'I grew up in a cult and then I got free... but who was I?'

Bexy Cameron was raised by the infamous Children of God but then expelled, with nowhere to go, aged just 15. So began an often traumatic search to find herself. She tells her story...

- Bexy Cameron

My parents joined the Children of God in the early 1970s. Back then, it was very much part of the Jesus freaks, hippy revolution. There were lots of people wanting to change the world, to have a different way of being, living outside what was happening politically and socially. I can understand why someone of that generation might say, “stop the world, I want to get off!” – which is essentially what my mum and dad did.

They joined a commune in Bromley. In some ways they were completely separate from society; in others, they were out in it every day, singing and trying to recruit new members. When you have a cult that has gone on for as long as The Children of God [incarnations have been around since 1968], the belief systems inside of it change with the wind. They’ll change based on how the leader is thinking that day, what they “download” from God – and, potentially, how corrupt they’ve become.

By the time I was born, it had gone from being this “revolution for Jesus”-type community to one that was very dangerous. The leader had gone from talking about free love and peace to creating an environment that was toxic and abusive, especially for children. My parents had joined one type of group, and my 11 siblings and I were born into something different.

How can people become so desensitised to the world that they’re in? In the world of cults, you hear this analogy a lot about the frog and the boiling water. If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it’ll jump straight out. But if you put them into cold water and slowly turn up the heat... well, they’ll boil to death.

When you are born into something that is separate from society, that’s your “normal”. It was our “normal” to grow up thinking that we were soldiers for the Armageddon, and that we were going to have superpowers, and that we were going to die as teenagers. Amid this petri dish of weirdness, though, our day-to-day was mundane, and really hard work.