International Journal on Criminology Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2013 | Page 73

International Journal on Criminology––Volume 1––Number 1––Fall 2013
Psycho-Criminology of Sectarian Reality
Loïck M. Villerbu
Abstract:
Universities or research laboratories rarely know how to equip themselves to study
sectarian reality and offer diagnostic criteria from a criminological perspective. This is
why too often it is not recognized that the victims of sectarian affiliations may have been
under an influence, nor are they seen as the victims they really are, and they may find
that sentencing in the criminal courts goes against them. 1 This influence upon them was
not in the form of manipulation whose passive objects they may be or may have been—
but because they themselves believed that they could give themselves meaning by
(unwittingly) trusting criminal groups, whose foundation (sometimes in total good faith)
is the scam. The work presented here attempts to show the construction of this sectarian
fraud 2 and the Criminogenesis that it informs. This is not an essay in psycho-pathology
on the psychological excesses of belief, although such may well exist.
We only have a small amount of relevant work on what could have been the first
fruitful moments of the creation of such and such a group’s sectarianism, a sectarianism
that assumes all the opportune faces of fiction, of medicine, of care, of education, or of
finance. Everything that calls itself and is named sect is not necessarily sectarian: for our
purposes, what is criminogenic and criminal is sectarian.
A Framework of References
Speaking of a sect quite often leads to contrasting it with a church; the former then
makes the latter out to be a sect that has succeeded in imposing itself to the point
that the marginal dissidence that it might have constituted disappears in the name
of assumed excellence. It is in a context of positive discrimination that equivalencies
have been insisted upon and are often referred to as New Religious Movements. The
problem is reduced to the problem of belief: each person has the right to believe what he
wants. Studying sectarian reality from a criminological point of view does not mean
studying a fact of belief but the concrete and criminal practices to which belief and its
organization give rise.
The criminological context means that we are not fooled by the mere reference to
beliefs, but consider from the outset what they elicit, impose, or solicit on the part of the
adherent and social group.
Psychic disorder or social disorder is the pivot points of belief, not in what they are
but in what they require as practices, conduct, and behaviors.
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1 In this sense, it is a matter of a phenomenon similar to the one potentially suffered by victims of
sexual assault (sexual, psychological, moral) harassment, or conjugal violence. The denial of the
earliest victims' speech had created mythomania (E. Dupré, La mythomanie, étude psychologique et
médico légale du mensonge et de la fabulation morbides (Paris: Imprimerie J. Gainche, 1905), just
as today, parental alienation syndrome runs the excessive risk of suggesting that the child is first of
all manipulated by one of the parents and through resilience escapes by relying on his/her own
resources.
2 This is the follow-up to an initial work published in 2000. L.-M. Villerbu, C. Graziani, Les
dangers du lien sectaire (Paris: PUF, 2000).
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