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Article

Not This Sh*t Again! High-Tension Religions and the Rise of Coercive Control in Child Protection Law

by
Marceline Blackwood
1,
Lilly Penner
2 and
Steven Foertsch
2,*
1
Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
2
Department of Sociology and Criminology, Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln, NE 68504, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Genealogy 2026, 10(4), 141; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10040141
Submission received: 27 July 2026 / Revised: 11 September 2026 / Accepted: 14 September 2026 / Published: 17 September 2026
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Kinship, Care, and Coercion: Historical Narratives of Family and Power in U.S. and Global Contexts)
Versions Notes

Abstract

Social scientists and scholars of high-tension religious groups (often referred to as new religious movements or emergent religious groups) have spent nearly half a century debunking the social psychological theory of “brainwashing.” But there is now a veritable brainwashing legal renaissance in child protection guidelines in Japan, several US states, and the UK through the concept of “coercive control.” In this exploratory perspective piece, we trace the ideological lineage of mid-century anti-cult rhetoric into twenty-first-century childcare and child protection frameworks. We argue that the legal doctrine and cultural logic of parens patriae, one means by which the state regulates and mandates the construction of care, is increasingly weaponized to regulate parental religious socialization under the guise of psychological safeguarding, building upon Japanese anti-cult educational guidelines and the American OneTaste trafficking legal case precedent. We hope that this brief discussion pushes back on recent international appetite for the suppression of “deviant” religious liberty within the family unit.

1. Introduction

In this article, we argue that the increased use of “coercive control” rhetoric among psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, and other scholars of violence and religion presents challenges that have not been addressed. Namely, coercive control and related concepts like brainwashing and mind control have a long and polemical history in the field of religious studies pertaining to what many call “new religious movements” (NRMs). In this article, we seek to elaborate on the history of this term and its usage among scholars and other interested parties, primarily in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom (for other geographic contexts like Australia, see Doherty (2026d); for former Soviet states, see the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (2020); and for Argentina, see Introvigne (2026a, 2026b)).
The 2026 conference of the International Cultic Studies Association featured about 28 items on its schedule, including speaker sessions and panels, directly or indirectly referring to the concept of “coercive control.” This concept has seemingly become more relevant to the work of many scholars, including cultic studies scholars. We find it necessary to cast a critical eye on this concept: How could coercive control impact the lives of members of new religious movements (or what we term “high-tension religions” or “emergent religious groups”—see Bromley and Melton (2012); Foertsch (2022, 2025); Foertsch and Yang (2026)) Although we do not present exact answers to this question, we hope to encourage more critical thought and consideration of coercive control and its various applications.
We do not present a wholesale rejection of coercive control as an analytic term. Coercive control is formally defined as “a systematic pattern of behavior that establishes dominance over another person” (Stark 2007; Stuart 2025). There are instances where scholarly applications of coercive control are productive. We believe that using coercive control to better understand intimate partner violence (IPV) is an effective means of employing this concept to better the lives of others. Other areas of care and family studies stand to benefit from the concept of coercive control as well (see Kamerman and Kahn (1981); Van Howe (2025); Pérez and Lugo (2026)). However, we believe that applying the concept to groups of people, particularly religious groups, presents a major problem (see Introvigne (2026b); Sessions and Doherty (2021); Doherty (2026a, 2026b, 2026c, 2026d)). (This is particularly true now that the Parliament of Victoria in Australia recommended legislation to criminalize “group-based coercion.” See Symons and Kendall (2026) and Doherty (2026a, 2026b, 2026c).) Coercive control narratives applied to groups allow for the complete regulation of religious liberties and a betrayal of religious freedom protections present in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. We still believe, however, that individuals within high-tension religious groups can perpetuate violence against intimate partners and others, which can be described as “coercive control.”
Recently, governments in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom have passed legislation or guidelines against coercive control. The legal concept of parens patriae is particularly relevant to these legal precedents. Here, we seek to examine these statutes and related court cases to better determine how this concept can be used to affect the lives of members of high-tension religions materially and legally. To begin, this article will briefly detail the history of the concept of coercive control and related ideas like brainwashing, mind control, and deprogramming. Then, we examine statutes and court cases in Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States that directly relate to coercive control law. We argue that coercive control law, though potentially useful against individuals conducting IPV, should not be used against groups of people, particularly high-tension religious groups, following the work of scholars such as Introvigne (2026a, 2026b).

2. Brainwashing, Deprogramming, and the Anti-Cult Movement

Although the concept of brainwashing predates the Cold War, in the 1950s, the United States experienced a great panic over brainwashing. Starting with (supposed) CIA agent Edward Hunter’s accounts of American prisoners of war in China soon after the Korean War, brainwashing was heavily associated with communism (Hoesly 2026; Parker 2021; Introvigne 2026a). The history of this concept is beyond the scope of this paper; however, we agree with Eileen Barker when, in 1984, she wrote that “We cannot assume that because the Unification Church [or any other new religious movement] is a bad/wrong/ill-conceived/incomprehensive movement, its membership can be recruited only by mind-control deception” (Barker 1984, pp. 7–8).
Soon, though, brainwashing would be extensively used to describe the activities of high-tension religious groups like the Unification Church, the Church of Scientology, and the Children of God (now The Family International). It was through his son’s interactions with the Children of God that compelled Ted Patrick to invent the practice known as deprogramming in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Parker 2021; Ushiyama 2019). Deprogramming is the practice of hiring someone to essentially “unbrainwash” someone. Most of the time, deprogramming is done against members of high-tension religious groups like the Unification Church, but as Parker (2021) shows, deprogrammers occasionally deprogram people for queer sexual orientation (similar to those conducting “conversion therapy” on gay and transgender people) and political affiliations. Many cases of deprogramming include the use of kidnapping, false imprisonment, and food, water, and sleep deprivation. This is because deprogrammers believe that to undo the brainwashing one must use the same or similar techniques.
Patrick and other disgruntled parents formed what would eventually become the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), which was the leading anti-cult and cult awareness organization in the United States until its eventual bankruptcy in 1996 through various lawsuits with members of the Church of Scientology and other NRMs. The CAN had a referral kickback system that propped up many deprogrammers, including Ted Patrick (Shupe and Darnell 2006). When someone would call in to the CAN for help with a member of a high-tension religion (or any affiliation that the caller does not like), the CAN would refer them to a deprogrammer. When the deprogrammer was eventually paid, they would kick back some of the money to the CAN, creating a sort of deprogramming syndicate.
Many scholars of new religious movements raised ethical concerns over the frequency of deprogrammings in the United States from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. However, only once the CAN filed for bankruptcy—and its files and other assets were bought up by wealthy members of the Church of Scientology—did deprogramming become very infrequent in the United States.1
During this same time, an ongoing debate—sometimes called the “Cult Wars”—was raging in American and British academies. On one side, many sociologists of religion, historians of religion, and religious studies scholars rejected brainwashing as an explanation for the rise of membership in high-tension religious groups in the 1960s and 1970s (see, e.g., Barker (1984), Bromley and Richardson (1983), and Introvigne (2022)). On the other, some psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists believed that brainwashing had its merits for explaining this new religious phenomenon. These debates culminated into two distinct fields of study: the field of new religious movement (NRM) studies and cultic studies. Support for the “brainwashing thesis,” as NRM studies scholars have termed it, is the key difference between the two fields of study (Parker 2021). Generally, NRM studies scholars reject brainwashing as an explanation for membership in NRMs, whereas cultic studies scholars are more likely to believe that brainwashing—or something similar like “thought reform”—are central to explaining NRM membership.
A few cultic studies participants were also deprogrammers, namely, Steven Hassan and Rick Alan Ross (Parker 2021; Introvigne 2026c). However, because of various lawsuits (particularly from Scientologists) against deprogrammers, Hassan and Ross changed their practices to avoid the more harmful activities of deprogramming like false imprisonment and kidnapping. Thus, a “non-coercive” form of deprogramming emerged called exit counseling, one example of which being Steven Hassan’s BITE model, through which he developed what he calls the “Strategic Interaction Approach” (Hassan 2020; Introvigne 2026c). The core goal of this activity, however, is the same as deprogramming: disaffiliate whoever is being counseled from an identity (usually from a high-tension religion).
Coercive control narratives have been used to study high-tension religious groups since the 1970s. In 1979, Susan Andersen and Philip Zimbardo (the psychologist behind the Stanford Prison Experiment) produced a technical research report to the Office of Naval Intelligence at Stanford University. “Cults” and “coercive control” are among the keywords in this report, which suggests methods of reducing “susceptibility to unwanted coercive control” (Andersen and Zimbardo 1979). Sessions and Doherty (2021) cover the history of the term “coercive control” in cultic studies scholarship to the present, which we feel no need to reproduce in detail here.

3. Coercive Control

Coercive control has been used as a concept to better understand battered women and IPV contexts, largely in the “feminist pathways” criminological literature (see Mallicoat (2019) for a good overview). Typically found in heterosexual relationship couplings and within the context of patriarchy, applying these standards can be seen as a gross overinflation of the original analytic object to group coercive control, hypothetically discovered in high-tension religious groups. This slippage is analytically and conceptually precipitous, because it takes a framework developed from a typical dyadic scenario rooted in the structurally enabled abuses of patriarchy and applies it to vastly different religious groups that have radically different conceptions of gender norms, sexuality norms, individual regulation level, childrearing practices, etc. A blanket application of the categories found in typical coercive control measures in academic studies (such as what is found in Raghavan and Doychak (2025)) and legal codes becomes a massive conceptual overreach that must be pushed back against in the context of high-tension religions.
Coercive control-like abuse certainly could happen in the context of high-tension or minority religions, but that does not mean that the full group should be held guilty of coercive control. As a court would not condemn the entire Catholic Church for the pedophilic tendencies of one priest, one cannot condemn the entire religious group for coercive control mechanics potentially found within its membership. Within the legal framework of coercive control as used in the context of high-tension religions, the law would need to focus on holding accountable the specific leaders or intimate partners that perpetrate this type of abuse, typically captured within more established legal and evidentiary precedent, rather than immediately moving to criminalize religious behaviors through the conceptually open-ended coercive control parameters that are now developing and being legally codified.
While there are no doubt instances in which abuse happens through coercion, our contention is that coercive control could be propagated in US courts to further the anti-cult “brainwashing” thesis, which has widely been considered debunked by sociologists and religious studies scholars for decades (Introvigne 2026a, 2026c). The recent rise in cultural hegemonic normativity associated with the growing influence of state integralist movements (such as Christian nationalism and Christofascism; see Foertsch (2026a, 2026b); Foertsch and Pieper (2023); Foertsch et al. (2024); Foertsch and Dougherty (2025); Py (2020, 2021a, 2021b); Whitehead and Perry (2020); Gorski and Perry (2022); Stewart (2022)), as well as a form of assertive secularism that decries religious “abuse,” has created a perfect storm that in other countries led to a strong deprogramming movement (especially in Japan, South Korea, France, etc.—see Introvigne (2026b); Duval (2026); Ushiyama (2019); Parker (2025); Tanaka (2026)). This alliance of evangelical integralists and secular anti-religionists creates the strong conditions for the codification of deprogramming into the corpus of law, which then takes on an influence of its own.
Coercive control laws are typically relegated to civil cases in the United States, which are on the books in Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, and Colorado. Related to our topic, parental fitness is determined to resolve custody disputes. Lawyers aligned with the anti-cult movement (on either partisan side) could use evidence of non-physical manipulation, such as financial manipulation, isolation, and surveillance (Santo 2025), to argue for religiously motivated abuse (Duval 2026; Introvigne 2026b).
Hawaii is currently the only state to have criminalized coercive control, which occurred in 2021 (Hawaii Revised Statutes 2025), making it a charge in criminal cases. It is considered a petty misdemeanor. The statute defines coercive control as “a pattern of behavior that seeks to take away the individual’s liberty or freedom and strip away the individual’s sense of self” (Hawaii Revised Statutes 2025). Not soon after, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1141 allowing coercive control to be used as an explanation for seeking civil protective orders (Stuart 2025). State lawmakers in Washington tried and failed in 2021 to also make it a criminal gross misdemeanor (Washington State Legislature House 2021), and a bill is pending in New York to make it a felony (New York State Legislature 2025) (Santo 2025). As one may have noticed, the wording of these definitions is quite vague. State legislatures throughout the United States have a clear interest in civilly and criminally punishing coercive control in IPV contexts, but some are attempting to use coercive control in the regulation of religion. The work of Sarah Feliciano (Feliciano 2023; Feliciano et al. 2020; Feliciano and Raghavan 2025) represents the latest attempts at bridging the concepts of cult and coercive control,2 in addition to the recent surge in scholarship from the International Cultic Studies Association connecting “cults” and coercive control.3

4. Legal Precedent and Court Cases Regarding Coercive Control

4.1. Parens Patriae

Parens patriae is a legal principle that was established in the English Middle Ages and became part of the Common Law tradition (Clark and Katz 2021; Wadlington et al. 2026). It originally referred to the monarch’s role as a father to all his subjects in the country. Eventually, it morphed into the legal role of the state as the ultimate “parent of last resort,” where the state assumes the role of the parent when no other guardian is immediately competent and forthcoming (Ingram and Ryals 2020, pp. 1–2). This legal principle was used in the creation of the juvenile justice system in the late nineteenth century. The first juvenile court act was passed in Illinois in 1899 (Springer 1986, p. 20). Called The Act to Regulate the Treatment and Control of Dependent, Neglected, and Delinquent Children, it established the first dedicated juvenile court in the nation, which established parental surrogacy: “This act shall be liberally construed, to be the end that its purpose may be carried out, to-wit: That the care, custody, and discipline of a child shall approximate as nearly as may be that which should be given by parent” (Ingram and Ryals 2020, p. 2).
In contemporary America, the parens patriae doctrine makes it the state that ultimately judges who is or is not a competent parent, and once deemed insufficient, usurps the familial function from the family unit and displaces it into the state (historically the absolutist sovereign, now the nation-state collectivity). This is one of the basic starting points of the intrusion of the state into what Habermas (1985) would call the lebenswelt after Husserl (1970), where the everyday life of the individual is slowly colonized by the state apparatus.
The legitimate use of violence upon the individual (Weber 1978; Foucault 1995), which is granted to the state asymmetrically through the biopolitical power dominance structure (Foucault 1995), creates a situation in which the parental role is usurped by the state at the threat of violence. In many cases, this extrication is a necessary role that the state must play out to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Nevertheless, parens patriae as legal and cultural logic (Bourdieu 1986, 1992; Enfield 2000) creates the continued condition for the intervention of the state into the individual family unit, a situation that is ripe for potential misuse. Parens patriae allows the state to construct conditions of care that may prove harmful to vulnerable populations like children, women, and queer people. Coercive control laws, then, are founded on these principles, in which the state is the ultimate “parent” to its subjects, and are one of many legal apparatuses of the construction of care that may harm vulnerable groups. Coercive control law, especially when coercive control is categorized as a criminally punishable offense, requires strict, unambiguous delineations, as we argue; otherwise, it would allow the state to hamper religious freedom rights for members of high-tension religious groups in favor of normativity.

4.2. Religious Abuse and Deprogramming in Japanese Public Schools

Japan is a hallmark case of how coercive control and child protection legal guidelines can develop if unchecked (Introvigne 2026b). In Duval’s (2026) article “Unification Church in Japan: After the Dissolution, the Purge,” the parens patriae governmentality (Foucault 1978) is found in full blush in Japanese anti-cult guidelines adopted by the government after influence from secular anti-cult activists.
The guidelines published by the Japanese Government Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare on 27 December 2022 argue that “making a child attend religious services when they do not feel like it or participate in religious activities constitutes ‘psychological abuse,’ and that imprinting continuous fear since childhood through verbal reprimands or references to ‘hell’ constitutes child abuse.” (Duval 2026, p. 39). The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (an entity whose mandate the United States no longer recognizes, as of February 2025) interceded to remind the Japanese government that this is a dangerous lower threshold of establishing abuse in religious settings (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 2025).
The goal in the Japanese context is to “de-indoctrinate” and “re-educate” second-generation (children) believers away from their parents’ faith using the public school system (Duval 2026, pp. 35–37). As such, the government uses anti-cult language as guidelines for teachers, school staff, and counselors (Duval 2026, pp. 40–43) as they meet with students to ascertain whether there is “religious abuse” afoot (“child abuse related to religious belief”—see Duval 2026, pp. 32, 35), in a striking example of a violation of freedom of conscience and religious association (see Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights; United Nations General Assembly (1948)).
These policy guidelines utilize the state role as a parent of last resort (otherwise known as the legal principle of parens patriae) to position the state in between the parent and child during the process of religious socialization. As we can see in the Japanese context after the disbandment of the Unification Church due to the assassination of former President Shinzo Abe, the role of the state in child protection becomes a forceful systemic function of asserting hegemonic religious normativity.

4.3. United States Human Trafficking Laws and the OneTaste Case

In the United States, the anti-cult movement has inserted its basic elements (namely, Hassan’s (2020) BITE model) into legal precedent regarding the protection of women, which will undoubtedly be used to foster children reprogramming. This legal precedent, found mostly in cases on human trafficking, is the legal precedent that Hassan himself has been desperate to establish (Introvigne 2026a).4
In 1988, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in United States v. Kozminski (1988) that involuntary servitude required physical or legal coercion and that extending this statute to psychological coercion alone would criminalize ordinary religious relationships, such as volunteering to put chairs back after a church bake sale (Introvigne 2026c). Congress, however, amended the law through the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (2000), adding psychological means as a basis of forced labor charges. Since then, psychological coercion arguments and training, largely based on Hassan’s “deprogramming lite” BITE model, have been found in FBI and Department of Justice documents.
For reference, Steven Hassan’s BITE model is built upon his mentor Margaret Singer’s brainwashing thesis, which was formally ruled as inadmissible after a review of hundreds of academic documents in the United States v. Fishman (1990) (The European Court of Human Rights also similarly ruled against the Russian government’s claims of brainwashing in Jehovah’s Witnesses of Moscow and Others v. Russia (2010)). BITE stands for “Behavior,” “Information,” “Thought,” and “Emotional control,” and applies indicators for each category that are so broad they can be applied to any group, religious or not (Introvigne 2026c). Hassan’s (2020) dissertation on the topic set out to prove the theory, but as external observers like Italian NRM and legal scholar Massimo Introvigne point out, it falls prey to self-selection bias from ex-member sampling, similar to Feliciano’s thesis (Introvigne 2026c; Feliciano 2023).
The OneTaste case and ruling, also known as the United States v. Cherwitz (2026), was a watershed moment where previously debunked brainwashing theory and the BITE model were used to convict two religious leaders of labor trafficking. Hassan served as the personal therapist to multiple government witnesses and repeatedly appeared in media surrounding the case (Introvigne 2026a, 2026b; Introvigne and Vardé 2026). This ruling was curious, as the initial suit was aimed at proving sexual misconduct related to the group’s use of mindfulness meditation to reach female orgasm. This investigation found little evidence, and the prosecutors then turned to newly developing FBI training that depends on Hassan’s BITE model to pursue a conviction of forced labor entirely based on an unfounded legal theory of psychological coercion.
The legal precedent allows for a major challenge to religious freedom, which is now structural (Introvigne 2026a, 2026b). Through trafficking law and the OneTaste case ruling, any spiritual or religious group can now be accused of psychological coercion and manipulation by prosecutorial proof of intense commitment, volunteer labor, or deference to leadership. This means, in function and in practice, that every religion is vulnerable—not just high-tension groups. But, as is almost always the case, unpopular minority groups accused of being “cults” (typically through a function of normativity regulation) are far more frequently targeted. This is even though studies have shown that actual sexual abuse is far more statistically likely in mainline religions than in new religious movements (Šorytė 2026, p. 73; Shupe 1995, 1998, 2000, 2007).

4.4. The United Kingdom

Under Section 76 of the UK’s Serious Crime Act (2015) abuse expanded beyond its traditional legal framework to recognize patterns of coercive control. For prosecution, the following must be present: repeated, continuous patterns of psychological abuse, coercion that occurs in an interpersonal dynamic, and evidence that the victim faces impairment in their daily life. This must be reasonably alarming behavior for a reasonable person (Serious Crime Act 2015).
Subsection 3 of the Serious Crime Act (2015) exempts parental authority if the child is under the age of 16. In doing so, parental authority is recognized to have a degree of control that supports normative parenting. This functions to prevent normative parenting from criminalization (Serious Crime Act 2015). This exemption of parental control from criminalization resembles the legal defenses that deprogrammers like Ted Patrick used historically to support their activities (Parker 2021, p. 196). This could be considered a subtle piece of evidence of the influence of anti-cult and cult awareness rhetoric and argumentation manifesting in UK law.
Although not entirely related to the Serious Crime Act (2015), there is some precedent of the UK government formally supporting the idea of “coercive control” attribution to groups rather than just individuals. At the University of Salford, a master’s degree program is available to students in “Coercive Control” (also available as a postgraduate diploma and certificate). Drs. Linda and Rod Dubrow-Marshall, the latter being a board member of the International Cultic Studies Association, created and primarily administer the program. Salford is a public university, which receives at least some funding from the UK government. Although this does not necessarily show that the UK government is in full support of studies on group-based coercive control, it is evidence that the government is growing accustomed to funding projects and programs on the idea.

4.5. Coercive Control Laws in the United States

The US federal government has no federal statutes against “coercive control” aside from the psychological coercion elements found within the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, but some states have enacted explicit laws against it like Hawaii and California. US courts can now use the legal precedent of coercive control to affect legal outcomes on childcare.
In 2020, the California legislature amended a section of its Family Code to include restrictions on coercive control (Garrett 2023). It amended a section dictating limitations on awarding custody of children to separating parents based on somewhat vague criteria. The new change considers “coercive control” to be any of the following: “Isolating the other party from friends, relatives, or other sources of support,” “Depriving the other party of basic necessities,” “Controlling, regulating, or monitoring the other party’s movements, communications, daily behavior, finances, economic resources, or access to services,” and “Compelling the other party by force, threat of force, or intimidation, including threats based on actual or suspected immigration status, to engage in conduct from which the other party has a right to abstain or to abstain from conduct in which the other party has a right to engage” (California Family Code 2025). Isolation, deprivation, and force are not necessarily concepts limited to the anti-cult sphere of thought, but through the written materials of some anti-cultists and some cultic studies scholars, “coercive control” seems to heavily resemble the ways that “cults” recruit and control members (see Hassan 2015). Although not in a NRM context, Hazani v. Hazani (2022) is one case in which California coercive control law was used to decide who retained custody of the children in a Jewish divorce (see Silverberg 2025; California Family Code 2025).
The state legislature of Hawaii passed a comparable bill in 2020 about coercive control. It defines “coercive control” similarly to the 2020 California law. It defines it as “a pattern of threatening, humiliating, or intimidating actions, which may include assaults, or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten an individual” (Hawaii Revised Statutes 2025). It is a “pattern of behavior that seeks to take away the individual’s liberty or freedom and strip away the individual’s sense of self, including bodily integrity and human rights” and is “designed to make an individual dependent by isolating them from support, exploiting them, depriving them of independence, and regulating their everyday behavior” (Hawaii Revised Statutes 2025). The law’s insistence that coercive control is an attempt to “take away the individual’s liberty or freedom” or their “sense of self” resembles exit counselor Steven Hassan’s understanding of “cultic” behavior (Hassan 2015). NRM scholars have noted that anti-cult sentiments are not necessarily anti-religious sentiments (Parker 2021), so although these and other coercive control laws are not targeting religion specifically, they do not have to be in order to be influenced by anti-cult theory.

5. Discussion

While the First Amendment to the US Constitution allows for the freedom of exercise when it comes to religious belief, the coercive control legal precedent that is emerging in US states and internationally creates an opportunity for anti-cultism to use parens patriae and the biopolitical function of the state to interrupt religious socialization and pick a winner in the religious market, much like what we can see in the Japanese case. While this is not happening en masse across the country yet, these laws may allow a systematic and structural way to legalize deprogramming through moral appeals made to protect children, as it has in the human trafficking precedent (the OneTaste case). As scholars who study new religious movements and believe in religious freedom, we would be remiss not to point this out. Though we do not reject the legal precedent of coercive control en toto, we urge lawmakers to further specify coercive control definitions as dyadic to eliminate potential ambiguity. A stronger measure would isolate the abusive criminal mechanics without drifting into discussions of religion operating as a form of abusive control (for more, see Goodwin 2020).
In a premier anti-cult journal International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation, Lagorse (2026) writes the following passage:
“In conclusion, I argue that cultic groups are a specific context in which women are subject to male authority, and using the term “patriarchal communities” to describe them is possible. In this context, coercive control theory seems relevant for understanding women’s experiences within cultic groups. First, it appears to be a context that resembles an intimate partner violence context, but what makes it different is that control comes from both the leader and the other members of the group”.
(Lagorse 2026, p. 99)
Lagorse, among others, make a mistake that we should be wary of codifying into legality. The shift from intimate partner violence frameworks from individual accountability to group accountability (like a RICO criminal conspiracy, a charge with an infamous history in NRM studies—see Singer and Ofshe’s lawsuit of the American Psychological Association, American Sociological Association, and roughly two dozen new religious movement scholars dismissed in 1993 (Singer v. American Psychological Association (1993)) is exactly the type of legal slippage that scholars should reject. The dynamics are completely different (Introvigne 2026a, 2026b). If fully implemented and codified, coercive control legislation derived from this epistemology can be used to fully criminalize whole religious groups. Where does the carceralization process of the state end (Foucault 1978, 1995)? Indeed, many feminist scholars ask as much.5 This would be a flagrant abuse of legal power and potentially lead to a criminalization of non-normative religious practice en toto, flying in the face of the First Amendment and providing the legal precedent for state-led deprogramming.
Building upon a carceral feminist epistemology found in Lamboley et al. (2022) that automatically assumes that all high-tension religious groups are patriarchal in organizational practice (which is an unfounded assumption), the extension of the IPV literature into coercive control embeds a conceptual slippage from individual accountability to group accountability. While the authors pay lip service to criticism of this slippage and danger to religious freedom largely coming from sociologists of religion like Eileen Barker and James T. Richardson (Lamboley et al. 2022, p. 38), they press forward with the well-known anti-cult perspective of sociologist Janja Lalich. This lack of critical interrogation when incorporating “cults” into the coercive control literature is also seen quite readily in Duron et al. (2021), who unquestioningly add “cults” to the list of coercive control contexts alongside human trafficking, intimate partner violence, and child and elder abuse.
Rather than assuming a “high-control” environment with the assumption of an omnipotent and abusive leader, criminological theories should acknowledge the literature indicating that “high-control” religious settings are often collaborative, agential, and self-selecting (Richardson 2021; Prophet 2016). A reliance on “ex-member accounts” has a known effect on research findings—mainly that it sensationalizes and dramatizes accounts of trauma and has response bias (for example, see Bromley et al. (1979) and Introvigne (2026c)). This is the same issue that fueled the “Cult Wars” of the 1970s and 1980s—reliance on ex-member accounts to support claims of brainwashing to encourage deprogramming (as seen in Hassan’s BITE model (Hassan 2020) and Feliciano’s thesis (Feliciano 2023)). The only difference is now anti-cultism is gaining a legitimate foothold for establishing religious regulation policy (deprogramming) through FBI training and law that protects battered and trafficked women and abused children (Introvigne 2026b).

6. Conclusions

Our goal is not to recreate the Cult Wars of the 1970s and 1980s. We acknowledge the adage of NRM scholarship: “some groups are criminal some of the time.” We are concerned, then, about the increase in scholars and lawmakers using coercive control frameworks to understand group settings. In 2026, the International Cultic Studies Association’s annual conference hosted at least 28 items on its schedule relating to coercive control, almost all of which used it to understand group dynamics. In approximately the last five years, numerous US states have passed civil and criminal legislation against “coercive control,” which is at least partially founded on anti-cult theory.
We are concerned about the potential for use of coercive control legislation to discriminate against new religious movements and, for lack of a better term, use the state as an anti-cult weapon, such as what we see in the OneTaste case. In Japan, for example, the state ordered the dissolution of the Unification Church, a notorious new religious movement, after a court found the NRM guilty of fraud (Duval 2026; Kuhn 2026). We suspect that, despite the Unification Church being particularly controversial in Japan after the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, this is not the end. Coercive control law and its usage as a framework for understanding group dynamics rather than dyadic ones may be used in the near future against other high-tension religions—harmful or not.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, M.B. and S.F.; formal analysis, M.B.,L.P. and S.F.; investigation, M.B.,L.P. and S.F.; writing—original draft preparation, M.B.,L.P. and S.F.; writing—review and editing, M.B. and S.F.; supervision, S.F.; project administration, S.F.; funding acquisition, S.F. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

No new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to Bernard Doherty, Gordon Melton, and our thoughtful reviewers for their guidance during this project.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Notes

1
Most of these files were deposited at the Department of Special Research Collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
2
Though not directly referring to coercive control in group settings, Feliciano et al. (2020) contributed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Law Enforcement Bulletin about IPV. Feliciano clearly is a point of contact with the FBI when pertaining to coercive control, so the turn toward using that framework against high-tension religions in Feliciano’s master’s thesis and its citation by government agencies, like the Victoria Parliament in Australia (Doherty 2026d), represents a mainstreaming of this train of thought in scholarly circles.
3
This is especially true, since the 2026 International Cultic Studies Association’s annual conference was themed around “cults” and coercive control.
4
In particular, Hassan and Shah (2019) argued that “There is a need to update the legal system to recognize the use of hypnosis and undue influence occurring throughout the world” (p. 97).
5
It is worth noting that non-carcel feminists, the authors of this article included, believe that incarceration and coercive control laws are not the right means of dealing with violence against women.

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Blackwood, M.; Penner, L.; Foertsch, S. Not This Sh*t Again! High-Tension Religions and the Rise of Coercive Control in Child Protection Law. Genealogy 2026, 10, 141. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10040141

AMA Style

Blackwood M, Penner L, Foertsch S. Not This Sh*t Again! High-Tension Religions and the Rise of Coercive Control in Child Protection Law. Genealogy. 2026; 10(4):141. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10040141

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Blackwood, Marceline, Lilly Penner, and Steven Foertsch. 2026. "Not This Sh*t Again! High-Tension Religions and the Rise of Coercive Control in Child Protection Law" Genealogy 10, no. 4: 141. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10040141

APA Style

Blackwood, M., Penner, L., & Foertsch, S. (2026). Not This Sh*t Again! High-Tension Religions and the Rise of Coercive Control in Child Protection Law. Genealogy, 10(4), 141. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy10040141

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