Over-emphasizing the authority of their sources is a common anti-cult tactic. Nobody at the Victorian Inquiry double-checked their claims.
by Bernard Doherty
Article 3 of 3. Read article 1 and article 2.
In Part 2 of this article, I highlighted an intriguing citation discrepancy from Victorian Inquiry witness Patrick McIvor relating to an American master’s dissertation by Sarah E. Feliciano; in this piece, I look at two other curious inconsistencies in McIvor’s evidence before the Inquiry.
Example 2. The Wrong Qualification
The Reference list for McIvor’s presentation was not the only time during that hearing that the witness mentioned a person with the surname Feliciano, and once again his information is misleading.
On December 1, McIvor informed the committee hearing that: “One study that was particularly helpful was Sarah Feliciano’s work. She did a PhD a couple of years ago applying coercive control to cult survivors, and she found that every story from everyone she interviewed mapped incredibly consistently across onto how we understand coercive control. That study also identified some similarities with intimate partner violence and some differences” (2025, 9). (The interested reader can consult the official transcript of the hearing here).
As noted in Part 2, Feliciano did indeed write a thesis on this topic, but it was not a PhD thesis; it was an MA thesis. Indeed, Feliciano, according to her current curriculum vitae linked on her personal website, does not have a PhD.
The “PhD” McIvor is referring to runs to the grand total of 35 double-spaced pages, including references and three appendices. It was a pilot study of 52 self-identified former cult members, collated via online snowball sampling through anti-cult networks (i.e. a self-identified victim population).
This thesis was eventually cited in the Victorian Inquiry report.
The quality of Feliciano’s work, sadly, is not strong —though having watched a video recording of Feliciano’s presentation of her work at the International Cultic Studies Association conference in 2025, I do believe she has the potential to do quality work in the future, and my remarks below are not intended to be mean-spirited.
Alas, the thesis in question relies heavily on the discredited work of Margaret Singer; it demonstrates a lack of awareness or engagement with the vast research conducted on religious abuse outside of the narrow “cultic studies” paradigm; it demonstrates significant sampling bias; and it makes massive over-generalizations across vastly different religious groups.
More interesting here, however, is that Feliciano claims her study was “the first study to apply the coercive control framework to cult settings” (2023, 26).
This goes to a wider problem, which the Victorian Inquiry has evaded, that is, how the “Beyond Belief” submission—and various other witnesses before the Inquiry—have consistently sought to clumsily extrapolate and extend findings from studies of coercive control in intimate partner settings onto settings involving “groups.”
This tactical ambiguity, which has been used for nearly a decade in “cultic studies,” seeks to provide a veneer that there is empirical support for confected anti-cult ideas of “group-based coercion” when in fact almost no peer-reviewed scholarship utilizing this terminology or its “framework” currently exists.
This is because the idea of “group-based coercion”—or “group-based coercive control” as it is called in McIvor’s presentation— as noted previously in “Bitter Winter,” has been concocted by anti-cult activists in recent years as a means for reviving various earlier discredited ideas around “cultic brainwashing,” though here it is presented as though it is a significant scholarly breakthrough, a veritable new framework for understanding “coercive high-control groups.” It is nothing of the sort.
The Committee, moreover, was aware of this; indeed, the report even cites a study—co-authored by the author of this article—which outlines at length these tactical ambiguities as they appear in a series of anti-cult writers including Steven Hassan and Alexandra Stein.
This brings me to my next example, the academic pedigree of the “Beyond Belief” submission.
Example 3. The Legacy of Margaret Singer
In “Beyond Belief,” the authors provide a condensed account of the history of the ideas around “coercive persuasion.” It reads: “Much of the early work in this space came from clinical, psychiatric, and social psychological researchers studying ideological control. Edgar Schein (1961) introduced the term ‘coercive persuasion’ to describe how behavioral compliance is shaped through situational control and enforced dependency. Robert Jay Lifton (1961) developed the concept of ‘thought reform’ to show how totalist systems suppress autonomy through confession, ideological purity, and self-renunciation. Margaret Singer (1976, 1995) expanded and popularized the concept of ‘coercive persuasion’ to describe how high-demand groups use deception, isolation, and sustained psychological pressure to wear down personal agency (2025, 24).”
Again, some poor editing is at play here, but when we consult the reference list (see 2025, 62), we find the following reference: “Singer, M. T. (1976). DIMPAC report: Deceptive and indirect techniques of persuasion and control. American Psychological Association Task Force on Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control.”
The reference should probably read 1986, when this report was submitted to the Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility in Psychology (BSERP) of the American Psychological Association (APA)
What has been left out here, however, is the additional information about the fate of the DIMPAC report—again something which will be well-known to many readers of “Bitter Winter,” and which is significant for assessing its credibility as an authoritative source. The DIMPAC report was rejected by APA’s BSERP in 1987.
What this board found was that it was “unable to accept the report of the Task Force,” opining that “the report lacks the scientific rigor and even-handed critical approach necessary for APA imprimatur.”
The four peer reviews of the report “independently agreed on the significant deficiencies in the report.”
Moreover, the APA explicitly noted in 1987 that: “The Board cautions the Task Force members against using their past appointment to imply BSERP or APA support or approval of the positions advocated in the report. BSERP requests that Task Force members not distribute or publicize the report without indicating that the report was unacceptable to the Board.”
That such a contested study was cited as authoritative in a submission to a public inquiry is concerning and raises very serious wider questions around the credibility of the other sweeping claims being put forward by this same submission. (The interested reader can examine the documentation around the DIMPAC report here).
I find it difficult to believe that Janja Lalich (one of the co-authors listed on the “Beyond Belief” submission), who also co-authored with Margaret Singer, and has been a vociferous anti-cult activist for decades, could have been unaware of the problems around the DIMPAC report.
The three examples cited above and in the previous article in this series only scratch the surface of the kinds of problems that underpin the evidence presented and accepted by the Victorian Inquiry.
What these examples collectively demonstrate is either a cumulative pattern of sloppy editing and research or a series of deliberate attempts at subterfuge that seek to disguise the dubious foundations and bolster the empirical support for the idea of “group-based coercion.”
I leave it up to the interested reader to examine the evidence and draw their own conclusions.
For my part, I would reiterate what I suggested in the first part of this series—the Victorian government should be very wary in how it responds to the recommendations of the “Inquiry into the recruitment methods and impacts of cults and organised fringe groups.”
Serious law reform, particularly the invention of new criminal offenses, should be grounded in serious empirical research, not in half-baked theories of questionable scientific merit.
Bernard Doherty is an associate professor in the School of Theology and a research fellow in the Centre for Religion, Ethics and Society (CRES) at Charles Sturt University, Australia, based at St Mark’s National Theological Centre in Canberra. He is also an Honorary Fellow of INFORM at King’s College, United Kingdom. He has published extensively on new religions in Australia.
