Lorraine completed her Master’s degree in Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in 2007 ; her research focused on the difficulties faced by individuals raised or born into insular religious community to integrate into mainstream society. Due to the innovative aspect of her research project, she won the Prize for the Best Master’s Research Project of the Sociology Department
at the Université du Québec à Montréal. In 2013 she completed her Ph.D. in Contemporary Religion at the Université de Sherbrooke (Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship, SSHRC). In her PhD she focused her research on the challenges faced by youth protection agencies and police when intervening into child protection cases involving children from closed and totalitarian religious environments. She has produced a model of intervention for professionals working in closed and totalitarian religious environments. She is one of the first in North America to have looked at this topic. Lorraine won the Best Thesis Award of the Humanities and Social Sciences
of the Université de Sherbrooke.
During her studies, she was involved in several research initiatives as a research agent in Funded Research Centres. As a member of the CRCF, with the Presses de l’Université du Québec (2018), she has published an intervention guide targeting children who are potentially at risk in closed sects: Intervenir auprès de groupes sectaires ou de communautés fermées - S’outiller pour protéger les enfants.
Lorraine Derocher is also very actively involved in the community. Aside from giving lectures to conferences, she currently provides training to professionals and gives public talks. She also wrote a mainstream book: Ces enfants oubliés —Grandir dans une communauté sectaire (2022; Éditions de l’Homme) where she relates stories of those children, aiming that the readers will learn from their experience. She is currently working as a non-tenure professor at the Centre d’études du religieux contemporain of the Université de Sherbrooke
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Email: lorraine.derocher [at] mail.mcgill.ca