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Concept
Cult Awareness Network
Summary
The Cult Awareness Network (CAN) was an anti-cult organization created by deprogrammer Ted Patrick that provided information on groups it considered "cults", as well as support and referrals to deprogrammers. After CAN lost a lawsuit and filed for bankruptcy in 1996, Scientologists acquired CAN's name and assets, including phone numbers and records, and reopened the organization under the name New Cult Awareness Network. The Church of Scientology had previously been one of CAN's main targets.
Ted Patrick founded FREECOG (Parents Committee to Free Our Sons and Daughters from the Children of God) in 1971 and the Citizen's Freedom Foundation (CFF) in 1974. These two organizations merged into the Cult Awareness Network in 1984. By 1991, the Cult Awareness Network had twenty-three chapters dedicated to monitoring over two hundred groups that it referred to as "mind control cults".
Patricia Ryan, the daughter of US Congressman Leo J. Ryan (D-Millbrae, California), who died from gunfire while investigating conditions at the Peoples Temple compound in Jonestown, Guyana, was president of CAN from 1990 to 1993. Actor Mike Farrell served on the board of advisors of CAN.
In 1990, the Cult Awareness Network established the "John Gordon Clark Fund", in honor of psychiatrist John G. Clark, who had given testimony about Scientology and other groups. The fund was established to assist former members of destructive cults.
The CFF was originally in favor of deprogramming, but distanced itself from the practice in the late 1970s, when it changed its name to the Cult Awareness Network. Despite this, the Cult Awareness Network also became the subject of controversy, when CAN-associated Galen Kelly and Donald Moore, were convicted in the course of carrying out deprogrammings.
Detractors Susan E. Darnell, Anson D. Shupe, and Church of Scientology attorney Kendrick Moxon charged that CAN deliberately provided a distorted picture of the groups it tracked.
In 1991, Time magazine quoted then CAN director Cynthia Kisser in its article "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power".
Official source
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