Comparación de casos

Participants offered us a variety of reasons for how they came to be at Centrepoint. Several of those we interviewed had been born at Centrepoint, others had come as young children with their parents, while yet others had arrived as teenagers either sent by a parent or of their own volition.

Being born into the community carried considerable symbolic meaning for those whose birthplace was Centrepoint. One described how being born there created a particular historical link to the community. For her it was important:

to be able to say ‘I was born over there in the [room].’ I mean I still, you know people go back and I you know go back and people ask me about you know, my history with the community.

This group of participants spoke about the significance of the birth process at the

community including the ritual of burying the placenta under a ‘birth tree’. A number of participants who had been born at Centrepoint felt that this gave them a very special relationship with the community’s land.

But the experience seems to have been rather different for those who had come to the community as younger children. Most of these participants told of being brought there, despite their reluctance, by a parent. Several participants spoke about how their parent’s decision to move into the community had come unexpectedly and without consultation. This participant’s account was fairly typical:

So [my mother] felt like she wanted to move there and so she just announced one day – I think we’d only been out to visit a few times – and she announced that we were moving there so it was quite, already it had my back up but being like [a young child], there wasn’t much we could do about it.

Several of the participants who had been moved to Centrepoint by their parents described feeling angry and distressed initially. One man told us how, as a very young child, he remembered protesting ineffectually to his mother about going to the community. Another participant recollected sitting outside and refusing to go in for several hours after they arrived at Centrepoint for the first time.

On occasions, parents anticipated their children’s resistance to the community. One woman rather told us how she was initially tricked into going to Centrepoint by her father and her subsequent fear at being there:

Because when I was really young Dad said to me ‘We’re going to get an ice cream’ and then he drove me up there, so he didn’t even tell me the truth from the start. And then the next time we went up there, I tried to run away, because I just didn’t like the feel of the place and the look of the place and it was just too different. And the way my father had talked about it, I knew what went on up there. So I just, was scared of going there for that reason too.

Yet another participant described how the process of being taken to live at Centrepoint against her wishes was part of a greater sense of powerlessness that stayed with her during her time there:

I think it really shows me now how kids will take stuff and go with it but they don’t have a voice to say, I didn’t have a voice to say ‘I don’t like this, I don’t want to be here.’ I didn’t even really have that voice about whether I wanted to be with my Dad or my Mum. I didn’t have the feet to, and the, you know, I couldn’t really voice that. I didn’t have the cognitive skills to think that through and articulate it So I went with it, like everyone else really.

Most of the participants were able to provide an account of their parent’s decision to live at Centrepoint. Some understood that their parents were linked to the community by their shared commitment to its values and ideas. A portion of these parents were apparently professional people who were active in contributing to the ethos of the developing

community. These people were described as being idealists by their children, committed to the vision of living communally and in a way that was different from the unhealthy

But in addition to this obvious reason for their presence at the community, participants also suggested a range of social, economic and interpersonal experiences that may have led their parents to want to try living in an ‘intentional community’ like Centrepoint.

It was notable that most of the participants in this research had parents who had been separated prior to coming to the community. A number of participants specifically link this with their parent’s choice to move to Centrepoint, but for different reasons. For example, one participant described how, following divorce, his father had seemed to be looking for ‘something new’ in his life. Another reported that his newly single parent had simply been trying to find somewhere to stay after he left the family home and followed a friend’s suggestion to move to Centrepoint.

One often repeated theme amongst the participants’ accounts was their understanding that their parents had come to Centrepoint because they were having difficulty managing their lives outside the community. For some this was the difficulty of parenting alone. One participant, for example, described how her mother was unhappy and was struggling to cope with several children close together in age. She thinks that her mother’s life on her own with her and her siblings must have been “lonely, sort of unsatisfying and unfulfilled.”

Quite a few participants also understood their parents to be psychologically vulnerable and drawn to the community for support. One participant, although young at the time of his arrival, speculated that his mother was probably having a ‘breakdown’ and may well have not ‘survived’ without the support Centrepoint provided. Several others acknowledged that their parents subsequently identified mental health problems may well have been worse without the structure of the community for them to rely on.

For others, the support the community offered was financial. One participant told us that her mother often pointed out to her how Centrepoint had given her access to resources that she would never have been able to provide for her daughter as a single parent. Others

commented on the apparent ‘abundance’ of the community in providing food,

accommodation and a large swimming pool. Several participants commented on the relative luxury that this represented for them when they first arrived at the community, at least implying that they had previously experienced relative financial hardship.

So, from the perspective of many of our participants, Centrepoint offered support to parents struggling to survive outside of it. As one participant put it:

It was a haven for people with split families, and solo mums and people whose marriages were on the rocks; it was a haven for people to come [to].

While participants attributed some of the impetus to come to Centrepoint to their parents themselves, some also accounted for their parents’ decisions by referring to active

persuasion having played a part. One participant who had been abused at Centrepoint said her mother had later told her how strongly she had been persuaded to come to the

community in the interests of her children’s well-being and her own:

Mum’s told me that when she first moved in, you know, they were really, really encouraging her to, was a big, a big push, that she would be much better off living there with me. Because there was a lot of struggle with her and because they split up, Mum and Dad, when I was nine so I was pretty hard t… pretty rebellious and didn’t want to listen to her and they convinced her it would be much better to come there, that there would be other people to help her support me. But it wasn’t really like that at all in the end.

On a more disturbing note, a few participants reported that their parent had been actively involved the sexual abuse of children prior to coming to the community. This raises the possibility that there were some parents who decided to go to Centrepoint because of the opportunities provided for paedophile activity. Seen through the lens of later abuse one participant explained why she thought her mother had insisted she leave her father’s house to join her at the community:

The Centrepoint community just hounded and hounded Mum to get us to go there. Really – just because Bert just wanted to have sex with us. And so, yeah, so basically, yeah, so he got us, got Mum to come and get us, and so, you know. [He] didn’t let up until we’d moved in.

Within our group of participants, those who came to Centrepoint as teenagers seemed to have had a rather different trajectory of entry into the community from those who were born there, or came when they were younger. Most of this group reported being sent to join a parent already living at Centrepoint after they experienced some difficulty at school or at the home of their other parent. Many described themselves as being somewhat rebellious and ‘in trouble’ prior to coming to the community. For at least one, a parent had been ‘counselled’ to bring them to Centrepoint and for others they were sent by a parent outside who was unable to manage their behaviour. Sometimes, from these participants’ points of

view, being sent to Centrepoint was used as a punishment for misbehaviour. One described how his mother used to threaten to send him back to the community after he had left it for a period of time:

Mum used to threaten ‘I’ll send you off to Centrepoint’. If I was naughty, it was like ‘I’ll send you off to Centrepoint’.

Others amongst this group of participants had dropped out of school or were temporarily homeless as they moved between living arrangements with other family or friends. For them Centrepoint was a refuge, intended perhaps initially to be temporary. One participant, who was teenager when she first started spending time at Centrepoint, described it like this:

Now the reason I went, I guess, was because I used to use Mum’s to go home, grab food, have a shower you know in between [laughs], I don’t know, ‘exploits’ or whatever. I was a bit of a ragamuffin, and yeah that security was gone so I don’t know why I went there but I did.

Some of these teenage children were reluctant to come to the community and leave their existing friendship groups behind, while for others Centrepoint seemed to represent an exciting new opportunity to live a more ‘adult’ life. As one participant put it:

I was sick of the teachers treating me like a kid and I was misbehaving and things. So, so there I had the, you know, instantly I was sort of like, treated like an adult.

Another explained how the freedom she had experienced during school holidays at Centrepoint provided a compelling reason for her to make the choice to live there permanently:

Oh I just wanted to get out of [my school] and I just really, I used to have lots of fun at Centrepoint and I just needed the freedom at that stage.

The experiences of children who had a family base outside were a little different again. Some would visit on weekends or holidays while others moved between longer periods of living with one parent outside of Centrepoint and one within. These participants describe a mixture of ‘push and pull’ factors drawing them back into the Centrepoint community. On the ‘pull’ side there was the excitement, the friendships, the sometimes illicit activity

provided at Centrepoint while the ‘push’ factors were provided by on-going difficulties with familial relationships or at school. One described her decision to return to the community as follows:

My [family members] were writing to me and talking to me on the phone about the drugs – they’d just started it and I was away. And I had a miserable time with my [parent] so I came back.

For this participant, some personal choice in moving ‘back’ to the community is evident. But some of our participants wanted to make it quite clear that they were ‘just kids’ and had never been actively involved in a choice about living at Centrepoint. Concern that their lack of choice be recognised was expressed amongst many of our participants: among some of those who felt that they had generally had a positive experience of the community, those who had been born there, and those who had came later.

There were a variety of reasons participants provided as to why parents – and in some cases the children themselves – decided to come to Centrepoint. Participants reported that the community offered hope or help with social, psychological or economic problems. This is not surprising given that Centrepoint’s goals as an ‘intentional community’ were personal and interpersonal growth and transformation. The adult children we interviewed understood that Centrepoint provided a kind of refuge to parents or teens who were struggling in one way or another with their lives outside. Children also ended up living at the community because of the idealism that drew their parents there. Some participants were, of course, born at the community and thus may have felt a connection with the community,

independent of the parent’s reasons for being there.