A brave woman who was brought up in a cult has spoken out about the shocking treatment her and other cult members were faced with everyday. Dawn Watson, 29, was born into the Children Of God cult and was raised by it for over a decade before managing to escape at the age of 13.
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First started in 1968 as Teens For Christ by David Berg, it then changed its name to The Children Of God. It amassed thousands of followers around the world, and achieved notoriety when its main tenet became using sex to "show God's love and mercy".
Dawn was raised in Brazil in one of the cults 130 worldwide communities, where sexual abuse was an everyday occurrence.
"As you learned to brush your teeth as children," she told The Daily Star.
"We learned to have sex: 'This is what you have to do this is how it happens'.
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"We learnt God is love and the way to express God's love is through sexuality.
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"I never knew anything different from that. I think that no one will truly understand, unless you have lived it, what abuse is. And abuse I say in all forms. Abused sexually, abused emotionally and abuse spiritually."
For the 13 years she was trapped in the cult, Dawn was braninwashed and subjected to pornographic images as well as disturbing sexual acts.She was also raped.
"I never had any father figure growing up in the community," she said. "Not someone that as a man I could relate to and can feel was protective of me.
"I always looked at men and uncles of the community as danger and I wanted to be as far away as I could from them.
"My mum definitely did not know many of the things that were happening; they always put her to go and sing and always gave her so many jobs to do.
"A lot of times women were not taking care of their own children."
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Cult leaders prevented any children in the sect from having a real education, ensuring they were easier to brainwash.
They were also denied access to music and books, because the cult members feared access to things from the outside world would tempt the children to leave. And kids were subjected to physical abuse to stop them talking about what was happening to them.
"A lot of the kids would get scotch tape on their mouth as in you don't talk about things that are not of this culture or our belief systems," said Dawn.
"We had a spanking room that I was always in and out of. I remember one day, we were just kids being kids, and we ended up getting a punishment and I remember I got so many spankings that my whole leg was bruised and I remember going to my mom and saying: 'Is this love?'"
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Thankfully, Dawn was able to escape. As a teenager, she began having an increased amount of contact with the outside world and began to realise she'd been sold a lie.
"I finally got to a point in my life where I needed a way out," she said. "I desperately said: 'You know what? If the outside world is a terrible place, if God is going to judge me and kill me and I am going to hell. I really don't care.
"Leaving the community and having to figure out life in the outside world was really difficult, exciting, scary, bunch of different emotions.
"I jumped from house to house, especially ex-members. They would accept me and I would jump from place to place that where people that had left the community."
When she was finally free, she discovered that her mother had already left the cult, and the pair were able to rebuild their lives together in a safe home.
In 2016, Dawn set up her own charity, the Dawn Watson Institute, which aims to help the many other people who have been caught in similar situations and help them realise the therapy of speaking out about it.
"Helping people start to break the silence within themselves, what they went through," she said. "And then they can begin the process of healing.
"I think the way that I relate to my past, it really defines how people will relate to me. I felt like the more I am ashamed of my past, didn't wan to talk about it.
"But now I talk about it as 'this is me and I am not ashamed of it. This is where I came from."
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