The Figures of the MIVILUDES 2009 International Inquiry, Recounted

2009 Report: The Figures of the International Inquiry into a Supposed “Cult Phenomenon” Reveal the Vacuity of the MIVILUDES’s Action.

By the CICNS team (April 2010)

In its latest 2009 report, the MIVILUDES, within a chapter entitled “Minors and dérives sectaires, an international state of play”, reports, comments and interprets over 39 pages the edifying results of an international inquiry covering 57 countries.

We can confront the MIVILUDES’s synthesis with the facts and figures it itself reports. Let us begin with the MIVILUDES’s surrealist conclusion before studying the data supposed to inspire it.

I- The synthesis of the MIVILUDES

“A majority of the countries studied are confronted with excesses of a cult character concerning children: illicit removals of children, parental conflicts, rupture with the family, friendly and social circle, risks linked to certain practices such as the rejection of medical or pharmaceutical care, or restrictions on the duration of sleep or on food, or again refusal of access to education and to play”

“Excesses of a cult character concerning children, notably illicit removals of children and parental conflicts over the involvement of children in certain movements or practices, worry the authorities charged with protecting their most fragile populations. Public structures of aid to these victims are often put in place (…) The States which have chosen not to legislate on this subject – for reasons linked to their history – often encourage and subsidise the private associations which provide this assistance (…) All the democratic States draw up the observation of the difficulty of protecting minors who are victims of dérives sectaires and the necessity of ensuring adequate structures”

II- Analysis of the data

We have, country by country, questioned the data provided to evaluate the pertinence of the MIVILUDES’s conclusions (see table at the bottom of the page)

1- Do the local authorities in charge of child protection say they are worried by dérives sectaires?

2- Do public structures of aid to victims of dérives sectaires exist?

3- Does the State subsidise associations assisting victims of dérives sectaires?

4- Does the State “draw up the observation of the difficulty of protecting minors who are victims of dérives sectaires”?

5- Do reliable data (statistics from official bodies), or mere assertions on the part of the local authorities, attest to a significant problem of “illicit removals of children, parental conflicts, rupture with the family, friendly and social circle, risks linked to certain practices such as the rejection of medical or pharmaceutical care, or restrictions on the duration of sleep or on food, or again refusal of access to education and to play” in connection with membership of the minorities, or adherence to the practices, denounced by the MIVILUDES in France?

The 5 questions posed for the 57 countries yielded 274 No and 11 Yes, that is, 96% No.

Only 3 countries of the 57: Belgium, Austria, Slovakia, seem to have, in far smaller proportions, a policy similar to France’s in the matter of “dérives sectaires”.

To note, in Belgium: The CIAOSN receives 10 to 20 complaints a year from private individuals concerning parental or family conflicts, which represent 25% of the reports. That gives an idea of the small importance of the phenomenon in this country, which is the closest to France in the matter of the anti-cult fight: between 40 and 80 files transmitted by private individuals each year. No figures provided on indictments or convictions. No figures for Austria. The Slovak anti-cult associations are still at the stage of “envisaging the possibility of creating associations of victims of dérives sectaires, on the model of what exists in France”.

Most of the “Noes” come from unambiguous assertions of the report itself. Examples:

Question 1: Do the local authorities in charge of child protection say they are worried by dérives sectaires?

- “In Argentina, the cult phenomenon and its excesses concerning the young retain the attention neither of the security forces nor of the media.”

- “The services of the State questioned by France ‘declared themselves incompetent to provide elements of an answer to the questions’ of the MIVILUDES.” (United Kingdom)

• “Sweden, out of concern to protect freedom of opinion and religion, is characterised by a very liberal vision with regard to movements bearing a cult risk. (…) Dérives sectaires do not moreover truly constitute a political question in Sweden”.

Question 2- Do public structures of aid to victims of dérives sectaires exist?

• “There is, in Uruguay, no public body of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires. There exists only – since 2000 – a private association devoted to the ‘study and evaluation of cults and new religious movements…’”

• “Some (editor’s note: among the local anti-cultists) consider that it would be fitting to envisage the possibility of creating associations of victims of dérives sectaires, on the model of what exists in France” (Slovakia)

Question 5, on the proven existence of offences committed in connection with membership of the minorities, or adherence to the practices, denounced by the MIVILUDES in France?

• “The principal Portuguese national victim-aid association, ‘APAV’ (Apoio a vitima), deplores no case of a victim of a group of cult character nor of excesses of a cult character concerning children”

-“No specific regulation concerning movements of a cult character” “The courts in fact receive very few complaints linked to movements of a cult character…” - ”(…) Little information available concerning the engagement of children in movements of a cult character…” - “No information in the matter of illicit removals of children or parental conflicts concerning the placement of children in organisations of a cult character is available in Canada…”

- “On the plane of child abduction, the bodies charged with collecting information that might lead to the discovery of the missing ignore the cult factor. They make no mention of particular risks linked to the frequenting of an at-risk movement” (United States).

- In Romania, the National Authority for the protection of children’s rights (ANPDC) carried out an inquiry among the general Directorates of social assistance and child protection. It revealed that no referral for the disappearance of a child in the framework of organisations of a cult character, or by reason of a parental conflict linked to a placement in this type of organisation, had been made to these institutions.

-“In Peru, the embassy has no knowledge of menaces of dérives sectaires against minors. However, young adults can be victims of these excesses. A single case of disappearance – unsolved – of a young French adult…”

In case of doubt, we consulted the MIVILUDES 2008 report or the site of certain bodies mentioned. For example, for Chile, the paragraph begins thus: “Currently, in Chile, possible dérives sectaires touching youth are treated with celerity and effectiveness”. Nothing indicates that this theme preoccupies anyone at all in Chile. Praise is on the other hand given to the work of SENAM, Chile’s national minors’ service. On the site of the body in question, the word cult (“secta” in Spanish) nevertheless appears nowhere.

In view of the evident tendency of the report’s authors to magnify the slightest fact supporting their theses, the absence of any mention of subsidies attributed to anti-cult associations, or of statistics of “cult delinquency”, means that nothing had been reported to the MIVILUDES in that sense.

When, finally, our investigations did not allow us to decide, we ticked “Yes”. More thorough investigations could therefore probably reduce their number.

III- Layering and coating: text composition according to the MIVILUDES

A partial reading, or a rapid skim, of the MIVILUDES text leaves an impression different from our methodical analysis: that of a planet under the menace of the “cult danger”. The particular structure of the report permits this confusion by means of two procedures:

Coating: the (false) conclusions (given at the start of the report!) and in bold (like an invitation to spare oneself the tedious reading of the pages that follow and that contradict this conclusion) seek to influence the reader, to tell him what to think.

Layering: the term “cult” appears 185 times combined with divergent notions on subjects unrelated to the object of the MIVILUDES, the mention of some forty movements or practices, classic targets of the anti-cult fight, and the use of shock-words and news items parachuted into the text; the whole in a certain disorder.

For example, a passage on Ukraine evokes child abductions, trafficking in human beings and in organs unrelated to spiritual or therapeutic minorities. One should know that the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior did not deign to answer the French embassy and advised it to inform itself on the Internet about possible “dérives sectaires”. The paragraph on Greece includes a very similar passage, evoking sexual exploitation of children and organ trafficking, where we are favoured with the following information: “Greece is among the European countries that have put in place the European alert number system 116 000. The Greek correspondent is the centre ‘To Hamogelo Tou Paidiou’ (The child’s smile).” It is not mentioned that this centre has recorded no “dérive sectaire”.

A broad evocation of the tragedy of Jonestown (in 1978) is made in passing for Guyana, which seems since then to have known no further “dérive sectaire”. Waco is of course cited concerning the United States, but in a version never heard from a French anti-cult organ, according to which the ATF (United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) and the FBI are the principal parties responsible for the massacre, which they had themselves tried to pass off as a collective suicide. We might, at this stage of the reading, hope for a mea culpa from the French anti-cultists for having brandished this tragedy to endorse the fear of spiritual minorities. The hope will have lasted only a few lines. Indeed, after describing the fiasco of the Texas police, removing 468 children supposedly in danger from a fundamentalist Christian community, only to have to return them on the judge’s order without any indictment, the MIVILUDES makes this surprising comment: “The action undertaken was a success on several counts (…) no violence or suicide was to be deplored (cf. the spectre of Waco)…”

IV- The incompatibility of the “fight against dérives sectaires” with respect for individual liberties.

The report’s authors underline several times, by way of explanation for the laxity from which the “cults” abroad supposedly benefit, supposed constitutional differences:

“In the United States, the First Amendment of the American Constitution and the case law developed by the Supreme Court guarantee in a quasi-absolute manner freedom of worship and freedom of expression, whose acceptation here is rather broad. Consequently…”

“The Constitution of the Republic of Ireland guarantees everyone religious and worship freedom on condition that public order and morality are preserved…”

“In Estonia, the authorities in charge of the protection of minors were keen to indicate that Estonia is a country where the free practice of a religion or belief is guaranteed by the Constitution”

It is dismaying to see an organ of the French government underline, as a weakness or an incongruity, the strict application of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

V – The art of producing smoke without fire.

“Yes, but all the same”, one might say on reading the report: excesses imputable to the said cults are indeed mentioned in it!

A great number of the cases evoked are only rumours or suspicions, and come from sources that are contestable to say the least:

“An occultist current, active notably in Novosibirsk and Ryazan, is the object of heavy suspicions of sexual practices involving minors”

”(…) Such as the case of an 11-year-old child who, in Omsk last June, allegedly attempted suicide after undergoing Scientology teachings”

“Current events attest to real risks of dérives sectaires”

“However, rumour attributes to certain extreme fringes of practitioners of ‘Obeah’, which is akin to ‘Voodoo’, a few disappearances of children…”

Over 39 pages, and for 57 countries, we have recorded only 4 cases that were the object of convictions and that involved beliefs or rituals. None of the countries in which these news items occurred, shocking though they were, judged it necessary to put in place measures of surveillance of spiritual minorities or a particular legislation on “mental manipulation”.

On the subjective and “cultural” character of the fear of the “cults”

• The MIVILUDES, in the paragraph on dérives sectaires in Bolivia, reports the arrest of seven Mennonites suspected of a hundred rapes of women and girls. The dozen articles we went through in the South American press establishes no link between the acts of these men and the beliefs and practices of the Mennonites (40,000 people in Bolivia), of whom they speak with all the respect due to a community touched by such a tragedy.

The contrast with France, where the slightest link between a news item and a spiritual minority is over-exploited in the media by using the anti-cult phobia, is vertiginous.

• 1953 - United States: A small polygamous Christian group “had made itself known following the police intervention at Short Creek (Arizona) and the placing under guardianship of 236 children (…) 150 children were returned to their parents’ custody only two years later; some parents never recovered their parental rights.” The MIVILUDES adds: “Public opinion, then little informed on the question of the cults, perceived the intervention as ‘shocking’ and ‘infringing individual liberties’.”

A contrario: “Informing” of a supposed danger makes it possible to infringe individual liberties without shocking public opinion.

Synthetic table of the data (see questions in paragraph II)