Category: cult | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Deprogramming: documentaries and movies about cults and fundamentalist Christian subculture

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 16, 2015.

Some people asked us what life was like after we left when I posted the UnBoxing Project series, how we handled leaving the sects of fundamentalist Christianity we were raised in.

My friends and I went through a period of deprogramming, which is still ongoing. We’d been told what to think our whole lives, what is good and what is evil, and then we found we’d been lied to.

Cults teach the people who want to leave the group that:

1) you’re the only one questioning

2) this is somehow your fault, because everyone else is compliant and does what they’re told.

This is how they maintain control, through isolation.

My best friend in college, Cynthia Barram, found some documentaries about cults and Christian fundamentalism that demonstrated nationwide trends and helped our little group of ex-fundamentalist homeschoolers realize that we weren’t alone in deconstructing from toxic religion.

Sons of Perdition (2010)

This documentary is about the teenage boys who get kicked out and the girls and women who leave Warren Jeff’s FLDS cult on the southern Utah / Arizona border.

Although our experiences in the Independent Fundamental Baptist or United Pentecostal Churches were different than the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints since our churches didn’t practice polygamy and didn’t have a prophet, we shared many similarities with their deconstruction process. Like the ex-FLDS young adults, we grieved the loss of family members who shunned us, struggled to find a sense of purpose when we no longer felt like we had been “chosen” to fulfill a divine mission like the cult taught us, and worked through unhealthy ways of coping with these losses and found a better way to live.

The “Sons of Perdition” struggled to support themselves and enroll in school. The daughters cut their hair for the first time and put on pants. We could identify with their stories because of our own experiences in fundamentalist cults.

Daddy, I Do (2010) and Cutting Edge: The Virgin Daughters (2008 TV Show)

These documentaries are about purity culture and the father-daughter virginity ball hosted at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs every year.

Daddy, I Do features a variety of perspectives: fraternity boys, churchgoing parents raising kids, abstinence-only program leaders, and progressive Christians like blogger Matthew Paul Turner. It addresses the problematic nature of a daughter promising her virginity to her father until marriage.

The Virgin Daughters focuses specifically on Colorado Springs and the father-daughter ball, interviewing the various families who attend and showing the pledge the fathers sign to protect their daughters’ chastity.

Both of these documentaries feature fundamentalist Christian parents who admit they actually were not virgins at marriage, but they want their children to be.

Jesus Camp (2006)

This documentary is mostly about an evangelical Pentecostal-style church camp gone wrong.

The charismatic camp director says in the opening scenes that America’s only hope for spiritual revival is through the hearts of malleable children. So she and the other leaders proceed to brainwash them and manipulate their emotions, telling the children that they are engaged in warfare for the good of the nation.

The film also shows the group of campers visiting New Life Church in Colorado Springs and meeting the pastor at the time, Ted Haggard.

Ted Haggard, who founded New Life Church in the mid 80s, was known for “waging spiritual war” in Colorado Springs and encouraging his church members to “anoint” streets and intersections with cooking oil, according to a Harpers’ Magazine article called “Soldiers of Christ” by Jeff Sharlet published in May 2005.

The neighbor family who lived across the street from my parents in Colorado Springs had attended New Life Church for years when we moved there. The husband and wife both worked at Focus on the Family while we were neighbors, and the wife often took a spray bottle of cooking oil on her walks around the neighborhood that she would use to “anoint” neighbor’s driveways if she felt that she sensed a demonic presence, in accordance with Haggard’s teachings.

Haggard resigned as senior pastor of New Life Church in the fall of 2006 after allegations surfaced that he used methamphetamine and had sex with a male escort in Denver. He and his wife left the city for several years, but he moved back to start another church in Colorado Springs in 2010, where he has been accused again of illegal drug use and inappropriate behavior with young men, according to a July 2022 article by the Colorado Springs Gazette.

Jesus Camp was a harrowing portrayal of spiritual abuse, but I needed this film to process what happened to me and my high school youth group in one of my fundamentalist churches, to realize how we had been radicalized for the culture wars.

God Loves Uganda (2013)

This documentary is about non-denominational evangelical churches like the International House of Prayer (IHOP) group (which has also been called a cult) that has emerged over the last 20 years increasing missionary efforts, reacting against established denominations leaning away from traditional theology and missions.

They look at what happens on the other side, at the financial impact of this church planting and aid on the countries receiving these missionaries.

The documentary makers point out that people end up depending on the monetary support from the missionaries and churches in Western countries, and the evangelical churches sending missionaries use their influence to pass laws, like the one in Uganda that advocated the death penalty for LGBTQ people.

Basically, this film demonstrates missionary work gone bad.

Waiting for Armageddon (2009)

I’ve given up on rapture theology. The whole philosophy is based on a handful of verses and wasn’t widely accepted until television preachers in the 1960s started it during the Cold War era. If Jesus actually comes back like that, great, but if not, I’m okay with that, too.

In the film, a group of somewhat clueless Texans tromp around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and their pastor threatens to cause an international incident by yelling that this is where Jesus will come back until security asks them to stop, reminding them that at least three different religions consider the Temple Mount to be sacred and each religion believes very different things about it.

Then they play the Star Spangled Banner while riding in a boat over the Sea of Galilee. Gotta love that American Christian exceptionalism. Lovely.

Jewish leaders who better understand the intricacies of the religious history of the area are also interviewed in the film, and it also covers the annual Tribulation Conference in Dallas, Texas.

On the lighter side, we also watched comedy movies and TV shows critiquing how we grew up.

Saved! (2004)

In this movie, a high school girl decides to “save” her boyfriend from being gay by giving him her virginity. Then she gets pregnant.

And did I mention she’s in a Christian high school?

Cue goth punk chick and dude in a wheelchair (the other “outcasts”) coming to her rescue.

We laughed so much watching this film, because many of the ridiculous plot lines would actually happen in evangelical and fundamentalist subculture.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015)

In this Netflix-only series, Kimmy escapes an apocalyptic cult’s bunker after 15 years of captivity and reinvents herself and her identity in New York City.

The episode titles are hilarious from the obvious “Kimmy Goes Outside!” or “Kimmy Gets a Job!” and “Kimmy Goes on a Date!” to the more mundane, like “Kimmy Makes Waffles!”

The show received a positive review from an actual survivor of an apocalyptic cult.

I watched the first season during spring break of my last year of college and loved it, but I couldn’t watch too many episodes in one sitting because some of the comedy was too real.

When I first moved out, I was so very, very much like Kimmy, right down to her bottomless optimism. Laughing at her is like laughing at myself, which is both healing and painful.

Leaving is hard.

But for those of us who seek freedom, it’s worth it.

And we’re not alone, in this mess of deprogramming and making sense of what our lives were like and what our futures will be.

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The UnBoxing Project: Surviving and thriving on the outside

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 7, 2015 as part of a series.

Continued from How You Can Help (Eleanor’s thoughts)

Although I had very little when I was kicked out of the cult and moved out of my family’s house, I came from an upper middle class, well-educated family. I grew up privileged.

I moved out as a college student with a couple of on-campus jobs after my parents emptied my savings account. Many of the people that we helped were in similar circumstances.

A week after I was kicked out, someone at the LGBT resource center at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, known as the MOSAIC office, told me about resources for people with low income.

My upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian cult had taught me that accepting assistance from the government or non-profits like food pantries was morally wrong. If you didn’t earn your own food through your own hard work, you shouldn’t get to eat, they said.

Slowly, I learned to accept help when it’s offered and allow the help to stabilize me.

Resources like these helped me and my friends to stay independent from our parents and the cults we left while living on a tight budget.

Food pantries and food stamps
When my paycheck barely covered rent and gas or three other girls were living out of our tiny apartment, we couldn’t afford food. Mercy’s Gate and other Care and Share pantries felt like small miracles. There’s even Colorado Pet Pantry for cats and dogs. And El Paso county provides SNAP benefits (food stamps).
Cellphone plans like Straight Talk, Wal-Mart Family Mobile, and Tracfone
Our monthly bills were between $30-40, or we used pay-as-you-go plans, which helped us avoid higher costs from major cellphone network companies.
Dollar stores
During the first year after I left, my roommate’s boyfriend issued me a challenge: go to a dollar store and notice everything they sold. It was so helpful that now I take other ex-fundies to show them what you can get with a few dollars in a pinch. Although some products are cheap or not good quality, it’s a good survival skill to see what supplies you can get at a discounted price.
Thrift stores
In Colorado Springs, we have the Arc and Goodwill, and local thrift stores whose profits benefit human trafficking survivors or disadvantaged teens that sometimes resell the leftovers from bigger thrift stores at even cheaper prices.
Temporary agencies
Our little band of cult survivors all needed jobs and often didn’t have much work experience to put on a job application. I didn’t know what temporary agencies did until one hard winter when I was down to only one of the three jobs I’d had the previous summer. Then I got a call from a temporary staffing agency that found my resume on Monster and wanted to hire me for a receptionist position at a pharmaceutical company, something related to my chemistry degree. They also gave me odd jobs like hotel housekeeping on the weekends for extra money. It wasn’t glamorous and sometimes the jobs I got were difficult, but it helped me survive short-term until I found something better.
Housing / utilities assistance
Most cities have section 8 housing, although people often are on wait lists for several years and it’s difficult to qualify for. Colorado also has a Low-income Energy Assistance Program (LEAP), which provides heating assistance in the winter.
Internet
Several major companies like Comcast and CenturyLink also offer low-income internet service. In Texas, Spectrum offers affordability connectivity programs.
Mental health
We wrestled with anxiety, self-harm, PTSD, and survivor’s guilt. But we found counselors both on campus at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and within the Colorado Springs community who wanted to help us heal and worked on a sliding fee scale.

We also found several non-profit and government organizations in Colorado Springs with resources for survivors.

TESSA
The 24/7 crisis line (719-633-3819) offers advice to abuse survivors, although they mainly deal with intimate partner violence.
DHS / CPS / Adult Protective Services
In El Paso County, call (719) 444-5700 or 1-844-CO4KIDS or email childabusereport@elpasoco.com to report child abuse.
Inside Out Youth Services
Housing for homeless LGBT youth under 25 and other resources.
The Independence Center
Services to empower people with disabilities.

On the outside, we formed our own little family, a chosen family rather than by blood.

Dale Fincher, who talks about recovery from spiritual abuse at Soulation, writes in The Exodus From Family:

“When our biological family puts a brake on friendship, we must look for friendship elsewhere. This year, I am no longer defaulting to blood and legal relatives as my ‘ohana.’ They will not lock me into a family orphanage until I conform to their demands. No. My family has become my Chosen Family, for we cannot live as orphans (John 14:18).”

A theme that resurfaces in the dialogue about spiritual abuse is that of Christian fundamentalism’s idolization of family values over the well-being of the individuals within the family. The family unit’s survival at all cost becomes idolized, enabling denial of abuse.

We learned we could all find freedom together.

No, we couldn’t save each other or support each other—we all had to ultimately find our own way because all of us are broken and hurting.

But we knew we weren’t alone.

Sometimes a hug, a shoulder to cry on, enabled us to just keep walking, to not give up.

Even if we were outcast, we believed our experiences were valid, we grasped for something better.

And we wanted to share this new life, this freedom with others.

R. L. Stollar, one of the founders of Homeschoolers Anonymous, wrote:

“I learned that Jesus of Nazareth was not content with 99 sheep when 99 sheep means that one gets left behind to suffer in silence and solitude. [….] But Jesus dealt with human beings, not statistics. Human beings are what I want to deal with, too. […] Us “bitter apostates” will be out in the wilderness, searching for the one you abandoned.”

And that is what we did, too.

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The UnBoxing Project: How you can help (Eleanor’s thoughts)

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 5, 2015 as part of a series.

Continued from How You Can Help (Cynthia’s Thoughts)

When we started helping people move out, we learned that getting out and finding freedom is messy, and everyone’s situation is different.

When someone contacted us for help, we said that they went “active.” It’s like being on call for an emergency move 24/7.

They’ll tell us the situation is deteriorating, but we don’t know it’s going to happen until they call us, because we leave the choice up to them.

In summer 2013, when Homeschoolers Anonymous posted Eve Ettinger’s Call For Help: A Quiverfull / Patriarchy Rescue, I wrote in an email to our network: “I think she is the first of many.”

The backlash is one of the most difficult things we all faced in leaving our cult-like churches and controlling families.

One morning in my apartment, right after Racquel and Ashley left their church, the First United Pentecostal Church of Colorado Springs, Racquel’s phone rang. She stepped into the next room for a private discussion.

She came back out looking troubled.

Ashley asked what was wrong, and Racquel said Sister H. from Louisiana just called.

Racquel started crying.

“Sister H. told me that the pastor may be wrong, our parents may be wrong, but not to give up on the Pentecostal church. But I just can’t do it. I can’t.”

“Did anything like this happen to you when you left, Eleanor?” she asked.

Yes. Yes, it did.

One of the pastors and his wife at our old church in the Dallas Metroplex, Rockwall Bible Church, called me and tried to convince me to attend Bob Jones University.

They agreed with my pastor at Grace Bible Church in Colorado Springs and they said the only way to honor my parents was to do this one thing, to obey them.

My friend Anna G. called me a few weeks after I moved out. She said she’d gone back to the church. The assistant pastor and his wife asked her to step into their office after an evening church service and asked her about two of my Facebook posts that she’d liked and commented on.

One of my Facebook posts that she had liked was lyrics from a song called “Keep Your Eyes Open” by the contemporary Christian band NeedtoBreathe (and the assistant pastor and his wife believed all syncopated music was of Satan).

The other Facebook post was a link to a Tumblr blog called Hey Christian Girl, a collection of memes with cheesy, silly pick-up lines with Biblical allusions. They said didn’t see the humor, and they thought it was sacrilegious.

Anna also said the pastor and his wife asked her if she agreed with me moving out, if she’d aided me in leaving the cult. They told her that they didn’t want her to influence their children to move out without their approval.

I caught my breath. I could see it now.

They can’t stand to lose one of their own, because that’s losing a soldier to the culture wars. You take one step back from fundamentalist Christianity and now you’re one of the outsiders, one of the “lost” that they evangelize. And they need your soul.

So when I hugged Racquel while she sobbed, I could say, “Yes, this happened to me, too.”

This is why leaving these churches and these homes is leaving a cult. And this is what it’s like to walk beside abuse survivors in seeking freedom.

I’ve waited through months of watching and making preparations before helping someone leave. I keep an emergency cellphone with an unlisted number in case a controlling parent blocks someone from calling my regular cellphone. I’ve carried pepper spray, a stun gun and a small knife, all legal to carry on my college campus, so I can protect myself and those who ask for our help if a situation turns confrontational and violent.

Our network of friends discusses alternate scenarios, backup plans with people who are wanting to leave. We plan for the worst while hoping that one day this won’t be necessary.

Here’s we learned about helping people move out:

Take the essentials, but stay safe.

TESSA, a non-profit in Colorado Springs that offers advice and support to spousal domestic abuse survivors, has a checklist of what to take with you when you leave that we found helpful.

Identifying documents
Clothes to last a week
Cash and bank information
Keys to car and work
Medications
Important paperwork and records
Personal items like photographs and jewelry

When Ashley moved out, five of us showed up because we knew her father was armed, he’d destroyed the inside of the car and the apartment, and we didn’t know when he’d return.

Later, I learned anyone who feels threatened can request police protection while moving their possessions.

Sometimes we left something behind we valued.

I couldn’t take my heirloom violin from the 1890s or one of our family dogs I’d bonded with. Ashley left her dog Sasha and her bed because we couldn’t fit it in the van, and Racquel sold her horse when later she couldn’t pay board and her own living expenses.

We lost diaries, mementos, and valuables.

We decided our freedom was worth losing those things or that lifestyle.

We realized the important thing was keeping ourselves safe and learning how to heal.

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The UnBoxing Project: Self-care during activism

Disability rights activist Cynthia Barram with her cat Dita in 2014. | Photo: James Sibert

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 14, 2015 as part of a series.

Continued from Homeschool, the perfect hiding place

Content Note: suicidal ideation, self-harm

Cynthia Barram was the first friend I met in college who helped me start my own moving out process before helping our other friends leave Christian fundamentalist, Quiverfull households.

Here’s her perspective on what happened, in her own words.

Lesson Number One: You can’t help anyone else if you don’t take care of yourself.

When several homeschool girls came to me, oppressed by churches and controlling parents, I helped them realize that sneezing would not condemn them to hell. They could kiss boys, get their ears pierced, and maybe even listen to some decent music without fear of the ground opening up beneath them.

But I didn’t realize I was trapped in my own cage, despite my involvement in disability activism. As the revelation hit me, I felt as though I’d been cut down from a whipping post.

My body sunk. My face went numb—unsure whether to react with joy or rage or some unholy spawn of the two. The revelation was the first of many from my support group. Long story short, the cage I had been living in due to the restrictions of my disability accommodations for the past ten years no longer existed, if it ever really existed in the first place.

The iron bars that burned when I touched them, the iron bars that held me fast to a life of poverty and escapism now crumbled and snapped in the hands of my mentors like dried reeds. One support group meeting did that, and afterwards I wandered the streets disoriented and moaning—drunk with the wine of freedom in all its bold bittersweet, soon to be very real possibilities.

But what was I to do without my chains? Like Jacob Marley on parole, I was now confronted with the equally real problem of how to get on without them.

So I understand the ones I’ve helped move out, the ones who have looked to me. Because I, too, don’t know how to handle so much sudden freedom.

Cut to support group a few weeks later.

“I love my friends,” I told them, “But rescuing two of them called me out of a final exam. I took an incomplete in a class last semester because we had a suicide attempt and dealing with it messed with my head, and now this.”

“No wonder you haven’t been yourself,” they said. “That’s way too much for anyone to carry, but we’ll help you.”

They then proceeded to divvy up my business as if it was their own.

I made a promise to the rest of the group members to keep our meeting days clear from other appointments, free from stress, and when I figure out who I am without my chains and graduate from college, I promised to let everyone know.

That’s the trouble with “witch work” as I often call it.

If you were born a witch (and I mean the green nasty one from the 1943 Wizard of Oz film, not Wiccans) like I was, you get used to that icky-sticky-kind-of-cool-but-on-your-own feeling.

On the one hand, you swear you must have three breasts, and are understandably and almost perpetually embarrassed.

On the other hand, you get used to hearing things like “Ever try to put a jet engine on that power wheelchair?” and “I’ve never been friends with a black person before,” and “You never wear feminine clothes.”

(Never mind of course that dresses get caught in my wheelchair!)

I heard many of these statements repeated again in college from formerly homeschooled people I met at college, like my friend Eleanor and the people she was helping.

When I first met Eleanor, she told me her homeschool textbooks taught her to sit or kneel when talking to people in wheelchairs, but I found the action too intimate for a casual conversation.

The only people who had done that to me without it being offensive were my first boyfriend and my childhood hero.

In other words, what the hell?

You laugh as if the jokes are funny, and offer up starters to the almost obligatory culturally informative conversations that follow.

You get so good at doing this on a small level that eventually you take on bigger game like formerly Christian homeschooled LGBT folks trying to move out when their parents have guns and women self-harming and ending up in the ER.

I didn’t seek out these people who asked for my help.

No, these homeschooled girls with braids and glasses, dressed like they were going to the Little House on the Prairie fan convention from hell, found me out on campus, at Bible studies, after church services. And I couldn’t scare them away, either.

They had never met anyone who was black or disabled before.

You become so brilliant at this in fact that you tie yourself with chains to the greater good and wait for this or that friend with this or that crisis to—effectively becoming more worn out than any of your mentees are.

That is, until the cross disability support group at the Independence Center on Fridays, until the smashing of chains and the breaking of cages, until a group of people who swear on their lives to keep your secrets, and who feed you as you feed others.

Sometimes you need to crash on somebody else’s couch, figuratively, after you’ve hosted several refugees, or you lose yourself.

And that support group has got to be there before during and after anyone is even considering doing this work.

It has to be there, or the psychological slavery that you work so hard to liberate everybody else from will find a much better mark in you than it ever did in your charges, and this slavery comes customized complete with your own set of flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, and mood swings, trust me.

The support group has to be there or you will contemplate crazy shit—drinking bleach, stepping in front of a car, shooting yourself in the head, and when a woman in trouble holds your hand and begs you to tell her why you are alive, you will not be able to answer her.

I cannot stress this enough. The support group in some shape or form has to, has to, has to be there.

And no matter the strength of the freedom fighter, no matter the clarity of his or her vision or the strength and purity of the intentions behind it—anybody, anybody, anybody can find themselves worn out by the difficult and delicate process of freeing people to follow their dreams.

Cynthia Barram graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and she is the former president of the Disabled Student Union on campus. She petitioned for the Colorado Springs City Council to not cut funding for bus routes in 2008, which was covered by The Gazette and the Colorado Springs Independent. Cynthia is involved with the community at the Independence Center, which sponsors disability access and justice in the city.

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The UnBoxing Project: Homeschool, the perfect hiding place

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 5, 2015 as part of a series.

Continued from Gissel’s story

I met our friend Shelby Shively while working for the campus newspaper, The Scribe. Shelby was earning a master’s degree in sociology, and she mentioned that the homeschooling population seemed to be understudied in academic literature.

Here is her perspective on Christian fundamentalist, Quiverfull children we were helping to leave their abusive households, in her own words.

I, personally, have come into contact with a handful of homeschooling experiences in my lifetime.

I had three friends who had been homeschooled, two of whom entered semi-public high schools for reasons I do not know.

My friend Mary took a GED test and attempted to take a few online college courses, essentially continuing the homeschool experience as a college student, before realizing she would be better off on an actual college campus. I also had six cousins from my aunt on my father’s side, most of whom she homeschooled.

Mary’s parents were incredibly controlling.

Her older sister used her body for her rebellion: she got her belly button pierced, got haircuts her parents considered strange, and dyed her hair unnatural colors. Mary rebelled in other ways, and she eventually moved out, although she is currently living with her parents again.

My aunt had four boys and adopted a young boy and girl from Russia. She homeschooled her four birth children and the girl she had adopted, but the boy was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. My aunt did not bother to try to understand his learning needs, and rather than alter her own teaching, she sent him to public school.

She was very abusive. She eventually kicked him out, and he tells stories of eating rats at the park when he was homeless. He is now in a transitional program.

I got my bachelor’s degree in sociology and women’s and ethnic studies, and I spent a lot of time learning about domestic violence because I had experienced it from a boyfriend in high school.

It was not until recently that I realized how common my cousin’s story is.

While the details of the situation vary, abuse seems to be common in families that homeschool.

When researching domestic violence and volunteering at a local shelter, I have found very little about children, even adult children, escaping abusive homes and even less about children of homeschool families. One of the only things I have heard is that the majority of homeless teens are escaping abusive homes, though this tells us little about the circumstances surrounding these escapes.

Little academic research has been conducted about abuse in homeschool environments, and the research that has occurred is necessarily incomplete.

Even surveys like the annual survey (part 1 and part 2 and part 3) conducted by the Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (HARO) group rely on a volunteer sample from the Internet, although it gathers much data that other organizations have not yet attempted to collect and analyzed. Informal surveys are not accessible to people without Internet access, and rely on snowballing (people take it and share it with others from the same population), which tends to yield a more homogenous sample.

Further academic research is needed to determine risk factors for homeschool environments.

Part of the reason so little research has been conducted is because it is simply difficult to properly conduct. Homeschool policies differ based on the state and sometimes even the school district, and record-keeping may also look very different on a state-by-state basis.

It is impossible for a researcher to gather demographics of the homeschool population with inconsistent records or use these records to gather a good, random sample.

Without resources like time and money, a researcher will have difficulty conducting research with homeschool families, especially if these families are reluctant to allow a person to question their motives, tactics, and overall situations.

There are increased difficulties in trying to conduct research with minors; for example, parents who homeschool their children are under no obligation to provide consent for their children to participate in a research project, even if said children would like to participate.

Many, though certainly not all, homeschool families are connected to a church, and the church may be involved in hiding abuse occurring within these families. Many families feel deep paranoia and are not willing to participate in research if they do not perceive the researcher as an ally in some way, such as a member of their church or at least the larger denomination.

The homeschool population is not easy for researchers to access, which is likely one of the primary reasons there is so little research about this population.

It is also possible that researchers lack awareness of the problem. They must be made aware that there is abuse in the homeschool population before they can consider researching it.

My recent awareness of the abuse in the homeschool population has sparked my interest in researching it, but I know there are many struggles to overcome in attempting to reach this population. I also know there are only so many resources available to a person with my current education level, and I may have to set aside this potential research project until I am further educated and perhaps even employed in a university or other research institution.

I can only hope by the time I am fully equipped to conduct this research, others have already done so.

Shelby Shively is a sociology graduate student at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and former columnist for the student newspaper, The Scribe.

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