There are two group psychology phenomena that I find disturbingly relevant. One might be called the ‘doctrine of the conserved extra-ordinary’ – where some eminent person shows themselves to be fallible, and because they are extra-ordinary they are not allowed to simply fall to the state of the everyday mortal, they must go from angelic to demonic, from the very best to the very worst. The recasting of Prem from deity to sociopath seems to me to, too closely match a group behaviour, rather than the simplest of explanations, which is that Prem was just an ordinary kid in the extra-ordinary circumstance that some people pronounced him God.

The second phenomenon is a mirror of the first but is specific to children, it could be called the doctrine of ‘acquired adulthood by dint of evilness’  - we see this in criminal legal systems where a minor commits an act judged so horrible that the minor loses all the legal protections otherwise given to a minor. It’s a perverse response, it has nothing to do with the child but with societal demand that the fallen ‘angel’ should be branded demonic, and because there are no child demons, the demon must be an adult. Again this seems to me to be too close to giving the young Prem extra-ordinarily malign characteristics opposed to being just averagely adolecent.

There’s no doubt that as an adult Prem was never going to win a ‘good guy’ contest, but to place all the responsibility for the creation of this failed adult on the desires of Prem as a manipulative adolescent seems bizarre when we see a sequence of a child who: loses a parent at age 8, who is immediately declared divine, is set up as a perpetually performing satsang doll, and whose close adult influences include a subsequently revealed paedophile, a subsequently revealed murderous psychopath, a pathological germophobe, a fantasist grifter, an implicated child trafficker -  and that’s before Prem even gets into the Western madhouse and whole new set of sycophants and enablers.

The recent revelations are about Prem as a parent, and in my view you can't understand the parent without understanding the parent's own childhood which necessarilly includes having an understanding of the adults who shaped that childhood experience.