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Week 1 - Understanding Cults and Coercive Control

How do I Support the Strong Survivors during Cult Awareness Month?

Welcome to the inaugural International Cult Awareness Month, an awareness campaign to be celebrated every August. This website stands as a resource site and launching point for content creation by anyone passionate about helping people thrive outside of their cultic or coercive communities. Every day, social media is filled with people commenting on victims of cults and making uneducated statements and jokes about the subject. This can cause serious psychological harm to survivors as they work to heal themselves. Our mission is to spread accurate information and raise awareness, help people leave their cults, and support survivors while also showing everyone else that anyone can suddenly find themselves in a cult. Our hope is to humanize victims, delegitimize cult leaders, and educate people on how to be more supportive of people as they do the hard work of recovery.

How can you help? That’s easy! Do what you do best! Create social media posts, blogs, reels, TikTok videos, and podcasts that promote and support the recovery process of cult victims. We have organized each week as a way to educate society on cults so that at some point during the month, each person might be able to identify with what cult victims experience.

Cult Awareness Week 1 – Cult Basics and Interventions

This initial week is all about the very basic information regarding cults. Think of this as ‘Cult 101’ when creating content. There are many different avenues you can take this week. Several ideas include how to spot cults, well-known cults, cult typology, and the history of cults in your country. Additional topics include recruitment techniques, the evolution of cults, coercive control, and how it relates to cults. A lesser explored topic to discuss is a second generation or ‘born-in’ ‘members’.

Additionally, it’s important to point out societal acceptance, society’s view of cult membership, and gender and cults. A hot topic to discuss is mental health related to cults as well as what drives people to accept the unacceptable. These topics for cult awareness may often reflect or mirror other victim population awareness content. Some examples are content for domestic violence awareness and human trafficking awareness. This is to be expected because cults utilize multiple victimization techniques. To view more information for week 1, visit the Week 1 content suggestion page.

Later this week we will release more information for week 2 as you prepare your content for the coming days. The primary color for the ‘ribbon’ is #940032. You can access the logo file via canva to download and use in your work. The ribbon also has #57021C as the inside color (top loop) and #84002D colors the ribbon in the bottom layer. If using a single color, please use the primary color #940032.

About The Freedom Train Project Incorporated

The Freedom Train Project Incorporated (FTP) is a victim assistance outreach agency. FTP sponsors The International Cult Awareness project. You can also help by making donations or encouraging donations via our Network for Good donation management page. Any donations go directly to supporting victims of coercive control and cultic abuses. FTP uses the gifts to help victims survive and thrive outside their cultic abuses.

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