Steven Hassan
Steven Alan Hassan or Steve Hassan is an author and self-proclaimed expert on "destructive cults" who left the Unification Church after breaking his leg in a car accident. He contends that the church had pressured him to drive while sleep-deprived. Hassan styles himself a high-level leader of the church, but church officials report that he was only the assistant leader of one small congregation for less than a year.
Hassan says that the Unification Church and numerous other religious groups and organizations recruit and victimize members through systematic deception, behavior modification, withholding of information, and emotionally intense persuasion techniques (such as the creation of phobias), which he collectively terms "mind control". American Psychologists Association (APA) officially rejected these theories in 1984.
He calls such religious groups destructive cults, a term that he defines by methods used to recruit and retain members (mind control, as just defined), not by the beliefs of a group. This is in contrast with others that define certains groups that hold unorthodox or controversial beliefs as cults on the basis of those beliefs alone.
After becoming an "ex-Moonie", Hassan engaged in deprogramming for a short period of time, but abandoned the practice; going on record as opposing it in favor of non-coercive methods to attempt to get members of "destructive cults" to voluntarily withdraw from them. He calls his method the "strategic interaction approach", which he views as an improvement on exit counselling.
Exit counselling is a term introduced by the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) in a pursuit to improve its image and distance itself from crimes and violence associated with deprogramming. Following the indictments of "exit counsellors" and associated civil lawsuits of their victims, CAN declared bankruptcy. Anti-cult activists sometimes substitute "exit counselling" with other terms, as Hassan does. Rick Ross, another notorious anti-cult activist and deprogrammer, call himself an "intervention specialist".
Theory of mind control
Steve Hassan wrote:
- My mind control model outlines many key elements that need to be controlled: Behavior, Information, Thoughts and Emotions (BITE). If these four components can be controlled, then an individual's identity can be systematically manipulated and changed. Destructive mind control takes the "locus of control" away from an individual. The person is systematically deceived about the beliefs and practices of the person (or group) and manipulated throughout the recruitment process- unable to make informed choices and exert independent judgment. The person's identity is profoundly influenced through a set of social influence techniques and a "new identity" is created- programmed to be dependent on the leader or group ideology. The person can't think for him or herself, but believes otherwise.
Hassan's theory is not accepted by the scientific community in general, or by U.S. courts. American Psychologists Association dismissed the theories in 1987, American Sociologists Association also supported the statement.
Books
