Civil Abuse and Coercion

Child Abuse does not necessarily mean child sexual abuse (CSA). Several other categories of abuse would fall under the headings of civil abuse, coercion, high control.

[Note from historyofthewbts: Barbara has raised more awareness of some of these “civil abuses,” most of which are outside the realm of child sexual abuse, and may not even involve children in many cases. Abuse of the elderly, for example, has long been known in crimes involving unwarranted control over vulnerable populations. Spousal physical abuse is often another example. There are many cases of physical abuse of both children and spouses known to Jehovah’s Witnesses. And some of the cases have a parallel with child abuse cases in that reporting to authorities has been discouraged in many cases based on the supposed need to protect the public reputation of the religion. Some of these will be discussed on her website: SCAARS.ORG. Barbara is president of the SCAARS organization. (Stop Civil Abuse — Advocate Reform and Safety).

Unfortunately, Jehovah’s Witnesses are far from immune to cases of civil abuse. One specific area of concern is the practice (and policy) of shunning. The religion is also known for coercion surrounding medical choices that have resulted in death. The courts have not usually been as helpful in these areas as they should be. We offer the following “essay” to bring attention to the problems and the legal difficulties we are facing in

The Unlitigated Harms: Legal Trends in Non-Sexual Abuse, Coercive Control, and Compelled Choice in High-Control Religious Groups

An essay on doctrine, direction, and the limits of legal redress

I. The Shape of the Gap

Over the last twenty-five years the law governing religious institutions and child sexual abuse has matured to the point of near-routine. There are established causes of action, developed theories of vicarious and direct institutional liability, statutes of limitation reopened by revival windows in more than twenty American states, national inquiries that have produced documentary records running to millions of pages, and insurance markets that price the risk. A survivor of clergy sexual abuse in most Western jurisdictions today has a recognizable legal claim, a specialist bar willing to take it, and a body of precedent to argue from. The law knows what to do with a hand on a child’s body.

It does not know what to do with the rest. The harms this essay concerns — the systematic engineering of a person’s associations so that expulsion functions as social annihilation; the threat of that expulsion deployed to compel obedience in matters ranging from career and education to medical treatment; the corporal discipline of children under scriptural warrant; the punishment of adolescents for sexual orientation or gender identity; the psychological consequences of being raised inside a totalizing interpretive system and then removed from it — occupy a legal category that barely exists. They are, in the vocabulary the courts actually use, “intangible” or “emotional” harms, and that characterization is not incidental. It is the load-bearing move in nearly every decision that has denied recovery.

This is the central analytic point, and it is worth stating plainly at the outset. The obstacle is not that judges disbelieve the harm. In Paul v. Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of New York, 819 F.2d 875 (9th Cir. 1987) — the foundational American decision on shunning — Judge Reinhardt wrote for the panel that “the harms suffered by Janice Paul are real and not insubstantial,” and then held that permitting recovery for them would unconstitutionally restrict the free exercise of religion. The court believed her. It ruled against her anyway, on the ground that “[t]he constitutional guarantee of the free exercise of religion requires that society tolerate the type of harms suffered by Paul as a price well worth paying to safeguard the right of religious difference that all citizens enjoy.” That sentence is the wall. Everything that follows is an account of where the wall stands, where it has cracks, and where legislatures have begun building around it.

II. The American Position: Constitutional Privilege

Paul repays close reading because its reasoning has proved durable and because it is frequently mischaracterized in both directions. Janice Paul was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, baptized in 1967, and formally disassociated by letter in November 1975 — at a time when, as the Ninth Circuit found as a matter of record, “there was no express sanction for withdrawing from membership,” and disassociated persons in fact continued to be consulted on secular matters and greeted warmly. In September 1981 the Governing Body issued a new interpretation collapsing the distinction between disfellowshipped and disassociated persons, published in The Watchtower of 15 September 1981 under the heading “Disfellowshiping — How to View It.” Three years later Paul returned to her home area and was told by a childhood friend, “I can’t speak to you. You are disfellowshiped.” She sued in Washington state court for defamation, invasion of privacy, fraud, and outrageous conduct.

The Ninth Circuit’s analysis proceeded in three moves, each of which matters. First, it declined to hold that no tort had been stated — expressly noting that Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court had, in Bear v. Reformed Mennonite Church, 462 Pa. 330, 341 A.2d 105 (1975), recognized that shunning “may be an excessive interference within areas of ‘paramount state concern,’ i.e. the maintenance of marriage and family relationship, alienation of affection, and the tortious interference with a business relationship,” and citing Washington authority that “intangible-emotional” injuries “can and do constitute real and significant harms.” Second, it held that tort liability constitutes state action under New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), and that imposing damages for shunning would be a direct burden on religion rather than the incidental burden tolerated in Braunfeld v. Brown, 366 U.S. 599 (1961) — because “shunning is an actual practice of the Church itself,” and liability “would in the long run have the same effect as prohibiting the practice.” Third, applying the pre-Smith strict-scrutiny framework of Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 (1963), it found the practice not to constitute “a sufficient threat to the peace, safety, or morality of the community as to warrant state intervention.”

Two features of the opinion are routinely overlooked and are precisely where future litigation lives. The first is the express carve-out: “No physical assault or battery occurred. Intangible or emotional harms cannot ordinarily serve as a basis for maintaining a tort cause of action against a church for its practices.” The court’s comparators for permissible direct burdens were Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878) (polygamy) and Hill v. State, 88 So. 2d 880 (Ala. Ct. App. 1956) (snake handling) — i.e., conduct posing physical danger. The second is footnote-level hedging in the holding itself: “A religious organization has a defense of constitutional privilege to claims that it has caused intangible harms — in most, if not all, circumstances.” Reinhardt, a judge not known for enthusiasm about religious exemptions, deliberately declined to make the privilege absolute. The line Paul draws is not between religious and non-religious conduct; it is between tangible and intangible injury.

The most significant American counterweight is Guinn v. Church of Christ of Collinsville, 775 P.2d 766 (Okla. 1989), decided two years after Paul and reaching a materially different result on a materially different fact pattern. Marian Guinn was subjected to congregational discipline — including the reading of her sexual conduct to the assembled congregation and the circulation of letters to four other congregations — after she had written withdrawing her membership. The Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld a jury verdict for intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy, on the theory that the First Amendment protects a church’s discipline of its members, whose voluntary submission to congregational jurisdiction supplies the necessary consent, but that this consent is revocable: “[t]he constitutional right of a church member to withdraw from church membership is protected by the First Amendment guaranty of religious freedom unless a member has waived that right.” Post-withdrawal disciplinary action was therefore not constitutionally shielded and was actionable.

Guinn and Paul are reconcilable, and the reconciliation identifies the doctrinal seam. Paul concerned the decisions of individual members about whom to speak to — an exercise of associational liberty that the state cannot compel in the opposite direction without burdening the members themselves. Guinn concerned affirmative institutional action directed at a person who had withdrawn consent to the institution’s jurisdiction. A claim framed around the organization’s own conduct toward a non-member — publication, directives to third parties, interference with specific familial or economic relationships — sits closer to Guinn; a claim framed around the fact of being shunned sits squarely inside Paul and will lose.

That seam has been narrowing, however, because the surrounding doctrine has moved decisively toward institutional autonomy. The ecclesiastical abstention rule of Watson v. Jones, 80 U.S. (13 Wall.) 679 (1872), and Serbian Eastern Orthodox Diocese v. Milivojevich, 426 U.S. 696 (1976), bars civil courts from redetermining questions of religious law and polity. Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, 565 U.S. 171 (2012), constitutionalized the ministerial exception; Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, 591 U.S. 732 (2020), expanded it from formal title to functional role, sweeping in employees whose work involves religious instruction regardless of designation. Lower courts have increasingly generalized these holdings from employment into a broader “church autonomy doctrine” applied to tort and contract claims. The practical effect on the harms discussed here is that even the Guinn seam — which depends on a court’s willingness to characterize an internal disciplinary process as having exceeded its jurisdiction — is increasingly met with the objection that characterizing it at all requires the court to interpret polity.

The newest data point runs the same direction while relocating the constitutional basis. In Chiles v. Salazar, decided 31 March 2026, the Supreme Court held 8–1, per Justice Gorsuch, that Colorado’s 2019 ban on conversion therapy for minors, as applied to a licensed counselor’s talk therapy, “censors speech based on viewpoint” and that the Tenth Circuit erred in reviewing it for rational basis rather than strict scrutiny. Justice Kagan, concurring with Justice Sotomayor, called it a “textbook” case of viewpoint discrimination while flagging that a content-based but viewpoint-neutral rule “would raise a different and more difficult question.” Justice Jackson, dissenting from the bench across thirty-five pages, warned that the decision “could be ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care administered by effectively unsupervised healthcare providers,” noting that Colorado and twenty-five other states had legislated against the practice on the strength of professional consensus that it is ineffective and harmful. The doctrinal significance for present purposes is that the free speech clause is now performing work that the free exercise clause performed in Paul: protecting the communicative core of a belief-driven practice from regulation aimed at its harms.

III. Compelled Medical Choice: The Most Developed Battleground

Where the harm becomes physical, the analysis changes — which is exactly what Paul predicted. The governing American principle for children was fixed in Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158 (1944), in Justice Rutledge’s formulation that “[p]arents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age of full and legal discretion when they can make that choice for themselves.” People ex rel. Wallace v. Labrenz, 411 Ill. 618 (1952), applied it to blood transfusion by appointing a guardian for an infant with hemolytic disease over the parents’ religious objection, and the rule has held: parental religious liberty does not extend to withholding life-sustaining treatment from a child.

The rule holds in principle and is riddled in practice. The riddling has a specific and traceable origin. The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 did not itself mandate religious exemptions, but the implementing regulations issued by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare conditioned federal funding on states adopting one — with the consequence that exemptions propagated into state child protection codes nationwide. The federal requirement was removed in 1983; a statutory exemption was inserted in 1996 and removed again in 2003; the current reauthorization contains none. The state-law residue, however, was never systematically repealed. Roughly thirty-four states plus the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico retain some form of religious exception to civil child neglect definitions, and a larger number retain narrower spiritual-treatment provisions. Idaho is the extreme case: exemptions attach not only to neglect but to criminal non-support, injury to a child, and manslaughter, with the result that advocacy groups have documented well over a hundred child deaths without a single prosecution.

Where exemptions do not bar prosecution, criminal law has proved capable. Walker v. Superior Court, 47 Cal. 3d 112 (1988), held that a spiritual-treatment provision in the misdemeanor neglect statute did not immunize a Christian Science mother from felony manslaughter charges after her daughter died of meningitis. Commonwealth v. Twitchell, 416 Mass. 114 (1993), reversed a manslaughter conviction on fair-notice grounds — because the parents had reasonably relied on an Attorney General’s opinion construing the exemption — while confirming that the exemption did not preclude prosecution as a matter of law. State v. Neumann, 2013 WI 58, upheld reckless homicide convictions of parents who prayed rather than treat their daughter’s undiagnosed diabetes. The pattern across these cases is instructive: exemptions rarely produce acquittals on the merits, but they routinely produce the notice and vagueness problems that defeat individual prosecutions, and they signal to prosecutors that such cases are difficult. Their practical function is deterrence of enforcement rather than legalization of conduct.

The adult cases are where the user’s core question — whether coercion through threatened shunning can vitiate an apparently voluntary medical refusal — actually gets litigated, and the governing authority is English. Re T (Adult: Refusal of Treatment) [1993] Fam 95, [1992] 4 All ER 649 (CA), concerned a pregnant woman, not herself a baptized Jehovah’s Witness, who refused blood after private conversations with her Witness mother. Lord Donaldson MR held that a doctor confronted with a refusal must consider not only capacity but “whether the patient’s refusal represented his own independent decision or had been vitiated by external pressure,” and found abundant evidence that T’s decision had been vitiated by her mother’s undue influence. The framework has three limbs: capacity assessed at the time of decision and proportionate to the gravity of the decision; the true scope of the refusal (a refusal premised on false assumptions is ineffective to the extent of those assumptions); and independence of will.

Re T is the most useful tool in the doctrinal kit, and also the most oversold. Three limitations should be stated honestly. It concerns influence exerted by an identified individual in a face-to-face relationship, not the diffuse pressure of institutional doctrine; extending it from “your mother persuaded you” to “your denomination’s disfellowshipping policy structured your preferences” is a substantial jurisprudential leap that no common law court has yet taken. It is a shield doctrine — it authorizes clinicians to treat, prospectively, in the teeth of a refusal; it is not a cause of action generating damages against the organization afterward. And its application risks a paternalism that courts rightly resist, since on a sufficiently expansive reading no deeply held religious commitment could ever produce a valid refusal. That last point is not a rhetorical concession; it is the reason the doctrine has not expanded.

For minors, the law has converged on a sliding scale that quietly concedes the coercion problem without naming it. In re E.G., 133 Ill. 2d 98 (1989), recognized a mature minor’s right to refuse. English law went the other way in Re E (A Minor) (Wardship: Medical Treatment) [1993] 1 FLR 386 and Re S [1994] 2 FLR 1065, holding that a Gillick-competent adolescent’s competence to consent does not entail a corresponding right to refuse life-saving treatment during minority — a position whose weakness is illustrated by Re E’s postscript, the boy having died at eighteen after refusing blood once the wardship jurisdiction lapsed. B.(R.) v. Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto, [1995] 1 S.C.R. 315, held that parental decision-making is a protected liberty interest but yields to the child’s best interests. The synthesis is A.C. v. Manitoba (Director of Child and Family Services), 2009 SCC 30, where Justice Abella held for a 6–1 majority that courts must assess the individual minor’s actual maturity, so that “[a] young person is entitled to a degree of decisional autonomy commensurate with his or her maturity.” What the sliding scale does not ask — because no common law court has framed the question this way — is whether maturity formed entirely inside a closed informational system, where the consequence of the “wrong” choice is loss of every significant relationship one has, is the kind of maturity the doctrine has in mind.

IV. Corporal Punishment: Where Physical Injury Unlocks the Law

Corporal punishment is the clearest illustration of the tangible/intangible line, because the moment injury becomes physical the constitutional privilege evaporates and ordinary criminal law operates without difficulty. Every American state permits parental corporal punishment subject to a reasonableness limit, and the federal definition of child abuse under CAPTA excludes reasonable parental discipline. Where religiously motivated discipline stays within that limit it is untouchable; where it exceeds it, religious motivation is neither a defense nor, generally, an aggravator.

The cases arising from Michael and Debi Pearl’s To Train Up a Child (1994) — which instructs parents to use a quarter-inch plastic supply line to “break the will” of children as young as several months, and endorses withholding food and cold-water exposure — demonstrate the point. Sean Paddock, aged four, died in 2006 after being wrapped in blankets to prevent him leaving his bed. Lydia Schatz, aged seven, died in California in 2010 after hours of beating with plastic tubing; her parents pleaded to murder and torture charges. Hana Williams, aged thirteen, died of hypothermia in Washington in 2011 after prolonged starvation, beating, and enforced outdoor confinement; her adoptive parents were convicted of homicide by abuse and manslaughter. In each case the prosecutions succeeded and the religious framing of the conduct was evidentiary rather than exculpatory. Efforts to reach the Pearls themselves — the authors and publishers of the method — have gone nowhere, for reasons that connect directly to Chiles: advocacy of a practice, however foreseeably lethal, is speech.

The structural trend is nonetheless toward abolition of the defense, and it is one of the few areas where the direction of travel is unambiguous. Sweden prohibited all corporal punishment of children in 1979. As of 2025, seventy states have enacted full prohibition, Thailand becoming the sixty-eighth in early 2025; within the United Kingdom, Scotland abolished the reasonable-chastisement defense by the Children (Equal Protection from Assault) (Scotland) Act 2019 and Wales followed with the Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Act 2020, in force 21 March 2022, leaving England and Northern Ireland as outliers. The countervailing figure is sobering: the Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment estimates that only about sixteen percent of the world’s children — roughly 389 million — are fully protected in law. The religious-liberty objection to these reforms is real and organized, and it is generally framed not as a defense of injury but as a defense of parental authority against state definition of proper child-rearing.

V. Sexual Orientation, Identity, and the Discipline of “Lifestyle”

Punishment of orientation and gender identity within high-control religious settings occupies an unusual legal position: it is simultaneously the subject of the most aggressive recent legislation and the least reachable by it. Between roughly 2013 and 2025, twenty-six American states plus numerous municipalities banned conversion therapy for minors; Malta became the first country to prohibit it nationally in 2016, followed by Germany (2020), France (2022), Canada (by Bill C-4, in force January 2022, which criminalizes the practice for adults as well as minors), and Australian states including Victoria (2021), the ACT, and Queensland. These are, almost without exception, professional regulation statutes. They bind licensed practitioners. They do not, and in most cases expressly do not, reach clergy, pastoral counseling, prayer, or the ordinary internal discipline of a congregation — the settings in which the great majority of religiously motivated change efforts actually occur.

That carve-out was politically necessary and doctrinally prudent, and it means that the pathway most relevant to high-control groups was never regulated in the first place. Chiles v. Salazar has now narrowed even the regulated pathway: after 31 March 2026, a state seeking to prohibit orientation-change talk therapy by licensed professionals must satisfy strict scrutiny, and the Court’s opinion strongly signals doubt that Colorado’s law can. Justice Kagan’s concurrence points to the only obvious legislative response — a content-based but viewpoint-neutral rule, perhaps framed around standards of care and evidentiary support for any intervention rather than around the direction of the intervention’s aim — but whether such a statute can be drafted, and would survive, is untested.

What remains available is indirect and fact-specific. Family law can and does account for a parent’s or institution’s treatment of a child’s orientation in custody and welfare determinations, though the European Court of Human Rights has been clear since Hoffmann v. Austria (1993) that religious affiliation as such cannot be the ground of a custody decision. Child protection law reaches conduct that crosses into physical or emotional abuse as domestically defined. Consumer protection and fraud theories have occasionally succeeded against commercial providers making efficacy claims. And civil claims can be constructed where the conduct involves confinement, physical intervention, or misrepresentation. None of these reaches the core case: an adolescent told, sincerely and within a protected doctrinal framework, that their identity is sin and that persistence in it will cost them their family.

VI. The European Turn — In Both Directions

European law approaches these questions with different equipment. Rather than a categorical constitutional privilege, the European Convention framework applies proportionality analysis under Articles 8 (private and family life) and 9 (religion), qualified by the limitation clauses, and — critically — recognizes positive obligations requiring states to protect individuals from harm inflicted by private actors. In principle that is a far more hospitable structure for the claims discussed here. In practice, at apex level, claimants have been losing.

Belgium tested the criminal route and failed. On 16 March 2021 the Ghent criminal court, on a prosecution brought with the involvement of the federal equality body, fined the Belgian association of Jehovah’s Witnesses €96,000, holding the teaching and practice of shunning to constitute unlawful discrimination and incitement to hatred. On 7 June 2022 the Ghent Court of Appeal acquitted, characterizing the practice as “passive social avoidance” protected by religious liberty and by the associational freedom of remaining members. On 19 December 2023 the Court of Cassation upheld the acquittal, ending the matter. The appellate reasoning is important: it located protection not only in the organization’s Article 9 rights but in the Article 8 and 11 rights of individual congregants to choose their own associations — a framing that converts an anti-shunning rule into a compelled-association rule.

Norway ran the same question through administrative rather than criminal channels, and much further. Following a 2021 complaint by Rolf Furuli, a former Witness and retired University of Oslo Semitics lecturer, the State Administrator of Oslo and Viken in 2022 withdrew the state subsidies the community had received for three decades under Article 16 of the Norwegian Constitution, and in 2023 deregistered it under the 2020 Religious Communities Act. The Oslo District Court upheld both decisions on 24 March 2024. On 14 March 2025 the Borgarting Court of Appeal unanimously reversed. On 29 April 2026 the Supreme Court of Norway ruled for the Witnesses and declared every measure in the chain invalid.

The Supreme Court’s reasoning is the most consequential recent statement on this subject anywhere. It held that the State had failed to demonstrate that shunning “constitutes improper pressure that violates members’, including children’s, right to free withdrawal”; that social consequences on leaving a small, cohesive community are neither unusual nor peculiar to this group; that domestic and international law “does not protect a right to maintain relationships between close adult family members”; and that an indirect state requirement that members maintain contact with former members would itself burden the Article 8 and 9 rights of those members. On minors it found no indication that baptismal decisions were uninformed, observed that baptized minors are typically fifteen to eighteen, that expulsion does not sever family bonds or remove a minor from the parental home, and that because the group operates no schools, disfellowshipped minors retain external social networks. Dissenting justices differed on evidentiary questions and placed greater weight on loss of family contact, but agreed that the practice does not amount to psychological violence against children. Two caveats belong here: the fullest English-language accounts of this judgment come from Bitter Winter/CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers, both editorially committed to minority-religion protection, and the Norwegian text should be consulted directly before the paragraph-level holdings are relied upon; and survivor organizations have characterized the same judgment as a significant setback for children’s rights.

The Strasbourg position is consistent. In the Norwegian case of Gry Helen Nygård — disfellowshipped in 2018, reinstated by a conciliation board, restored to disfellowship by the Follo District Court, reinstated again by a divided Borgarting panel in 2021, and finally resolved by a unanimous Supreme Court in May 2022 holding that secular courts cannot review theological determinations — the European Court of Human Rights rejected the resulting complaint as manifestly ill-founded in 2023. There is no Convention right to be readmitted to a religious body, and, on the current state of the authorities, no right not to be shunned.

And yet the European picture is not one-directional, because the most significant legislative development anywhere runs the other way. France’s Loi n° 2024-420 of 10 May 2024, strengthening the fight against dérives sectaires, did two things of direct relevance. Article 3 recast Penal Code Article 223-15-3 to create an offense of placing or maintaining a person in a state of psychological or physical subjection resulting from serious or repeated pressure, or from techniques designed to alter judgment, punishable by three years’ imprisonment and a €375,000 fine. Article 12 created Article 223-1-2, penalizing provocation to abandon or abstain from medical treatment where, on the state of medical knowledge, that abandonment is manifestly liable to cause particularly grave consequences given the person’s condition, and the perpetrator is aware of that risk.

The provision that matters most is the interaction between them. Article 223-1-2 contains a defense: the offense is not made out where the circumstances establish the person’s free and informed will, particularly where clear and complete information about health consequences was provided — unless it is established that the person was placed or maintained in a state of psychological or physical subjection within the meaning of Article 223-15-3. That clause is, so far as I can determine, the first statutory instrument anywhere that expressly provides that apparent consent to forgo medical treatment does not exonerate the person who procured it where the consenting party was subject to religious or psychological subjection. It converts the Re T insight from a clinician’s shield into a prosecutorial sword. The Conseil constitutionnel upheld both provisions on 7 May 2024 in Decision n° 2024-865 DC against challenges based on legality of offenses and freedom of expression, emphasizing that the offense requires targeting of identified persons rather than general publication, that mere diffusion of information to an indeterminate public cannot constitute the requisite pressure, and that whistleblower disclosures are excluded. Article 2 of the law was struck, but as a cavalier législatif — a procedurally improper rider — not on substance.

Japan supplies a fourth model: regulatory dissolution rather than tort or criminal prosecution. Following the assassination of Shinzo Abe and the ensuing scrutiny of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, Japan enacted legislation in December 2022 restricting unjust solicitation of donations, and the Ministry of Education sought dissolution of the organization’s religious corporation status in 2023. On 25 March 2025 the Tokyo District Court granted the order, finding the organization’s problems extensive, continuous, and unlikely to be voluntarily remedied — the first dissolution under the civil provisions of the Religious Corporations Act, prior orders having involved criminal convictions (Aum Shinrikyo, Myōkakuji). The appeal is before the Tokyo High Court, with final written arguments filed in November 2025 and judgment anticipated in 2026. The Japanese model targets financial exploitation and its family consequences rather than shunning as such, but it establishes that a demonstrated pattern of civilly wrongful conduct causing harm to members’ families can cost an organization its legal personality — a sanction of a different order from damages.

VII. Emerging Legal Concepts and Their Difficulties

Three conceptual developments are worth tracking because each could, in principle, supply the vocabulary that tort law currently lacks.

The first is coercive control as a criminal category. Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 (England and Wales), the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018, Ireland’s Domestic Violence Act 2018, and a growing set of Australian state statutes criminalize patterns of controlling behavior that no single act would capture — precisely the structural insight needed here. Every one of them, however, is confined by a relationship requirement: the parties must be intimate partners or family members. The mechanisms the statutes describe — isolation from support networks, monitoring, regulation of everyday conduct, degradation, and the manufacture of dependency — map onto high-control religious settings with very little adjustment, but the drafting excludes them. Campaigns to extend the offense to institutional and religious contexts, notably by the Family Survival Trust in the United Kingdom, have not succeeded. The Victorian parliamentary Inquiry into Cults and Organised Fringe Groups, opened in 2025 and the first of its kind in Australia, is examining precisely this question, with terms of reference directed at “the methods used to recruit and control their members, and the impacts of coercive control,” and with an explicit framing that “[t]here is a distinction between genuine religious practice and harmful behaviour” — that freedom of religion is “not freedom, for example, to defraud, nor is it freedom to cause significant psychological harm to any person.”

The second is “spiritual abuse” as a safeguarding category. The Church of England incorporated it into its Safeguarding e-manual in 2021, defining it as a systematic pattern of coercive and controlling behavior in a religious context, and classifying it as a form of emotional abuse where the subject is a child and psychological abuse where the subject is an adult — a deliberate choice designed to bring it within existing statutory categories rather than create a new one. It has since been adopted by the Methodist and Baptist churches, appears in the safeguarding literature of Thirtyone:eight, and has featured in high-profile Church of England reviews. Claimant firms in England now plead it, sometimes as a standalone claim and sometimes alongside sexual abuse or financial exploitation claims. The Evangelical Alliance’s objection deserves to be stated at full strength rather than dismissed: an elastic concept of spiritual abuse could “potentially criminalise whole religious communities with whose theology they happen to disagree,” and could be turned against ordinary conservative teaching on sexuality, marriage, and sin. That is not a frivolous worry, and any workable legal definition has to distinguish the content of doctrine, which must be beyond regulation, from conduct that isolates, threatens, or physically endangers. The Victorian inquiry’s formulation — abusive practices, not the beliefs behind them — is the right instinct, but the line is far easier to state than to apply, because in these settings the belief frequently is the mechanism.

The third is the psychology of coercive influence, and here caution is warranted, particularly for advocates. The empirical literature on coercive control has matured substantially, and systematic reviews now document robust associations between coercive control exposure and PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Applications to religious settings by scholars including Janja Lalich and Alexandra Stein are serious work. But “religious trauma syndrome” is not a recognized diagnosis in either DSM-5-TR or ICD-11; the “BITE model” is a practitioner framework rather than a validated instrument; and “brainwashing” as an explanatory construct was substantially discredited in American courts after the American Psychological Association declined to endorse the relevant amicus submission in the mid-1980s, and remains contested in the sociology of religion, with CESNUR-affiliated scholars in sustained opposition. This matters practically: expert testimony resting on contested constructs invites Daubert exclusion and hands the defense an easy characterization of the claim as an attack on belief. Claims grounded in ordinary, well-validated psychiatric injury, documented by treating clinicians and tied to specific identifiable conduct, are considerably more robust than claims grounded in a totalizing theory of mind control.

The international human rights framework supplies the normative anchor these concepts otherwise lack, though it is weak on enforceability. Article 19 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child obliges states to protect children from “all forms of physical or mental violence,” and General Comment No. 13 (2011) elaborates “mental violence” to include psychological maltreatment, emotional abuse and neglect — expressly encompassing “scaring, terrorizing and threatening,” “isolating, ignoring and favouritism,” “conveying to children that they are worthless, unloved, unwanted, endangered or only of value in meeting another’s needs,” and “neglecting mental health, medical and educational needs.” Article 14 protects the child’s own freedom of thought, conscience and religion, subject to parental direction consistent with evolving capacities. Read together these provisions describe the harms at issue here with considerable precision. They are, however, addressed to states, not to religious organizations, and the Norwegian Supreme Court’s 2026 judgment demonstrates how far a state can be from being required to act on them.

VIII. Synthesis: Four Obstacles and Four Openings

Four structural obstacles recur across every jurisdiction surveyed.

Characterization. The harms are classified as intangible, and intangibility is doing constitutional work, not merely descriptive work. Until a claimant can point to injury the law already recognizes as concrete — physical harm, quantifiable economic loss, a documented psychiatric diagnosis with an identified precipitant — the Paul privilege operates almost automatically in the United States and the proportionality balance tilts decisively toward Article 9 in Europe.

Consent. Adult members are volunteers who may leave. Every apex court to consider the question has treated the formal availability of exit as answering the coercion objection, and has declined to treat the engineered cost of exit as vitiating the voluntariness of staying. This is the single most important analytical disagreement between claimants and courts, and claimants are losing it.

Causation. The harm is cumulative and environmental, produced by a pattern rather than an act. Tort law is built for acts. Coercive control statutes were the legislative answer to exactly this problem in the domestic context, which is why their relationship limitation is so consequential.

Privilege. Where the conduct is doctrinally mandated, regulating it burdens the doctrine, and both the American free exercise framework and the European Article 9 framework treat that as close to dispositive absent tangible harm — with the additional European wrinkle, from Ghent and Oslo, that anti-shunning rules burden the remaining members’ associational rights too.

Against this, four openings are real and identifiable.

Post-withdrawal institutional conduct. The Guinn line remains good law and is under-exploited. A claim directed at what the organization affirmatively did to a person after they revoked consent to its jurisdiction — published, directed third parties, interfered with specific identified relationships — is analytically distinct from a claim about being shunned, and survives Paul on Paul‘s own reasoning.

The physical-harm threshold. Paul expressly reserved cases involving assault or battery, and corporal punishment and medical-refusal cases cross that threshold routinely. The most productive litigation of the last decade in this space has involved bodies, not feelings.

Undue influence in medical consent. Re T is the doctrinal bridge, and France’s Article 223-1-2 shows what it looks like when a legislature builds the bridge deliberately: apparent consent does not exonerate where subjection is established. This is the most transferable legislative model currently in existence, and the fact that it survived constitutional review on legality and free-expression grounds makes it a usable template rather than an aspiration.

Regulatory conditionality rather than liability. The genuine institutional movement of the past decade has not been in tort at all. It has been in charity regulation (the Charity Commission’s statutory inquiries), funding conditionality (Norway, notwithstanding the eventual outcome), corporate dissolution (Japan), and the evidentiary infrastructure built by public inquiries (the Australian Royal Commission, IICSA, the New Zealand Abuse in Care inquiry, the Utrecht study for the Dutch government). These mechanisms do not require a claimant, do not require proof of individualized causation, and do not run into the consent problem — which is precisely why they have been more effective, and precisely why organizations have litigated so hard to escape them.

The honest summary is this. On the specific question of shunning, claimants are losing at apex level nearly everywhere, and the trend over the past five years has been sharply against them: Ghent, Cassation, Strasbourg in Nygård, the Norwegian Supreme Court, and — on the adjacent free-speech front — Chiles. The reasoning is not indifference to harm; it is that the alternative is a state power to compel association and to superintend the internal membership rules of religious bodies, which courts in liberal democracies are unwilling to create. Whether that judgment properly weighs the position of a person raised inside such a system from birth, whose entire associational world was constructed by it, is a serious question that the Norwegian dissents raised and the majority answered in the negative. Advocates who want the law to move will do better to concentrate on the openings that exist — post-withdrawal conduct, physical harm, the French subjection model, and regulatory conditionality — than on a frontal attack on shunning itself, which has now been tried in three jurisdictions and has failed in all three.

References

United States — cases

  • Paul v. Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of New York, Inc., 819 F.2d 875 (9th Cir. 1987) (decided 10 June 1987). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/819/875/245063/
  • Bear v. Reformed Mennonite Church, 462 Pa. 330, 341 A.2d 105 (1975).
  • Guinn v. Church of Christ of Collinsville, 775 P.2d 766, 1989 OK 8 (Okla. 1989). https://law.justia.com/cases/oklahoma/supreme-court/1989/10494.html
  • Watson v. Jones, 80 U.S. (13 Wall.) 679 (1872).
  • Serbian Eastern Orthodox Diocese v. Milivojevich, 426 U.S. 696 (1976).
  • Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, 565 U.S. 171 (2012).
  • Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, 591 U.S. 732 (2020). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/19-267_1an2.pdf
  • Chiles v. Salazar, 607 U.S. ___ (2026) (decided 31 March 2026). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-539_fd9g.pdf; analysis: Amy Howe, “Supreme Court sides with therapist in challenge to Colorado’s ban on ‘conversion therapy,'” SCOTUSblog, 31 March 2026. https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/03/supreme-court-sides-with-therapist-in-challenge-to-colorados-ban-on-conversion-therapy/
  • Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158 (1944).
  • People ex rel. Wallace v. Labrenz, 411 Ill. 618, 104 N.E.2d 769 (1952). https://law.justia.com/cases/illinois/supreme-court/1952/32094-5.html
  • Walker v. Superior Court, 47 Cal. 3d 112 (1988); Commonwealth v. Twitchell, 416 Mass. 114 (1993); State v. Neumann, 2013 WI 58.
  • In re E.G., 133 Ill. 2d 98 (1989). https://law.justia.com/cases/illinois/supreme-court/1989/66089-7.html
  • Application of the President and Directors of Georgetown College, 331 F.2d 1000 (D.C. Cir. 1964); United States v. George, 239 F. Supp. 752 (D. Conn. 1965).
  • Supporting First Amendment authorities cited in Paul: New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964); Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 (1963); Braunfeld v. Brown, 366 U.S. 599 (1961); Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 (1940); Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972).

Commonwealth — cases

  • Re T (Adult: Refusal of Treatment) [1993] Fam 95, [1992] 4 All ER 649 (CA). https://www.globalhealthrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/EWCA-1992-In-re-T-adult-refusal-of-medical-treatment.pdf
  • Re E (A Minor) (Wardship: Medical Treatment) [1993] 1 FLR 386; Re S (A Minor) (Consent to Medical Treatment) [1994] 2 FLR 1065.
  • Malette v. Shulman (1990), 72 O.R. (2d) 417 (Ont. C.A.). https://www.globalhealthrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/MalettevShulman.pdf
  • B.(R.) v. Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto, [1995] 1 S.C.R. 315. https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/1995/1995canlii115/1995canlii115.html
  • A.C. v. Manitoba (Director of Child and Family Services), 2009 SCC 30.
  • Highwood Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Judicial Committee) v. Wall, 2018 SCC 26. https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/17101/index.do

European and international

  • Hoffmann v. Austria, App. No. 12875/87 (ECtHR, 23 June 1993).
  • Nygård v. Norway — complaint declared inadmissible (ECtHR, 2023); underlying: Norwegian Supreme Court judgment of 3 May 2022. Discussion: Massimo Introvigne, “Norway: Why the European Court of Human Rights Rejected a Complaint from a Disfellowshipped Former Jehovah’s Witness,” Bitter Winter, 25 February 2023. https://bitterwinter.org/european-court-rejected-a-complaint-from-a-disfellowshipped-jehovahs-witness/
  • Supreme Court of Norway, judgment of 29 April 2026 (deregistration and state subsidies; shunning and minors). Coverage: Massimo Introvigne, “Jehovah’s Witnesses Win Landmark Case at the Norwegian Supreme Court,” Bitter Winter, 2 May 2026 (https://bitterwinter.org/jehovahs-witnesses-win-landmark-case-at-the-norwegian-supreme-court/); Human Rights Without Frontiers, 30 April 2026 (https://hrwf.eu/norway-the-supreme-court-dismisses-all-accusations-against-jehovahs-witnesses/). Critical perspective: AvoidJW, “Norway’s Verdict: A Setback for Children’s Rights in the Face of Religious Control” (https://avoidjw.org/court/norway-appeal-verdict-childrens-rights/).
  • Belgium: Ghent Criminal Court, 16 March 2021; Ghent Court of Appeal, 7 June 2022; Court of Cassation, 19 December 2023. Discussion: “The Ghent Saga Ends: Belgium Cassation Court Confirms that Shunning Is Lawful,” Bitter Winter. https://bitterwinter.org/the-ghent-saga-ends-belgium-cassation-court-confirms-that-shunning-is-lawful/
  • UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, General Comment No. 13 (2011), The right of the child to freedom from all forms of violence, CRC/C/GC/13. https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/crc/docs/crc.c.gc.13_en.pdf
  • Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), Arts. 14, 19.

Legislation

  • Loi n° 2024-420 du 10 mai 2024 visant à renforcer la lutte contre les dérives sectaires et à améliorer l’accompagnement des victimes. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000049523123
  • Conseil constitutionnel, Décision n° 2024-865 DC du 7 mai 2024 (press release and decision). https://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/actualites/communique/decision-n-2024-865-dc-du-7-mai-2024-communique-de-presse
  • Serious Crime Act 2015 (England and Wales), s. 76; Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018; Domestic Violence Act 2018 (Ireland).
  • Children (Equal Protection from Assault) (Scotland) Act 2019; Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Act 2020 (in force 21 March 2022). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_(Abolition_of_Defence_of_Reasonable_Punishment)_(Wales)_Act_2020
  • Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, Pub. L. No. 93-247 (1974), and subsequent reauthorizations; history of the religious exemption requirement discussed in Pew Research Center, “Most states allow religious exemptions from child abuse and neglect laws,” 12 August 2016. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/08/12/most-states-allow-religious-exemptions-from-child-abuse-and-neglect-laws/
  • Colorado HB19-1129 (Minor Conversion Therapy ban); Canada, Bill C-4 (2021), in force 7 January 2022.
  • Japan: Act on Prevention of Unjust Solicitation of Donations (December 2022); Religious Corporations Act (dissolution provisions).

Inquiries, regulators, and reports

  • Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (Australia), Report of Case Study No. 29 (2016) and Final Report (2017). https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/case-studies/case-study-29-jehovahs-witnesses
  • Parliament of Victoria, Inquiry into Cults and Organised Fringe Groups (2025– ). https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/cofg
  • Charity Commission for England and Wales, statutory inquiries into the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Britain and the Manchester New Moston Congregation (opened 27 May 2014); Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society of Britain & Ors v Charity Commission [2016] EWCA Civ 154. https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/civ/2016/154
  • Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (England and Wales), Child Protection in Religious Organisations and Settings (2021).
  • Church of England, Safeguarding e-manual, s. 4.2, “Spiritual Abuse” (2021). https://www.churchofengland.org/safeguarding/safeguarding-e-manual/safeguarding-children-young-people-and-vulnerable-adults/section-42-spiritual-abuse
  • Evangelical Alliance, Reviewing the Discourse of “Spiritual Abuse” (critique of the concept). https://www.eauk.org/current-affairs/media/press-releases/upload/Reviewing-the-Discourse-of-Spiritual-Abuse.pdf
  • Tokyo District Court, dissolution order re Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, 25 March 2025; appeal pending, Tokyo High Court. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/10/29/japan/crime-legal/unification-church-dissolution/
  • Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children / End Corporal Punishment, global progress data (70 states with full prohibition as at 2025). https://endcorporalpunishment.org/countdown/

Scholarship and commentary

  • Evan Stark, Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Oxford University Press, 2007).
  • Alexandra Stein, Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems (Routledge, 2017).
  • Janja Lalich, Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults (University of California Press, 2004).
  • Amanda van Eck Duymaer van Twist and Sarah Harvey, Abuse in New Religious Movements (Cambridge Elements, Cambridge University Press). https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abuse-in-new-religious-movements/37CE4DA3B61779EC42C96F169A9973D5
  • Massimo Introvigne, “Jehovah’s Witnesses and Shunning,” The Journal of CESNUR 8:1 (2024). https://cesnur.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/tjoc_8_1_4_resnote.pdf
  • Jaime Simpson and Kathleen McPhillips, “Victoria is looking into religious cults — here’s what it should examine,” The Conversation, 19 June 2025. https://theconversation.com/victoria-is-looking-into-religious-cults-heres-what-it-should-examine-259152
  • Hayley Chapman-Todd, “Spiritual abuse: a new type of claim?” (2025), noted at Private Law Theory. https://www.private-law-theory.org/2025/09/23/hayley-chapman-todd-spiritual-abuse-a-new-type-of-claim/
  • “Spiritual Abuse and Coercive Control,” Weightmans (practitioner analysis). https://www.weightmans.com/insights/spiritual-abuse-and-coercive-control/
  • CHILD USA, Religious Exemptions to Medical Care (2025). https://childusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/religiousexemption.pdf

Note on Sources and Bias

Several of the most detailed English-language accounts of the Belgian and Norwegian shunning litigation come from Bitter Winter (published by CESNUR) and Human Rights Without Frontiers, both of which are editorially committed to the protection of minority religions and are frequently critical of ex-member testimony. Several of the most detailed accounts from the other direction come from survivor-advocacy organizations. Where a judgment’s paragraph-level holdings matter to an argument, the original text should be consulted rather than any secondary account — this applies particularly to the Norwegian Supreme Court judgment of 29 April 2026, whose paragraph numbering is reproduced here from secondary English-language reporting.

A second caution concerns psychological constructs. “Religious trauma syndrome” is not a diagnosis recognized in DSM-5-TR or ICD-11, and the “BITE model” is a practitioner framework rather than a validated psychometric instrument. Both are useful descriptively and both are vulnerable to exclusion as expert evidence. The underlying empirical literature on coercive control and its psychiatric sequelae is considerably stronger and should carry the weight in any litigation context.

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