The Gloriavale & Centrepoint children - the impetus New Zealand needs to bring about change
The following address was made to an invited audience of policy makers, politicians, social sector leaders and advocates on 14 October 2024 in the Grand Hall of the New Zealand Parliament building.
Ngā mihi ō te pō. Ko Caroline Ansley toku ingoa.
Good evening. My name is Dr Caroline Ansley. I’m a clinical lead for Te Whatu Ora Waitaha Canterbury and Te Whatu Ora West Coast Te Tai o Poutini Healthpathways. I am also a General Practitioner based in Otautahi Christchurch. I am a survivor of childhood abuse and neglect at the Centrepoint cult in the 1980s. I now run a platform for the child survivors - the Centrepoint Restoration Project. I co-host the NZ award-winning cult awareness podcast and radio show Cult Chat.
Personal Centrepoint History
I spent a significant chunk of 1983, when I was seven, living at the Centrepoint Community, a notorious cult in New Zealand, without any other members of my family, as a foster child. In that time I was exposed to extreme sexual activity on a daily basis. Being exposed to constant sexual stimuli, and then encouraged to explore their bodies led to sexualised behaviour in the children. Sexually active children were elevated in the group as sexually “liberated” and given much neglected attention, often from predatory adults. As a direct result their parents gained status in the community, at the expense of their children. Adult sexual contact with children became normal.
I was a forgotten and neglected child, left to sort out my own basic needs, exposed to violent interactions between adults, and expected to become a “little adult” - which is how they treated the children. The needs of the children at Centrepoint - much like those in any cult - were inconveniences to the adults. The attention of the adults was drawn over and over again to the guru, to meeting his needs, and to attending to the incessant demands the group. I was a vulnerable, unprotected child, in an environment which welcomed outsiders and which pressured children and teenagers alike into early, amplified, boundariless and emotionally disconnected sexuality with each other and with adults.
It was a perfect environment for paedophiles to thrive without any consequences, and I was a perfect target.
Research Findings
I tell you this part of my story because I need to remind you of the Centrepoint children.
In 2010 a research study by Massey University was published about the former Centrepoint children, decades after they had left the cult. The purpose was to understand their experiences and to determine what their needs might be.
The researchers stated:
“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.”
In the study these former Centrepoint children revealed the experiences they had there, many of which were negative and harmful. The significantly harmful exposures included drug use, psychological manipulation, parental neglect; being witness to abuse, corporal punishment, and adult conflict; experiencing peer bullying, parental imprisonment and societal stigma. A third of the children admitted to having been sexually abused.
This is the only New Zealand research which examines the impacts of a coercively controlling group on the children of that group. Since the Massey study was published, there has been no further research about New Zealand cults published to build on the Massey study findings, despite the clear and present danger which is evident in other similarly abusive and coercively controlling groups during this same time period in New Zealand.
The Christchurch and Dunedin longitudinal studies, which together followed 2300 children from birth for 40-50 years, have collectively produced more than 1500 publications over the past 4 decades.
The Christchurch study research has demonstrated that experience of childhood maltreatment doubles the odds of mental health problems (compared to no maltreatment); and that exposure to childhood maltreatment and abuse has long-term effects that span youth, parenthood, maternal outcomes, early adulthood and into middle-age.
The Dunedin study research has shown that the more adversity a child experiences, the more likely they are in adulthood to experience poorer physical, cognitive, mental, neural, and social outcomes. People who experienced childhood sexual abuse were more likely to have persistent problems across their 20s, 30s, and 40s in terms of physical health, mental health, sexual health, interpersonal relationships, economic outcomes, antisocial behaviour, and cumulative problems across multiple life domains.
These studies inform many of the current policies that exist today, of note they also parallel the timelines of both Centrepoint and Gloriavale, the most notorious coercively controlling groups in NZ both proven to cause extreme harm to the children. These longitudinal studies provide evidence and comparative measures of the health burden, and a rationale for effective intervention.
Maltreatment and abuse in childhood - such as has occurred to children in both Gloriavale and Centrepoint communities, and in many other less high-profile cults in New Zealand - predicts negative physical health, maternal and neonatal outcomes; psychological injury including completed suicide; and education and occupational derailment across the lifespan. The Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry into State and Faith-Based Care revealed the actuarially calculated average lifetime cost for an individual abused in care is estimated to be approximately $857,000 per abused person, and that the faith-based groups considered had a care relationship to the abused children.
It is costly to society to allow these children to grow up in these microcosms of harm. We cannot afford to ignore it.
Gloriavale
The Gloriavale Christian Community continues to operate now without legal restrictions or consequences for their human rights violations, much like Centrepoint did.
In 2021 and 2022, in the Gloriavale community of 600 people, police operations identified 138 potential victims of an estimated 400 suspected crimes, ranging from physical assaults to serious sexual offending within the community of Gloriavale. More than three-quarters of the reported offences relate to victims who were aged under 18 at the time. This is a significantly higher prevalence than in the NZ general population. Multiple court proceedings within the last 5 years have referenced the normalisation of physical violence within the community up until 2015. Gloriavale Employment Court Judgements Courage 2022 and Pilgrim 2023 found that young men and women performed unpaid work from childhood under arduous conditions, and experienced adverse childhood events.
In 2023 an ERO Special review found that the education provided by the Gloriavale school is substandard. Of the estimated 600 who live in Gloriavale now, 350 are children under the age of 16. Despite these findings, the core relationships and infrastructure of Gloriavale remains materially unchanged [reference the employment judgement of Pilgrim 2023].
If an organisation is creating conditions - directly or indirectly - where maltreatment or abuse is present or probable, then it is generating poor health outcomes. Coercive control in such a context works against fundamental health principles and the laws that uphold human rights in this country. Coercive control is costing us both in economic and non-economic measures. We already have the information that evidences the risks to the wellbeing of those children and the future adults they will become.
Do we have effective scrutiny, checks and balances in place to ensure that harm is prevented to vulnerable people in harmful communities? Do we have methods for supporting their exits from these harmful groups, and pathways for assisting their community integration and recovery?
How can it be feasible, today, for an organisation to form and replicate the same conditions that exist in these high control communities, or continue to perpetuate similar structures that interfere with health and wellbeing – because right now - that is legally possible.
What the New Zealand public discovered during the Centrepoint criminal trials in the 1990s - that it supported the maltreatment of both children and adults in the community - failed to lead to any protective policy or societal change. Despite the devastating human cost of Centrepoint in the 1980s and 1990s, Gloriavale has been tolerated and allowed to thrive and flourish. We learnt nothing from Centrepoint it seems; though we should have known better, we have failed to keep safe the children of Gloriavale. I am telling you as a former child of Centrepoint community, that this is not good enough. The children of both communities and many other cult groups across New Zealand in the last 3 decades, have paid the price of our tolerance and inaction.
What I am asking for
Currently in New Zealand, due to a stunning lack of public awareness, we have a steady supply of uninformed and unprepared future victims in our communities, and new cultic groups constantly popping up all the time. We have no protection within the law for victims of group coercive control. We have people leaving - many who are children, or were born into the group they are a part of - who have no supports on the outside, and currently receive less support to integrate into society than the 1500 refugees who arrive on our shores every year. Cult refugees in New Zealand actually receive no support to enter the world outside the group. We also have few appropriately resourced workers who have the training to recognise and support victims of group coercive control who are ready to leave.
New Zealand desperately needs a commissioned multiagency working group to establish the extent and breadth of the issue and the harms, to make recommendations to government about necessary actions, and this workgroup needs the support of commissioning bodies within different government sectors to implement change. This working group of experts must have representatives from health, social services, psychology, justice, policing, policy, education (both direct to the general public, and direct to the workforce) and academic research. The goal would be education of the community, education and support for the small and at-risk-of-burning-out workforce, research that is New Zealand based, and development of a care pathway for leavers of coercively controlling groups.
I urge you to consider for the thousands of children in New Zealand trapped in coercively controlling and harmful groups.
Ngā mihi nui. Nō reira. Tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.
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