David Berg was a Christian and Missionary Alliance preacher who lost his church, took to the road with his family in the late 1960s, and gathered a following among hippies in Huntington Beach. The Children of God grew into an international network of communal houses.
Berg communicated with the movement through Mo Letters — mimeographed instructional documents, sometimes illustrated, issued for decades. He was almost never seen. Even senior members frequently did not know where he was.
That invisibility is a control mechanism in itself. An unverifiable authority cannot be contradicted by observation, cannot be found to be behaving inconsistently with his own teaching, and cannot be confronted.
From around 1974 the letters instructed a practice Berg called Flirty Fishing. Female members were to use sexual relationships to recruit men and to obtain money, protection and support for the group. Internal statistics reported in the movement's own publications ran into hundreds of thousands of encounters over the following decade. The practice was formally discontinued in 1987, in part because of AIDS.
The mechanism operates in two directions and it is important to see both.
Outward, toward the target: sexual intimacy accelerates attachment. The neurochemistry is contested in its details but the behavioral finding is not — physical intimacy substantially increases trust and reduces the disposition to evaluate. What Flirty Fishing produced was a bond that attached not to a person but to a group, since the woman was explicitly acting as its representative.
Inward, toward the member, and this is the more consequential direction. Doing this required overriding a boundary. And once it had been done, Festinger's mechanism runs: a person who has done something significant and contrary to their prior values must either conclude that they were coerced into something wrong, or that the doctrine requiring it was right. The second is far cheaper, and it produces a deeper commitment than the doctrine could have produced by argument.
Boundary violation, in other words, is not merely an abuse the group commits. It is a device for manufacturing belief.
The material that emerged later is worse than the practice itself. Publications produced within the group in this period included sexualized material involving children, and litigation, custody proceedings and inquiries in several countries in the 1990s addressed allegations of child sexual abuse. The group, renamed The Family International, later acknowledged and apologized for aspects of its past teaching and formally prohibited the conduct.
Berg died in 1994. Survivor accounts, including from children raised in the movement, are extensive, and several of the second generation have spoken publicly about what was done to them.