Review: Ces enfants oubliés: Grandir dans une communauté sectaire (These Forgotten Children: Growing Up in a Sectarian Community), by Lorraine Derocher

Abstract

These Forgotten Children is both a recovery guide aimed at those who have grown up in sectarian communities, and an instruction manual for people wishing to assist those individuals. Directed at parents, grandparents, educators, service providers, law enforcement, and other leaders, the book features advice from ten adult survivors of secte membership interviewed by the author—seven intensively—as well as reflections from dozens more with whom she was in contact, and insights from former cult members gleaned from books and articles.A member of McGill University’s Centre for Research on Children and Families, Lorraine Derocher has published extensively on the subject of cult membership, with a special focus on its effects on children. In contrast to her other publications, These Forgotten Children is clearly written for a general, rather than scholarly, audience. Call-outs, text boxes, lists, and other graphic elements break up the text and allow casual readers to dip into and out of the book.Chapter 3, however, addresses scholarly definitions of religion, new religious movements, and sectes (knowns as cults in English). Derocher debunks a list of common negative cult stereotypes, asserting, for example, that a guru is simply a spiritual master, not the head of a dangerous or criminal cult, and emphasizing that brainwashing is not a theory recognized by the scientific community. Nevertheless, she wishes to retain the word secte to describe a certain type of religious group, which she defines as an ideological movement, religious or not, closed in upon itself and that is opposed, in varying degrees, to the values of modern society (49). According to Derocher, a potentially dangerous secte does not merely separate itself from society, but rather effects a complete rupture by embracing a totalistic way of life at odds with the wider culture.Although the book advises parents and secte members, former and current, throughout, its concluding chapters present specific recommendations to those in the therapeutic community, government officials, and other leaders. In this way, it extends the research, and child advocacy work, of its author.