In many ways, cults are similar to the military. There is a process of breaking down free will and replacing it with blind obedience. One way to achieve such dominion is through dictating the most minute details of a person’s life — how he washes, how much food she eats. Like the military, cults promote a bunker mentality, an us-versus-them attitude. They discourage independent thought and stress the importance of "group think." They maintain rigid discipline, deftly meting out rewards and punishment.

Tariq was certainly adept at using all these techniques in his own little boot camp — adding liberal doses of intimidation, humiliation, and violence for good measure. He kept his group fearful, off kilter. By the time the Pakistan mission came about, he was presiding over a bunch of quivering lackeys.

When they returned from their summer in Pakistan, in 2001, the group moved into a single basement room in suburban Maryland, which is where Tariq’s mania really began to flourish. "He would beat the guys and he would instruct us to beat one another," Kerry says. "The guys wouldn’t beat me, but he would make me self-inflict. With the guys it became very abusive, a lot of punching, a lot of kicking. He introduced it gradually, over time. I had to kick and punch them repeatedly, hit them on the head with books. It was awful."

Awful, but not unacceptable. By this point, Kerry and the others were so far gone that Tariq was able to convince them that the abuse was for the "greater good" — the glory of God. "I would keep repeating this to myself, it was the only way I could do it," Kerry says of the beatings. "He said it was a way to rid one another of sin. But he interpreted what sin was, he defined what sin was. If we didn’t speak fast enough, it would be punishable. I had to tell myself over and over again, ‘I have to get the sin out of him. I want him to be white on the inside.’"

By occasionally withholding punishment and proffering a kind of paternal love, Tariq was able to inspire a twisted form of devotion, affection, and even gratitude in his group. Like many cult leaders, he kept his followers isolated, tucked away, until eventually he began to serve as an emotional proxy for friends, family, and lovers — not to mention God. "There were definitely periods where I had affection for him," Kerry says, "and a love for him and a reverence for him. I wouldn’t have stayed if it was just fear."

And then, one day last spring, something clicked.

"I was in the back of a van," Kerry says. "I was being punished because I’d fallen asleep that day. I had to do this really painful position in the back of this van, as it was moving, you know, my head banging all over the place. I remember I looked out of the window and thought, ‘Wow, I’d like to be outside on the grass instead of being in here.’ It was the first time I recognized I had an option not to be with him. The next day, I was anticipating receiving more punishment for the sin I’d committed, so I called my mom and told her I wanted to go home."

Although Kerry’s parents hadn’t realized the extent of the abuse their daughter was suffering — they didn’t even know where she was half the time — they’d been dubious about the group she was in. So when Kerry’s call came, they jumped on the opportunity, recruiting a husband-and-wife team of cult researchers named Bob and Judy Pardon to help them pry Kerry from Tariq’s grasp. They succeeded — sort of. "I went back [to Tariq] three times, three or four times," Kerry says. "I just kept thinking, ‘I need to get back, I need to get back, I need to get back.’" Last November, Kerry entered Meadow Haven, the Pardons’ Massachusetts-based treatment center for cult survivors, where she has lived ever since.

When she arrived at Meadow Haven, Kerry was withdrawn to the point of being mute. In time, her silence gave way to bouts of "wailing and hollering." She was afflicted with eating disorders, a shattered sense of self, and deep-seated paranoia. "I’d constantly be having evil thoughts about people," she says. "I didn’t trust my parents, I didn’t trust my friends, I didn’t trust anybody. All I trusted was Tariq. I don’t know what my life would have been like had I not come here. I can’t honestly say that I wouldn’t have committed suicide."

Kerry’s stint at Meadow Haven is almost over. In a week or two, she will venture out into the world again, to find a job, an apartment, maybe go back to college, pick up where she left off before she met Tariq. The treatment she has received at the center, according to those who have tended to her over the last seven months, has not necessarily cleansed Kerry, but it has equipped her to cope. "She has the tools now to be able to function better," says Bob Pardon. "Kerry has worked through this. She can look back and not feel the sting quite as much."

Though deciding what, exactly, constitutes a cult can be a slippery and contentious issue, cult researchers generally agree on a single, broad definition: any group whose followers pledge blind allegiance to a leader, to their physical, emotional, or psychological detriment, through a process of manipulation and duress, can be put into the cult category.

According to the AFF’s Carol Giambavo, there are between 2000 and 6000 cults in the United States. There are religious cults and therapy cults, marketing cults and UFO cults, yoga cults and political cults. The groups range in size from army-size outfits like the Moonies and Jehovah’s Witnesses to mini-cults like the one that held Elizabeth Smart and the one in which Kerry became ensnared. If there are any Al Qaeda cells in the US, then they are part of a large, destructive cult. Some marriages have an internal dynamic similar to that of cults, as do many street gangs. Locally, according to Bob Pardon, the groups the Twelve Tribes and the International Church of Christ fit the standard definition very well.

Generally, cults — or "destructive mind-control groups," as the experts like to say — come to the public’s attention only when something catastrophic happens, such as the 1978 mass-murder/suicide at Jonestown, in which 900 followers of Jim Jones drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid; or when 80 Branch Davidians died in an FBI raid, and subsequent fire, in Waco, Texas, in 1993; or when, in 1997, 39 Heaven’s Gate members left California for that big sci-fi convention in the sky. Here in New England, cults hit the headlines in 2000 following the discovery of two infants buried in Baxter State Park, in Maine — both of whom had been born into the so-called Attleboro sect.

For the most part, though, these groups go about their business in relative anonymity. There’s not much headline potential, after all, in the break-ups of families, the loss of jobs, the suppression of free will. And some cults could actually be described as relatively benign — no more coercive or bizarre than many forms of Christianity, with their tales of eternal hellfire and the End of Days. Certainly Tariq’s group — though no deaths have occurred — represents a fairly extreme form of the cult phenomenon.

While anti-cult activists like Hassan and the Pardons have had some success in countering these groups, there has been an unfortunate side effect of their work — a splintering effect, wherein those who have been liberated from large cults go on to form little cults of their own. As for how many people are in cults large and small, nobody knows, but the figure is at least in the tens of thousands. Bob Pardon, for one, guesses that 300,000 Americans leave a cult every year, while another 300,000 people join. If the number is only a fraction of this, the cult problem is far more urgent than the help available to its victims would suggest.

In a country teeming with alcohol- and drug-abuse clinics, halfway houses for habitual criminals, rehabilitation centers for chronic gamblers and spouse abusers, Bob and Judy Pardon’s enterprise is unique. Though there is a short-term "emergency room" in Ohio, the Pardons run the only long-term residential cult-member-rehabilitation center of its kind in the country.

"The whole issue of mind-control cults is vastly misunderstood," says Steve Hassan. "People have a perception that there aren’t that many cults any more. I think there is just widespread ignorance about this."

Hassan has been trying to spread the word about cults for 27 years. The Pardons have been doing the same for about 12. Before he got involved in the cult business, Bob was a pastor for seven years at a church in Middleborough, and then for eight in Watertown — which is where he met Judy, then an elementary-school teacher. In 1991, Bob left the church, Judy quit teaching, and the two founded the New England Institute of Religious Research (NEIRR), an informational clearing-house about cults. "I’ve always been tremendously fascinated by the subject," Bob says. "It’s always been an interest of mine."