The Devon cult that canes tiny children to ‘cleanse their sins

The Devon cult that canes tiny children to ‘cleanse their sins’:
As social services launches an investigation, a mother’s shocking testimony lifts the lid on the mysterious commune squatting on a farm

    'Vicki' has lifted the lid on the commune she escaped from in 2005
    Then a vulnerable, single mother, she was ordered to beat her son
    The commune is linked to the controversial US Twelve Tribes cult
    Forty children were taken in to care at two German branches recently
    The NSPCC has now raised concerns with Stentwood Farm in Devon

By David Jones 4 October 2013

In recent weeks, via an undercover TV documentary screened in Germany (where similar communes have been raided) and later by personal accounts of former members — including a British mother who escaped the Devon commune with her son — details of the brutal discipline to which they are routinely subjected have started to emerge.

Supposedly to cleanse them of sin and prepare them for salvation when the world ends (the cult insists it will, within the next century or so), they are repeatedly ordered to bend over to be thrashed on their bare bottoms with a willow rod soaked in resin to make it more pliable.

And as these so-called ‘correction’ sessions are central to the cult’s beliefs — a mishmash of Judaism and Christianity devised by its messianic leader Eugene Spriggs, a former carnival showman from Tennessee — the children are often thrashed several times a day....

In Germany, the child protection authorities clearly agree. Shocked by scenes in this month’s TV documentary, immediately after it was screened they raided the cult’s two Bavarian communes and took all 40 children into protective care, where they remain pending court proceedings.

Given that the law prevents German parents from striking their children at all, and the film showed a four-year-old boy being led to a punishment cellar and caned until he scream....

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2444736/Devon-cult-canes-children-cleanse-sins-Mothers-testimony-lifts-lid-mysterious-commune.html