Right on, blondie!
We had this scary cult in my province - there are others. We learned about it when the father abducted the children and mother was fighting to bring them back to the USA. The cult actually moved away because of such issues - to New England.
http://factnet.org/children-and-northeast-kingdom-cult
excerpts:
The women of the Northeast Kingdom church in Island Pond wear babushkas. Their children are beaten with rods; the children are also forbidden to entertain fantasies. Members of the cult believe that we are living in the "end-times" and that only those living a sacrificial Christian life -- which is to say, them -- will survive; the rest of us will be consigned to the Lake of Fire. Jan has seen terrified children.
Cult children are not like other children. It's more than a matter of their not being allowed toys or coloring books. Their expressions are both vacant and watchful; they are preter- naturally grave. The old house, the silent children, re- minded me -- though I am not given to hysteria -- of a scene from Village of the Damned.
The state, he said, acted on these specific allegations, obtained during child custody hearings and from affidavits from former church members:
A named four-year-old was hit fifteen to twenty times for imagining that a block of wood was a truck.
A named seven-year-old was stripped naked by several persons besides her father for asking for more food. The spanking went on until her bottom bled.
A named three-and-a-half-year-old boy was "disciplined" until his neck bled.
A named thirteen-year-old girl was stripped to her underpants and hit with a rod for being deceitful. She had as a result more than eighty welts.
A named eleven-year-old was hit with a two-by-four for laughing at a church member, receiving a large blister and bruise.
According to Burchard's document, sworn statements by witnesses and victims attest to these acts of brutality; in several instances, photographic evidence exists.