Leaving Gloriavale

| Greymouth Star |
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A former Gloriavale woman who was put on a bus at just 16 when she left the Christian community at Lake Haupiri has written a book about her experiences. Unveiled — A Life of Surviving Gloriavale by Theophila Pratt, is out this month.

Named Honey Faithful at birth, Theo was born and raised at Gloriavale. She found herself questioning the hostile and controlling environment in which she lived, where a small contingent of men held all the power. At 18, having been utterly sheltered from the outside world, and with no knowledge of how society operated, she was forced to leave the community and was dropped at a bus stop and left to fend for herself. “Eight years on from leaving, I often find myself thinking back to the teenage girl in Gloriavale who looked around and wanted to scream for help so often, the young woman who longed to be heard without judgment and seen as the valuable female she was. None of those things were possible during my 18 years spent in the rural West Coast community.”

In Unveiled, Theo talks about how women and girls face oppression and abuse on a daily basis. Theo is now a qualified occupational therapist who owns her own home. She is telling her story, to unveil the secrets of the community and empower other survivors to break free of the cycle of abuse.

Her story was explored in the recently aired TVNZ documentary Escaping Utopia, in which she travelled to India to meet her sister Precious, who resides in a Gloriavale community there. “’I want everyone in Gloriavale — even the people of my mother’s generation — to realise that their life can be so much more than that place. Sometimes, when people see or hear our names, they put us in a box. By doing this, they make it even harder for us to leave Gloriavale behind. “While living inside Gloriavale, we didn’t have a voice. Now we’re on the outside, there’s a group of us who have banded together and we’re showing the leaders the power that is held in the voices of women. We will not be silenced.”