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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2008-07-23 Daily Xml
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MERCY MINISTRIES

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (15:37): Today I will finish reading into the record the personal story of a young woman who suffered at the hands of Mercy Ministries. Anne, as I have called her, states:

I was devastated. I couldn't work out what I had done wrong. Maybe I wasn't a good enough Christian? Maybe God didn't want to heal me? Maybe I really did have demons inside of me? The exorcism messed me up a lot. I started to question who I was, what I was, I didn't know what I believed and I didn't know what to think. Were my thoughts my own? Were they the thoughts that demons were putting into my head? Was I truly as evil as the staff had said I was? On top of all of this, I wasn't allowed to discuss it with family members or friends.

On one particular night, I got into such a state because the staff had told me that I had demons. I wanted to get them out of me, so I started to hurt myself, cut myself; because by that stage I was such a mess that I believed if I cut myself then the demons would come out in the blood. It sounds crazy, I know. I had never thought like this before, but the indoctrination was that bad. That night I desperately wanted to talk to my family—I needed to.

I could feel myself going crazy. The staff had told me that the demons were putting thoughts into my head and speaking to me through them, so I believed that any thought in my head was a thought coming from a demon. It was horrible and I had no support, nobody who I could turn to within the house, only staff who reinforced the belief that demons were talking to me. So, I asked to call home, to speak to my family.

I was given the option of calling home from within the staff office with a staff member listening to the conversation (to make sure I didn't tell my family more than I was allowed to), or not to call home at all. I was devastated. I had no way of getting immediate help or counsel from my family, who were solid Christians, who I knew could have helped me. I had no way of telling them then and there what the staff had been doing to me.

I had gone into Mercy Ministries as an educated, independent young woman who had an illness and was seeking treatment. I came out a real mess. I had reverted back to being a child: totally dependent, very very fragile and believing that somehow the illness I had was my own fault.

Since coming out of Mercy Ministries, I have been able to seek proper treatment from qualified people and they have really helped me to turn things around. The effects that Mercy Ministries had on me psychologically were so much worse than the initial problems I went to Mercy Ministries to deal with in the first place. It took me such a long time to trust anyone again, but since Mercy I have met some wonderful Christians and I have also had professional treatment, and slowly the lies that Mercy Ministries staff told me and the effects the lies and indoctrination had on me have been undone. Mercy Ministries has been a long and difficult process—one that I would wish on no-one.

This is the personal story of a woman I have called Anne Roberts for her own protection. The mistreatment of Anne at the hands of untrained counsellors is scandalous, made more so by the fact that Mercy Ministries continues to claim that they offer professional help to those who seek it. Instead, desperate young women are subject to a life in a cult-like environment where their every move is controlled, their access to the outside world limited and their treatment handled by staff whose sole skill base seems to be derived from some form of Bible studies.

They are cut off from their families, friends and their support networks and told that they will be helped and that they will be helped for free, but both claims are manifestly untrue. Mercy Ministries destroys those whom it claims to help whilst pilfering their Centrelink payments. It is also alleged that this money-grubbing goes further, with Mercy Ministries attempting to claim carers' benefits for the young women in their so-called care.

In recent months, Mercy Ministries has been under increasing public scrutiny. Unable to defend Mercy's actions, two CEOs have resigned since March. Mercy's residential facility on the Sunshine Coast has reportedly closed its doors. Increased public scrutiny has exposed Mercy Ministries as a particularly bad example of a money-making cult, posing as a Christian-based counselling service.

I put on record my admiration for those young women who have been brave enough to speak out publicly about their treatment at the hands of Mercy Ministries. I hope that their actions go some way to empowering themselves again and enabling them to get on with their lives.

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