Alex Constantine - September 16, 2007
Globe and Mail, September 4, 2007
Born into abusive grip of a cult - Community of Jesus parents abandoned their teen daughter at now-shuttered school
MICHAEL VALPY
Ruth Buddington was 13 when she was brought to Grenville Christian College in Brockville, Ont., as a prisoner of her cult-member parents.
Ordered by a Massachusetts child probation officer to let their daughter see a therapist and to take therapy with her, her parents instead fled the probation officer's jurisdiction and drove Ms. Buddington across the Canadian border to the elite Anglican private school, left her there and didn't see her again for a long time.
Ms. Buddington's account of the next four years of her life at the school - including a story of having her face pushed against a window into the school boiler and being told that the flames she saw inside were the flames of hell she was destined for - echoes the stories told by many former students who have been posting on a website organized by Ms. Buddington and have been interviewed by The Globe and Mail.
Amid widespread allegations that Grenville was run for more than 25 years by a cult, the school abruptly announced at the end of July that it was closing its doors, citing falling enrolment and rising operating costs.
‘I was treated as less than human,’ Ruth Buddington, 33, of Portland, Me., says of her time at Ontario school. (Daniel Limmer for The Globe and Mail)
The school's current and former headmasters, Rev. Gordon Mintz and Rev. Charles Farnsworth, both Anglican priests, have denied in interviews that any student was mistreated. But a former senior administrator at the school, Joan Childs, has publicly apologized for the "hurt and pain that so many experienced" and has spoken of psychological and physical abuse of students.
Ms. Buddington's account of abuse began on the trip to Canada from the self-styled Anglican Community of Jesus, which her hippie parents had joined when they were barely out of their teens (her mother is still a community nun; her father was later kicked out).
She tried jumping out of the car, but was restrained.
Within 48 hours of her arrival at Grenville, Ms. Buddington, now 33 and living in Portland, Me., was pulled from her bed by three staff women in the middle of the night, dragged into a room and berated for several hours for allegedly criticizing the leaders of the Community of Jesus, which had close ties with Grenville. (The cult leaders, known as Mother Cay and Mother Judy, were at the time living on the Grenville campus.) She was then placed on "discipline," not allowed to talk or attend classes or wear the school uniform and spent her days scrubbing pots, floors and toilets and asking God to change her heart. The several-week sentence, she said, ended only after she wrote a series of letters to the headmaster saying her heart had indeed been changed.
That event, Ms. Buddington said in an interview, was the beginning of four nightmarish years at Grenville, where she experienced constant psychological abuse, isolation, punishment and humiliation at the hands of school staff before eventually running away.
"I was treated as less than human," she said. She said she lived in constant fear of punishment and was depressed and frequently suicidal. Repeated requests to get psychological help were denied by school authorities.
The school appeared to have a double image.
The face it showed to boarding students from wealthy Ontario and overseas families was of a strict, religious but otherwise unremarkable private school with a solid academic reputation.
The face it showed to the children of staff members and the Community of Jesus, and the boys and girls sent to Grenville by their frustrated parents to have their behavioural problems "fixed," was of a psychologically bizarre and destructive Christian community.
From a number of accounts, former students tried for years to bring public attention to what went on.
In 1989, for example, they attempted to get the Brockville newspaper, The Recorder and Times, to publish an account.
The paper devoted considerable resources to investigating the school. But in the end it abandoned the project after sources who had agreed to be identified suddenly refused to let their names be used and a high-powered law firm in Toronto threatened the paper with legal action from school authorities.
Ms. Buddington was literally born into the Community of Jesus.
At the age of two months, she was removed from her parents by community leaders who deemed her mother unfit. She was then passed around various community caretakers and returned to her parents at age four.
She described her parents as "in-between people" in her life and completely controlled by the cult leaders. She said day-to-day life in the cult consisted of ritualistic group humiliation and church attendance.
She was so depressed by the time she entered middle school that she was visiting the school nurse daily and begging police to put her into foster care.
Her parents fled with her to Grenville after Massachusetts child-care authorities began to show interest in her.
"I do know that living there [at Grenville] was just as bad if not worse than living at the community. For me it was the same cultural experience, and they [the school authorities] didn't have parents to answer to with me. They had free rein to do with me what they wanted."
She said that when her father was kicked out of the community "they had my mum come up to the school, and they sat me in a room and they told me that my mother represented God and my father represented the devil, and I needed to choose between my parents and therefore whether I was going to follow God or the devil. And they sat me there for hours because I refused to make that choice. Because I was old enough to know that was an insane thing to ask of a child."
She was compelled many times, she said, to take part in sessions where staff members surrounded her in a dark room and demanded that she confess her sins. She had to attend meals with other staff and community children where they were ordered to attack each other for alleged sins.
She was taken to the school boiler room and shown the flames of hell.
As she neared graduation - with grades in the 80s, she said - she asked the school guidance counsellor for help in applying to college and university and was laughed at and told she wouldn't be allowed to apply.
She put a change of clothing into a backpack and ran away two weeks after graduation. She eventually made her way back to the United States and had several troubled years, including some time spent living on the street. However, starting in 2005, she said, she pulled herself together and is now about to graduate from school to become a massage therapist.
"My story is just one of many," she told The Globe. "It's time that people stopped getting hurt."
http://religiouschildabuse.blogspot.com/2007/09/born-into-abusive-grip-of-cult.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070904.wgrenville04/BNStory/National/home
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September 11, 2007
Abuse probe widens to include ex-teachers
Globe & Mail - Canada
September 8, 2007
MICHAEL VALPY
The investigation into Grenville Christian College has widened with allegations of abuse involving former teachers – allegations that will be heard firsthand Saturday at an inquiry established by an Anglican bishop of Eastern Ontario.
Bishop George Bruce, in whose diocese the now-closed school is located, will hear from former student Richard Van Dusen how one teacher held him down while a second teacher beat him with a heavy wooden object until his underpants were soaked with blood.
Mr. Van Dusen, managing director of Toronto's contemporary dance company, Dancelands, said he sent the bishop a letter on Thursday recounting his experiences and received an e-mail back saying Bishop Bruce was treating it as a “formal complaint” – which in church language means a cause for a disciplinary inquiry where a bishop decides he has jurisdiction.
Other letters and e-mails that Bishop Bruce has deemed to be formal complaints have focused on the alleged behaviour of Rev. Charles Farnsworth, headmaster of Grenville for two decades until 1997. Mr. Van Dusen's letter makes little direct reference to Mr. Farnsworth.
Bishop Bruce has said his diocese “at no time had any contractual or de facto responsibility or control over the operations of Grenville Christian College.” But he has acknowledged he has jurisdiction over the priests connected with the school, Mr. Farnsworth and Grenville's last headmaster, Rev. Gordon Mintz.
In fact, the school flew the Anglican flag, had new buildings dedicated by Anglican bishops – including the primate, the church's national leader – and had compulsory Anglican services of worship.
Predecessors of Bishop Bruce variously sat on the board of directors and had ties with the religious community that ran the school, as well as links with a companion religious community in Massachusetts labelled a cult by the U.S. media. After Mr. Farnsworth retired in 1997, Bishop Bruce's immediate predecessor was called on for help and support as the school's religious community began to crumble.
Bishop Bruce said earlier that he has informed Mr. Farnsworth, 71, who lives in Brockville, Ont., near the school, that allegations have been made against him which the bishop is looking into.
The Globe and Mail for the past week has published accounts from former students alleging cult practices at the school and physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Joan Childs, a former senior administrator at the school, has called it an emotionally, spiritually and physically abusive place and apologized for the “hurt and pain” caused to people.
The school's board of directors met Thursday night, but vice-chairman Don Farnsworth, the reverend's son, said it would make no statements at this time.
Mr. Van Dusen, who was a Grenville student for his last two high-school grades, graduating in 1981, said in an interview: “I know my story is a bad story, a hard story for me to talk about.
“But I know from talking to other people that there are hundreds of worse stories. I just want to get that point across to the bishop, that it is something that happened in a school under the watch of Anglican priests. I have the feeling the church is trying to distance itself from this. I think the church can't really distance itself from something that happened under their watch.”
Bishop Bruce will also talk today with Jennifer Reid, a former Grenville student and now a teacher in Peterborough, Ont. He rejected her e-mail on Wednesday as a formal complaint, but later invited her to meet with him in his Kingston office.
Ms. Reid said: “I'm hoping the bishop and the chancellor [legal officer of the diocese] will see that they have some power and influence to be able to make a difference in terms of preventing this kind of abuse from ever happening again within the Anglican church.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/
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