Loony as that gospel may have sounded to outsiders, scores of seemingly rational, intelligent adults on the inside believed it faithfully enough to follow its prophet into the fire. So what could be expected of 21 surviving children who spent most or all of their brief lives under Koresh’s magnetic sway? For them, all is confusion. Released into the custody of Texas child authorities after the first deadly shoot-out at the Ranch Apocalypse compound, they have found themselves suddenly bereft of the parents, the teachers and the overarching authority figure who made the rules. Some wary and secretive, others clinging and anxious, these are kids not just orphaned but emptied of moral certitude. At the very least, says psychiatrist Bruce Perry, head of a team of volunteer counselors who’ve been treating them for the past two months, they will need “a whole new set of internal landmarks.” That may be only part of the challenge therapists face in restoring the Koresh kids to the real world-or rather, the world the rest of us live in.
Not that the doctors lack know-how. They have built substantial expertise on the traumatized young, based on studies of children in war zones from Mozambique to Chicago, as well as victims of natural disasters. Relatively little work has been done with young cult survivors, but in at least one respect the findings among all victimized children are similar. Most show signs of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a syndrome marked by nightmares and psychic numbing, among other problems, that was reported mostly in Vietnam combat veterans. Reactions to extreme stress can vary with age and temperament. But some doctors estimate that at least 80 percent of the Branch Davidian children will experience PTSD. “There’s been a major and horrific set of experiences for these children,” says Saul Levine, head of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla. “Regardless of any therapy they get, this was for them a holocaust, one of the worst possible disasters. The chances that they are unscathed are very poor indeed. It’s very common that they will have a bland, affectless response right now, only to be reminded years later in dreams, memories or psychopathology.”
The psychopathology, in particular, worries doctors. A troubling pattern of repetition seems to play out in childhood trauma. As many as 70 percent of child abusers and wife beaters, for instance, turn out to have been abused children themselves. David Koresh, too, said he was abused. “So often the problem recurs because a person seeks a way of turning the passive-victim experience into the active mode of being a perpetrator,” says UCLA child psychiatrist Dr. Spencer Eth. Does that mean some of the young Davidians will grow up to be oppressive parents? Not necessarily. Therapists try to find a healthier outlet for the active impulse, and sometimes they succeed.
For the Koresh kids, it is too early to say what the outcome will be. For one thing, there are still too many unanswered questions about what really happened to them in the cult. Indeed, the reports that emerged during the long siege of Ranch Apocalypse were as reductively black and white in their way as Koresh’s teaching. Life inside “was not the horrible, bleak picture,” acknowledges Perry, after his two-month examination of the children. Researchers have only been able to piece together a vague image of what the daily routine was like for the children, Perry says, but evidently not everything that went on was bad. “Many of the kids are very open about the fact that they really liked living there, and it was a nice place, and they felt happy and healthy.” That, of course, wasn’t the whole picture. Many also have recounted stories of harsh discipline, including physical punishments. And daily, the kids were being told that “the outside world was not good, that there were people out there who wanted to hurt them and would misunderstand them.”
That probably accounts for the lingering secretiveness of many of the children. Therapists treating them in Waco’s Methodist Home found them adept at dodging certain questions about life in the cult. “They use these pat comments or distraction techniques to get you away from really finding out the truth,” says Perry. “We’d say, ‘Well, you’ve heard people say David had all these wives. What do you think about that?’ And they’d say something like, ‘Read Psalm 53’.” When the children first arrived at the Methodist Home, Perry notes, they set up a kind of miniature version of the Davidian social structure. An older male child and an older female child were said to have the “light,” the state of grace that signified maturity in Koresh’s eyes. “The boys sat with the boys and the girls sat with the girls, and they were exceptionally compliant. “But as relatives came to claim various kin, this structure broke down and the children lapsed into more typical behavior.
The transition to living with family members again may be critical, for these children. “They have trouble developing trusting relationships with adults,” says Perry. “The most meaningful adults in their life are gone, including their biological parents. All those adults around whom you organize your development are gone.” The Davidian blurring of lines between parental and other authority figures creates further problems.
Trust may be the key issue right now. Psychologists say that like adults, children often become cunning and manipulative in a repressive atmosphere. They develop stratagems to get things they want. In a new social system, they quickly begin wondering what the new rules are, what the people in charge are looking for. “Once they figure out they can’t escape you,” says Susan Andersen, an associate professor of psychology at New York University, “they’ll try to figure out what they can do to manipulate you, to please you. I would think there’s likely to be a lot of pretending involved.” Therapists have to gain the child’s trust by proving that they really care. At some point, perhaps to test the adult, the child might do something he’s sure would bring punishment. A good therapist, says Andersen, will respond instead by showing understanding: “That will be the beginning of the child’s realizing that it’s safe to tell the truth.”
Such an incident did occur at the Methodist Home, according to staff members. When one boy accidentally spilled milk–the kind of infraction that might have incurred a beating at Ranch Apocalypse-he cringed and instinctively raised his hand over his head. But a staff member quickly assured him he wasn’t going to be struck. Above all, says Perry, therapists tried to be nonthreatening with the children-a policy that might well be practiced by any future caregivers. Staff members made it a point not to pry or ask too many questions. “The majority of it was completely nonintrusive. It was being with them, eating with them, playing with them. And when the kids would bring up a topic where they were upset, we had the staff literally right there who could provide nurturance.”
It wasn’t always easy to observe the no-threat rule. Jack Daniels, president of the Methodist Home, says the Davidian children at first were taught separately in their living quarters but then began attending classes outside the compound at the Methodist school. On the first day of class, one of the Davidians refused to relinquish the computer when his time was up. To discipline the boy, school officials decided he would be the last to use the computer the next day. When Daniels relayed that word to him, the boy launched into a rambling, flaky explanation about why he had needed to stay at the machine because of a game he was playing. Daniels told him that nevertheless he would be relegated to last in line. “He swelled up,” says Daniels, “and said that in that case, he wasn’t going to school. I said he had no choice, he was going. You could feel it in the air-he was just dying for me to make him do something. I raised my voice and repeated he would go to school. Then he decided he had to do it, but to maintain his defiance, he rolled off the sofa and rolled all the way down the hall to his room. It was a challenge to show him you could enforce discipline without physical contact or abuse.”
The children, in fact, seem to have moved from one kind of conformist society to another. Only instead of just figuring out ways to manipulate the rules of their new milieu, they will have to adapt to them-a process that may be far from smooth. Perry is convinced there will be good outcomes for many of the children. All are still receiving some form of counseling and treatment–and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Perry’s team will also stay in contact with them for a time, to monitor their progress in adjusting to their new lives.
The adjustment may be rough going. Symptoms of posttraumatic stress can be immediate: in the first three weeks after their release, the Davidian children showed such typical signs as sleeplessness, hypervigilance, elevated heart rates. But other symptoms can turn up years later. Lenore Terr, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, studied 25 children kidnapped aboard their school bus and buried underground in a truck trailer for 16 hours, in a bizarre incident near Chowchilla, Calif. Four years after the event, Terr found that “every child exhibited posttraumatic effects,” including repeated nightmares, feelings of shame and, particularly disturbing in people so young, a “severe pessimism” about their lives. Having narrowly escaped death, most of them doubted they would live long; some died in their dreams.
It’s not unusual for people to feel shame about a set of circumstances in which they were the victims. In subtle– or sometimes not so subtle-ways, they are made to feel responsible for their own misfortune, the classic case being the rape victim. Former cultists seem to carry a particular stigma when they’ve been sexually abused. Clinical psychologist Margaret Thaler Singer, of the University of California, Berkeley, has treated hundreds of ex-cultists. She considers it a kind of “intellectual mistake” to equate sexual abuse in outside society with sexual abuse in cults. “They’re two different programs, so to speak,” she says. In outside society, because of the furtiveness and guilt attached to the act, an abused child is made to feel “part of an illicit, dirty conspiracy.” In the cults, the abuse tends to be more open, an accepted if not approved part of the group’s behavior. “Children may resent it, they may hate it, but they see it happen to other children and they don’t feel they’re the only one-which is such an important aspect of the way it’s experienced on the outside.” And, Singer adds, she has interviewed scores of abused former cultists who grew up to be wellfunctioning adults.
Other psychologists agree that the readjustment victims make can hinge on how outside society receives them. After studying children in war zones around the world, James Garbarino, president of Chicago’s Erikson Institute, concludes that their experience was not unlike what happened at Waco. In Mozambique and Cambodia, he says, he and his team of researchers encountered apocalyptic events and children subjected to strange rituals. In Mozambique, children kidnapped into the opposition army group, Renamo, were sometimes subjected to “heinous” punishments and forced to serve as executioners. How the children handled the stress and guilt afterward was partly a matter of individual differences of temperament. But a lot depended also on reintegrating them into the community. Many of the children came home originally as prisoners of war, having served in the enemy army. But community activists persuaded friends and neighbors to welcome them back. “It took a lot of effort to do that,” says Garbarino, “and to get the kids to give up the idea they were responsible for the bad things that happened.” By the same token, he says, what some of the Davidian kids will have to face is that both in their own minds and in the minds of those around them, their identity may be tied up with Koresh. “So it’s much more than a set of narrow psychiatric symptoms. It’s more a philosophical and community problem of what kind of identity the child has,” Garbarino concludes.
By now, according to Perry, some of the children have formed “very intense attachments” to staff members who have worked with them over the past two months. Under the circumstances, he thinks that their behavior is normal and predictable. “What’s going on is that these kids are clinging to anybody who is available to kind of nurture and take care of them.” Obviously, he adds, those attachments will have to be gradually pried loose and transferred to the families that have begun getting custody of the children.
Whoever takes over the care and welfare of the Waco waifs will be hard pressed to replace what they have already lost. Only 10 children were left at the Methodist Home when the Branch Davidian compound burned to the ground. Perry says that when the children were told of the fire they reacted “pretty much as you’d expect from any other group of children who were told that their loved ones were dead. There was some disbelief, sadness, anger, confusion and outright fear about what the future held.”
For all they’ve been through, the future may not hold any comparable ordeals for the cult children. Some of them seem likely to become productive members of society; some no doubt will continue to bear the emotional scars of their experiences for years to come. For qualified observers such as psychiatrist Levine, “the psychological jury is still out.” Levine cites a study by the Ford Foundation in the 1970s of hundreds of children in different family situations. Long-term outcomes showed no significant differences, as long as there was even a “modicum” of such things as loving, setting of rules and teaching. If those things are done it doesn’t really matter what the social setting is, Levine says. “If not, then these Davidian kids are in jeopardy.” But of course, the jeopardy was there from the time their parents sought the false comfort of a cult.
