Cult Awareness Network
The Cult Awareness Network was an anti-cult organization founded by deprogrammer Ted Patrick that provided information on groups it considered "cults", as well as support and referrals to deprogrammers. It operated from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s in the United States.
The Cult Awareness Network was the most notable organization to emerge from the anti-cult movement in America. In the 1970s, a growing number of large and small new religious movements caused alarm in some sections of the community, based in part on the fear of "brainwashing" or "mind control" allegedly employed by these groups. The Cult Awareness Network presented itself as a source of information about "cults"; by 1991 it was monitoring over 200 groups that it referred to as "mind-control cults". It also promoted a form of coercive intervention by self-styled "deprogrammers" who would, for a significant fee, forcibly detain or even abduct the cult member and subject them to a barrage of attacks on their beliefs, supposedly in order to counter the effects of the brainwashing. The practice, which could involve criminal actions such as kidnapping and false imprisonment, generated controversy, and Ted Patrick and others faced both civil and criminal proceedings.
After CAN lost a lawsuit and filed for bankruptcy in 1996, lawyer and Scientologist Steven L. Hayes acquired the rights to CAN's name, logo, PO box, and hot-line phone number, and licensed the name to the "Foundation for Religious Freedom", who established the New Cult Awareness Network. Hayes made the purchase with funds raised from private donations, not from the Church of Scientology, although a number of scientologists had been among the most active participants in a coalition of religious freedom advocates from whom he had collected money. The Church of Scientology had previously been one of CAN's main targets.
History
In the United States in the early 1970s there was an increasing number of New Religious Movements. In 1971, Ted Patrick founded FREECOG. In 1974, he founded the more wide-ranging "Citizen's Freedom Foundation", and began offering 'deprogramming' services to people who wanted to break a family member's connection to an NRM. The deprogramming methods involved abduction, physical restraint, detention over days or weeks, food and sleep deprivation, prolonged verbal and emotional abuse, and desecration of the symbols of the victim's faith. The perpetrators' justification for these actions was that the individual had been "brainwashed", and was not amenable to reason.Brainwashing theory denied the possibility of authentic spiritual choice for an NRM member, proposing instead that such individuals were subject to systematic mind control programs that overrode their capacity for independent volition. Ted Patrick's theory of brainwashing was that individuals were hypnotized by brainwaves projected from a recruiter's eyes and fingertips, after which the state was maintained by constant indoctrination, a totalistic environment and self-hypnosis. Most academic research, however, indicated that the reasons for people joining, remaining in, or leaving NRMs were complex, varied from group to group and individual to individual, and generally reflected the continued presence of a capacity for individual responsibility and choice.
Patrick's organizations were later merged to become the Cult Awareness Network. CAN became the most prominent group in the emerging national anti-cult movement of the 70s and 80s. The anti-cult movement lobbied for state and national legislative action to legitimize its activities, and although this had very limited success, the movement was nevertheless able to forge alliances with a number of governmental agencies. This was primarily on the back of its propagation of the "cult/mind control ideology", which succeeded in turning affiliation with NRMs into an issue of public—rather than private—concern, and gave a pseudo-legitimacy to the anti-cultists' more extreme claims and actions. By 1991, the Cult Awareness Network had twenty-three chapters dedicated to monitoring over two hundred groups that it referred to as "mind control cults".
Although CFF and CAN were in favor of deprogramming, they distanced themselves from the practice from the late 1970s onwards. Despite this apparent repudiation, however, they continued the practice. In the 1980s, CAN referred thousands of paying clients to activist members who kept lists of deprogrammers. The total number that occurred is unknown, but in 1980 Ted Patrick claimed to have been hired over 2000 times as a professional abductor. Many other operators emerged both during and after the period in which he was active, many of them trained by him. Deprogramming was an integral part of the anti-cult ideology and economy, and was seen as an effective response to the demand emanating from people who wanted a family member extracted, but it also clashed with the need for anti-cult organizations to present themselves as 'educational' associations. This, along with its tenuous legal and moral status, meant that deprogramming tended to be publicly disavowed, while its practice continued clandestinely. The Cult Awareness Network became the subject of controversy when Patrick and other CAN-associated figures, such as Galen Kelly and Donald Moore, were convicted of crimes committed in the course of deprogrammings.
Patricia Ryan, the daughter of US Congressman Leo J. Ryan, who died from gunfire while investigating conditions at the Peoples Temple compound in Jonestown, Guyana, was president of CAN from 1990 to 1993. Actor Mike Farrell served on the board of advisors of CAN.
In 1990, the Cult Awareness Network established the "John Gordon Clark Fund", in honor of psychiatrist John G. Clark, who had given testimony about Scientology and other groups. The fund was established to assist former members of destructive cults.
Detractors Susan E. Darnell, Anson D. Shupe, and Church of Scientology attorney Kendrick Moxon charged that CAN deliberately provided a distorted picture of the groups it tracked.
In 1991, Time magazine quoted then CAN director Cynthia Kisser in its article "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power". Kisser stated: "Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more money from its members". This quote has since been referenced verbatim in other secondary sources discussing Scientology. These comments and other forms of criticism from CAN garnered the attention of the Church of Scientology and Landmark Education, and both separately began litigation proceedings against the organization.
CAN declared bankruptcy after a jury found that CAN conspired to violate the civil rights and religious liberties of Jason Scott, a Pentecostal, who had been forcibly kidnapped and subjected to a failed deprogramming by Rick Ross, a CAN-referred deprogrammer, and others. The court ordered CAN to pay a judgment of 1 million USD. The large award was intended to deter similar conduct in the future; the court noted that the defendants were unable to appreciate the maliciousness of their conduct towards the deprogrammee, and portrayed themselves, throughout the entire process of litigation, as victims of the alleged agenda of the plaintiff's attorney, Church of Scientology attorney Kendrick Moxon.
In 1996, CAN went bankrupt and its assets were bought by a coalition of organizations and individuals, including Scientologists. The bankruptcy trustee told The Washington Post that he put CAN's name-brand assets on the auction block only because Kisser herself asked to buy them. As a result of a legal settlement with Landmark Education, CAN agreed not to sell copies of Outrageous Betrayal, a book critical of Werner Erhard, for five years after it emerged from bankruptcy proceedings. Following its bankruptcy, the files of the "Old CAN" were made available to scholars for study and transferred to a university library.
Deprogramming referral kickback scheme – NARDEC
The National Resource Development and Economic Council was formed in the mid-1980s and had become institutionalized as a special unit within CAN by 1987. The unit's role was to provide referrals to deprogrammers in exchange for a "kickback" – either in cash or in the form of a tax-deductible "donation" or "commissions" which were then funneled back to national CAN headquarters.Journalist Nora Hamerman, in writing about the Dobkowski deprogramming, referred to CAN as "a clearinghouse for kidnap-for-hire rings", with her phrase affirmed by scholarly researchers as "an apt description" of CAN.
Hamerman referred to the "financial symbiosis between CAN and coercive deprogrammers".
CAN-associated deprogrammers included Steven Hassan, Carol Giambalvo, Rick Ross, Ted Patrick, Galen Kelly David Clark, and Robert Point.
Reception
The Jason Scott case in 1995 demonstrated the ongoing involvement of the "Old CAN" in deprogramming referrals. Also, in 1993, the trial of deprogrammer Galen Kelly revealed that the "Old CAN" had, contrary to its stated policy, paid Kelly a monthly stipend during the 1990s.Sociologist Anson Shupe, Susan E. Darnell, and Church of Scientology attorney Kendrick Moxon have alleged that the "Old CAN" could be described as a criminal organization operating in large part for the profit to certain actors, and that it cultivated a hypocritical and deceptive public persona. They alleged that despite public denials, the "Old CAN" operating policy included routine referrals to coercive deprogrammers, citing, among others, FBI wiretap evidence documenting frequent, casual contact between coercive deprogrammers and Cynthia Kisser, the executive director of the "Old CAN". They further allege money laundering, and personal enrichment by some "Old CAN" officials, as well as the use of legal and illegal drugs by deprogrammers during deprogrammings, and occurrences of sexual intercourse between deprogrammers and deprogrammees. Shupe and Darnell expanded on these topics in their 2006 book Agents of Discord, referencing their prior work with Kendrick Moxon.
In chapter 8 of The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, Shupe, Bromley, and Darnell state that the "Old CAN" countered fiscal challenges by soliciting donations for referrals whereby exit counsellors or deprogrammers either made donations themselves, or had client families make donations to the "Old CAN", and that these donations made up as much as one-third of "Old CAN" revenues. While the "Old CAN" was set up as a tax-exempt organization serving educational purposes, coercive deprogramming referrals remained an integral part of its economy and response pattern, a contradiction that was concealed, but not resolved by the "Old CAN" publicly renouncing deprogramming while covertly engaging in referrals. The authors state that ironically the "Old CAN" was finally "undone by the same kind of civil suit strategy it had employed against , in a case involving the same type of coercive practices it accused cults of employing, and with the result that its name and assets were purchased by members of one of its most bitter enemies", the Church of Scientology.