‘I grew up in a cult and managed to break free’

My parents joined the Children of God in the early 1970s. Back then, it was very much part of the Jesus freaks, hippie revolution. There were lots of people wanting to change the world, to have a different way of being, living outside what was happening politically and socially. I can understand why someone of that generation might say, “stop the world, I want to get off!” – which is essentially what my mum and dad did.

They joined a commune in Bromley. In some ways they were completely separate from society; in others, they were out in it every day, singing and trying to recruit new members. When you have a cult that has gone on for as long as The Children of God [incarnations have been around since 1968], the belief systems inside of it change with the wind. They’ll change based on how the leader is thinking that day, what they “download” from God – and, potentially, how corrupt they’ve become.

By the time I was born, it had gone from being this “revolution for Jesus”-type community to one that was very dangerous. The leader had gone from talking about free love and peace to creating an environment that was toxic and abusive, especially for children. My parents had joined one type of group, and my 11 siblings and I were born into something different.

How can people become so desensitised to the world that they’re in? In the world of cults, you hear this analogy a lot about the frog and the boiling water. If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it’ll jump straight out. But if you put them into cold water and slowly turn up the heat… well, they’ll boil to death.

When you are born into something that is separate from society, that’s your “normal”. It was our “normal” to grow up thinking that we were soldiers for the Armageddon, and that we were going to have superpowers, and that we were going to die as teenagers. Amid this petri dish of weirdness, though, our day to day was mundane, and really hard work.

The children were essentially the workhorses of the Children of God. We looked after the younger kids. We cooked every single meal. We cleaned the house from top to bottom. When you have a commune of 90-odd people, that’s a lot of work. We were the glue that held it together.

The key story we were told was that the end of the world was coming within the next seven years. We were brought up believing that none of us was going to reach adulthood, that we had a ticking clock above our heads, that we were going to die in these “End Time Wars”.

It meant there was no point in going to school. You didn’t need to learn anything outside of reading and writing to follow the word of God and the word of [cult founder] David Berg. You didn’t need to prepare for being an adult, because you would never be one. You didn’t need to know anything about the outside world, because you were never going to be in it.

We were also told we were going to develop these superpowers, which is amazing storytelling for kids – you’re like, wow, life might be really horrific right now, but wait till my lasers kick in and I can start blowing things up!

When you look at coercive control, one of the best things that you can do is to make someone as vulnerable as possible. And what’s more vulnerable than a teenager who doesn’t have an education and is completely unprepared for the outside world? Because of that, so many of the girls who left when they were teenagers ended up turning to what we were taught – which was sex work. The Children of God became infamous in the Seventies and Eighties for “flirty fishing” – it was used to make money, essentially by using the women of the cult as sex workers.

I became aware that things weren’t right when we were put in “End Time teen camps” to ensure that we were toeing the line. We were hurt, psychologically and physically: everything from being isolated for months at a time, to being starved to the point of hallucinating, to exercising to the point of broken bones, to malnourishment, to public beatings. It felt like the types of things they would do to make soldiers break in wartime.

The other big turning point was when I met a journalist from The Guardian who was allowed to come into the Children of God community. We’d set up this complete facade for him – the whole thing was a PR exercise. We were trained on how to answer questions about our welfare, our education, and the teachings of David Berg. We had to memorise all these lies.

He spoke to us kids like we’d never been spoken to before – like we were human beings. He asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, a question we’d never been asked before. It started the wheels turning for me. I thought: “What if he’s right, and what if they’re wrong?”

We were living in this tiny village outside of Leicester at the time that had two pubs and a post office. I started to sneak out and hang out with the local teenagers, to understand about their way of life.

By the time I was 14, I was desperate to get away. I met an 18-year-old boy who helped me plan my escape; I secretly got a job on the side to save money. When you’re a teenager, you think you can get away with stuff like that. But it didn’t last very long before I got caught.

Instead of being able to leave on my own terms, I was excommunicated – all of the adults voted me out of the house, and the next day I was kicked out. I had to deal with the reality of being an underage kid in the big wide world. It was even scarier than I’d imagined – I had to learn to survive, work two or three jobs at once, lie about my past, pretend I’d been to school.

I worked in a shop for eight hours a day, then ran straight to my (illegal) job in a bar. The one thing the Children of God had prepared me for was working my arse off. But it was difficult. There were times when we didn’t have enough money to eat. There were times when we’d want to spend what little money we did have on a couple of cans of beer to experience getting pissed for the first time. It was amazing in some ways, because everything was new and incredible – but everything was also terrifying.

Going back was never an option for me. Not after we’d been lied to for so many years. Once you leave, you’re seen as the enemy. There was even a prophecy that once somebody left the Children of God, they had a demon living inside them. I was only allowed to go back and visit my siblings once a year under supervision by a chaperone.

Now everyone’s out, and that’s amazing. Eight of us live in London, we talk every single day, and we have a fantastic relationship. But it’s important for me not to have a relationship with my parents. How they make me feel reminds me of everything that went on.

People think that those of us who grew up in cults will be these timid people who are scared of everything. But from my experience, kids who come out want to do everything. I’ve got friends who are motorcycling across the Sahara. I’ve got friends who do 13 festivals in a year. They do all these amazing, mad things, because they spent their childhoods being told that they couldn’t do anything. Yes, we’re afraid, but kids who grew up in a cult have already experienced the worst day of their life in some way. Now, we want to taste life.

‘Cult Following: My Escape and Return to the Children of God’ by Bexy Cameron is available now