Conservatorship

Conservatorships were used by relatives and others to "rescue" cult victims and hold them against their will for deprogramming. In hundreds of documented cases, an order for conservatorship was signed by a judge without seeing the subject of it.

Lawyers for new religious groups such as the Unification Church argued that conservatorships should not be issued without the judge seeing the person in question and giving them a chance to produce expert testimony opposing the conservatorship. They argued that deprogrammers were abusing the mechanism of conservatorships to justify what would otherwise be called kidnapping and false imprisonment.

To do: explain some less controversial aspects unrelated to cult issues