressively recruit students at “every Australian university in every major city”.
“[They’re] targeting vulnerable young people, specifically people from non-Australian backgrounds who come here to study,” Klevjer told the inquiry.
Both he and Aron urged the Victorian government and universities to improve awareness and support services, particularly for international students.
The inquiry also heard confronting accounts from survivors of more mainstream groups.
Elise Heerde told the inquiry on Monday that she had been sexually abused by a high-ranking member of Hillsong church. She described evangelical and Pentecostal churches as high-control environments rife with financial, emotional and sexual exploitation.
“From Hillsong specifically, based on different survivor groups, there would be about 300 victims, and thousands if we look at survivors across evangelical Pentecostal churches in Victoria and Australia,” she says.
Heerde says even though the government banned gay conversion practices since 2022, they continue informally, “in one-on-one conversations all the time”.
Samantha Sellers, who works with Heerde at the Religious Trauma Collective, says conversion practices are “hardwired into a lot of religious cults”.
“I was personally told that if I walked back into my church to attend a service with my then partner, who was of the same sex, that I would be heaping judgment and ill health on myself and everybody in the building,” Sellers says.
“People learn to monitor every thought, every relationship, every action, every behaviour.”
Cult or religion? The crucial conundrum
Survivors are urging the inquiry to recommend legislation criminalising coercion by high-control groups, though experts were mixed on how this would work.
A key question was how such laws would be able to differentiate between a cult and legitimate religious groups.
Lex de Man, a former detective who investigated the Family in the 1980s, put it bluntly: “Tell me the definition of religion. Tell me a definition of a cult. Some would say they would be very close.”
Kojo Akomeah, a board member of Freedom for Faith and a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor, told the inquiry he was concerned practices such as volunteering or tithing – where a portion of a person’s income is donated to a church – could be inadvertently caught up in any new laws.
But he admitted such practices could “become a problem” if they were forced.
Ben Shenton, who spent the first 15 years of his life in the Family cult, now describes himself as a born-again Christian. He warns against government overreach but says the “hallmarks” of a cult are the “power and influence” exerted by its leadership.
Klevjer is calling for a “consumer law model” under which groups would be required to publish a statement of beliefs and their expectations of members. Members, in turn, would have protection against deceptive conduct.
The inquiry will continue public hearings before reporting to parliament in September 2026.
• Information and support for anyone affected by sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
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