Children are easy prey for extremist groups; a risk which, rightly, concerns many parents.
Whether for sects and even more today extremist groups, adolescence represents a key period when the influence of parents often becomes weak. The great specialist in adolescence, Professor Philippe Jeammet, in a book published a few years ago, “Adolescence”, published by Solar, spoke of sects as “the most perverted form of education”. To educate a child is to take into account his originality, his uniqueness, which is not the case with extremist groups who rather prefer to practice a form of “intellectual cloning” whose goal is to produce – often in the name of a charismatic leader – a unique model of thinking and driving. To educate is to give the necessary tools to be able to learn pleasure and curiosity, to know how to criticize and to be able to make choices. Perversion is using the weak – either a weak personality or a child in a weak position – for personal ends, denying them the right to exist with their own needs and desires.
However, how to explain that, in certain supposedly normal families, there is sometimes a member who escapes the educational scheme to join groups with questionable ideologies. Not every adolescent can be totally protected from the chance of encounters and events. Fortunately, however, very few take action. For this, two conditions are needed. The first, and parents have little means to fight against, except by anticipating the discussion, is the charismatic personality of a pseudo leader who will find the right words to hit the mark. The second is trauma, a humiliation that can, according to Professor Jeammet, lead an individual to merge with a cause, without the encounter of which he would perhaps have committed suicide. People who are victims of this kind of injury – which are self-esteem injuries – often take refuge in a disproportionate pride that it seems more acceptable to delegate to a cause than to assume it oneself.
Extremist groups, with the help of the Internet escaping almost all means of control, especially at home, are a real and above all high-profile threat. But since the injuries of adolescents most likely to enter into these processes are not always the most visible, this is yet another reason to remember that adolescence is an extremely delicate period in human life, which requires more than never with his own children observation, skill and communication.
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