A note for readers outside the Netherlands before this one. The original report on Israel van Dorsten and Vrijhartig ran in AD, one of the country’s largest newspapers, in September 2024. It was the first press coverage Vrijhartig received after Joel Crosby co-founded it with Israel van Dorsten and Jan van der Winden. Two names in that sentence need context a Dutch reader would already have. Here is that context, then the article itself.
What Happened at Ruinerwold, Before Israel van Dorsten Founded Vrijhartig
In October 2019, a young man walked into a pub in the small village of Ruinerwold, in the Dutch province of Drenthe, and asked the owner to call the police. His name was Israel van Dorsten. He told the officers that his father, Gerrit Jan van Dorsten, had kept him and five siblings in near-total isolation on a remote farm for close to a decade. They lived in a concealed section of the house, reached through a hidden staircase. The children had no birth registrations, no schooling, and almost no contact with anyone outside the family. Their father, who had briefly belonged to the Unification Church decades earlier, taught them that the outside world had ended or become too dangerous to enter. Dutch and international media covered the case extensively. A bestselling book and a documentary series followed. Israel is one of the children who lived that story, and he is one of the three founders of Vrijhartig.
Three Founders, Three Different Doors Out
Naming precisely what each of us survived turned out to be harder than expected, and the article captured that difficulty honestly rather than smoothing it over. Israel puts it this way. What he grew up in could be called a sect, or it could be called a family built around an extremely manipulative father, and in his experience the two often look identical from the inside.
Jan van der Winden grew up inside a strict branch of anthroposophy, the spiritual philosophy that also produced the Waldorf school movement. He says the clearest test for him is not a label but a practical question: how hard is it to actually leave. In his case, leaving was extremely difficult.
Joel Crosby grew up in the evangelical church De Deur in Zwolle, part of the wider Christian Fellowship Ministries network documented throughout this site, including its founder’s grip on the network worldwide. Members needed the pastor’s permission to marry and could not relocate without approval. The pastor who led the congregation for decades abused several young women, including a relative of Crosby’s. When he was finally removed, he was allowed to name his own successor, who covered the matter up rather than address it, a pattern this site has documented in other CFM congregations as well. Standing up against that cost Crosby the life he had built there. His own marriage was forbidden at one point. He married his girlfriend anyway. He calls what he grew up in a sect without much hesitation now, though saying so plainly took years.
What Vrijhartig Actually Does
Vrijhartig Training en Advies exists at the intersection of lived experience and professional practice. Through talks, training sessions, books, and consultancy, the three of us work to raise awareness and share knowledge about sectarian dynamics and abuse inside closed groups. The work is aimed primarily at the people who encounter these situations professionally: youth protection workers, police, local government staff, and care institutions. We deliberately do not lead with labeling a given group a sect. Sectarian groups sit on a spectrum between radical closed communities and healthy ones. The label itself is often less useful than learning to recognize specific signals, so we focus on training people to spot the signals and respond well once they do.
Why This Exists Now
The Netherlands used to have a dedicated reporting line for sect victims, Sektesignaal, which the government defunded and closed in early 2020. We considered rebuilding something like it ourselves. Then we learned Stichting Fier planned to fill that specific gap, so we shifted our focus toward training the professionals who are often a victim’s first point of contact instead. The legal gap matters here too. England and France both have laws that make psychological manipulation easier to prosecute. The Netherlands does not. Proving coercive control is difficult everywhere. But having the concept written into law does something a court case alone cannot. It puts the public on notice, in advance, that this conduct is not acceptable, rather than waiting for physical or sexual abuse before the law has anything to say.
What Recovery Actually Looks Like
None of the three describe recovery as a clean line from harm to healing. Israel credits some of his own progress to circumstances that will not repeat for most survivors. The global attention his case received opened doors that stay closed for people who leave less publicized groups, and he says so directly rather than pretending his path generalizes. He also names resilience itself, the simple, stubborn work of deciding how to respond to what happened, as the harder and more replicable factor. Jan goes further still, describing the hardest periods of his life as something close to a gift in retrospect, not because the harm was good, but because of what working through it built in him. Crosby is more skeptical of his own progress than either of them. By his own account, he holds onto the past longer than he would like, and he says so plainly rather than performing a recovery arc he has not fully finished.
Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow… And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, 12, KJV)
Three men who each left a closed system alone did not build Vrijhartig alone. Whatever any one of us might have managed separately, the work of teaching institutions to recognize what we lived through needed more than one voice repeating it. That is very nearly the whole argument for why this organization exists at all.
If you work in youth protection, care, law enforcement, or local government and want training on recognizing sectarian dynamics, more information is available at vrijhartig.nl.
