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P.E.I. commune ruled by fear of God, court told
Former nun charged with assaulting five children
National Post (Canada), Sep. 18, 2002
http://www.nationalpost.com/
By Richard Foot
CHARLOTTETOWN – A diminutive, 78-year-old woman who leads a religious commune on Prince Edward Island — and allegedly claims to be a prophet of God — is on trial facing charges of assaulting five children in her care.
The trial caps more than a year of investigations by police and child-welfare authorities into alleged abuses inside the fundamentalist Christian “family,” whose members moved from Alberta to P.E.I. in 1995.
That year, Lucille Poulin, a former Roman Catholic nun, led eight adults and nine young children away from Alberta after authorities there began asking questions about the group’s practices. They settled into a farmhouse in central P.E.I. and ran a restaurant beside one of the island’s major highways.
The children were schooled at home, and together with their parents lived an austere, communal life according to a strict interpretation of the Bible.
In July, 2001, P.E.I. officials began investigating after three children escaped the commune and complained about abuses there.
Although other adults allegedly took part in beating the children, Ms. Poulin is the only one who has been criminally charged.
Yesterday, the bespectacled woman sat sternly and quietly in the Supreme Court of P.E.I., wearing a long dress and woolen shawl, listening to allegations by the first Crown witness — a former commune member and mother of two of its children — that Ms. Poulin brainwashed the adults in the group and regularly forced their children to be beaten, sometimes ordering up to 39 strikes at a time with a small wooden paddle.
The woman’s name, plus those of the five children in the case and their parents, cannot be published according to a court order.
The mother said the children, aged seven to 12, were hit on the buttocks and thighs for behaviour ranging from not falling asleep to taking extra cookies. She said Ms. Poulin sometimes beat them so long and hard the children fainted. Sometimes, she said, the boys and girls were beaten awake in the morning while still lying in bed.
Asked by Ms. Poulin’s lawyer why she and the other parents permitted the alleged abuse, the mother said the commune’s members lived in the grip of bizarre Biblical fears.
“[The adults] were afraid of what Lucille could do,” the middle-aged woman testified yesterday. “She had a mental hold on us, she had us under fear,” the woman said, her voice quaking and close to tears.
“Obviously she was an older woman, she wasn’t going to beat [the adults]…. But she told us she was a prophet of God, and people who had come up against her had sometimes died.”
She said commune members believed if they left the group, or if they tried to confront Ms. Poulin, she would put a curse on them.
“She told us if we left we’d go to Hell,” the mother said. “I was afraid that God would strike me dead or something.”
In a statement of facts filed with the court, Ms. Poulin admits to hitting children with the wooden paddle, but says her use of force was not excessive.
“She asserts that her physical contact with the children was justified and/or authorized in various passages of the Bible,” the statement says.
In a television interview first broadcast in 2001, Ms. Poulin said she and other commune members “took very good care” of the children, using the Bible as their guide.
Life at the commune began to unravel in December, 1999, when one child, a 12-year-old boy, died of an apparent viral infection. Then last summer three of the children escaped.
Yesterday’s witness said one boy managed to contact family members in Alberta, who helped him plan his escape.
Provincial authorities seized the remaining children from the commune following the escapes.
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