Janice’s Scientology Story

Posted by on October 9, 2012 in Voices In Unison | Comments Off on Janice’s Scientology Story

I was 5 years old when it happened. I grew up in one of their usual camps with my mother. To be honest, I didn’t understand most of it when it happened, and now that I look back to it on this day, I notice what happened to my mother. Is she really dead? Did they lie to me?

So anyway my name is Janice Parker, daughter of [deleted by admin on request] ex Scientologist, now dead. One morning I got up at 5AM from the room I slept in with 3 other children and put on the itchy, bottle green uniform, ready to start cleaning the canteen for breakfast. All 12 of us started to set the tables like we did every day when I was called away to see my mother who I hadn’t seen in the past 3 weeks.

When I got into the room, I saw my mother sitting on a chair to the left behind the heavy oak door. She explained she was going to have to go away for a bit and would like me to come with her. Before my mother could finish, I was told to leave the room and head back to where the others were. That’s the last I saw of my mother.

It went on like this for a month, with me receiving various punishments for asking about my mother all the time and refusing to do work. One of these [punishments] was to get up an hour before everybody else and clean the canteen before the [other] children came to set the tables. If I was Late, they would make me wear the same uniform for a week without washing.

Then one day I got called out again and went to talk to a woman named Sharon. She never told me her last name or anything about her, I just remember her first name and her fluffy red hair, and her telling me that my father, an ‘SP’, wanted me to stay with him, but I shouldn’t as he was a very bad person. I agreed, as I thought if I didn’t I’d get in trouble.

I carried on with life as normal and tried to forget about my dad to no avail. I had 1 or 2 meetings with Sharon every day, still telling me my father was bad and to keep following Scientology and I would one day enter the Sea Org.

But then it all changed. I was woken up at 6 am one night and was told to pack my stuff and was hurried to a car and driven to a house. Inside the house was my father (this was where I was to spend the rest of my life free from Scientology).

The Scientologists told me I was to stay here, that’s it, no goodbyes or anything – they just drove off. It seems behind my back there was a custody battle who was to keep me, my father explained. My mother committed ‘suicide’ by hanging herself in her room a week after she told me she wanted us to leave. I was told that they wanted to keep me but my father has refused, and that’s it, my simple and pretty boring story of my childhood in Scientology.