The STOPLight

Techniques of coersive persuasion

Editor's note: Although the following list was supplied by the Cult Awareness Network, almost all the techniques are also used to entrap and keep people in prostitution. Substitute the words victim and pimp as you read.

• Isolation—Recruits are isolated from society and from contact with opposing points of view to prevent critical judgement.
• Peer group pressure—Recruits doubt their own convictions when everyone around them acts totally convinced of other beliefs.
• Love bombing—A beguiling sense of belonging is contrived through flattery, touching and hugging.
• Removal of privacy—One is never left alone to think through and sort out these confusing new experiences. Sleep deprivation—Adequate sleep is prevented and work hours are excessive over a long period of time making fatigued members vulnerable and disoriented.
• Games—Playing strenuous games with confusing rules builds increasing dependence on group leaders for correct answers, thus undermining the members' decision-making skills.
• Indoctrination—Members are conditioned to stop thinking and to accept without question the ‘revealed truths' from the ‘master.' Fatigue prevents them from seeing the contradictions.
• Confession—Recruits are maneuvered into sharing innermost secrets. This helps destroy personal egos, induces them to buy the new ‘truths.' Later, any escape possibilities are compromised by the knowledge that these exaggerated secrets may be revealed.
• Change of diet-Ommission of nutrients increases susceptibility to manipulation of one's emotional highs and lows.
• Guilt is used endlessly to force members to work harder and without relief. Guilt about mankind's sorry state and the member's personal sins is used as a lever to force acceptance of ‘holier' beliefs.
• Physical and spiritual fear is constantly injected to maintain group loyalty. The slightest negative thought is held to be soul threatening. Tragic consequences for self and family are prophesied for anyone leaving the group.
• Chanting and signing—Constant repetition of mind-narrowing chants block rational thought and induces a quasi-hypnotic state of high susceptibility.
• Childlike dependence is promoted by denying opportunities for normal decision-making.
• No questions are allowed—Blind acceptance is mandatory.
• Conformity in dress removes individuality and promotes disorientation.
• Elitism-Only the group is righteous; everyone else is satanic, or at best, misguided.
• Replacement of relationships is promoted by sabotaging communication between members and families. Cult-arranged marriages can further disrupt previous ties.
• Rejection of old values—Former life values are constantly denounced to make them seem worse than they are.
• Financial commitment—Members burn their bridges to the real world by donating earnings, savings and cars to the cult, thereby limiting escape possibilities for lack of money to start over again.

Do all cults (pimps) use all of these techniques? No. Are these techniques all inherently evil? Not necessarily, but their power is being destructively used by cults (and pimps) to entrap, to enslave, to coercively persuade, thus denying the very freedom of choice and of religion which the Constitution of the United States was meant to protect.