WARNING DISTRESSING CONTENT: Growing up inside a horrifying cult where children were treated as a ‘workforce’ and regularly subjected to abuse, Becky Cameron now uses her trauma to educate others
Born inside a terrifying cult, activist and filmmaker Bexy Cameron, 42, did not know just how abnormal her childhood was.
Her parents had joined the Children of God community in the early 1970s, before she was born, hoping to find an alternative way of life that was in line with their hippy Christian values. But over time, the cult had become a dangerous and toxic community: one where mass orgies and child abuse was rife.
Bexy, who has written a memoir about growing up in the cult, was, along with the other children of the cult members, used as child labour, and subjected to rampant beatings and terrifying exorcisms – all of which left her with lifelong scars.
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Founded by David Berg in 1968, the Children of God had communities across the globe in over 130 countries, and actors like the late River Phoenix and Rose McGowan both spent chunks of their childhood inside it.
Phoenix described the community as “ruining people’s lives” before his death, and McGowan has been candid about the huge amount of damage living in an Italian branch of the cult did to her, telling Louis Theroux that though she had “really thought I’d escaped the programming” some aspects of how she brought up still impacted her as an adult, though it “took years to notice”.
Bexy has explained that the children in her Bromley cult branch were used as a “workforce” and so from a very young age, she was forced to cook and clean for the community of nearly 100 people, along with her 11 siblings.
“We looked after the younger kids. We cooked every single meal. We cleaned the house from top to bottom. When you have a commune of 90-odd people, that’s a lot of work. We were the glue that held it together,” she told The Independent.
The children were taught to believe that the end of the world was imminent, and would arrive within the years ahead. They were told they would suffer through “end times wars” and that none of them would make it to adulthood.
Totally separate from the normal world operating around them – people who took part in society were dubbed “systemites” – Bexy shared a cramped room with 15 other girls, as they were trained their only purpose was to be a “soldier for Christ.”
None of the children went to school or were allowed to consume art, music, or culture that everyone else enjoyed.
She explained that they were totally unprepared for adulthood because they were cruelly told the world was poised to end, and they would never make it that far anyway.
The children were also conditioned to believe that they would one day develop superpowers, which would enable them to fight in the predicted wars.
Bexy describes her childhood as being a “prisoner” to the whims of the cult, where there was rarely enough food for everyone and errant members were regularly beaten in public.
Sexual abuse was a core tenet of the cult, Bexy explained to Crime Monthly, calling it a “defining belief”.
The following year, she was caught telling a lie and subjected to a terrifying “exorcism” at age nine, which saw everyone in her community touch her across her entire body while speaking in tongues. Bexy told Crime Monthly that this left her with lifelong trauma.
“The exorcism told me I was evil. It’s quite a scary thing for a child to go through, and I had my first panic attack,” she described.
The lack of education and sexual trauma meant that many of the young female members turned to sex work when they got older, something they had been trained for.
This would see women “seduce men in bars” to get money, or to encourage the men to join the group themselves, and was a practice widely used by the cult in the 1970s and 1980s.
As a teenager, Bexy was dumped into what the cult called the “end times teen camp” which saw her undergo hugely traumatic events, including spending 11 months in total isolation, banned from speaking, making eye contact, or reacting to anything that was said to her.
“That year was one of the defining moments of my life,” she has said. “The most damaging part of it was my right to communicate being taken away…I had to act as if I were invisible, and I felt invisible. I felt like I was losing my mind. The training camps had the most effect on me. Our routines became a severe combination of army training and a spiritual camp.”
At age 15, Bexy and her family were living in a Children of God community in Leicestershire when she met an 18-year-old boy who she quickly fell for. The local teen and Bexy kept their relationship a strict secret, but he helped her secure a job at a nearby pub.
However, this would end up being the unravelling of her life with her family in the cult due to a simple mistake.
She accidentally gave her new employer the landline number of the cult, instead of her boyfriend’s, and when they rang the Children of God branch, Bexy was unceremoniously kicked out for participating in the real world – with even her own parents voting to expel her from the group.
Aged just 15, Bexy was thrown out into a world that she basically knew nothing about: “I wanted to leave,” she has said, “But not like that.”
She told the Independent: “I had to deal with the reality of being an underage kid in the big wide world. It was even scarier than I’d imagined – I had to learn to survive, work two or three jobs at once, lie about my past, pretend I’d been to school.”
Eventually, her siblings all managed to escape the cult’s clutches, and Bexy enjoys close relationships with them and her nieces and nephews – but even now, her parents remain inside the shadowy cult.
If you are affected by this story and need support, contact the Samaritans on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org or visit samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.
