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In Reply to: Re: Another plug for xfamily posted by Jim LaMattery on December 11, 2005 at 20:39:47:
JLM: The coordinators decided to delete my post under "One of My Posts", followed by your post asking about my history with COG. Here is my reply to your question:
If children were exploited sexually between 1972-74 in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington DC, Virginia, South Carolina or Georgia, I was not aware of it nor do I have reason to believe (in hindsight) that such exploitation occurred in the colonies where I lived. However, I was aware of the implications of the Law of Love and One Wife with regard to marital relations and family unity. It was fairly clear to me that Berg had an open marriage and that COG leadership had a liberal sexual ethic, particularly after one of the married shepherds hit on me. It was also clear to me that if I wanted to raise "revolutionary" children, I would have to submit to the "guidance" of shepherds.
When I was at the Washington D.C. home in 1973, I watched a toddler beomg punished by his mother under the direction of a colony shepherdess. The mother spanked the child repeatedly because he refused to "get the victory." The child was being physically beaten because of how he felt about his situation. If I had been that child, I would have felt humiliated and resentful--and very confused about what was expected of me. (This is called empathy.) I doubt the child's mother would have dealt with her toddler so harshly and inappropriately if she had not been ordered to do so by her "leader."
At the time, I did not identify what I witnessed as physical abuse. I just felt very troubled by it and determined that I would never disipline a child of my own in this manner. As my time in the Family went on, I figured out that meant not being in a position where some leader felt authorized to meddle in my marriage and family life. I didn't want someone to tell me who I should marry, nor did I want someone telling me how to raise my children.
I don't know if many people in the late 60s and early 70s recognized there is a fundamental conflict between the requirements of family life and the demands of communal living. I count myself fortunate to have understood that each vocation requires a very different lifestyle. At the same time, my awareness of the issue in 1974 when I got pregnant and left COG/TFI doesn't makes me better or smarter than people who stayed in for 10 or 20 years. Even without being in COG/TFI for years and years, I've made stupid mistakes in my life and taken some pretty hard knocks. When it comes to judging other people's mistakes, I'm inclined to think that "except for the grace of God, there go I."
When I went to graduate school in social work in the late 1980s, I learned to identify what I had witnessed in the COG during 1973 as physical abuse. The mother's expectation of that toddler regarding "yieldness" and "obedience" was inappropriate for his developmental stage. The idea of deliberately breaking a small child's will and destroying his sense of dignity (in an attempt to teach him obedience & humility) was abhorent to me before I knew what to call it.
Many people in TFI did not recognize the sexual exploitation of children for what it was. In some cases--Sarah Davidito, for example--there appears to have been a significant personal history of childhood sexual abuse. This does not excuse her behavior, but it does explain why she was inclined to normalize the sexulization of a toddler under Berg's personal direction. The sexual abuse (SA) of children is inter-generational. Very often we see mothers and grandmothers with a history of SA when child cases are identified. SA is actually quite common in the general population. Current statistics indicate 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys experience some type of inappropriate and exploitative sexual contact with adults or much older children (adolescents). The reason many Family members didn't recoil with horror when The Devil Hates Sex & Davidito Book came out is because they really didn't know about appropriate sexual boundaries to begin with.
Finally, recognizing adult/child intimacy behavior as sexually exploitative and abusive is not as simple and straightforward as many people think it is. I wrote a dissertation on the subject in 1999.
