The Cult Awareness Network (CAN) was an anti-cult organization founded by deprogrammer Ted Patrick that provided information on groups it considered "cults", as well as support and referrals to deprogrammers. It operated (initially under the name “Citizens’ Freedom Foundation”) from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s in the United States.
The Cult Awareness Network was the most notable organization to emerge from the anti-cult movement in America. In the 1970s, a growing number of large and small New Religious Movements caused alarm in some sections of the community, based in part on the fear of "brainwashing" or "mind control" allegedly employed by these groups. The Cult Awareness Network presented itself as a source of information about "cults"; by 1991 it was monitoring over 200 groups that it referred to as "mind-control cults". It also promoted a form of coercive intervention by self-styled "deprogrammers" who would, for a significant fee, forcibly detain or even abduct the cult member and subject them to a barrage of attacks on their beliefs, supposedly in order to counter the effects of the brainwashing. The practice, which could involve criminal actions such as kidnapping and false imprisonment, generated controversy, and Ted Patrick and others faced both civil and criminal proceedings.
After CAN lost a lawsuit and filed for bankruptcy in 1996, lawyer and Scientologist Steven L. Hayes acquired the rights to CAN's name, logo, PO box, and hot-line phone number, and licensed the name to the "Foundation for Religious Freedom", who established the New Cult Awareness Network. Hayes made the purchase with funds raised from private donations, not from the Church of Scientology, although a number of scientologists had been among the most active participants in a coalition of religious freedom advocates from whom he had collected money. The Church of Scientology had previously been one of CAN's main targets.
History
In the United States in the early 1970s there was an increasing number of New Religious Movements. In 1971, Ted Patrick founded FREECOG (Parents Committee to Free Our Sons and Daughters from the Children of God). In 1974, he founded the more wide-ranging "Citizen's Freedom Foundation" (CFF), and began offering 'deprogramming' services to people who wanted to break a family member's connection to an NRM. The deprogramming methods involved abduction, physical restraint, detention over days or weeks, food and sleep deprivation, prolonged verbal and emotional abuse, and desecration of the symbols of the victim's faith. The perpetrators' justification for these actions was that the individual had been "brainwashed", and was not amenable to reason.
Brainwashing theory denied the possibility of authentic spiritual choice for an NRM member, proposing instead that such individuals were subject to systematic mind control programs that overrode their capacity for independent volition. Ted Patrick's theory of brainwashing was that individuals were hypnotized by brainwaves projected from a recruiter's eyes and fingertips, after which the state was maintained by constant indoctrination, a totalistic environment and self-hypnosis. Most academic research, however, indicated that the reasons for people joining, remaining in, or leaving NRMs were complex, varied from group to group and individual to individual, and generally reflected the continued presence of a capacity for individual responsibility and choice.
Patrick's organizations were later merged to become the Cult Awareness Network. The CAN became the most prominent group in the emerging national anti-cult movement of the 70s and 80s. The anti-cult movement lobbied for state and national legislative action to legitimize its activities, and although this had very limited success, the movement was nevertheless able to forge alliances with a number of governmental agencies. This was primarily on the back of its propagation of the "cult/mind control ideology", which succeeded in turning affiliation with NRMs into an issue of public—rather than private—concern, and gave a pseudo-legitimacy to the anti-cultists' more extreme claims and actions. By 1991, the Cult Awareness Network had twenty-three chapters dedicated to monitoring over two hundred groups that it referred to as "mind control cults".