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************
An abridged version of this article appeared in the Family Violence Bulletin, Vol. 6, Issue 4,
Winter 1990, published by the Family Violence Research and Treatment Program, University
of Texas at Tyler, 3900 University Boulevard, Tyler, TX 75701. A variant of the same article,
entitled “Ritual Child Abuse: Where Do We Go From Here?” appeared in the Children’s Legal
Rights Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter 1991, published by William S. Hein &Co., Inc., 1285
Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14209. This article is reprinted with their permission.
The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent
the views or policy of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, the Administration on
Children, Youth, and Families, or the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Dept. of
Health &Human Services.
************
David W. Lloyd is Director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, U.S.
Department of Health &Human Services, Washington, D.C. At the time he wrote this article,
he was Project Director at the National Resource Center on Child Sexual Abuse.
This article is an electronic version of an article originally published in Cultic Studies Journal, 1981, Volume 8,
Number 2, pages 122-133. Please keep in mind that the pagination of this electronic reprint differs from that of the
bound volume. This fact could affect how you enter bibliographic information in papers that you may write.

Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1991, Page 30
Outreach to Ex-Cult Members:
The Question of Terminology
Michael D. Langone, Ph.D.
American Family Foundation
William V. Chambers
University of South Florida, Ph.D
Abstract
A questionnaire listing terms applicable to cults was sent former members of
cultic groups. 108 were returned in time for analysis. Subjects were asked to
rate and rank terms with regard to the degree to which they would be
meaningful and acceptable to cultists who left their groups on their own
(“walk-aways”). 71 of the 108 subjects were themselves walk-aways.
Although subjects on average gave favorable ratings to the terms, subjects
indicated that walk-aways would relate less well to traditional terms used
by cult educational organizations, e.g., “cult,” “brainwashing.” Terms such as
“psychological abuse,” “spiritual trauma,” and “trust abuse” received higher
average ratings and rankings. A factor analysis produced five factors, two of
which, Abuse and Trauma, were significantly more acceptable than the
other three factors, Mind Control, Social Manipulation, and Group Intensity.
The implications of these findings for cult educational organizations are
discussed.
Organizations such as the American Family Foundation (AFF) and the Cult Awareness
Network (CAN --originally called the Citizens Freedom Foundation) came into being in the
late 1970s in order to respond to the needs of individuals and families troubled about
involvement with groups that appeared to use high-pressure tactics to recruit and retain
members. Such groups were often called cults because a) most at this time were religious
and b) the term “cult” typically referred to new, marginal religious movements that were
not connected to mainstream religions, as were sects for example (Nelson, 1968).
The families and individuals disturbed by cult involvements began to organize and form
organizations such as AFF and CAN because traditional helping sources, mental health
professionals and clergy in particular, dismissed or misunderstood their concerns
Affected individuals and families saw similarities between the tactics they had observed in
the groups causing concern and those observed by students of Korean War POWs. The
terms “brainwashing” (Hunter, 1953), ”coercive persuasion” (Schein, 1961), ”thought
reform” (Lifton, 1961), and the more popular “mind control” were used to describe and
explain the disturbing phenomena. The process of deprogramming, in which a cultist‟s
family hired former cult members to physically restrain the cultist and force him or her to
listen to information not available in the cult (Dubrow-Eichel, 1989), was a frequently
employed method for helping family members in cults (in recent years “forced”
deprogramming has been largely replaced by voluntary deprogramming, now called ”exit
counseling”).
The controversy over deprogramming became bitter as cult propagandists and sympathetic
academicians (Bromley &Richardson, 1983), on the one hand, and affected persons
and academicians and professionals sympathetic to the other side (Delgado, 1978
Langone &Clark, 1985) argued about whether cults or deprogrammers more
severely curtailed civil rights. A change in terminology quickly resulted from this debate.
Academicians sympathetic to cults stopped using the term “cult” (see Robbins, 1969 for an