Submission to the Victorian Inquiry into Cults & Fringe Groups
This is a shortened version of the November 2025 submission written by Dr Caroline Ansley on behalf of CIPN to the Victorian Inquiry into Cults and Organised Fringe Groups.
About the author
I am the founder and clinical lead of the Cult-Informed Professional Network CIPN. This network brings together professionals and survivor advocates in New Zealand and Australia who have an interest in cult awareness, prevention and recovery, coming from the health, social sector, therapy, education and legal professions. CIPN is building a cult-informed workforce in both countries, developing better intervention, support, prevention and recovery services.
In 1983 when I was seven I became an unprotected child in a psychotherapy sex cult. This cult was the Centrepoint Community, based in the North Shore of Auckland. I told my story of living there in 2021 in the multi-award winning Warner Bros documentary “Heaven & Hell - The Centrepoint Story”. In this past decade I have connected with dozens of former Centrepoint children through my work as founder of the Centrepoint Restoration Project, a website telling the truth about the harms which happened to children at the Centrepoint community.
This experience as a Centrepoint child and the ten years I have spent as both a survivor and professional advocate has given me a unique perspective. I ask that you consider what my perspective and expertise may offer the Inquiry’s purposes.
Centrepoint Community
I lived at the former notorious New Zealand cult, Centrepoint Community, which operated between 1978 - 2000, in 1983 when I was 7, after I was sent to live there with a family that I knew. While I was there I was in the nominal care of a family, though I was not really being cared for because children at Centrepoint had limited contact with their parents, were often unsupervised and parents were kept so busy that they barely saw their kids. As a foster child in that culture of negligence, I was completely forgotten. Instead, non-parental adults were picked as new mums and dads, to watch out for kids. Superficially this looked like everyone raising the children, but what this actually meant in a chaotic, intense environment where adults were exhausted from meeting the demands of the leader and the chores of communal living, was that no one was raising the children, and the focus of the parents was elsewhere. Ultimately that meant there was no one protecting children from the predation of pedophiles - because Centrepoint was a free-loving sex cult, it was a highly sexualised environment and sexual activity with children was encouraged.
Centrepoint was not just a commune, it was also a therapy business, making money running week long workshops and encounter groups to outsiders, as well as one to one therapy. People flocked from around Auckland to pay to be part of what Centrepoint were doing. Centrepoint was not closed and so the combination of a heightened sexual environment, active recruitment in the health and wellness space and unsupervised children, was almost as if someone designed the community for pedophiles. In fact, it was designed for pedophiles, because the spiritual leader and guru of the community, Bert Potter, was indeed a pedophile, creating a world which suited his needs. This environment was extremely harmful for children. During the months I was at Centrepoint I was exposed to adult sexual activity and contact, emotional and psychological abuse, and neglect.
Centrepoint was not closed
This harm was not without the potential for outside intervention because the doors weren’t closed. The Centrepoint children went to the local schools - the primary, intermediate and high schools. They mixed with other children and had friends outside of the commune they saw in the weekends or after school. They walked down the road to buy sweets at the local dairy. Some had a parent on the outside, whom they would visit in the holidays or weekends. Though there were doctors living and working in the commune, children and teenagers would also visit health workers outside the commune, and because teenagers were pressured early into sex with the adults, they also would visit the hospital-lead sexual health clinic in van-loads.
Neighbours were watching Centrepoint closely and were very concerned about what they saw happening there - especially children exposed to nudity and sexual activity - and some made strong efforts to counter the commune’s attempts to expand. Others criticised these neighbour activists, accusing them of being stuck-up Christians.
During the Inquiry so far the question has been raised of how outsiders such as health workers can access children in high-control or cultic communities. This is a valid question, as access is indeed challenging when a group is socially and psychologically gated. I would remind you though that not all psychologically-closed communities are in fact entirely socially- or geographically-closed - Centrepoint was such a case.
A cult’s social and geographical isolation exists on a spectrum, and Centrepoint was actually fairly open. Yet, extraordinary harm was happening to the children in this social system, which Dr Janja Lalich calls a ‘self-sealing system’. Many people were raising concerns - neighbours, teachers, parents on the outside, people who had left. Unfortunately for myself and my peers, repeatedly these efforts to draw attention to the harm were shutdown - a police investigation was quashed, concerns at the local school about the kids were pushed aside, social workers who were tasked with responding to queries were ignored by their superiors, parents on the outside were discouraged from asking deeper questions of their children.
It took 20 years for Centrepoint to close down in 2000 - and even the conviction of around 12 of the key leaders for child sex and drug crimes was not enough - Centrepoint continued for many years after most of these criminal convictions occurred in the early parts of the 1990s. Sadly, despite the court evidence of serious harm and risk to children who lived there, it was not the government that closed Centrepoint down. Instead it was the prolonged and determined activism of a large group of former members concerned for their loved ones still inside that eventually lead to the charitable trust being closed by order of the High Court in 2000.
Research into the Impacts on the Children
The children in the 1990s could not speak for themselves at the time to describe their experiences. 20 years later they got an opportunity however. In 2010 a Massey University retrospective qualitative research study was conducted to examine what growing up in this alternative and coercive community was like for the children. 29 children of the community were interviewed, all now in their 30s, 40s and 50s. In the study these former Centrepoint children revealed the experiences they had there, many of which were negative and harmful. These included early exposure to drugs, psychological manipulation, parental neglect, being witness to abuse or experiencing it themselves, corporal punishment, exposure to adult conflict, experiencing peer bullying, having a parent imprisoned (for those who were the children of the convicted perpetrators) and societal stigma. A third of the children admitted to having been sexually abused. Having been a child in that environment I believe the actual incidence was much higher than a third.
In their conclusion, after reflecting on this failed social experiment and its aftermath several decades later, the researchers stated that:
“During the years of Centrepoint’s existence there was an alarming lack of action from health professionals and others who may well have known or suspected the abuse that occurred there. It is important that there is a broad knowledge of the potential for this kind of experiment in communal living to go badly wrong and for those on the outskirts to recognise the warning signs.”
Unfortunately for the children of Centrepoint, and other cults in New Zealand, this recommendation from the 2010 research has not been implemented at any level by social, health or education sectors, nor have any changes occurred legislatively to reduce the chances of another cult like Centrepoint occurring. And in the background, the general awareness of what cults are, how they recruit, who is more at risk, how they exploit and harm, is all largely unknown and unrecognised. Society has learnt nothing from Centrepoint. I share this story because I don’t believe the situation is any different in Victoria.
In 2015 I started the Centrepoint Restoration Project, which supports children of Centrepoint to recover and invites repairing of the injury that occurred to the children at Centrepoint. Throughout this project - which has now spanned a decade - I have met again many former children of Centrepoint and seen the devastation that being raised in that community in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in. Relationship problems, addiction, prostitution, employment instability, mental illness, chronic health issues, broken intimate and family relationships, isolation, a difficulty feeling part of the world, and a longing for a family which no longer exists - these are all the common experiences of the cohort that I was a child with. Since 2015 I have been a vocal advocate for addressing the injustices which occurred at Centrepoint to this cohort of children and exposing the systemic issues which allow cult-based harm to continue unchecked.
Long term health impacts
Maltreatment and abuse in childhood - such as that which occurred to children in Centrepoint Community, and in many other less high-profile cults both extremely closed, or more open - predicts negative health outcomes. Children raised in cults face serious developmental disadvantage. Regardless of age however, there is an increase in morbidity in cults, related to both controlling tactics and to ideology.
We have heard from others in the inquiry about the significant negative mental health outcomes that cult-impacted people face such as risk of suicide, serious mental illness such as C-PTSD, depression, anxiety, bipolar and schizophrenia. Entrapment in a chronically abusive environment leads to psychological injury, and compounding this, limited or no access to healthcare leads to later presentation of treatable or preventable health conditions. It is very common in all sorts of cults for mental illness to be particularly discriminated against, sufferers to be blamed for their affliction, and appropriate treatment withheld from the person.
Cults create an environment where the needs of the individual are subsumed by the needs of the group - which are effectively the needs and whims of the leader. Therefore, the needs of individuals - including their health needs - must be deprioritised in a cult. The cult creates an insider/outsider paradigm which results in distrust of outside authorities like health workers, and elevates the ideology of the group so that it replaces other systems of thinking. This often leads to sound scientific and evidence based health principles being replaced with spiritualised pseudo-scientific and frankly, made-up ideologies about health and wellbeing. The longer the person is in such a setting, the longer the potential negative health outcomes for that person, and are especially destructive if the exposure to this environment started from birth or early childhood where lifelong ideas and practices about health and wellbeing are learnt.
The avoidance-of-health-workers paradigm from cults is deliberate - creating an anti-healthcare ideology, and avoiding adequately addressing the healthcare needs of members is intentional. Instead, needs are inadequately met through spiritualised or fabricated health ‘treatments’ or from health professionals within the cult who fail to put the member and their legitimate health needs before the doctrine or agenda of the leadership. Avoidance of external, evidence-based, objective, registered health providers keeps members from getting their medical needs met, from seeing the world outside the group, from finding a caring advocate, from being exposed to other ways of thinking, and allows health needs to be weaponised and exploited by the group. A number of international cults and many smaller ones hold to an anti-medicine /anti-healthcare ideology, which at the same time over-values the sacredness of personal suffering as the path to holiness or enlightenment. This combination of neglect of needs, rejection of science, and overvaluing of suffering - in addition to a belief that illness or injury is spiritual rather than biological in origin and therefore requires a spiritual not medical solution - can lead to serious negative health consequences.
In October 2024 I presented at the Decult Conference in Christchurch about the medical neglect which occurs in cults, the impact on access to health care, and the necessity of health workers better understanding the specific and unique needs of this hidden population. Healthcare in cults matters because cults alienate a person from their body and often leaves permanent physical scars on these bodies or prematurely shorten lives.
And at this stage, there is almost no understanding of this or recognition of it amongst health-workers.
The need for research
These health consequences are not well known, understood, quantified or researched. There is very little direct research on the topic of how wide and significant the health impacts are for people impacted by cults. Much of what we know has been extrapolated from research gained in longitudinal studies on children raised in more traditional environments, research on women and children experiencing other forms of coercive control, testimonies given to recent Australian and New Zealand Inquiries into abuse in care, testimonies from clinicians and experts who have worked closely with survivors, and survivors themselves. Direct research on this population is sparse because this population are hidden, both by the groups themselves, but also as a result of the stigma these people face in society and the lack of ability of professionals to identify these people or recognise their physical and psychological injuries and deficits.
A hidden population cannot be measured, nor identified and as such, the health system in both New Zealand and Australia will likely be failing to address the unmet health needs of these people.
Education to the Health and Social Services Sectors
I have a long history as a clinical lead and an educator in the New Zealand health sector working for a platform called Healthpathways. Healthpathways is used by health workers as a single point of evidence in their consultations with their patients, to support them in a constantly evolving and changing health system.
In 2024 I wrote and published the pathway suite “High-control Group Informed Healthcare” which has been adopted to the Healthpathways sites across all health areas of New Zealand. These three pathways are designed for frontline clinicians to use when interacting with patients who are in or have recently left a high-control or cultic group. The pathways educate the clinician about what a high-control group or cult is, how a member or leaver might present in primary care, what health needs they may have, what barriers to healthcare they might have that the clinician may need to support them to surmount, how a clinician can adapt their practice to more adequately support their needs, and what services, resource and supports may be available to them. When the pathways went live all across New Zealand it was followed up with a national webinar, where I and another doctor spoke to the issue, which attracted over 200 health workers.
Healthpathways exists in Australia. There is a well developed, mature Healthpathways programme in Victoria, across all health regions, and as such these pathways can easily be moved on to the Victorian Healthpathways sites, enabling relevant, appropriate information about how to recognise and support cult survivors to be delivered to doctors and nurses in Victoria. All that is lacking is for this work to be prioritised. Should this Inquiry see and recognise the value of a targeted deliverable outcome to address some of the significant gaps which are currently enabling widespread health inequity for this population, I urge you to consider the adoption of these pathways across Victoria as one tangible and fairly straight-forward outcome to achieve.
Doctors and nurses can become advocates for cult-impacted adults and their children, but they lack knowledge and skills in this area. These pathways are a good first step towards changing that, from one of the children of a cult where such professionals could have acted but their ignorance allowed their inaction or inadequate action. The Massey University Centrepoint study highlighted the need for doctors and other professionals to gain the necessary skills to recognise and prevent the harm children invariably experience in these groups. Here is a step towards that necessary education.
The Cult-Informed Professional Network
The Cult-Informed Professional Network has been mentioned in the Inquiry already. A key initiative of CIPN is education to the health and social service workforce - building a workforce of cult-informed practitioners who can recognise and appropriately respond to the needs of cult-impacted people.
When I was at Centrepoint, doctors, nurses, social workers, police, teachers, therapists and more, failed to see, understand, know how to act, or appropriately intervene to protect me and my peers. Since Centrepoint closed, this cohort of child survivors has faced mostly marginalisation, discrimination and stigma - this is a common experience for survivors and we in CIPN hope to be part of changing that. Currently CIPN has an education programme for our members, and we are taking opportunities to reach the different sectors. In the last 6 months I have presented to approximately 500 health professionals, introducing these health workers to the basics of cultic harm.
This is a grassroots movement, by professionals desperate to fill the extraordinary gap in knowledge that is unnecessarily compromising the care of this hidden and marginalised population. There is a mass of critical health workers who know next to nothing about this topic, a huge population of invisible or hidden victims of who desperately need health workers to recognise, understand and support them and as yet, there is little in the way of education and health system support. CIPN is moving into this space and there is much work to be done and few organisations doing the work.
Recommendations to the Victorian Inquiry
More is needed to create the cult-informed professionals that are so desperately needed in both Australia and New Zealand. Already there is Trans-Tasman activity happening in this space and I encourage you to support what is already underway. Australian and New Zealand professionals and advocates are learning from each other and supporting one another’s work and this will naturally continue.
To support this needed work I recommend for your inquiry that you:
Support the roll out of the “High-Control Group-Informed Health Care” suite on Healthpathways across Victoria.
Support the work which is already being done by professionals working in this space through legitimising, endorsing and funding their professional activities.
Offer funding to develop education packages such as what CIPN is building on through volunteer hours, and are currently constrained by a lack of funding.
Fund state wide webinars and work shops targeted at the health and social sectors in Victoria.
Provide scholarships for the research that is desperately needed to quantify the extent of harms in this population, and determine the most appropriate care pathways for survivors
Create consequences for the perpetrators of group based coercive control through legislative change. The harms they cause will not stop until there are limits within the law for their activities and recourse for justice of victims. Until group coercive control is illegal, survivors will struggle to be accepted or treated with legitimacy and dignity. A law change is part of culture change and it is desperately needed.
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