When Government Finally Says What Cult Survivors Have Been Saying All Along
I'm a little late in getting this one to the press. I wrote it not long after the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry released its report on coercion and harm in high-control groups. Figured publishing this now was better late than never.
When we were kids, “I told you so” was one of the great pleasures of being right. You'd say it with real indignantly — chin up, arms crossed, daring the other person to argue. Being vindicated felt simple. Someone was wrong, you were right, and the universe had finally caught up.
As adults, we learn it's rarely that clean. Being right doesn't undo the years it took to be believed. But every so often, something comes along that makes the ten-year-old in us want to say it anyway.
For survivors of coercive high-control groups, this was one of those moments.
For years, we've been told we were difficult cases. Mental health services treated the anxiety. Family services focused on estrangement. Police investigated isolated incidents. Child protection looked at individual risks. Each service responded to whatever piece of the puzzle landed on its desk — and almost no one recognised the puzzle itself.
We've been saying this for years: the problem was never just that individual workers lacked compassion or commitment. The problem was that the system itself had no shared understanding of coercive high-control groups.
Now, for the first time, a Parliamentary Inquiry has said exactly that.
A blind spot, confirmed in Parliament's own words
In its report Crossing the Line, the Victorian Parliamentary Legal and Social Issues Committee found that inquiry evidence from key government agencies and oversight bodies consistently pointed to the same thing: there was no system-wide understanding of coercive high-control groups.
The Committee wasn't relying solely on survivor testimony or advocacy organisations for that conclusion. It cited responses from the Department of Education, Victoria Police, the Commission for Children and Young People, and Child Protection within the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing. The agencies acknowledged the blind spot themselves.
The Inquiry went further, formalising it as a finding:
Finding 73
The services most likely to be accessed by people in or leaving coercive high-control groups were not designed with their distinct circumstances and risks in mind. This has created systemic gaps in the capacity and capability of services to identify and respond to group-based coercion.
And it named the root cause directly:
Finding 74
Understanding of the dynamics of group-based coercion is not embedded in any standard professional training or curriculum for frontline service providers in Victoria.
Why this matters to cult survivors
For decades, people leaving coercive high-control groups have moved from one service to another without anyone recognising the underlying pattern. A psychologist might see trauma. A teacher might notice a quiet child. Police might investigate family violence or fraud. Housing workers might respond to homelessness. Each professional may be doing their job to the expected standard — and still miss the thing connecting all of it, because nobody has ever trained them to look for it.
Some of these people will go on to present with mental health issues that get treated as standalone conditions, with no one ever seeing the underlying cause. Not because the cause is invisible. Because the workforce was never taught to see it.
This isn't about blaming frontline workers
One of the most encouraging aspects of the report is that it doesn't blame individual professionals. It identifies a systemic gap instead. Most teachers, psychologists, police officers, social workers, doctors and child protection practitioners have never received training in recognising coercive high-control groups. They cannot reasonably be expected to identify something they have never been taught to see.
That's a systems problem, and systems problems require systems solutions.
What the Inquiry recommends
The report doesn't stop at naming the gap. It sets a path for closing it:
Recommendation 21
The Victorian Government undertake a whole-of-system mapping of service gaps affecting people leaving coercive high-control groups. This mapping should identify services likely to be first points of contact, assess capacity and capability gaps across those services, and inform a coordinated plan for addressing them.
In practice, that means Victoria now needs shared indicators for recognising coercive high-control groups, system-wide training across every agency likely to encounter a survivor, cross-agency collaboration instead of siloed responses, trauma-informed practice that reflects survivors' actual experiences, and meaningful involvement of lived-experience experts in designing what comes next.
These aren't optional extras. They're the logical response to evidence the Inquiry has now placed on the public record.
A turning point
For many survivors, this report is more than a government document. It's recognition. For years, people have described being misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or passed from service to service without anyone seeing the bigger picture. Now Parliament has confirmed what we always said: the problem was never just individual cases. The system itself had a blind spot.
That changes the conversation. Survivors are no longer simply asking government to believe them — government agencies have acknowledged it themselves, in evidence, in findings, in a formal recommendation.
So maybe there is a little room for the ten-year-old version of “I told you so” after all. Not as a victory lap — there isn't much to celebrate in a system that took this long to see us — but as something quieter and more useful: proof. Proof that what looked like isolated hardship was a pattern all along, and that naming it is the first step toward a system built to actually catch it next time.
The question now isn't whether the gap exists. It's how quickly we close it. Cult survivors have been waiting long enough
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