The International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA), formerly the American Family Foundation (AFF), is a non-profit educational and anti-cult organization. It publishes the International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation, ICSA Today, and other materials.
History
The American Family Foundation (AFF) was founded by Kay Barney in 1979 in Lexington, Massachusetts. It was one of a few anti-cult groups founded in this period, and one of several dozen disparate parents' groups founded in the late 1970s by concerned parents. Barney's daughter had joined the Unification Church, and he came to see her relationship with it as alarming and controlling; he sought to learn more and therefore counteract its influence.
For a time the AFF was affiliated with the Citizens’ Freedom Foundation (CFF) which later became the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). They were the two biggest anti-cult organizations in the United States.
They promoted the idea of satanic groups connected to "satanic ritual abuse" as part of the Satanic panic. They had a "Task Force on Satanism", and sold a "Satanism information packet" that checked for a "ritual abuse behavioral checklist" and included miscellaneous news clips on allegedly satanic crimes. Their periodicals also ran articles on the topic, and editors of their periodicals expressed a belief in ritual abuse. They had the "Center of Destructive Cultism" as an arm of the main organization. In 1999, its executive director was Michael Langone.
In 2001, publication of the Cultic Studies Journal and The Cult Observer ceased, and the AFF began publishing the Cultic Studies Review as an online journal with triennial print editions. They have published the ICSA Today magazine since 2010. The journal ceased in 2019. In 2020, they launched the International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation. In a previous article Richardson and Marat S. Shterin said that Western anti-cult organizations, including the CSA, had been a source of anti-cult material in Russia.
In their book Cults and New Religions: A Brief History, sociologists Douglas E. Cowan and David G. Bromley describe the ICSA as a "secular anticult" organization. They claim that the ICSA provides no indication of how many of its cult characteristics are necessary for a group to be considered "cultic," and that the checklist creators do not adequately define how much of certain practices or behaviors would constitute "excessive," nor do they provide evidence that any of the practices listed are innately harmful. Cowan and Bromley also state that the ICSA’s list is so broad that even mainstream religious movements such as Buddhism, Evangelical Protestantism, Hinduism, and the Roman Catholic Church could fall within the criteria.
See also
- Cult Information Centre
- Dialogue Ireland
- Decult Conference
- European Federation of Centres of Research and Information on Sectarianism
- Info-Cult
- MIVILUDES
- The Family Survival Trust