TIME Magazine - April 5, 2011
Increasingly, Internet Activism Helps Shutter Abusive 'Troubled Teen' Boot Camps
By Maia Szalavitz
For the last 40 years, teens with drug problems, learning disabilities and other behavioral issues have been sent to residential facilities to endure "tough love" techniques that are widely known to include methods of outright physical and psychological abuse.
Whether labeled as boot camps, emotional-growth schools, behavior modification programs or wilderness programs, these organizations have operated without federal oversight, and state regulation of the schools ranges from lax to nonexistent. Now, however, individual critics of the programs are using the Internet to find each other and mobilize, and are bringing change.
Consider the Elan School, in Poland, Maine, which has long been known for its extreme practices. On April 1, Elan shut its doors after four decades in operation, blaming negative publicity online for recent declines in enrollment. "The school has been the target of harsh and false attacks spread over the Internet with the avowed purpose of forcing the school to close," Sharon Terry, Elan's executive director, told the Lewiston Maine Sun Journal. The paper reported:
Despite several recent investigations conducted by the Maine Department of Education that Terry said have vindicated the school, "the school has, unfortunately, been unable to survive the damage."
Elan is just the most recent in a growing list of victories for opponents of tough residential programs for troubled teens. In the last three years, some 40 other private institutions like Elan have closed, and others have been condemned by state investigations, as activism online — mostly led by survivors of such programs and their parents — has increased.
Last month, the Oregon Department of Human Services released its report on the August 2009 death of Sergey Blashchishena, a 16-year-old student at the Sagewalk wilderness program in Bend, Ore., which was run by Aspen Education, the largest chain of behavioral health centers for teenagers in the U.S. Blashchishena died of heatstroke on his first day at the program after being made to hike in 89-degree weather, carrying a backpack that exceeded the weight standard for adult infantrymen. He was not given medical aid when he began to show signs of heat exhaustion.
Online activists widely posted stories about Blashchisena's death and encouraged former program participants to send information to investigators. The state's final report substantiates findings of neglect against the program and two of its staff members.
Also in 2009, an investigation by TIME found that girls at another Aspen program in Oregon, Mount Bachelor Academy, were being forced to do lap dances and other inappropriate sexual acts as part of "therapy." A state investigation of the school would later confirm that "sexualized role play in front of staff and peers, requiring students to say derogatory phrases about themselves in front of staff and peers" and "requiring students to reenact past physical abuse in front of staff and peers" did occur, and that the practices were "punitive, humiliating, degrading and traumatizing."
In this case, again, Facebook groups, websites and email lists allowed program survivors and their parents to find one other; they uncovered information about earlier state investigations into Mount Bachelor that had been stymied by lack of access to victims, and they were able to pool new information to help current investigators see the pattern of abuse.
Both Aspen programs are now closed, and just last month the group announced the closure of five more programs as well as the consolidation of another three around the country. In a press release, Aspen blamed the economy, saying, "This transition reflects the reduced demand for therapeutic schools and programs in today's economy."
While it's certain that the economic downturn has contributed to the programs' financial troubles — tuition can cost $6,000 a month or more, over several months to years — activism online has also clearly played a significant role. The Elan School was simply the first to cite Internet activity as a direct cause of its closure.
"This movement couldn't have happened without the Internet," says Kathryn Whitehead, founder of CAFETY, the Community Alliance For the Safe and Ethical Treatment of Youth, and a former student at another abusive program that recently closed. "The Internet has been absolutely critical because survivors are spread out across the U.S. They get sent to a program and then they have to go home. When you connect to other program survivors, you recognize that this is a large-scale problem, not an individual program's problem. That has been critical in bringing people together. It's an incredibly effective organizing tool."
What's more, unlike in the heyday of troubled-teen programs, the Internet now allows the instantaneous sharing of information about the current and past goings-on at the schools; in previous eras, those details were scattered in the archives of local newspapers or government files.
When activists looked up local newspaper accounts of the Elan School from 1975, for instance, they found that psychologists who visited Elan had been quoted as saying it was "bizarre and degrading" and that "the whole concept of the program seems to be a brain-washing technique."
Elan was among the most notorious of the country's emotional-growth schools. It was there, in the late 1970s, that Michael Skakel, cousin to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., allegedly confessed to the 1975 murder of his 15-year-old neighbor in Greenwich, Conn., Martha Moxley — a crime for which Skakel remains incarcerated. Skakel's parents had enrolled the boy at Elan to treat an alcohol problem after he was arrested for drunk driving in 1978, several years after the murder.
But what is less known are the techniques commonly used to prompt such confessions at Elan — tactics that were employed at the school for decades, according to former students, often with knowledge of state authorities.
Take "the ring," for instance. In this disciplinary tactic, two students are encircled by a ring of their peers, their arms tightly meshed to prevent escape. Dozens of students and staff members congregate around the ring to spectate, packed into a bare room not much bigger than a studio apartment. At the only exit to the outdoors, which opens directly to the Maine woods, a teenage sentry is stationed. Sentries guard interior doors as well.
One of the student "boxers" inside the ring has been designated to "fight on the side of good." He's there as a representative of the school. The other has been labeled as the bad guy: he is there to accept punishment for breaking one of the school's many strict rules.
As the match gets underway, the ring of teens, typically aged 13 to 18, participates by hitting, pinching or trying to trip the bad guy; maltreating him is not only not encouraged, it's the point. Refusing to participate in jeering or bullying is suspect, and teens who stay quiet risk becoming victims themselves.
Between one-minute rounds, the victim is taunted by spectators and denied water and crowd support. Until he surrenders and accepts whatever label or rule he had rebelled against, fresh opponents are brought in to break him. When he does finally break, the damage is both physical — he's typically bruised and bloodied — and mental. Similar "rings" were also held for girls.
And that's only one example tough love, Elan style. Such accounts of torture and neglect date back to the 1970s, and many came to light as part of the sensational Skakel murder trial in 2002. Witnesses describe kids being systematically slammed against every wall of an entire dormitory. They detail grueling days of sleep deprivation, beatings and psychological humiliation. Students were consistently left in charge of other teens, and instructed to beat them if they did not comply with orders.
Based primarily on testimony from Elan classmates, who said they heard Skakel confess to killing Moxley, the Kennedy cousin was convicted. At Elan, Skakel was made to wear a sign for weeks saying "Confront Me About Why I Killed My Friend," and he is said to have confessed to the murder only after a session in the ring. Confessions gained by the police through methods similar to those used at Elan are illegal. "Basically, they tried to erase you," said one woman who attended Elan from 2002 to 2004.
Jeff Wimbelton led the online charge to close Elan. (The name is a pseudonym; for professional reasons, Wimbelton does not wish to be identified.) Now in his 20s, he attended the school in the early 2000s, having been sent there following an arrest for running away from home.
Wimbelton says he witnessed the brutality of the ring at least 20 times during the two years he was enrolled at Elan, and was himself made to fight "on the side of good."
Although the state of Maine was aware that this violent ritual was being conducted at the school, it did little more than encourage Elan to stop voluntarily. Yellow Light Breen, a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Education, told the Sun Journal in 2002 that:
...his department was aware of the "ring" treatment at Elan and that it was a "real issue" 10 to 12 years ago. "We pressed them pretty hard and they agreed not to do it," he says. "We were certainly led to believe it ceased several years" ago.
Also, he added, in the last year, the DOE has banned the use of restraints and so-called "adverses," like being hit, pinched or being subject to loud noises.
Wimbelton says that despite Elan's claims that the ring was stopped in 2000, he saw a ring session as late as 2001. Other former students corroborate his story.
In 2007, the continued use of so-called aversive therapies despite a lack of evidence of their effectiveness — and despite significant evidence of their harms — spurred me to write an op-ed piece about Elan for the New York Times. At the time, Elan was one of two out-of-state programs using punitive treatment at which New York State youth with conditions like autism, learning disabilities or behavior problems were eligible to receive state-funded treatment.
My piece prompted a state investigation. As the Sun Journal reported:
David Connerty-Marin, spokesman for the Maine Department of Education, said the agency has "investigated Elan a number of times based on reports of abuse and other deficiencies, and never found any evidence." He said that New York officials also have investigated, and never found evidence of abuse at the Poland school.
But that's not what New York State officials told me. In a letter to Elan following the investigation prompted by my Times op-ed, regulators said that Elan used "sleep deprivation," excessive isolation and restraint, and "coercive and confrontational" counseling that was conducted by untrained students, who often used foul language. They asked that these "health and safety" issues be resolved within seven days.
It's not clear why Maine's investigators failed for decades to find abuse at the school, while New York's officials saw disturbing treatment during their first visit. It could be because Maine announces its inspections in advance, while New York sends investigators to programs unannounced.
Wimbelton was inspired to act after reading media reports about the 2007 investigation of Elan and the later comments of recent graduates. One woman wrote in the comments section below my Huffington Post article about the investigation that her nephew had committed suicide after being enrolled at Elan. Another woman who had attended the school from 2005 to 2008 commented there that she was "traumatized."
"Reading that comment, it was like a fuse went off in my brain," says Wimbelton, who had assumed that Elan had reformed its ways since he had attended. "I thought, I can't believe this is still going on. I have to do something to stop it."
He waged an online war using every weapon he could think of: Facebook pages, tumblr blogs, websites and other social media. When Wimbelton posted about Elan on Reddit, the post received thousands of votes and generated enormous traffic. He encouraged others to post their stories too. People responded, posting and cross-linked their missives enough so that anti-Elan sites soon began to rise to the top of Google's search results, offering parents a very different view of the program than that on the school's own website.
Wimbelton even looked up the local media's coverage of school sports, which listed the names of Elan athletes. With a little online sleuthing, Wimbleton was able to find the names of the parents of the kids; he called them to try to warn them about what went on at the school. Upon hearing Wimbelton's story and reading the links he sent, the parents of four such children decided to withdraw their enrollment, he says.
"The fantastic thing about the Internet has been that individuals can post their own personal experiences — it's not a one-sided marketing tool," says Whitehead.
Elan insists that it has done nothing wrong, and that the 40 years worth of stories from dozens of teens has misrepresented its curriculum. Indeed, there are some former students who thank the school for its tough tactics, crediting them for saving their lives. But since there has never been a controlled study of the program's methods, it's impossible to know whether they could possibly be broadly effective.
"It's surreal," Wimbleton says of the school's closure. "There were times I thought it was a lost cause. How in God's name was that allowed to go on for so long?"
"It's fantastic news," says Whitehead. But she notes that about 400 private, unregulated programs still operate, locking down teens and using harsh, humiliating and confrontational approaches as therapy. Legislation to regulate these programs passed the House following GAO investigations and Congressional hearings in 2007 and 2008, but the bill is still awaiting introduction into the Senate and passage of new regulations appears unlikely.
This article was found at:
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Posts
"... unlike in the heyday of troubled-teen programs, the Internet now allows the instantaneous sharing of information about the current and past goings-on at the schools; in previous eras, those details were scattered in the archives of local newspapers or government files."
ReplyDeleteThe author of this article has identified one of the reasons I keep this archive of news articles. Even today many news items online become quickly inaccessible. I can't count the times I have clicked on a link to a news item I'm searching for only to find the link is dead and the article cannot be found on the originating site, or it is hidden behind a subscription wall.
News articles often contain many important details that can help survivors of abuse or warn those searching for information about a person or group. By archiving such articles here my intention is to make it as easy as possible for people to find information about abusive organizations. I know it works because people have thanked me for it, although I certainly get my share of angry comments from abusers or their apologists who hate being exposed.
Horror Stories From Tough-Love Teen Homes
ReplyDeleteGirls locked up inside fundamentalist religious compounds. Kandahar? No, Missouri.
Mother Jones July/August 2011 Issue
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/new-bethany-ifb-teen-homes-abuse
[excerpt]
... At both the state and federal levels, the "troubled teen" industry—religious and secular—enjoys quiet support from many politicians. (Key fundraisers for Mitt Romney's 2008 and 2012 campaigns hail from Utah's teen-home sector [16].) Local courts promote the homes as an alternative to juvenile detention, and facilities can collect a variety of state and federal grants.
Congress has tried, and so far failed, to rein in the schools. In 2007, a spate of deaths at teen residential programs prompted a nationwide investigation by the Government Accountability Office [17]. Its findings—which detailed the use of extended stress positions, days of seclusion, strenuous labor, denial of bathroom access, and deaths—came out in a series of dramatic congressional hearings over two years. The result was House Resolution 911 [18] (PDF), which proposed giving residents access to child-abuse hotlines and creating a national database of programs that would document reports of abuse and keep tabs on abusive staff members.
Hephzibah House's Ron Williams and Reclamation Ranch's Jack Patterson urged supporters to fight the bill. In an open letter, Williams argued that it would "effectively close all Christian ministries helping troubled youth because of its onerous provisions." They were joined by a group called the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs, which opposed HR 911 [19] on the grounds that states—despite all evidence to the contrary—are best situated to oversee the homes. The bill passed in the House, but stalled in a Senate committee.*
In March 2010, the House passed the Keeping All Students Safe Act [20], a bill that would have banned the use of seclusion and physical or chemical restraints by any school that benefits from federal education money. (It, too, died in the Senate.) Andy Kopsa, who covers abusive homes in her blog, Off the Record [21], noted that GOP members whose districts host tough-love schools rallied against the act. They included former Indiana Rep. Mark Souder (Hephzibah House), Alabama Rep. Robert Aderholt (Reclamation Ranch, Rachel Academy), and North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx (King Family Ministries), who testified: "This bill is not needed...The states and the localities can handle these situations. They will look after the children."
In the absence of federal action, alumni of the teen institutions have been trying to expose the abuses. In 2008, Susan Grotte, a Hephzibah House alum, led some 60 survivors in campaigning for its closure; they wrote to newspapers and picketed outside the county courthouse in Warsaw, Indiana, near where the school is located. "We have laws to protect people from illegal incarceration," she says, "but apparently not if you're a teenage girl." In the past year, New Bethany alums staged a reunion trip to confront the Fords, and they joined with members of kindred groups such as Survivors of Institutional Abuse [22] to gather and publicize survivor stories. SIA is planning a 2012 convention [23] for adults who have been through "lockdown teen facilities."
...
How To Create An Addict - Trauma, abuse and chronic stress increase—massively—the risk of a child turning to drugs and alcohol. Warning to fans of "tough love" treatment like Dr. Drew: try a little tenderness.
ReplyDeleteby Maia Szalavitz The Fix
Is addiction caused by drugs alone? Or could chronic stress in childhood—AKA trauma—play the determining factor in predicting who will lose control once they start using drugs?
As we reckon with the consequences of 9/11 a full ten years on, the role of childhood trauma in addiction gains increasing scientific traction. Early life experience programs the brain and body for the environment it encounters: a calm, nurturing upbringing will orient a child to thrive in most conditions, while a stressful, barren one will predispose it to conditions of scarcity, anxiety and chaos. Not all stress is bad, however. Learning requires some stress, and coping with intermittent, mild doses builds the system up, like a muscle. Stress crosses into the hazard zone of trauma only when it comes in "doses" that are too large or too unpredictable or too sustained over which the person has little or no control. Paradoxically, early neglect—an absence of parenting—can be as traumatic as overt abuse.
...
The type of adverse experience doesn’t make a large difference in the results, according to Felitti: what seems to matter most is the cumulative effect of multiple types of stress. For example, having been both physically abused and neglected is worse than having been physically abused alone.
One factor does stand out, however. “I would have assumed before we looked at it that probably the most destructive problem would be incest—but interestingly it was not, it was co-equal with the others,” says Felitti. Instead, he notes, “The one with the slight edge, by 15% over the others, was chronic recurrent humiliation, what we termed as emotional abuse,” citing examples like parents calling their children stupid and worthless. (The study did not look at bullying by peers, but other studies have found that such abuse can haver similarly negative health effects.)
Ironically, humiliation is a common theme in addiction treatment, where tough confrontation to “break” addicts remains a frequent practice, despite research showing its ineffectiveness and harmfulness. Some so-called therapeutic-community programs, for example, place people on a “hot seat,” where they are confronted about their personality flaws and other negative qualities, sometimes for hours on end. Other programs force people to wear humiliating signs or even diapers. Sexual humiliation, such as forcing men or teenage boys to wear drag or women pose as prostitutes, is not uncommon. Although mainstream programs like Phoenix House and Daytop have worked to eliminate such degrading practices, they persist in the industry, particularly—and tragically—with adolescents.
Indeed, people traumatized as children can actually be re-traumatized by this form of treatment, exacerbating both post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction.
read the full article at:
http://www.thefix.com/content/trauma-and-addiction9180
For teen program's chief, tough love may have turned criminal
ReplyDeleteBy Ricardo Lopez, Los Angeles Times
November 13, 2011
The surprise visit to Alberto Ruiz's house was swift. Dress quickly, he was told. You're going to boot camp. His parents, worried about his drug use and habit of skipping school, had followed a friend's advice and called Kelvin McFarland. Ruiz's behavior had earned him a spot in McFarland's Family First Growth Camp in Pasadena, a place with a reputation for breaking gang-bangers and drug addicts and turning them into law-abiding teens.
A former Marine who likes to be called "Sgt. Mac," McFarland founded the camp two years ago and boasted that his tough-love tactics and military-strict discipline were the perfect formula for reforming gang members, taming runaways and getting through to troublemakers. Ruiz, who is now 18, credits McFarland's intervention for helping him finish school and quit drugs. But authorities say McFarland's scared-straight approach crossed the line and veered into criminal behavior earlier this year when he crossed paths with another Pasadena teen.
Investigators allege that in May, McFarland was driving in Pasadena when he spotted a girl walking along the street during school hours. He stopped to question her, then handcuffed her, placed her in his car and told her to direct him to a relative's home. At the relative's home, he demanded money from her father to enroll the 14-year-old in his program. The girl's father mistook McFarland for a truancy officer when he flashed a badge, Pasadena police said.
McFarland is facing trial on felony charges of kidnapping, extortion, false imprisonment and child abuse, and unlawful use of a badge, a misdemeanor. Now Pasadena police are investigating possible abuses that allegedly occurred at a rival Pasadena boot camp where McFarland once worked. The Pasadena Star-News recently published videos allegedly filmed in 2009 in which McFarland can be seen yelling at teens, forcing them to gulp down water even as they retch and vomit. In one scene, McFarland and other drill instructors appear to scream at a youngster, inches from his face, as he collapses in tears under the weight of a car tire on his shoulders. ...
McFarland is set to stand trial Wednesday ...
But McFarland continues to operate his program throughout Pasadena, in local parks and occasionally a small strip-mall church. In fact, it didn't take long for the boot camp to resume after McFarland got out of jail In mid-June, from the stage of Faithworks Ministries church, McFarland — freshly released on bail — thanked his cadets and their families, quoting the Bible as he spoke. For days, they had rallied on his behalf outside a Pasadena courthouse, hoping a judge would reduce his bail.
McFarland, a deeply religious man raised by an aunt in rural Georgia, looked on quietly. Dressed in his signature military fatigues, he occasionally barked commands as the cadets stood in formation. "I don't know of a boot camp that praises the Lord as much as we do," said McFarland ...
...Gibbs said he fired McFarland when he discovered his criminal history and heard complaints from staff that he was using excessive force when disciplining cadets. McFarland said he only followed Gibbs' orders.
Gibbs has also faced allegations of child abuse. In a 2010 letter from Edwin Diaz, superintendent of the Pasadena Unified School District, Gibbs was told his permit to use school district facilities for his camp had been revoked. School officials had received reports from parents that Gibbs' boot camp tactics amounted to corporal punishment. ...
read the full article at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sarge-20111113,0,4902275.story
Where Evil Lies: Our View of the Penn State Scandal
ReplyDeleteBy Maia Szalavitz, The Fix November 14, 2011
When I learned that Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky—the Nittany Lions’ former assistant coach charged on November 5 with 40 criminal counts of sexually abusing eight boys—had founded a program for “troubled youth” in 1977, I couldn’t have been less surprised. You see, if you want to rape, molest and sexually traumatize children—while enjoying impunity for decades and being paid to do what you love—running a program for troubled children is the way to go. Especially if the kids are "disadvantaged"—poor, involved with drugs and/or have addicted parents.
Unfortunately, as a society, we tend to read "disadvantaged" as not only disposable but disreputable and dishonest. We give the benefit of the doubt to those “saints” who will condescend to care for orphans and “crack babies” (a term that addiction researchers now say should be no more acceptable in public discourse than the n-word), not to the children themselves.
When Sandusky and his wife adopted six kids and took others from difficult backgrounds into foster care—thereby founding his charity, The Second Mile, as their own personal foster home—their motives were seen as pure (as is true, no doubt, for most families that make the sacrifices necessary to help these children). But this glow of altruism also allows predators access to easy prey: children whose parents have lost their battles with addiction and/or are incarcerated; many of these kids often already have difficulty distinguishing between affection and abuse—and anyway may have nowhere else to turn.
Such children themselves are at high risk of becoming addicted to drugs—and the Second Mile, now a charity with over $9 million in assets—explicitly seeks out those who are experiencing “a divorce in the family, the death of a parent, impoverishment, a chronically ill sibling, personal health issues, familial substance abuse or neglect,” for its summer camp programs. While the charity now claims that it does background checks on staff and volunteers, it refuses to confirm that one was done on founder Sandusky, who was compensated with close to $60,000 a year for “fundraising and other services” as recently as 2007.
Our stereotypes about drug use and “troubled youth” are a huge part of the problem. America is inundated with portrayals of these teens and children as “liars” and “manipulators” whose complaints should rarely be believed. Ironically, former addicts on the recovery bandwagon often reinforce these prejudices, claiming that active alcoholics and drug addicts are inherently untrustworthy, given to lying as though it were breathing. “When is an addict lying?” the “joke” goes: “When his lips are moving.”
Over a decade spent covering the routine emotional, physical and sexual abuses that take place in rehabs and, even more so, in “troubled teen” programs, I’ve seen the devastating results of this stigmatizing stereotype.
...
That reminds me of the things I’ve heard from teen program victims. Many of the residential programs I covered sent literature to parents explicitly warning them that their children are likely to make claims about abuse. “Don’t believe this,” they are told. “It’s simply your manipulative offspring trying to get you to bring them home so they can avoid the hard work of recovery.”
Since most children who get into enough trouble to wind up in a “boot camp” or “troubled teen” program will already have lied to their parents in an effort to avoid getting caught, these warnings rarely raise red flags. Parents are all too ready to side with the institution. They think, “Ah yes, the program knows how to work with these difficult kids,” rather than “Oh my God, how would real abuse ever be revealed in such a place?” ...
read the full article at:
http://www.thefix.com/content/penn-state-abuse-and-addiction
Ultra-Orthodox Jews Rally to Discuss Risks of Internet
ReplyDeleteBy MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM, New York Times May 20, 2012
It was an incongruous sight for a baseball stadium: tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, all dressed in black suits and white shirts, filing through the gates of Citi Field on Sunday, wearing not blue-and-orange Mets caps but tall, big-brim black hats.
There was no ballgame scheduled, only a religious rally to discuss the dangers of the Internet.
More than 40,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews were expected to attend — a sellout in a season where the average attendance at a Mets game has been barely half that. The organizers had to rent Arthur Ashe Stadium nearby, which has 20,000 seats, to accommodate all the interested ticket buyers.
The organizers had allowed only men to buy tickets, in keeping with ultra-Orthodox tradition of separating the sexes. Viewing parties had been arranged in Orthodox neighborhoods of Brooklyn and New Jersey so that women could watch, too.
For the attendees, many of whom said they came at the instructions of their rabbis, it was a chance to hear about a moral topic considered gravely important in their community: the potential problems that can stem from access to pornography and other explicit content on the uncensored, often incendiary Web.
Inside the stadium, a dais was set up by the back wall of center field, where rabbis led the packed stadium in evening prayers and offered heated exhortations to avoid the “filth” that can be found on the Internet. English translations of the speeches appeared on a jumbo digital screen, beneath an enormous “Let’s Go Mets!” sign.
Still, many attendees readily conceded that the Internet played a big role in their lives.
Shlomo Cohen, 24, of Toronto, said he used the Internet for shopping, business and staying in touch with friends — “Everyone needs e-mail,” he said.
Mr. Cohen said he came to Citi Field on Sunday because the rally was a good way to remind his community to keep temptation at bay.
“Desires are out there,” Mr. Cohen said, adding that men could be particularly susceptible. “We have to learn how to control ourselves.”
For an event billed as taking aim at the Internet, signs of the digital age seemed to pop up everywhere.
On a No. 7 train headed toward the stadium, several men wearing the clothing of the ultra-Orthodox whipped out smartphones as soon as the subway emerged from the East River tunnel, poking at e-mail in-boxes and checking voice mail messages.
Several opponents of the rally gathered outside the stadium, including a crowd that stood by police barricades holding signs that read, “The Internet Is Not the Problem.”
continued in next comment...
continued from previous comment:
ReplyDeleteMany of the protesters said they shared the religious beliefs of the attendees but wanted to show support for victims of child sexual abuse, some of whom in ultra-Orthodox communities have been discouraged from calling the police and have been shunned after the crimes against them were reported.
The rally in Citi Field on Sunday was sponsored by a rabbinical group, Ichud Hakehillos Letohar Hamachane, that is linked to a software company that sells Internet filtering software to Orthodox Jews. Those in attendance were handed fliers that advertised services like a “kosher GPS App” for iPhone and Android phones, which helps users locate synagogues and kosher restaurants.
Nat Levy, 25, who traveled from Lakewood, N.J., to attend, said he frequently surfed the Web at a cafe, overseen by a local rabbi, that filtered out certain types of online content and monitored which Web sites he visited.
He said he often used the Internet to deal with customers for his company. “You get to do business the same way,” he said. “I have unlimited access, but it’s done in a kosher manner.”
Eytan Kobre, a spokesman for the event, delivered a more intense message to reporters outside the stadium. “The siren song of the Internet entices us!” he pronounced in a booming voice. “It brings out the worst of us!”
Still, Mr. Kobre confirmed that the event would be broadcast live on the Internet, via a stream available to homes and synagogues in Orthodox communities around the New York area. He said the general public would not be able to gain access, but several unauthorized streams appeared soon after the rally began.
The rally was also a hot topic on many Twitter feeds on Sunday evening.
The gathering had the feel of a gigantic family reunion — or perhaps, given the single-sex attendance, the religious version of a scouts’ jamboree — but many guests had arrived with only a friend or two.
“It may look like a community because we all look the same,” said Mr. Cohen, of Toronto. “But I don’t know almost any of the people here.”
For some attendees, the dangers of the Internet seemed more in line with the usual complaints voiced by any New Yorker tethered to a BlackBerry or besieged with Twitter messages.
Raphael Hess, 29, of New Jersey, pointed at his LG phone and said he found peace in simply keeping its Internet connection turned off.
“Life is more pleasant without it sometimes,” he said with a shrug.
Laurie Goodstein contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/nyregion/ultra-orthodox-jews-hold-rally-on-internet-at-citi-field.html
Religious exemption at some Florida children's homes shields prying eyes
ReplyDeleteBy Alexandra Zayas, Tampa Bay Times Staff Writer October 28, 2012
They shaved him bald that first morning in 2008, put him in an orange jumpsuit and made him exercise past dark. • Through the night, as he slept on the floor, they forced him awake for more. • The sun had not yet risen over the Christian military home when Samson Lehman collapsed for the sixth time. Still, he said, they made him run. • The screaming, the endless exercise, it was all in the name of God, a necessary step at the Gateway Christian Military Academy on the path to righteousness. • So when Samson vomited, they threw him a rag. When his urine turned red, they said that was normal. • By Day 3, the 15-year-old was on the verge of death, his dehydrated organs shutting down. • Slumped against a wall, cold and immobile, Lehman recalls men who recited Scripture calling him a wimp. And he thought: Maybe, if I die here, someone will shut this place down. • Not in Florida.
In this state, unlicensed religious homes can abuse children and go on operating for years. Almost 30 years ago, Florida legislators passed a law eliminating state oversight of children's homes that claim government rules hamper their religious practices.
Today, virtually anyone can claim a list of religious ideals, take in children and subject them to punishment and isolation that verge on torture — so long as they quote chapter and verse to justify it.
The Tampa Bay Times spent a year investigating more than 30 religious homes that have housed children in recent years across Florida. Some operate with a religious exemption, legally regulated by a private Christian organization instead of the state. Others lost their exemption and operate with no legal accreditation at all.
Although most drew few complaints, nearly a dozen have been hounded by allegations of abuse. A review of thousands of pages of investigative files and interviews with dozens of former residents found:
• State authorities have responded to at least 165 allegations of abuse and neglect in the past decade, but homes have remained open even after the state found evidence of sex abuse and physical injury.
• The religious exemption has for decades allowed homes to avoid state restrictions on corporal punishment. Homes have pinned children to the ground for hours, confined them in seclusion for days, made them stand until they wet themselves and exercised them until they vomited.
• Children have been bruised, bloodied and choked to unconsciousness in the name of Christian discipline. A few barely escaped with their lives. In addition, in two settled lawsuits, a mother said her son was forced to hike on broken feet; a father said his son was handcuffed, bound at the feet, locked away for three days and struck by other boys at the instruction of the home.
• Adults have ordered children to participate in the punishment, requiring them to act as jailers, to bully troublemakers or to chase, tackle and sit on their peers.
• Teens have been denounced as sinners, called "faggots" and "whores," and humiliated in front of their peers for menstrual stains and suspicions of masturbation.
• Parents share the blame. Some sign away their children for a year or more without first visiting a home or checking credentials. But state officials bear some responsibility because they have not warned the public about programs they believe are abusive.
• Florida taxpayers have supported some unlicensed homes with hundreds of thousands of dollars in McKay scholarships — a government program to help special needs students pay tuition at private schools.
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In Florida, the vast majority of children's homes are regulated and inspected by the state Department of Children and Families. But under Florida law, a home can shield itself from that oversight by claiming a religious exemption.
ReplyDeleteInstead of state-trained child safety workers, these homes are regulated by the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, a private, nonprofit group run almost entirely by the same people who run the homes.
FACCCA executive director Buddy Morrow said his organization condemns extended isolation, humiliation and the shackling of children. He also said the association aggressively monitors homes for abusive practices, but he refused to provide copies of inspection reports and other documentation.
In response to the Times investigation, he expects his board will strengthen restrictions on corporal punishment, limit seclusion and ban shackling.
Morrow would not talk about specific homes, but he said his association has revoked or refused to renew accreditation for at least three homes since 2005. Some continued to operate — without a state license or a religious exemption — the Times found.
At least four religious homes are accepting children without any legally recognized credentials. Foster children in state care have been illegally placed in at least two of those homes, the Timesdiscovered.
In response, DCF officials have launched a statewide review to identify rogue children's homes and any state-dependent children who have been placed in them.
More must be done, says Robert Friedman, a psychologist and professor emeritus with the University of South Florida's Department of Child and Family Studies. Friedman founded an advocacy group to stop abuse in residential facilities and has given congressional testimony on the topic.
"For us not to be able to regulate these programs," he said, "for us not to be able to provide the oversight of these programs that's needed is just shameful.
"We don't know even the scope of the problem, and we allow these youngsters behind these closed doors."
Religious homes
For years the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies has listed its primary address as 2603 SW Brim St., a three-bedroom house in Lake City.
The agency's two full-time employees and two part-timers must process new applications and fan out across the state to monitor and investigate more than 20 Christian child care facilities.
Every year, association officials say, they check on the nearly 700 girls and boys whose parents have placed them in the homes. Many parents come to the homes in desperation, hoping religion or strict discipline can get their child off drugs or correct severe emotional problems.
"They've been through state-supported or state programs. None of the programs have worked for them," said Doug Smith, a former board member who runs Safe Harbor Maritime Academy with his wife. "And for some of these children, this is a last resort."
Parents who can afford it pay tuition that can reach $20,000 a year or more. Some must take out loans, dip into college funds, or accept scholarships provided by the homes. In addition, the state has paid more than $600,000 in McKay money to parents for use at FACCCA-accredited homes.
In Florida alone, unlicensed religious homes collected at least $13 million in 2010, according to available IRS filings.
Most of the homes pay a small portion of that income for membership in the Christian association. Those members get to vote on whether new programs will be granted a religious exemption.
Association leaders say they spend months vetting new homes. They visit multiple times and review a home's policies. They also are required by law to run a criminal background check on all employees. The head of the home must have at least a high school diploma and a few years' experience running a home.
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There is no litmus test to determine whether a home is truly guided by religion. Morrow said FACCCA officials use their own judgment to determine that during inspections.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, the association has a reason to stringently monitor its homes, officials said.
"We are here to help kids and our reputation of not helping kids hurts us all," Smith said. "So we're pretty reluctant to take someone that we're not really confident in. If we get a home that gets a black eye, we all get a black eye."
A pattern of abuse
The Department of Children and Families takes complaints made against unlicensed religious homes when someone calls Florida's child abuse hotline. And it sends workers to investigate potential abuse and neglect.
But in the nearly 30 years since Florida began allowing religious exemptions, state officials have never tallied up how much abuse was occurring at the homes they stopped regulating.
The Times, in the first effort of its kind, requested public records noting abuse complaints for homes currently or formerly accredited by FACCCA. It also reviewed emergency dispatch records, police reports and court records.
The records show authorities have been called to the homes hundreds of times over the past decade for everything from runaways to suicide threats to child abuse allegations.
DCF alone has conducted at least 165 investigations into the mistreatment of children.
Its investigators found evidence to support allegations in more than a third of those cases — 63 incidents at 17 homes with a list of offenses that include physical injury, medical neglect, environmental hazards, threatened harm, bizarre punishment, inadequate supervision, mental injury, asphyxiation and sexual abuse.
Among the cases DCF "verified:" a 16-year-old girl in Orlando pressured to perform oral sex on a counselor she considered a father figure; a 15-year-old boy in Punta Gorda forced to lie facedown in the dirt for three hours as a 220-pound counselor lay on top of him; and a 16-year-old boy in Port St. Lucie, shackled for 12 days and berated by staff with racial slurs.
Extreme discipline
The most troubled programs are easy to see.
Of the 30 facilities reviewed by the Times, half had never been investigated by the state for abuse or neglect, and others had only a few, unsubstantiated allegations.
Seven facilities account for two-thirds of abuse hotline complaints over the past decade. Among them: Gateway Christian Military Academy, Camp Tracey near Jacksonville, Anderson Academy in Vero Beach, Southeastern Military Academy in Port St. Lucie and Lighthouse of Northwest Florida in Jay.
Several others, including New Beginnings Girls Academy, have few hotline complaints but show up in Internet message boards and "survivor" groups.
Jamie Lee Schmude said she was 16 when her parents sent her to New Beginnings to stop her drinking and pot smoking.
She recounts extreme punishments, including being forced to stand in one place so long she urinated on herself.
One day in 2003, she'd had enough. When she was made to stand at a wall for a deed she doesn't remember, she gave up and sat.
She said girls were ordered to take her to the preacher, who made them pin her to the ground as his wife unhooked a thin plastic rod from the blinds.
The wife started swinging.
"It didn't matter where she hit me," Schmude recalled. "I had bruises all over my butt and my lower back and my upper legs."
Two others told the Times they were forced to witness it all, made to hold her down as she wailed on the filthy floor, then made to sing once it was over: Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound …
Officials with New Beginnings Girls Academy did not respond to a phone call, emails or a letter sent by the Times. The home, which left Florida voluntarily in 2007, was last investigated in 2006 on allegations of sexual abuse. State officials found no evidence to support the claim, records show.
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On the other side of the state, 16-year-old Cody Livingston found himself at Camp Tracey, a fundamentalist Baptist reform program on the rural outskirts of Jacksonville.
ReplyDeleteWhen Livingston got caught smoking cigarettes, they made him eat one. When he cursed, they made him swallow two spoonfuls of citrus-scented liquid soap, he said. "If I didn't do it, then I didn't get to eat that night."
But that paled in comparison to what he says happened when he got caught engaging in sexual activity with other boys in 2008.
They told him his mother didn't want him. They shaved his head. They made him carry two 5-gallon buckets of dirt everywhere he went, and at night, run laps around the dorm with a tire tied to his waist. They let him speak to no one but staff, and only if he was spoken to first, and they made him sleep on the floor of a mudroom for a week or more, giving him a bucket to use as a toilet.
"We got sprayed down with a water hose for our shower," Livingston said. "They made it very clear that we were not human; we were subhuman pieces of trash."
Officials at Camp Tracey declined to speak with a Times reporter.
Opening the gate
Florida became a magnet for unlicensed religious homes in the mid 1980s, when a small group of preachers teamed up with a powerful Florida legislator and a lobbyist to successfully press for a law that exempted them from state control.
Now, the homes answer to FACCCA instead of state regulators.
By law, FACCCA standards of child care must be in "substantial compliance" with the state's. But the state has not made sure the association's rules keep up with current standards.
DCF officials could find no evidence of an agency review of FACCCA rules since 1984. They asked the Christian association for a copy of its corporal punishment guidelines only after the Times began asking questions earlier this year.
David Wilkins, DCF's top administrator, said it is not the state's responsibility to review the association's standards unless they change.
"I don't believe the statute tells us we ought to be going out and regulating them," Wilkins said. "They provide us their standards, and we review those. Quite frankly, it hasn't been reviewed in years."
Held side-by-side in 2012, there are significant differences between the rule books.
The state requires a doctor's order to shackle children. FACCCA does not.
The state bans spanking and severely limits the time children can be held in isolation. FACCCA does not.
State-licensed facilities cannot punish children by withholding communication with parents and must guarantee kids access to an abuse hotline.
FACCCA officials say children can report abuse, but former students said they had no way. They can be denied access to a phone for any reason.
Experts say this is a recipe for trouble.
Jack Levine, who has a master's degree in child and family development and for 25 years served as president of a statewide network of advocates called Voices for Florida's Children, opposed the exemption back in 1984.
He still does.
"The great fertile ground for abuse and neglect is isolation," Levine said. "If you are isolated and don't have an avenue to express what you know, what you see, that promises further problems."
In 1984, mainstream religious organizations, including Catholic Community Services, Southern Baptist Child Care Executives and others across the state, lined up to try to stop the exemption from becoming law. They echoed concerns from child advocates who predicted it would open the door to extremists.
"Any weirdo, any charlatan who has been kicked out of some other state could come into Florida and say, 'I'm a religious facility and I don't want to be licensed,' " Hugh Forsyth, director of a licensed girls' program in St. Petersburg, predicted to the Times in 1984.
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"They just decide they're going to have a child care facility and away they go. There's nothing to stop them."
ReplyDeleteOrdained by God
New Beginnings was the kind of children's home FACCCA was created to regulate. Its founder was Lester Roloff, a Baptist radio preacher among the first to use religion as a shield against the licensing of a reform home.
The subject of repeated abuse allegations over several decades, the program left Texas for good in 2001 when that state's Legislature decided religious homes were no longer exempt from licensing.
It settled in a Panhandle city called Pace and remained there until 2007.
At New Beginnings, teenage girls got a heavy dose of strict Christianity. They were forbidden to wear pants or hear news of the outside world or even make eye contact with crowds when they toured churches in the summer.
Brittany Campbell arrived at the home in 2001.
Her sister enrolled her, Campbell said, after the 15-year-old smoked pot for the first time and began dating girls.
She recalls Pastor Bill McNamara's introduction during the first sermon.
"He just looked right at me from the platform, ran at me, and all these girls jumped out of the way," Campbell remembers. "And he jumps, like, onto the pew in front of me and then bent down at his waist and told me I was a 'faggot.' 'God's not going to bless a bunch of faggots.' "
The Times interviewed nine women who attended the home in Florida from 2001 to 2007.
They say their menstrual-stained underwear was waved around to chastise them for being unclean and recall being timed when they went to the bathroom and rationed squares of toilet paper based on what they disclosed they needed to do.
They remember being awakened in the night, as the preacher stormed into their dorm, screaming that the room stank and he could "smell masturbation."
"Every time he said it, I would just cringe," recalls Anni Leigh Smith, now 26.
Reporting abuse? Unlikely, former residents said.
New Beginnings, like many other unlicensed homes, monitored all phone conversations.
Several former New Beginnings residents said they were scared to speak out and were intimidated by adults at the home about talking to investigators.
Campbell said she witnessed the whipping of Jamie Schmude. She said before DCF came asking questions, she was coached by the stout, fiery McNamara.
"He would play that sort of thing from a classic cult angle," Campbell said. "Related them (investigators) to Satan. … 'These people don't know what we do here. The world doesn't support God's way' …
"We were under his authority, as ordained by God."
Today, the women have a 130-member Facebook group called "Proactive Survivors of New Beginnings Girls Academy." In recent years, there has been online talk about the new children's home that moved in after New Beginnings left Florida for Missouri.
Newer Beginnings
Marvelous Grace Girls Academy now sits at the end of that long, clay driveway in Pace.
It is hard to tell where New Beginnings ends and Marvelous Grace begins.
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The property has not been sold since its days under Pastor McNamara. It is still owned by a corporation that lists McNamara as an officer.
ReplyDeleteAnd though the girls of New Beginnings recall moving to Missouri in 2007, back in Florida, police reports continued to call the home by the same name for years.
The home's website in 2009 called Steven Blankenship executive director for "New Beginnings Girls Academy." On that site, Blankenship — now director at Marvelous Grace — said he found God "after years of living as a Satanist and a Witch."
Another defunct site, truth4teens.org, showed photos of Blankenship preaching during radio broadcasts and revivals and listed his name under blog entries. The site called hatred "a family value."
It also showed what the site called a brain scan of a man hospitalized for voices in his head.
The image contained a horned shape that the site suggested was the face of Satan caught by modern medical equipment. "It has been validated as authentic!" the site declared.
Marvelous Grace has no state license and is not accredited by FACCCA. DCF investigated an abuse allegation in 2010, finding no evidence.
Blankenship declined to be interviewed. In an email, he wrote: "Please do not call, email, text, send letter, or show up on Marvelous Grace Girls Academy's property."
He told the Times he will be accredited by January 2013.
Desperate for help
Not everyone calls the children who pass through an unlicensed home "survivors." Many see the homes as saviors, when all else has failed.
Parents from across the country gathered one recent Friday on a remote Panhandle property, the home of Gateway Christian Military Academy, also known as Teen Challenge, in Bonifay.
Dozens sat in folding chairs outside the children's home and applauded their sons, once drug-addicted and defiant, as they marched in camouflage and recited in perfect unison this passage from Hebrews:
Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves.
A handful of rule-breakers were not allowed to participate. They stood off to the side in faded orange jumpsuits.
The jumpsuits, some missing buttons and held together by duct tape, are also worn by new recruits in the first days when drill instructors get in their faces and make them exercise; it's what Samson Lehman had on when he was made to run until he almost died.
Parents assembled for the monthly visit know this place is tough. That's why they chose it.
Sabrina and Lane Stromsnes, registered nurses from Plant City, almost lost their 13-year-old son to a progression of drugs that culminated in crack.
The parents thought they had covered their bases. They drug tested their son, took him to a counselor, even sat behind him in school.
The decision to send him away became clear the night they found him running through the woods, nearly naked and out of his mind. They believe if they hadn't taken him to Gateway, he would be dead.
Now, they see their son healthy. They know he can't sneak out like he used to. He is sober, alive.
"I just hugged my son," the father said. "I kissed him. I told him I loved him. And I know that next May, I'll get him back."
During a nighttime service, as Christian rock played, boys overcome by emotion fell to their knees and cried. Drill instructors hugged them, held them and whispered prayers into their ears.
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Despite such tender moments, instructors' rough tactics have brought DCF investigators into the Panhandle group home 24 times in its 14-year history, with allegations of bizarre punishment, beatings, physical injury and medical neglect.
ReplyDeleteDCF had verified such claims in five cases and found credible evidence of similar mistreatment in three others by 2008, when a woman dropped off a 15-year-old son she suspected had been drinking.
On the verge of death
Samson Lehman was a straight-A student enrolled in honors Algebra and English. He had no juvenile record, and his guidance counselor thought his friends were the "cream of the crop."
He said he was caught off-guard when men in camouflage patted him down, called him a mom beater and a drug addict and began a marathon of exercise that ended only when his body gave out.
Clammy. Pale. Changing colors. That's how staff members described Lehman's appearance more than 24 hours before they drove him to the hospital, a Holmes County sheriff's report shows.
Four other boys watched him vomit repeatedly. Boys watched him fall during seemingly endless laps inside the barracks, and they watched staff restrain him.
Counselors offered him ibuprofen, which his doctor would later say can cause kidney damage in a dehydrated person. Then they waited an entire day before driving him to the hospital, a sheriff's report shows.
Emergency room tests showed Lehman's organs were shutting down. He was airlifted to an intensive care unit at Children's Hospital in Alabama, where his doctor described a "race for time."
"Waste products had accumulated to a dangerous extent," nephrologist Dr. Frank Tenney wrote in a letter to DCF that Lehman gave the Times.
"Left untreated, his heart would certainly have stopped in a short time."
DCF investigated and listed the case as
"verified medical neglect," finding a "preponderance of credible evidence." But the State Attorney's Office in Holmes County did not pursue charges.
Pastor David Rutledge, director of the children's home, says Lehman's illness was the result of a young man arriving with mineral deficiencies. He points out the home now employs a registered nurse, has a doctor on its board and requires all incoming residents to pass a metabolic panel. He said boys are no longer forced to endure such long stretches of intense exercise.
Lehman is now 20 and majoring in engineering at the University of Florida.
He endured months of dialysis. Years of nightmares.
"The whole time, the thought is running through me, like, I don't deserve this, this sucks," Lehman said.
"You can't do anything as a child to protect yourself."
Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/article1258390.ece
Military-style children's home still open despite troubling complaints
ReplyDeleteBy Alexandra Zayas, Tampa Bay TimesStaff Writer
October 29, 2012
PORT ST. LUCIE
Anyone can run a program that houses troubled children in Florida. • Even Alan Weierman. • In the past decade, state officials have investigated an unlicensed military program run by the self-titled “colonel” 24 times and found evidence that kids were punched, kicked, slammed into hard objects and choked to unconsciousness. • They know about a boy who left Weierman’s home in 2004 on the verge of kidney failure. • And another boy who was shackled for 12 days in 2008 and called a “black monkey.” • They say Weierman, a Christian minister, has repeatedly crossed the line of abuse in his three decades running religious group homes in this state. Regulators have tried to shut him down. • The state license to operate his children’s home lasted only two years.
Eight years ago, he lost a religious exemption that had allowed him to keep his reform home open without government oversight.
So now he operates without any state-recognized accreditation at all.
He has even had to answer allegations of sexual abuse and of failing to report abuse alleged by a girl at his facility.
The facility staff engage in discipline that is harmful, DCF officials wrote in a report four years ago.
The risk to children is high.
Yet his home is still open and caring for a dozen boys.
Still collecting $28,600 per child from parents.
Still punishing kids in ways that trouble the state.
Easy to abuse
The story of Southeastern Military Academy exposes an ugly truth about Florida — you can get a license to open a group home, torment children for years and face few repercussions, so long as you are not convicted of a crime.
The Department of Children and Families can storm into licensed homes, order changes and remove children. But the department’s ultimate weapon — revoking a home’s license — is virtually meaningless.
Lose your state license and you can apply for a religious exemption. Lose that and you can register as a “boarding school.”
Each time, the process starts over. New regulators with different rules come to visit.
Each step down the regulatory ladder relaxes the standards required of a children’s home.
Or you can start out as a “boarding school” and skip the hassles of licensing and government oversight altogether.
State-licensed facilities are inspected by DCF; religious exempt homes are reviewed by a private, nonprofit agency with headquarters in Lake City.
No one in Florida monitors boarding schools, which are allowed three years to apply for accreditation by one of five organizations listed in statute. Those organizations focus largely on academics.
DCF investigators respond to abuse allegations at all children’s homes. But for years they did not routinely verify whether those facilities had their required credentials. DCF officials said that’s because state abuse investigators didn’t understand the “intricacies of the law.”
“That is not the duty of the DCF investigator,” DCF spokeswoman Erin Gillespie said in April. “If anyone had any concerns that these homes were running illegally, they would have to report that to DCF and our licensing staff or legal team would investigate.”
In response to the Times’ investigation, DCF is now making sure abuse investigators check a facility’s credentials.
But for years while DCF waited for the general public to make a complaint, homes fell through the cracks.
Southeastern Military Academy, which the state once took to court because it had no accreditation, has been operating without state-recognized oversight for years.
When asked about the academy earlier this year, a DCF spokesperson questioned whether the home remained open, hearing that the site “looked abandoned,” with a “For Sale” sign outside.
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The ‘colonel’
ReplyDeleteSoutheastern Military Academy abuts Florida’s Turnpike on an unfenced property in Port St. Lucie where anyone can see boys sweat in a sand pit, counting exercises for a man in fatigues.
That man, 50-year-old Alan Weierman, is big and tall and wears his graying hair high and tight; “snow on top,” he calls the style.
Smiling, drinking coffee in his combat boots, he has been up for five hours when he greets visitors at 9 a.m. on a recent Wednesday. He hands them a business card emblazoned with a U.S. Army logo and the title “colonel.”
Weierman is not affiliated with any branch of the military. Nor has he ever been close to the rank of colonel. He says he tried to join the Army more than three decades ago but was dismissed after six weeks because he was allergic to bees.
“I’m not sorry where I’m at today,” he said. “It all comes around to where you still get to serve. Training young men is like being in the military. It’s like training soldiers all over again — kids with no respect for parents, no respect for police, or themselves.”
Weierman says he instills that respect in the dozen boys in his care.
He takes in “recruits” as young as 11, strips them of individuality, dictates rules and nitpicks for infractions. When they break and lose control, he says, he builds them back up.
His program is not about “breaking down” kids or creating “robots,” he says. It’s about shaping behavior that will last. He says the “mind, body and soul” approach includes daily spiritual devotions, Sunday worship and accommodations for boys of other religions.
“It doesn’t matter to me why he’s here. It doesn’t matter to me even what he thinks about being here,” Weierman said. “He understands there is compliance. He must understand there are rules.”
Weierman’s program is built around discipline that would never be allowed at a state licensed home.
Parents sign a contract allowing corporal punishment and giving up the right to sue, even if their child dies.
Weierman says he hasn’t had to shackle a boy in years, but reserves the right to do it when a boy presents a threat or tries to run away.
While the home has been accused by state child protection workers of abusive treatment, nothing has been proved to rise to criminal child abuse.
Still, even Weierman concedes there have been problems.
He stopped showing the war film Full Metal Jacket after he caught boys having “blanket parties,” mimicking a scene in the movie where a recruit is gang-beaten with bars of soap, wrapped in towels.
Over the years, child abuse investigators have found dozens of children with minor injuries and classified the cases as maltreatment stemming from out-of-control disciplinary efforts.
Moving to Florida
Weierman scoffs at the idea that the harsh discipline doled out at his group home amounts to child abuse. He says he knows real abuse.
“My dad shot me when I was 13 years old, trying to kill me,” he said. “I was ripped out of bed many nights and beaten bloody, simply because I failed to close a gate or shut a door.”
He grew up hard in Ohio in the 1970s. By 17, he said, he had racked up criminal charges, including armed robbery. A judge told him to choose between the military or jail.
Around that time, he met William Brink, a preacher who had an Ohio group home and ministered to delinquent youths. Brink invited Weierman to live at the religious home.
He showed up with long hair and a leather vest.
“I was just 12 ways of bad.”
But Weierman quickly gained Brink’s trust and at 19, he married the preacher’s daughter. They worked together at the children’s home in the early 1980s, when Ohio regulators required the home to stop using corporal punishment.
In 1984, Florida legislators passed a law that would allow religious homes to use corporal punishment if they could justify it with Scripture.
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Weierman’s father-in-law was among the first to apply. In 1985, he opened Victory Children’s Home, a home for abused and abandoned children in Fort Pierce.
ReplyDeleteHis son-in-law would soon work there.
But not before leaving behind an allegation in Ohio.
In 1986, a 16-year-old girl told police she had had sex with Weierman more than 30 times. The girl passed a lie-detector test and had kept a calendar of the sexual encounters, the local police chief told the Akron Beacon Journal at the time.
Weierman denied the allegations. And prosecutors declined to press charges, saying there wasn’t enough evidence.
Still, Brink and his home took criticism. After learning of the girl’s allegations months before the police, group home officials conducted their own investigation. They deemed the allegations false and never reported them to police.
Three years later, Weierman would find himself in a similar position. He investigated sex abuse claims against his new home’s director without informing police.
Police later arrested Weierman and accused him of tampering with a witness and failure to report child abuse. Although the charges were dropped, Weierman now says he should have called police as soon as he heard the girl’s allegation.
A few years later, his father-in-law was convicted in Ohio of sexual abuse involving a 14-year-old resident he took in as his daughter and a 16-year-old he made his wife.
Brink went to prison.
Weierman remained in charge of the Florida home, now split from the Ohio pastor.
A state license
Through the 1990s, Weierman would continue to have problems. State abuse investigators were called to his campus at least four times, finding evidence once that Victory Children’s Home was using excessive corporal punishment.
At the end of the decade, despite years of complaints, DCF granted Weierman a state license to run a foster home in Florida. The license meant more stringent rules and more state inspections, but it allowed Weierman’s home to accept children seized from parents by child protection workers.
Both sides soon had regrets.
In 2000 alone, DCF records show six child abuse allegations: a boy thrown by a staff member, one dragged and beaten by a peer then refused medical treatment, a boy abandoned in the parking lot of another youth shelter, and kids being hit with a belt and slammed against walls and the ground.
Reports show DCF investigators found credible evidence in four of the cases, including those involving asphyxiation and beatings.
Weierman denies all abuse allegations.
“If I said to you, ‘If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to kick the snot out of you,’ is that threatened harm? I don’t know,” he said. “Child abuse requires intent to commit harm. You have to intend to commit the harm.”
Weierman said he regrets getting a state license, saying the state’s requirement that his children have access to an abuse hotline led to a spate of false reports.
“If you’re a licensed facility, you have to make a phone available to any child,” Weierman said. “At times, I had eight investigators here at a time?…
“Children can lie.”
By the end of 2000, DCF had had enough.
On the day the agency was scheduled to present evidence to a judge to revoke Weierman’s license, he surrendered it.
But that wasn’t the end.
A second chance
When a group home that calls itself Christian can’t or won’t get a license, when it is chased out of another state for refusing oversight, or, like Weierman’s, when it fails to meet government standards, Florida provides a fallback:
FACCCA accreditation.
Florida is among a handful of states that legally recognize a religious exemption when it comes to licensing children’s homes.
By law, exempted facilities must register with the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, a nonprofit group that accredits homes. The association has long allowed homes to strike children with paddles, so long as they justify it with the Bible and pray with the child afterward.
continued in next comment...
Weierman surrendered his home’s state license on Feb. 12, 2001. The following month, DCF got a letter saying FACCCA had accredited his home.
ReplyDeleteUnder FACCCA, Weierman was able to shut down direct access to the state’s child abuse hotline, which was created to dispatch authorities any time allegations are reported.
Longtime child advocate Jack Levine, who opposed the religious exemption when it was voted into law in 1984, says such safeguards exist for a reason. To complain that kids lie is just a way of avoiding scrutiny, he said.
“It’s so easy to find an excuse for doing the wrong thing,” he said. “You can blame the child. You can blame the system. You can sit around and make excuses for any kind of malfeasance, but that doesn’t make it right.”
Weierman’s home was accredited by FACCCA for three years. The complaints kept coming.
2002: The facility has been locking kids up in chains to keep them from running.
2002: Many of the children have current bruises or have had bruises in the past.
2003: Alan Weierman grabbed a child by the neck and slammed him against the wall with force.
2004: A staff member punched (a child) in the mouth and kneed him in the chest... As a result, his mouth was bleeding.
Investigating these cases, DCF found credible evidence of beatings, inappropriate or excessive restraints, bruises or welts and physical injury.
Michele Muccigrosso sued Weierman’s corporation, saying her 12-year-old son, Dillon, was made to hike on broken feet.
“Our insurance company settled,” Weierman said. “That’s the learning curve. ... We marched them a lot, younger guys, 10, 11, 12 years old. Plates are still growing in their feet. We cut back the marching.”
Muccigrosso said the home disregarded a doctor’s order that her son not hike.
“He was in a wheelchair for five months.”
FACCCA cut ties with Weierman in June 2004. Its executive director later told police it was because the religious home had become a boot camp.
FACCCA officials have declined to provide the Times records of inspections, complaints or investigations at any of the homes it has accredited. They said they do not accredit boot camps because they are “not appropriate.”
The last rung
After failing under two separate forms of oversight in less than four years, Weierman was not shut down.
Instead, he took advantage of a loophole in state law that allows children’s homes to skirt oversight by calling themselves “boarding schools.”
Department of Education officials keep a list of boarding schools, but do not police them. They do not inspect the campuses or establish discipline standards for the schools.
A state law passed in 2006 says boarding schools must be accredited by one of five scholastic organizations.
But those groups focus on academics. And no one has been checking to make sure the schools meet the requirement.
Weierman’s program has not been accredited under the boarding school rules since it registered as one, under the name Victory Forge, in 2004.
With the new name, came new complaints.
In July 2004, Weierman says, a boy left on the verge of kidney failure after being forced to endure what the colonel called an “extreme” amount of exercise.
Weierman said the boy’s kidneys were not functioning correctly and staff at the home made it worse by forcing him to drink a quart of water an hour.
“The more we did that, the more damage was caused by doing that,” Weierman said. “There was no way we could know.”
Weierman said a detective gave him “accolades” for catching the damage on time.
DCF made a “verified” finding of medical neglect.
Then, on April 6, 2008, Port St. Lucie police officers came upon the aftermath of a capture.
A runaway sat shirtless on a bench outside a middle school, cuffed at the hands, shackled at the ankles, surrounded by Weierman’s staff and the boys who had taken him down. He bore a 5-inch red mark on his neck.
“Please take me to jail,” 16-year-old Lochane Smith told the officers. “I don’t want to go back.”
continued in next comment...
When an officer questioned the home’s authority to shackle the student, Weierman cursed and yelled, police reports show. “If you had a black kid like that,” he told police, “you would put him in handcuffs also.”
ReplyDeleteThe police took Smith to the station, where they got his story.
He said he had been shackled for 12 days, chained at the wrists even as he slept on his top bunk and released only to shower.
Employees had punched him, choked him, thrown him against the walls.
He ran when he got a chance, vaulting over the fence, darting across the highway.
The home sent a search party, including boys.
He told police a recruit named Tango ran toward him yelling “I’m going to get you, black boy,” then tackling him and choking him, until an employee told Tango, “You better stop, the police are coming.”
DCF interviewed the 15 other boys at the facility and determined all had been in some way mistreated — bruised, bloodied, choked, shackled, subjected to “cruel and unusual punishment.”
One had been called an “Iraqi” and a “rag head.”
Smith had been called a “black monkey.”
Soon after the incident, DCF called parents to take their boys home.
Police spoke to those same boys, who reported they saw Smith being pushed, dragged and “tossed around.” But the police determined none of his injuries rose to child abuse.
St. Lucie County Assistant State Attorney Jeff Hendriks wrote a letter saying no charges would be filed, in part, because parents had consented to corporal punishment.
In an interview from the jail where he landed years later on robbery charges, Smith, now 21, said the abuse was worse than that police report suggests.
He said staff slammed his head into the walls on the first day because he cried and pushed his face in the sand.
Smith said he was made to stand all day and allowed to urinate on himself.
“Some boot camps help people,” he said, “but Victory Forge made me worse.
“Look how I ended up.
“I pray nothing like what happened to me happens to someone else.”
‘Good faith effort’
In 2009, DCF tried to force Weierman to submit to oversight or shut down for good.
By then, he was calling his home Southeastern Military Academy and had registered it as a boarding school.
DCF sued, saying the registration and name changes were “evidence of his intent to circumvent and subvert” statute. The lawsuit summarized a history that included 35 prior child abuse allegations.
The staff at this facility, DCF wrote, continues to cross the line between acceptable discipline and abuse.
DCF attorneys argued that Weierman had no license or accreditation. Under state law, he should be considered a rogue foster home and be barred from accepting children.
But in a March 2011 order, St. Lucie Circuit Judge Dan L. Vaughn found that Weierman was making a “good faith effort” to get accredited and denied DCF’s request for an injunction.
A year later, Weierman is still trying to get accredited. He has applied with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which accredits public and private schools. The process takes a couple of years. Weierman says his home is up for review in March.
“I’m hoping and I’m praying they don’t look at the politics of it,” he said.
Still in business
For now, Southeastern Military Academy continues its daily routine.
Weierman still doesn’t have a problem threatening to beat a kid into a “bloody mud puddle.”
He needs to let them know he’s in charge.
When they threaten to fight him, he threatens them back — “I’m going to hurt you,” “I’m going to send you to the hospital,” “With my dying breath, I’m going to take you with me.”
“It’s all bull,” he said. “It’s all just a facade.”
But that facade is how Weierman molds his rebellious young boys.
continued in next comment...
At the academy, every action is scrutinized. A wrinkle in a bedsheet, a boot misplaced by 2 inches — all are worthy of punishment, because, to Weierman, all indicate something inside the boy is still defiant. Throughout the day, recruits get lists of orders they must follow. But instructors switch up orders to cause confusion and create a reason to dole out punishment.
ReplyDeleteAny excuse is good enough. If a student asks permission to do something that’s already on his to-do list, he is punished.
Twenty-five push-ups here, 150 side-straddle hops there. Boys spend many hours in the “pit.”
They can also can get swats and lose family visits.
Michaela Mattox turned to Weierman to deal with the 14-year-old son she couldn’t control. He was defiant, running away, smoking marijuana.
She left him at the academy five months ago without touring the home and now has regrets. She doesn’t even know the names of the “captains” on the phone.
She has read about other boys’ allegations online.
And when she speaks to her son on the phone, with staff listening, he cries so hard, she can barely understand what he says.
Your son may complain to you about unbearable pain, crying that it’s too hard, says parent literature. DON’T BE FOOLED!
Among the most feared punishments is being sentenced to bowls of “stuff.”
Boys on “stuff” must down soggy bowls of vegetables, swimming in vinegar and designed not to go down easy.
They get “stuff” every meal, every day until they complete their sentence. Some go more than a week with nothing else to eat. If they don’t finish a bowl, it gets served up at the next meal.
Forcing kids to eat “stuff” may sound like juvenile hazing, but state child safety regulators have labeled it “bizarre punishment.”
Weierman doesn’t buy it.
“It’s mind over matter,” Weierman recently told a few boys, who had 15 minutes to shovel the peas and corn into their mouths.
“It’s just vegetables.”
They lifted their bowls to drink the acidic dregs.
One gagged.
Another vomited.
Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.
Critical moments in Alan Weierman's career
1984 Florida creates religious exemption
for group homes.
1985 "Colonel" Alan Weierman's father-in-law opens Victory Children's Home, a religious
children's home in Florida.
1986 A 16-year-old girl says she had a sexual
relationship with Weierman when he was working at a children's home in Ohio. No charges filed.
1989 Weierman is aware but does not report
a girl's sex abuse allegations against another staff member at his Florida group home. Charges of tampering with a witness and failure to report abuse are later dropped.
1992 Weierman and his wife change the name of the home to Treasure Coast Victory Children's Home when his father-in-law is accused of sexual abuse. They incorporate the home in Florida.
Feb. 2001 After operating under DCF oversight for about two years, and dealing with an increase in abuse allegations and findings, the home surrenders its state license. A month later, it is operating with religious accreditation under FACCCA.
June 2004 The home loses its religious accreditation. Weierman changes the name of the home and registers as a "boarding school."
April 8, 2008 A boy claims he was shackled at the home for 12 days straight and berated
with racial slurs.
2009 State officials seek a judge's order to
shut down the home, arguing it is not legally accredited. A judge later refuses.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/article1258820.ece
Abuses in the Troubled Teen Industry
ReplyDeleteInternational Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) and Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth (CAFETY) are cosponsors of a one-day conference that will bring experts together with individuals harmed in teen treatment programs.
WHEN: Saturday, April 20, 2013—10:00 AM – 5:30 PM
WHERE: Comfort Inn, Pentagon City, 2480 South Glebe Rd., Bldg. 2, Arlington,
VA, US, 22206. Phone: (703) 682–5500 Fax: (703) 682-5505 Exit 7B
(Glebe Rd.), I-395. Free parking.
Some teen treatment programs have used psychological control techniques commonly associated with manipulative, high-demand groups, often called “cults.” Sometimes such techniques have contributed to the psychological, physical, or sexual abuse of teens that the programs were supposed to help.
The conference will include the following talks, followed by discussion:
--Overview of the Cultic Influences in the Troubled Teen Industry (William Goldberg)
--Clips from Surviving Straight Inc., a Documentary (Kelly Matthews)
--The Great Drug War (Arnold Trebach)
--Survivor Interviews: Surviving Straight Inc., a Documentary
--Personal Story (Sunny Linkfield and Ethel Linkfield)
--Cultic Practices in Residential Care and Applicable Human-Rights Conventions (Katherine Whitehead)
--How Do We Really Help Troubled Teens? What Science Tells Us (Steve Eichel)
--Overcoming and Healing After the Abuse (William Goldberg)
--Healing Through Advocacy (Kathy Moya)
Space is limited, so please REGISTER ASAP. The registration fee is $30, payable to ICSA.
To Register Online: http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/event_conferences_workshops.asp
Mail: ICSA Box 2265, Bonita Springs, FL 34133 E-mail:
mail@icsamail.com Fax: 305-393-8193
More information at http://icsahome.com/pdf/fax_mail_spev_dc.pdf
Troubled Teen Industry: Saving children from institutionalized abuse and torture
ReplyDeleteABOUT THIS SITE http://troubledteenindustry.com/
What is the Troubled Teen Industry?
The troubled teen industry has varying formats and varying claims as to what they can accomplish, but all have the same tendency to separate children and parents, limiting contact between a child and their family. Many also limit contact with the outside world. This lack of contact enables programs/facilities to be more abusive due to the lack of scrutiny. There is a lack of concern that someone will catch them, or find out they've done something wrong. Why? Because if your kid is there, then everyone assumes they must be bad; they must be a liar; they must be difficult; they must not be trustworthy. If they are complaining, it must be because they are manipulative liars. They're being disciplined and they don't like it. Discipline is NOT what we're against, it is the line that has been crossed from discipline to abuse and torture that has caused us to stand up and take action.
"Breaking" the children is a common theme, but it is a harmful tactic that ultimately, has devastating results for the individual, later in life. Some of us know this from personal experience. Some of the tactics used are fear, brainwashing, repetitiveness of menial tasks. Other tactics are more severe, harder labor, standing/sitting in stress positions, physical punishments that go beyond swats with a paddle and into violence. Some of this meted out by other teenagers.
"Indoctrination/Brainwashing" is the next step. Repetition of the programs beliefs and standards, without regard to the child involved and without regard to the example they themselves set on a daily basis. They will tell your child he is not good enough to survive in the regular world until they believe or behave the way the program says they should. They may tell you and your child that they will end up insane, dead, in jail or on drugs without their 'help'.
You may believe the driving force behind these programs and facilities is to help your child. It's not. Money is. If you don't believe me, tell them your insurance isn't going to cover the tuition any longer and you've gone bankrupt. See how fast little Susie or Johnny is redeposited into your life.
We are dedicated to preventing others from experiencing the same traumas we have been through. Our goal is to bring awareness to the troubled teen industry and hold the abusers accountable for their actions.
If you're considering sending your child away, take a week and read Help at Any Cost, by Maia Szalavitz first. http://www.helpatanycost.com/ You owe it to your child.
Also see: http://www.reddit.com/r/troubledteens The "Troubled Teen" Torture Industry — A Primer for Newcomers
If you are a teen or parent who is troubled or in crisis, message the mods. We will help you find alternatives to prison camps. Are you a survivor? Are you a parent that has been fooled by the troubled teen industry? Have an idea how to save children from institutionalized child abuse? Share your stories and ideas here. What can you do to help? Send a message to your legislators that you want federal regulation! Share this primer about the Troubled Teen Industry across all of your social networks. Awareness is key! We believe...
Tenet 1. Families with 'troubled teens' often have other issues that need to be fixed. Any therapy that excuses parents and blames the child may be a fraud.
Tenet 2. Any program referring to 'troubled teens' may be a fraud. Why?
Tenet 3. Any program that rushes you into making a placement decision, may be a fraud.
Tenet 4. Any program that tries to get you to ignore the financial impact of a troubled teen facility may be a fraud.
Tenet 5. Any troubled teen program that advises you to ignore your child's complaints about abuse or injury because your child is trying to 'manipulate' you, is a potentially abusive program.
Safe Teen Schools http://www.safeteenschools.org/
ReplyDeleteSafe Teen Schools is a informational service ran by a former student of a "Tough Love" boarding school. Our goal is to make sure the children enrolled in these types of facilities are being properly cared for. Such as but not limited to education, nutrition, medical treatment and mental health treatment. Are you getting what you are paying for?
As a parent, you worry about your child. Which is why you are looking for schools to help them. We are here to help show you the signs of manipulation and abuse that takes place in these facilities so you do not get scammed and your child does not get abused.
Parents, what is better than information coming from a person who has been in your child's shoes? Someone who has seen how abuse in these types of facilities can ultimately damage a child.
We ask these questions so you may ask yourself. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. If you are a concerned parent or member of the public and would like to get involved in making sure child abuse stops in boarding schools please feel free to contact us and we will let you know what you can do to help!
If you are unhappy with your child's stay at a facility and have some questions, or know children have been abused at a facility please contact us so we can expose them. Thank you.
To contact Safe Teen Schools call (517) 974 9140 email lillian@safeteenschools.org or go to http://www.safeteenschools.org/
Students Recall Special Schools Run Like Jails
ReplyDeleteBy TIMOTHY WILLIAMS, New York Times July 23, 2013
After Alexander Chomakhidze and his family moved to the United States from Greece a few years ago, he became so despondent he started skipping school and even tried to kill himself. Worried, his parents sent him to Horizon Academy, a Utah boarding school that promised therapy.
But Mr. Chomakhidze, now 18, said that instead of getting help he was roughed up and taunted by staff members, who held him down and cut off his long hair when he arrived. Later, after he slit his wrists, he said he was disciplined but received no mental health counseling.
“They didn’t help,” said Mr. Chomakhidze, who will be a college freshman this fall. “No one talked to me about it. They just punished me.”
During the past 15 years, a network of Utah-based “tough love” boarding schools for troubled youths has closed nearly two dozen programs amid claims of child abuse, which the schools have denied. But Horizon Academy and at least half a dozen other schools with business or family ties to those who ran the network are still operating, and others with those ties are newly opened. And once again, former students, parents and former staff members say that children at some of the schools, Mr. Chomakhidze among them, have been routinely mistreated.
School officials have denied Mr. Chomakhidze’s claims. But interviews and e-mail exchanges with more than 30 former students, parents, current and former staff members, and owners of the schools reveal a rigid system of discipline at the facilities, which are typically locked compounds, often in remote areas. Everyday activities like speaking, using the bathroom, walking freely between rooms, taking showers and talking to parents are limited by the staff.
Robert B. Lichfield, the founder of the network, the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, said in an e-mailed statement that he no longer owns any of the schools and that he was unaware of children being harmed. He said that for more than a decade he has supplied only business and educational services to the programs.
“Allegations against schools I did not own or manage, I can’t answer,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I wasn’t there, I didn’t abuse or mistreat students, nor did I encourage or direct someone else to do so. I provided business services that were non-supervision, care, or treatment services to schools that were independently owned and operated.”
Behavior modification programs for troubled teenagers have thrived as state and federal laws allow private boarding schools far greater leeway in how they treat children than is permitted in public school systems, which generally prohibit physical punishment, the isolation of children and other severe discipline methods.
In fact, there are no federal laws governing schools like those built on the World Wide model. A 2011 Congressional bill that would have banned physical abuse and the withholding of food at such schools died in committee after it was opposed by lawmakers reluctant to impose new federal standards on a matter often regulated by states.
Instead, states oversee the facilities variously as camps, boarding schools or residential treatment facilities, and state regulators often hesitate to step in because the programs exist in an ill-defined area of the law. For example, private boarding schools are not regularly inspected and are not required to be licensed or accredited, according to the federal Department of Education.
In a case that is not directly related to World Wide, children at a number of privately operated facilities in Florida recently said they had been abused in programs with little governmental control because the schools are regulated as religious institutions.
‘Manipulative’ Students
continued below
Mr. Lichfield said that accusations of mistreatment by troubled adolescents are common in the business. “All schools working with disturbed teens have a few students who are angry and manipulative, with long histories of lying and dishonesty, who will make allegations,” he wrote. “Find one school for me that does not. The schools we provided services for had such volume that even a very small percentage of students who make such allegations start to add up, but every school has about the same percentage of students who didn’t like being there and are willing to make such allegations.”
ReplyDeleteMr. Lichfield’s lawyer, J. Ralph Atkin, said that parents of the nearly 20,000 children who have attended World Wide schools during the past 20 years had a satisfaction rate of 96 percent, and that the schools’ employees had been required by law to report signs of mistreatment. Mr. Atkin himself owned a World Wide program in the Czech Republic during the 1990s. It was investigated by Czech authorities after accusations of child abuse and was later closed; World Wide said no children had been mistreated there.
A lawsuit on behalf of more than 350 former students and their parents in a Utah state district court claims that World Wide’s programs provide little education or mental health help, and that staff members engage in outright assault. “In many instances,” the suit says, “the abuse could be accurately described as torture of children.”
In May, a lawsuit against a World Wide-related company was resolved for $3 million without the company admitting liability — nine years after a 16-year-old girl hanged herself in a bathroom stall at a facility in Montana called Spring Creek Lodge Academy, which has since closed. Before her suicide, the girl had been punished by being forced to carry a bucket of rocks, according to depositions by the school’s owners and staff.
Owners of the facilities that are currently open say their programs have no connection to World Wide, and turned down requests to visit. But in interviews, former students, parents and staff members — many of them, like Mr. Chomakhidze, not part of a lawsuit against World Wide — described them as spartan places.
Daily life is highly structured, with limited free time. Students, who are required to wear uniforms, generally perform schoolwork at their own pace for about five hours a day, though many students and parents say the curriculum is far less rigorous than that of local public schools. While some of the programs have gyms, usually only those who have earned enough points for good behavior can use them. Former students say those points can be rescinded quickly after months of hard work.
Violating rules often leads to being placed in isolation, or being “restrained” — held on the floor for as long as an hour by staff members, who students say twist their limbs in painful positions until they stop resisting. Other punishments at World Wide programs have included pepper spraying, handcuffing, being forced into dog cages and being made to sit or stand in uncomfortable positions for hours, according to former students and claims in lawsuits.
Complaining or crying invited further punishment, the former students said, and children who intentionally injured themselves, including attempting suicide, were punished with demerits and extra work, according to former students and a school handbook. The programs’ contracts require parents to release the schools from legal liability.
The schools are typically surrounded by fences or walls to thwart runaways. As an additional deterrent, those who have insufficient accumulated points are required to wear flip flops, even in winter, because, staff members have told them, they make it harder to run.
continued below
Even if a student does escape, however, the schools’ isolated locations make hiding difficult, and former students said escapees were usually quickly recaptured. On a recent trip to one of the programs, Seneca Ranch, in Donalds, S.C., which is set amid pastures and woods on 500 acres, there was little along a stretch of rural highway.
ReplyDeleteWorld Wide once had behavior modification schools in at least 11 states, as well as countries including Costa Rica and Mexico. In recent years, hit by the recession and accusations of abuse, Mr. Lichfield has divested ownership of the schools, which he once likened to McDonald’s franchises. But the programs’ structure and the disciplinary philosophy he helped conceive continue to be the template at most if not all of the schools.
Mr. Lichfield, an entrepreneur who has an interest in dozens of Utah, Arizona and Nevada businesses, has along with members of his family raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for political candidates nationally over the years, and was a fund-raiser for the 2008 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.
World Wide lawyers say Mr. Lichfield’s original company has largely dissolved, and exists in name only. But World Wide was reregistered with the state of Utah in March, according to business records.
The Money Flow
Mr. Lichfield, family members and business partners have financial interests in a layer of secondary companies through a web of limited liability companies, consulting arrangements and property ownership that Mr. Lichfield has acknowledged in depositions — while also saying he does not fully understand the links himself. These entities oversee the marketing, business and educational services for many of the schools, and have received up to one-third of the programs’ gross revenues, according to business records and court depositions.
One former owner of two World Wide schools, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still does business with Mr. Lichfield, said that even after Mr. Lichfield transferred ownership of a school to him, Mr. Lichfield continued to treat him as an employee, including dictating contractual terms.
“He controlled the money flow,” he said.
According to business filings and Mr. Lichfield’s court testimony, the schools and programs that have ties to Mr. Lichfield and his associates are Horizon Academy, Cross Creek Programs and Old West Academy in Utah; Seneca Ranch in South Carolina; Midwest Academy in Iowa; Red River Academy in Louisiana; and Pillars of Hope in Costa Rica. Annual tuition ranges from about $36,000 to $60,000. Most of the schools denied an affiliation with World Wide.
An example of the complex financial bond between Mr. Lichfield and the schools is illustrated in Red River Academy in Lecompte, a small Louisiana town.
The company that owns the school’s property, Octwell L.L.C., shares an address in LaVerkin, Utah — population 5,000 — with World Wide, of which Mr. Lichfield is listed in records as a trustee and part owner. Business filings show Mr. Lichfield is also a manager at Octwell. Further, Red River Outsources L.L.C., which has provided business services to Red River Academy, is owned in part by Mr. Lichfield and is based at the same LaVerkin address as World Wide and Octwell — 50 South State Street.
Still, Brent Hall, Red River’s owner, said he was not aware of any connection with World Wide or Mr. Lichfield. “Any association that I ever had with World Wide ended nearly a decade ago when I left my employment at Cross Creek Manor as a therapist,” Mr. Hall wrote in an e-mail.
Many of the hundreds of adolescents in the schools are sent by parents who say they can no longer cope with their problems, including Asperger’s syndrome, depression and drug use. Many have been sexually or physically abused.
continued below
Some former students and their parents, while acknowledging the tough rules at the schools, say the programs’ emphasis on discipline and order helped steer children from serious antisocial behavior. “I don’t think my son would have graduated from high school,” said Jeff Cardwell, 52, an Illinois man who sent his 16-year-old son to Midwest Academy in 2012. “He probably would have ended up in some legal trouble.”
ReplyDeleteBut other parents, students and former staff members say the programs’ harsh culture has had dire consequences, including at least one other suicide, in 2001, when a 17-year-old girl jumped from a balcony at Tranquility Bay, a facility in Jamaica that is now closed as well.
World Wide schools in Samoa, Mexico and Costa Rica, in addition to the Czech Republic program, have closed after concerns were raised about mistreated children. World Wide says that while the school in Mexico was closed by the Mexican authorities, the other three programs were closed voluntarily. World Wide denies that any children in the Mexican program or the others were abused.
Tackled by Staff Members
Ken Stettler, director of licensing for Utah’s Department of Human Services, said he had received numerous complaints about World Wide programs over the years, and had temporarily closed one of its facilities after finding evidence of child abuse.
He said that while World Wide’s claims about high satisfaction rates among parents may be true, the company’s reasoning was flawed because it discounted the experiences of children who have been mistreated.
“Do you want to have a milkshake with a half teaspoon of dog poop in it? Would you still drink the milkshake?” he said. “There probably is a small percentage who had a bad experience, but why did they have a bad experience?”
Mr. Chomakhidze was at Horizon Academy for seven months in 2011 before his mother pulled him out. He said that on one occasion — after he was sent to an isolation room — he began to cry and was tackled by two staff members who twisted his arms behind his back for about 10 minutes.
Mr. Chomakhidze also said staff members and students bullied him because he is gay — and even though he had a history of suicide attempts, he said one staff member encouraged him to kill himself. “They said I was a girl,” he said. “They said I was crazy.”
When he slit his wrists, he lost his accumulated points for good behavior, which are necessary to finish the program. The school has denied mistreating Mr. Chomakhidze, but acknowledged a policy of taking away students’ points after a suicide attempt.
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John, who requested that his last name not be used, was 16 when he was sent to Horizon last year. He said he had been restrained by staff members several times during his five-month stay, and that he became so distressed that he refused to eat for nearly three weeks, losing 15 pounds off his thin frame.
ReplyDelete“When I stopped eating, they put me in a room for a few days,” he said, referring to a small isolation room used to punish students. He said his pants and jacket were taken away, leaving him with only his T-shirt and underwear in a room so cold he shivered. Horizon denied that the room was cold or that his clothes were removed.
Taylor Smith, who recently sent her 17-year-old daughter to Horizon, said she had wanted her child to receive therapy for depression. But Ms. Smith said it was only after she had enrolled her daughter that she was told there were no licensed therapists on staff. “I sent her there because it was supposed to be a residential treatment center,” she said. She took her daughter home after nine days.
Like some other managers at schools based on the World Wide model, Jade Robinson, Horizon’s director, has moved frequently among programs, including Casa by the Sea, which was shut by the Mexican authorities in 2004.
Another school run by Mr. Robinson, Bell Academy, in Terra Bella, Calif., was closed in 2003 after state officials found it operating without a proper license, according to California Department of Social Services records.
Several former students at schools operated by Mr. Robinson, a former amateur boxer, said in interviews — some dating back to the 1990s — that he had physically harmed them while disciplining them, and that they remained psychologically damaged.
Mr. Robinson declined a request for an interview and to respond to most written questions. But he wrote in an e-mail: “My intent and action for years have always been pure to help teens and their family. It is unfortunate that there are a few past students that are unhappy that want to tarnish my reputation for their revenge.”
He added that he had “always followed the state regulations in all areas and especially on restraints.”
One former student, Matt Hoyler, was 16 when his parents sent him to Casa by the Sea for smoking marijuana and being disobedient.
Mr. Hoyler, now 30, said that after violating a rule prohibiting passing gas without permission, staff members had hogtied him with duct tape and rope and left him in that position for 8 to 12 hours.
While bound, Mr. Hoyler said, Mr. Robinson climbed atop him and pressed a knee into his spine while applying extreme pressure with an elbow to the back of his neck. Mr. Hoyler said that Mr. Robinson, who denied harming Mr. Hoyler, had physically hurt him in three or four similar incidents during his 11-month stay.
“It was terrifying,” said Mr. Hoyler, who said he still has nightmares about the episodes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/us/students-recall-a-school-run-like-a-prison.html
A handy guide to tough love teen reform homes
ReplyDeleteby Jonny Scaramanga, Leaving Fundamentalism January 27, 2014
I spent some of 2013 collecting information about ‘troubled teen’ reform homes. These are usually compounds surrounded by barbed wire, where at-risk teens are sent ostensibly for a godly education. They have always been surrounded by shocking allegations of abuse and torture.
Many of them use the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum. Those are the ones I’ve come across in the course of my other research, so they’re the ones I’m writing about here, but they are by no means the only ones. My emphasis on ACE is not meant to imply that they are the worst or that the others are less important. If anyone has information on the others or can share a survivor story, I will gladly post it here.
In meantime, here’s a compilation of my findings so far. I trust this will be a useful resource for people seeking to raise awareness about these places or to get justice for the survivors.
There is more information online about troubled teen reform homes than I thought. These repugnant centres of abuse and torture have actually received a reasonable amount of coverage. In a sense, that’s a good thing, but it’s also worrying, because this huge amount of coverage hasn’t made much difference. These places still exist, and in some US states they can do so with no meaningful regulation. Some Americans think this is a good thing, thanks to some poisonous definition of liberty which includes “the freedom to abuse children in secret”. Because of statutes of limitations, in some cases victims of these places no longer have the possibility of seeking justice. So while abusers have no regulation whatsoever, their victims are restricted by the state.
So here’s a guide to some of the main culprits: Who they are, where they are, and what they’ve been accused of doing. Be warned, the list includes all kinds of vile abuse, cruel and unusual punishment, and rape. You’ll also see they almost all use the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum. And why not? It’s so beautifully conducive to abuse, by simultaneously promoting total obedience to authority and unquestioning acceptance.
This is a work in progress. If you know of other homes or other allegations, please add them in the comments or by email.
go to the following link to read tthe rest of this guide and the numerous links embedded in it:
http://leavingfundamentalism.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/a-handy-guide-to-tough-love-teen-reform-homes/
Synanons Sober Utopia: How A Drug Rehab Program Became A Violent Cult
ReplyDeleteby MATT NOVAK, Gizmodo Australia APRIL 20, 2014
In 1970, George Lucas needed dozens of actors with shaved heads for his sci-fi dystopian movie THX 1138. He had trouble filling the roles at first, since so few actresses wanted to cut their locks, but Lucas eventually found the extras he needed in a strange utopian community where everyone worshipped sobriety and expressed solidarity by shaving their heads. It was called Synanon, and over the course of three decades it would become one of the weirdest and most vindictive cults of the 20th century.
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life…”
Charles E. Dederich spent the better part of two decades wandering the country as a barely functional drunk. A sales exec from Ohio, Dederich moved to Southern California after his first divorce, and in 1956 gave Alcoholics Anonymous a good faith effort at the insistence of his second wife. She chose to leave him anyway, but the program really resonated with Dederich, who quickly became a sober evangelist for everything AA stood for. Dederich was only dismayed by one fact: AA didn’t accept other kinds of substance abusers to their meetings.
Narcotics Anonymous was founded in Los Angeles in 1953, but by the late 1950s (when Dederich was sobering up) the organisation was still very disorganized, and NA groups rarely met. So in 1958 Dederich decided to form his own group that, unlike AA, embraced all kinds of addicts. He first called his group the Tender Loving Care club, but soon after renamed it Synanon.
Dederich is credited with a lot of positive innovations early on in his career as a drug rehab guru. He focused on a marginalized group that most institutions wanted nothing to do with. He was said to have coined the phrase “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” He was stern with the people around him, but he believed this tough love was necessary to achieve and maintain sobriety.
But Dederich made it quite clear early on that treating addicts was merely a byproduct of his larger mission. He wanted to create an experimental society that would transform the world. Over the years, the organisation grew — it built businesses and started schools — and its goal was no less than a utopian revolution. Synanon was a new way of living, as important to its members as any of the world’s major religions.
“This is the kind of revolution that moved the world from Judaism to Catholicism to Protestantism to Synanism,” Dederich would insist. “This is a total revolution game.”
But as one might anticipate given that kind of rhetoric, a dark side emerged. Not with one single act, but with many small changes that would enable the organisation to evolve into something much more dangerous. What was once a small drug rehab facility in sunny Santa Monica would become a violent, abusive and well-funded cult with satellites throughout California and beyond.
The Game Begins
“He was the first person I have ever met that was able to somehow able to cut through the nonsense,” one early Synanite said in a film referring to Charles Dederich. “He struck a chord.”
That chord was one of supposed honestly, with Dederich’s brash and booming voice dominating whatever room he entered. And that booming voice made him a worthy opponent in a brutal form of therapy created by the man himself. It was called The Game.
The Game was most important method of treatment at Synanon. When it came to getting addicts clean, the program rejected any form of pharmaceuticals or tapering of drugs. Everyone went cold turkey, and junkies were left on a couch to writhe and vomit for a few days while they went through withdrawal.
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The Game was the medicine administered later, a kind of group therapy invented by Dederich where people sat in a circle to express (and often shout) their frustrations at each other. The confrontational approach was a way to hash out everything that bothered you about others in your group. It was supposed to help you learn about yourself as well. While playing the Game, your frustrations didn’t even need to be true. Lying was just one of many strategies in The Game, which could last anywhere from one to 48 hours.
ReplyDeleteAs Rod Janzen notes in his book about Synanon (a book, it should be noted, that’s bizarrely sympathetic to the cult and its methods), Dederich’s writings suggested that the Game start with a question like “The most boring person in this circle is ____?” or “What really pissed you off most this week?”
On its face, many found The Game to be positive and a constructive (if admittedly unconventional) way to deal with issues within the group. But it would lay the groundwork for the abuse that was to come.
Meeting the Neighbours
Many of Synanon’s neighbours in Santa Monica weren’t terribly excited to have a drug rehab facility in their neighbourhood. The Synanon members faced harassment early on, some of it unjustified and rooted in racism and fear of addicts, some of it seemingly more deserved. In 1961, Dederich spent just under a month in jail for zoning violations and operating a hospital without a licence. In this case, he was guilty on both counts.
Those events and persecutions only served to make the Synanites more cohesive as a group, and elevated Dederich to martyr status, suffering unjust incarceration for his beliefs. It also didn’t lead anywhere; at this point, the group was firmly committed to non-violence. But it wouldn’t be until much later that Synanon would take its revenge. Soon, that would change.
That Hollywood Scene
In the early 1960s, the Synanon house became quite the fashionable hang-out for Hollywood’s more cerebral celebrities. Guest speakers in 1963 alone included Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, legendary sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, and the original host of the Tonight Show, Steve Allen. Other visitors included Leonard Nimoy, Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston, and Milton Berle, among dozens of other curious stars. Synanon had some pretty cool parties, thanks to the fact that so many jazz musicians were around trying to kick their habit.
But it wasn’t just the Hollywood elite and L.A. musicians lining up to get a peek at the exciting things happening in Santa Monica. Others who couldn’t resist poking their heads in for a look at the program included counterculture drug aficionado Tim Leary, futurist Buckminster Fuller, and labour activist Cesar Chavez.
Politicians also came knocking. Senator Thomas Dodd from Connecticut claimed in 1962 that, “There is indeed a miracle on the beach at Santa Monica.” Jerry Brown Jr., the current governor of California, even visited Synanon while with his father in the mid-60s. Synanon was widely held up as a tremendously successful program by countless politicians well into the early 1970s. No wonder, given the kinds of numbers Synanon was reporting.
Dederich’s organisation insisted recovery rates were anywhere form 80 to 100 per cent, though those figures were never confirmed by outside sources for obvious reasons. It simply wasn’t true. Some observers claim that fewer than 70 people in Synanon’s entire existence — of the thousands who sought treatment — could reasonably have been claimed as rehabilitated, though it’s probably somewhere in between these extremes.
It’s especially tough to judge rehabilitation rates when a program’s founder eventually comes to claim there’s no such thing as rehabilitation, and that staying within the organisation is the only true path.
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Growth Curve
ReplyDeleteStarting in 1965, Synanon started buying up land in Marin County, California. It would eventually have three sites in the county, comprising just over 3,300 acres in total, making it the largest private property owner in the county.
That year it also reached a high-watermark of public awareness: It got the Hollywood movie treatment. The film starred Edmund O’Brien as Dederich, and was even filmed on location in Santa Monica with the full cooperation of the Synanon organisation.
In 1967, Synanon also purchased a palatial new building in Santa Monica called Club Casa del Mar. First built as a hotel in 1926 and then used by the US Army during World War II, the building sat on a gorgeous spot on the beach. Now a hotel again, you’d never know its bizarre history if you walked inside.
At the same time, Dederich himself abandoned Santa Monica, moving north to his Tomales Bay site. By the mid-1970s, his organisation had acquired over 2,000 acres in Tulare County.
One reason for the Synanon’s rapid expansion? The organisation was fast attracting non-addicts into the fold. Aside from the bevy of celebrities that would make appearances, locals who had never been considered addicts (squares, as Synanon called them) also wanted in. They were reluctantly allowed, and by 1967 Synanon broadened its mission to include “research into the causes of alienation and delinquency.”
Synanon’s ranks were swelling. After starting in 1958 with just 40 junkies in a rundown building, it now boasted 823 members and some incredibly expensive digs to boot.
Circling the Wagons
By 1968, a new type of Synanon membership was established: the Lifestyler. Members of this group were allowed to have jobs outside of Synanon and live outside of the Synanon community, provided they gave most of their income to the organisation. This new kind of member allowed Synanon to fill its coffers with outside money that it had otherwise been reluctant to receive. After all, the organisation was leaving a lot of cash on the table by declining government-funded grants. Why? Those grants stipulated that there be some kind of independent examination and verification of success rates through drug tests and the like. These were flatly rejected.
This experiment with Lifestylers wouldn’t last long, however, as this type of member was often accused of not being committed enough to the cause. Most Lifestylers washed out of the program, though some joined the ranks fully, leaving their homes behind as a show of true commitment.
By 1968, the group was becoming even more isolationist, with Dederich declaring that it would no longer graduate any of their members. This meant that no addict who kicked their addiction would be allowed to “graduate” to a life outside of Synanon. What little pretense the group had about helping addicts rejoin the outside world had been dropped. Synanon was now the only place to be, a narrowly focused utopian experiment that was ready to swallow you whole.
After the massive expansion into all parts of California, not to mention satellite offices in places as far out as Detroit, the business side of the organisation was growing tremendously. In 1968, Synanon was bringing in roughly $US1.2 million from its various businesses, including gas stations and a manufacturer of branded promotional items. By 1976 it was grossing $US8.7 million, with estimated assets of over $US30 million.
Raising Kids
Children inside the Synanon cult were raised communally. This was a common practice romanticized by utopian communities of the 19th and 20th century (including in Upton Sinclair’s failed Helicon Home Colony), though Synanon took it a step further than most.
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Parents had highly restricted access to their children after they reached the age of about 6-9 months. By the end of the 1960s, adult members might only see their kids once a week, even if they wanted to see them more often. The policies dictating how often a given member could see their children became more and more restrictive throughout the 1960s, and by 1972 Dederich had proposed that the children from every California branch be moved to a single site in Marin County. This was quite obviously a way for Dederich to better control his followers. But for many people, it was the final straw. According to Janzen, between 200 and 300 people left the organisation after this new policy was proposed.
ReplyDelete“Dederich and others displayed a good-riddance attitude,” Janzen writes in The Rise and Fall of Synanon. “Those who left lacked commitment to Synanon’s new utopian vision, they said.” The choice was clear: Your family, or that of Synanon.
LSD and Do As I Say
Synanon was a completely drug-free environment, save for aspirin, caffeine and nicotine. But there was another drug that Dederich didn’t consider harmful. In fact, he credited this drug with expanding his mind and allowing him to create the Synanon program in the first place. That drug was LSD.
Early on, Dederich’s experience with LSD at UCLA, under the supervision of doctors, was written about with the kind of mythical terminology that you’d expect of a charismatic leader. In 1961, one admirer profiling the group explained that Dederich was not affected by the LSD as some commoners might be:
Chuck was an atypical patient in that he experienced no regression, no sensory enhancement or hallucinations. During the active period of LSD intoxication, his normal traits appeared merely in a sort of caricature. One phrase that came into his mind impressed him: “It doesn’t matter, but, at the same time it matters exquisitely.” He would go to his room and give way to tears for an hour or more every day. Even with the seeming grief, there was euphoria.
He was seemingly stronger than powerful hallucinogens. And yet he would credit them with inspiring him to start Synanon. Sometimes his philosophy was do as I say, not as I do. Other times, it was explicitly, do exactly as I do.
In 1970, Dederich decided that he should quit smoking for health reasons. Once a safe-haven for nicotine, with centres filled with smoke, Synanon banned smoking for everybody. This top-down control over the lives of Synanites was common, and would ultimately contribute to its violent transition. Dederich would act on impulse, rationalize his behaviour, and then claim that had been the plan all along.
A pivotal moment occurred in 1973 when a woman was speaking disrespectfully of Dederich’s wife Betty during a session of the Game. This, of course, was part of the Game, but for whatever reason, this time Dederich took it very personally.
Dederich grabbed a can of soda and poured it on the woman. At first, he apologized, but he almost immediately recanted his apology and rationalized his behaviour as justified. “I gave the woman a lesson in manners,” he explained.
Finding Religion
In 1974, Synanon moved to become recognised as a religion. The organisation was running up against troubles with the IRS and had realised, much like other self-help cults of the 20th century, that being recognised as a religion could help it maintain tax-exempt status.
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After abandoning drug treatment as its sole mission in the 1960s, Synanon could no longer claim to be simply a non-profit organisation. And its substantial for-profit businesses weren’t helping its case. Becoming a full-fledged religion was the best way to protect its massive holdings from the tax man.
ReplyDeleteIt didn’t work, though. The IRS never officially officially recognised Synanon as a religion, though it would be at least another decade before it finally stripped the company of its tax-exempt status.
Death and Embracing Violence
At same time it was claiming its religious rights, Synanon stepped up its use of violence within its ranks. Suspected “spies” were severely beaten. Teenagers sent to Synanon to help cure juvenile delinquency were regularly physically abused for insubordination. Everyone in the group started shaving their heads. Things were gradually, but steadily, getting worse inside the sober cult of Synanon.
Dederich was also becoming less interested in having any children around, telling many members that if they wanted to have kids they probably shouldn’t be a part of Synanon. “I understand it’s more like crapping a football than anything else,” Dederich would say about childbirth in 1976.
By January of 1977, Dederich’s distaste for children turned into an official policy. Men were pressured to get vasectomies, and women were shamed into getting abortions. These policies instigated another wave of defections, though Dederich’s increasingly inward focus caused him not to care. As Rod Janzen notes in his book about Synanon, one member told Dederich, “I’ll give you my life, Chuck, but not my balls.” Notably, Dederich didn’t get a vasectomy himself. Those that stayed, completely beaten and indoctrinated, didn’t seem to care that Dederich had become a tyrant who couldn’t even pretend that he held himself to the same standard as other Synanites.
Chuck Dederich’s wife Betty died of lung cancer on April 19, 1977. After that, all bets were off. Betty, a strong woman in her own right, seemed to dial back some of Chuck’s weirder megalomaniacal tendencies. After her death, nothing could temper his darker desires to control people.
By October of that year, only a few months after the death of his wife, Dederich’s policies became even more extreme and controlling. He declared that married Synanites should split up and find new partners. He started by breaking up his own daughter’s marriage. About 600 couples were divorced by the following year.
At the same time that Synanon was becoming increasingly militant and strange, it was enjoying substantial support from American businesses as a charitable organisation. As Richard Ofshe notes in his 1980 paper The Social Development of the Synanon Cult, there were 20,000 businesses and organisations giving to or interacting with Synanon by the late 1970s, “including one out of five corporations in the Fortune 500 who were listed either as donating or as doing business with the organisation.”
By the late 1970s, Synanon was going from bad to worse in some terrifying ways. The group’s reported purchase of over $US200,000 in firearms in 1978 raised plenty of eyebrows. If you were on the fence about Synanon’s classification as a cult before, you certainly had fewer doubts now.
In 1978, ex-Synanite Phil Ritter would try to extract his young daughter from the organisation and nearly paid with his life. Ritter’s wife was still in the organisation, and had moved with their child to Synanon’s Detroit facility. Ritter sought legal action against the cult and in response, the church sent two men to beat him senseless in his own driveway. He wound up in a coma for a week.
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Bad Press
ReplyDeleteDuring the 1970s Synanon attracted a fair amount of attention from the media, though unlike the positive press it was getting in the 1960s for its drug rehab “successes,” the coverage was overwhelmingly negative.
Major news networks had started slowly reporting on the organisation, but much of the legwork that went into exposing Synanon as a violent cult was done by a tiny newspaper with a circulation of only about 1,700.The Point Reyes Light in Marin County was dogged in its pursuit of the Synanon story, which involved child abuse, wrongful imprisonment, assault and misappropriation of funds. Despite being constantly threatened for libel action, the paper didn’t back down. The Light even won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for its reporting on the organisation, something virtually unheard of for a paper of that size.
Members of Synanon didn’t take kindly to the criticism. The group lashed out at anyone who dared question their organisation; after an expose by NBC in 1978, members sent hundreds of ominous letters to NBC executives, threatening physical harm.
Syanon also spent the 1970s suing anybody who wrote a critical article or aired a negative TV segment about it. In 1972 it sued Hearst Corporation over a San Francisco Examiner article that described the cult as the “racket of the century.” When it was finally revealed to the broader public just what a financial and emotional scam Synanon had become, this was no longer considered hyperbole.
The Rattlesnake
The most famous incidence of the organisation’s violence — and the one that Americans old enough to remember may recall — was a planned attack by Synanon on a Los Angeles lawyer. It’s remembered largely due to the bizarre choice of weapon: a rattlesnake.
Attorney Paul Morantz had successfully represented a young woman who had been held against her will by the cult. Morantz came home on October 10, 1978 to his house in the Pacific Palisades and opened his mailbox, only to be immediately bitten by a rattlesnake. The people who had placed the snake there had removed its rattle so as to keep it quiet. Morantz rushed outside yelling to his neighbours for help.
Thankfully they were able to call an ambulance in time, saving his life after quick and extensive treatment with anti-venom. Two men — 20-year-old Lance Kenton and 28-year-old Joseph Musico — were charged with attempted murder, along with Dederich for conspiring to commit it.
Dederich’s obsession with recording audio came back to haunt him, as the police produced tapes of him talking about violence and specifically mentioning Morantz’s address in the Pacific Palisades. All three plead no contest and Dederich entered into a plea deal that included probation, though he didn’t see jail time. The other part of the plea: Dederich would have to step down as head of Synanon.
It should be noted that I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI for Dederich’s file but was told that he had none.
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The Dwindling Game
ReplyDeleteSynanon’s reach was relatively limited, and yet everyone that came in contact with the organisation left with battle scars. The cult hobbled along throughout the 1980s, badly damaged from their wars in both the press and the courtroom. Who wanted to be associated with the rattlesnake cult?
Synanon was formally stripped of its tax-exempt status in 1991 and completely disbanded shortly after that. Charles E. Dederich died in Visalia, California in 1997.
Relative to other cults of the second half of the 20th century, Synanon wasn’t the worst. But if you stuck around with Synanon in the 1970s, you would have felt right at home in some of the most notorious cults of the 1970s and 80s.
Synanon started with what looked like the best of intentions. And the organisation still has defenders today. But no matter what the initial goals of this strange community and its heavy-handed leader, there’s no denying what it had become: a dangerous cult ultimately tossed on the scrap heap of failed utopias.
Whether dangerous or benign, the utopian impulse is almost always about control. We strive for perfection with small actions, working toward some greater change in our lives; our own slice of heaven. We blind ourselves to the dark undercurrents of our carefully controlled little worlds.
That’s what happened at Synanon. Members ignored the greater sins for the smaller ones. As members became more and more invested in the utopian project’s minutiae, it became harder and harder to escape. Ultimately, Synanon collapsed under its own utopian hubris — a tyrant’s ant farm masquerading as a grand experiment with the good life. And for some of the bruised and battered left in Synanon’s wake, its undoing came none too soon.
Images: Top two photos inside the Synanon organisation come from the March 9, 1962 issue of Life magazine; Synanon’s Santa Monica headquarters circa 1970 via Synanon.org; 1965 movie poster for Synanon via the Movie Poster Database; Screenshot from the 1971 film THX 1138; Richard Grotsley holding a snake in the October 13, 1978 edition of the Hutchinson News in Kansas; Two Synanites Bonnie Cunningham and Ellen Delgado look over the hair they and other women at a Synanon community in Santa Monica shaved off in February 1975 via Associated Press; Charles Dederich in 1979 via the Associated Press; 1978 CBS News screenshot of Connie Chung reporting on Synanon via YouTube; Kids playing the Game circa 1977 via Synanon.org; 2014 photo of the Hotel Casa Del Mar by Matt Novak
Sources: The Rise and Fall of Synanon by Rod Janzen; Synanon: A Therapeutic Life Style by Curt G. Batiste and Lewis Yablonsky (1971); The Anticriminal Society: Synanon by Lewis Yablonsky (1962); Synanon: Toward Building a Humanistic Organisation by Steven Simon (1978); The Social Development of the Synanon Cult: The Managerial Strategy of Organizational Transformation by Richard Ofshe (1980); Social Structure and Social Control in Synanon by Richard Ofshe and others (1974); Child Rearing and Education in the Synanon School by Edward Gould (1975); Synanon House — A Consideration of its Implications for American Correction by David Sternberg (1963); The Phenomenon of Self-perpetuation in Synanon-Type Drug Treatment Programs by Donald Scott and Harold L. Goldberg (1973)
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/04/synanons-sober-utopia-how-a-drug-rehab-program-became-a-bizarre-cult/
Kiddie Boot Camp Accused of Abuse
ReplyDeleteA group of parents is suing a boot camp-style private school, along with the state of Wisconsin, over the alleged abuse of children in its care.
by Brandy Zadrozny, The Daily Beast June 24, 2015
A group of parents is suing a boot camp-style private school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, claiming the teachers there abused seven children without their knowledge in the name of turning their young lives around.
Their complaint, filed this week in Milwaukee county circuit court, alleges seven elementary and middle school students enrolled at Right Step—a school program for some 200, mostly low-income students—were the victims of the organization’s structure and disciplinary system, one meant to instill self-control into students who have previously failed in a traditional school setting.
According to the complaint, in the 2014 fall semester, these students were: pushed, kicked, and punched; threatened and called derogatory names; forced to stay in smoke-filled rooms until they passed out; and exercised to exhaustion with limited food and water. The complaint goes on to list specific mistreatments by instructors. Instructors allegedly urinated on a student’s clothes, held a student on the ground by placing a foot on his back, forced a student to drink a beverage that the instructor had spit in, and regularly flipped them from their beds in the middle of the night. One student was made to lie in his vomit for half an hour, according to the complaint.
“[These children] were taken to a boot camp in central Wisconsin and physically abused and humiliated. Their parents had no idea that physical abuse and humiliation was part of the school’s program. They felt deceived by the school and were upset that they enrolled their kids in the school, thereby subjecting them to this abuse,” said Aaron DeKosky, the lawyer representing the three parents in their civil suit.
Calls by The Daily Beast to the school were returned by Right Step’s Rebecca Fitch—a named defendant in the suit. She said one of the defendants, Randy R. Martus, hadn’t worked with Right Step for three or four years, but wasn’t familiar with the current case and couldn’t comment on the allegations. Fitch said a similar sounding case had been brought against the school last year.
Since its founding in 2006, Right Step Inc. has marketed itself as a lifeline to what its founders call Milwaukee’s “lost youth.” Its mission as advertised on theirwebsite, has been “to develop the minds, bodies, and spirits of the community's most challenging youth, through discipline, and motivation toward positive outcomes.”
"Our kids have been weapon-carrying, drug-using habitual truants," Right Step’s director of education, Rebecca Fitch, told the Journal Sentinel in 2008.
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The boot camp and school are part of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program administered by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and a large majority of students there utilize government subsidies to attend.
ReplyDeleteAs such, the parents are also suing the state of Wisconsin and its education arm, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, arguing the extensive voucher program there uses public and taxpayer dollars to fund private, mostly religious and sometimes—as in this instance, critics say—unregulated schools, effectively turning the majority of the private institution public.
“The state does not require that schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program provide parents of prospective students with information on the school’s academic achievements or punishment practices,” DeKosky said.
Despite the advertised achievements of Right Step cadets, numerous studies of juvenile boot camps have found the “scared straight” model to be ineffective and claim the highly-structured routine and intense physical labor often results in a temporary obedience. Children often leave these programs more hostile and distrusting of authority figures than when they entered and most reoffended in short order—at similar rates to juveniles in traditional correctional institutions. These studies however are mostly for camps where juvenile offenders go to be reformed and then return to their normal lives. Right Step and other boot camps that also operate as schools and have students for years may have better success rates.
A promotional video for the school shows students—known as cadets—running military drills in the yard as well as receiving instruction in a classroom. Several members of the student body—90 percent of whom are at least three grades behind, according to a drill sergeant quoted in the video—offer testimonials of how the tough love of Right Step kept them off the streets, away from gangs and criminal activity.
Along with low graduation rates and test scores and high truancy rates, Milwaukee’s public school system boasts one of the largest black-white achievement gap in the country.
Furthermore, the area consistently ranks on the country’s most dangerous citieslists and at least 28 city children have been shot there this year.
In light of those abysmal statistics, there’s no denying Milwaukee children—particularly the poor, black children Right Step primarily enrolls—are in need of quality educational alternatives. Whether Right Step is saving or harming the children entrusted to its care will be for the courts to decide.
see the links embedded in this article at:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/24/kiddie-boot-camp-accused-of-abuse.html
Life and Death in a Troubled Teen Boot Camp
ReplyDeleteA tragic accident exposes the dangers of an out-of-control billion-dollar industry
BY JESSE HYDE, Rolling Stone November 12, 2015
In the darkness of early morning, 16-year-old Bruce Staeger lay splayed across his mattress, sleeping soundly for once. Most nights, he would smoke a blunt and crash, but not this one.
Lately, his mother had been watching him closely. She and Bruce's stepdad had even installed a motion detector on the porch of their doublewide trailer to keep him from sneaking out at night. Around 4:30 a.m., his bedroom light suddenly flipped on. Bruce rolled over, blocking his eyes from the glare to find his mom sitting on the edge of the bed. "Bruce, do you remember what I told you a few days ago?" She said softly. "I would never make a decision that would hurt you."
Over her shoulder, two men in cowboy hats and Wranglers hovered near his bedroom doorway. Other kids, he would later learn, freaked out in this moment. They yelled, they swore, they swung wildly at the two strangers. But Bruce did none of this. He quietly got dressed as instructed. "You're going away with these men," his mom told him. "This is for your own good."
The cowboys nudged him out into the cold morning air and loaded his things into the bed of a pick up. They headed west, towards the Black Range, a rugged and remote stretch of mountains in southern New Mexico. After a few hours of driving, one of the men put a black pillowcase over Bruce's head so he wouldn't know where they were going. The truck lurched and heaved as the paved road turned dirt. Eventually, Bruce would come this way again and see it all—the dry creek beds and narrow slot canyons, the craggy ridgelines and low-lying mesas that glowed red in the sun—but for now, his head hooded in darkness, he could see nothing.
Bruce had been getting into trouble ever since his dad left six years earlier. A skinny kid with sloping shoulders, braces and a mild case of acne, he rarely went to school, spending his days smoking pot and skateboarding instead. A few months earlier, he had run away and holed up with some meth junkies. When he finally returned home, his mom said she didn't know what else to do for him. Apparently, this was her answer.
Finally, they arrived at their destination: a camp known as Lockwood, a satellite location of Tierra Blanca Ranch, which for almost 20 years had reformed troubled youth. The camp's owner and director, a man named Scott Chandler, emerged from the truck, bowlegged with a slight hitch in his step. He lifted the hood from Bruce's head. "Hey guys," Chandler called out. "Come meet the new kid!"
It took Bruce a minute to gain his bearings. He was in the mountains, above 5,000 feet, standing in a clearing surrounded by towering strands of pine. A thin plume of smoke rose from a cooking fire and two industrial grade Army tents loomed in the distance. Down by the creek, he could hear voices, high and reedy.
Slowly, a dozen boys emerged, hard and lean, with haunted eyes. Their clothing was soiled and stained, their fingernails rimmed with dirt. The ones wearing orange, Bruce would soon learn, were trouble. The worst cases didn't approach at all; they were firewalled, which usually meant they couldn't speak to anyone except staff. Each looked Bruce dead in the eye and shook his hand firmly — something in their manner, though, both cocksure and skittish, unsettled him.
Bruce had no idea the terrors and torment that awaited him at Tierra Blanca, some of the worst of it at the hands of the boys who now surrounded him. And he could never have imagined the decision to send him here would result in his death.
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A working cattle ranch spanning 30,000 acres in one of the most isolated regions of the country, Tierra Blanca promised to take unruly teenagers—drug users, drop outs, kids in and out of the court system—and reform them through "sound Biblical principles," exercise, hard work and discipline. The program operates on the fringes of what's known as the troubled teen industry, a booming business that generates as much as $1.2 billion a year and takes in 10,000 to 14,000 kids and teenagers at any given time. For around $100 a day, or the rough equivalent of prep school tuition, you could send your teen to Tierra Blanca to become the sort of raw-boned young man who answered "yes, sir" and didn't complain when asked to do the dishes.
ReplyDeleteWhen Bruce arrived in October of 2011, he had little idea how the camp functioned, what it would take to leave, or how long he'd be there. "There was no program, there was no handbook, there wasn't anything," says Nathan Bailey, who was at the ranch with Bruce. "As you became more trusted, more things were explained to you by the other guys. The only way you learned about the place was just a trickle of information."
The aim of the program, several boys told me, was to break you down so what Chandler called "real change" could begin. Each day began early, typically at 7 a.m., with breakfast and Bible study or reading about historical leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Tuesdays and Fridays a retired elementary school teacher known as Miss Allie came to the ranch and handed out assignments from teachers in the nearby town of Deming. Every other day, the 15 or so kids at the camp were put to work on the ranch, clearing land, chopping the firewood that Chandler sold in town, or building miles of fence to keep cattle from wandering off. To soften up the rocky ground for fence posts, the biggest kids ran the digger, an unwieldy contraption with sharp metal spikes, or they just used "ghetto dynamite," bullet cartridges stuffed with gunpowder, to blow the rock apart.
"That's what we did every day, shit like that," says Gunnar Hatton, who was at Tierra Blanca with Bruce. "And then they'd say, ‘Everyone put your tools down, it's time to run up and down the mountain, 10 fucking times with a 20 pound rock in your hands.' And then it was back to work. That's all we did, run and work."
Exercises varied from grueling long distance runs to charging up a hill with a truck tire hoisted above their heads, a drill Chandler called "Halos." In between, boys were made to do up-downs, scissor kicks, push-ups and wall sits until their legs burned and their lungs were on fire. "The bigger you were and the stronger you were and the more you liked fucking up the little guys, the more powerful you were," says Hatton. Bruce tried to keep up, but he was out of shape. When he couldn't do exercises, staff encouraged the other boys to "help" him, which was code for either dragging him or "just a punch to the gut," another camper later told police.
If Bruce did what staff asked, and didn't give them any trouble, he could earn three points a day. Once he earned 60 points he could call home. Staff favorites who had accumulated enough points for good behavior were given "privileged status," which meant they could also go home for a visit, rent a movie (as long as it wasn't R-rated) or play on the Deming football team. Those who broke the rules or tried to run away were taken to a special closet full of orange clothing, assigned an outfit, and in some cases made to sleep, work and eat shackled and cuffed. (Chandler says this has only happened a "handful" of times when a boy was a danger to himself or others.)
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I talked to several boys who said they spent weeks in shackles, and one showed me scars on his ankles and wrists from times the cuffs and shackles cut into his skin until he bled. "Sometimes kids would step on your shackles just to fuck with you," he tells me. "I learned how to sleep with them on, do the dishes with them on, everything."
ReplyDeleteTo cope, some boys made a crude form of hooch out of canned fruit, bread and sugar, and tattooed themselves using ballpoint-pen ink and cactus needles. Others tried to run away. A boy named Jordan Almanza tried twice, once stealing a hacksaw to cut off his handcuffs and shackles, but every time Chandler and his staff hunted him down. "There was no way out," Hatton says. "You could either run and fucking die of dehydration, or just end it yourself."
At first, Bruce was so timid the other boys had to look at his homework packet from Miss Allie to figure out his name. "He was hard to read," recalls Bruce's fellow camper, Nathan Bailey. "At times he would just stare off. He could go from being completely stoic, like nothing was getting to him, and then he'd just break down."
As the months passed, though, Bruce began to open up. Laying in his tent at night, careful to make sure staff weren't listening, he talked about his ex girlfriends, the metal band he fronted back home and how much he missed his mom. "This shit really sucks," Bruce often said. "But I deserve it."
In the spring of 2012, Chandler took Bruce and a group of other boys three hours east into the Sacramento Mountains to build fence line and turn rugged terrain into a hunting camp for wealthy clients. Most of the boys, including Bruce, were in orange for breaking camp rules. Because they were in such a remote location, roughly 100 miles from ranch headquarters, there was limited electricity; much of the food was canned — "way past the expiration date," Hatton says — and stored in a horse trailer with a leaky roof. Another camper later told police that "rain would get in the pancake mix and it would mold, but it was the only food that was there so you just cooked it and fried the crap out of it and just ate it." (Chandler denies this. "I ate everything the boys ate and 90 percent of the time there were leftovers, which we fed to the dogs," he says. "They got plenty to eat.")
One night, after a week of work, the boys were loading up to return to Tierra Blanca headquarters when Chandler realized his wallet was missing. After hours of searching, he became convinced one of the kids stole it. One by one, he and another staffer took them under a tarp beside the horse trailer, and strip-searched them. When the wallet still didn't turn up, he gathered them around his truck. "One of you stole my wallet," he said. "And this is your one chance to come forward and admit you did it." No one said anything.
The next morning, Chandler told the boys they'd stay at the camp until the wallet turned up. Suspicions quickly fell upon Bruce; he'd been one of the last ones in the truck with Chandler before the wallet went missing. But Bruce insisted he didn't have it.
Chandler slowly upped daily exercise to extreme levels and cut rations down to just rice, canned beans and tortillas. To turn the boys against Bruce, the staff sat him in a lawn chair, gave him water and forced him to watch the other boys do "Halos" up and down a steep rocky slope. When that didn't elicit a confession, Chandler and his staff started waking the boys up in the middle of the night to run. (Chandler says this only happened twice.) "We were already starving, and really the only thing we had left was sleep," Hatton says. "When he took that from us, it felt like we were losing our minds."
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The other boys tried to figure out why Bruce wouldn't reveal the location of the wallet. Some of them guessed it was a final stand against Chandler, to show he wouldn't break. But others began to wonder if he'd stolen it at all. At some point, Bruce reportedly told Chandler that he had taken the wallet and burned it. Either way, after a few weeks, several boys say that Chandler subtly suggested how to end the ordeal. As Hatton later told police, "He wanted Bruce beaten."
ReplyDeleteHatton says the beatings started off once or twice a week, but eventually escalated to every day. A group of four or five boys, usually the biggest, would take Bruce away from the camp and start interrogating him. "We'd tell him, ‘You know what's about to happen,'" Hatton recalls. "And then we'd beat the shit out of him."
Several boys say they'd beat Bruce in plain sight of ranch staff, something Chandler denies. The camp consisted of a cluster of tents near the mobile campers where Chandler and the staff slept. "They'd either just go in their trailers while it was happening or sit there right outside their trailers eating," says one of the boys who participated in the beatings. "They never once intervened."
When beatings alone didn't work, the boys grew more inventive. They hung Bruce from the horse trailer from his handcuffs; lassoed him and dragged him across the dirt; and put him in a sleeping bag stuffed with cow shit and kneeled on his chest. The worst of it, one boy told me, was the day they hogtied him to a pole by his cuffs and shackles and paraded him around camp like a pig on a stick, while other boys beat him.
Eventually the boys decided the only way to end the ordeal was for one of them to die so authorities would shut down the camp. They drew lots to decide who would drink nightshade tea, derived from a poisonous plant, but staff discovered the plot before anyone could go through with it. Two weeks later, they met again. This time they decided they'd have to kill Bruce, but ultimately abandoned the plan.
And then one day a staffer found the wallet in a five-gallon bucket of electrical wires. While Bruce never confessed to putting the wallet there, Chandler says he has never doubted that Bruce did it. Not that it mattered to any of the boys. After six weeks, their trip to the Sacramento Mountains was finally over.
All the boys I talked to who participated in the beatings had trouble admitting what they had done to Bruce. "It's something I have a really hard time forgiving myself over," one former camper says. "I feel so guilty, not just for taking part in the beatings, but for wanting him to die. I still have nightmares from what we did to him."
It's hard to know how many programs like Tierra Blanca operate across the country, but conservative estimates put the number in the hundreds. Some are tough-love boot camps; others are wilderness-based programs whose philosophies can vary from meditation and yoga to the most extreme versions of fundamentalist Christianity. Many of the programs share an outright disdain for traditional therapy and try to fly under the radar of state regulators.
Despite an alarming report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2007 that found "thousands of allegations of abuse, some of which involved death" at residential treatment programs nationwide, the troubled teen industry has flourished in recent years, especially in states with religious exemption laws. In Florida, which bans the inspection of private, faith-based facilities, there have been at least 165 allegations of abuse and neglect over the past decade. Children have complained of being pinned to the ground for hours, held in seclusion for days and made to stand until they wet themselves.
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Some have even been choked to unconsciousness. Girls have been forced to wave around their menstrual-stained underwear as chastisement for being "unclean." Conversion therapy for gay teens is a common practice at many of the faith-based facilities as well.
ReplyDeleteMost troubling about the growth of the industry, advocates say, is that there's no proof any of it works. In fact, research highlighted by the GAO report suggests that tough love programs are actually counterproductive. "If you want to teach a kid how to get along better in the outside world, it doesn't make sense to completely isolate them and submerge them in this world with arbitrary rules and unpredictable and severe punishments and make them live in a constant state of fear," says Julia Graff, of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C. "Most kids are worse when they get out."
In the past 15 years, as many as 86 kids have died in troubled teen programs. At least 10 kids have died at wilderness programs like Tierra Blanca, most of them because of starvation, exposure to the elements or pressing medical needs that went ignored. In one of the most highly publicized cases, a 16-year-old named Aaron Bacon was forced to hike without food for as many as 14 days and sleep for several nights in freezing temperatures in the canyons of southern Utah without a sleeping bag or blanket. When his body began to shut down, and he lost control of his bowels, the staff made him walk without pants. He died after just 20 days at the camp.
"These programs are based on the premise that today's teens are so out of control and morally compromised that only the most extreme and harsh tactics can keep them in line," says Maia Szalavitz, who interviewed hundreds of kids who had attended tough love programs for her 2006 book,Help At Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids. "And they think the answer is to isolate them, deprive them and eventually break them."
The largest industry trade group—the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs (NATSAP)—says that tough love programs like Tierra Blanca are outliers and not representative of the industry as a whole. The group requires its 166 member programs — which serve an estimated 6,000 kids, or about half of those in the industry — to be licensed or accredited, something programs like Tierra Blanca are notorious for resisting.
"There's a lot of frustration about these sorts of programs because it's a black eye for the field as a whole," says the NATSP's spokesperson, Megan Stokes. "Programs using outdated tough love methods with no science, that's absolutely not what we're about."
By the time Bruce arrived at Tierra Blanca, New Mexico's Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD) had compiled a growing list of concerns about the ranch. In 2006, a father contacted CYFD to complain that his son had been kicked in the head by a staff member for "faking" a seizure. Two years later, a 16-year-old escaped with a satellite phone, until state police found him miles away trying to remove the shackles from his ankles. During visits, CYFD found that one staff member had no first aid training, another hadn't undergone a criminal background check and there were no written policies or procedures to explain the ranch's rules.
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There was also no working landline, meaning the only way anyone could communicate with the outside world was through Chandler's cell phone. "This is not an acceptable safety situation," a CYFD staffer wrote in an internal memo, "especially since [Tierra Blanca Ranch] is located in a very remote, rural area." To make matters worse, calls were monitored and letters were screened. "If I wrote, ‘This shit is happening, they ran me until I was coughing up blood,' they wouldn't have sent it out," says Ryan Houghton, who was a camper at Tierra Blanca the same time as Bruce. "There was really no way to tell anyone what was going on."
ReplyDeleteBefore their next visit, CYFD informed Chandler that, among other things, he'd need to ensure that any vehicle used to transport kids had a fire extinguisher, a first aid kit and enough seat belts. Otherwise, CYFD warned, Chandler would be shut down.
Chandler said he was working to come into compliance with these requests when the state decided, in 2006, to re-classify Tierra Blanca as a wilderness camp. That meant the program would no longer fall under the state's purview. "I don't think anyone can explain why the state agreed to that," says Liz McGrath, Executive Director of Pegasus Legal Services for Children, in Albuquerque. "At that point, the state abdicated its responsibilities to oversee the ranch. There really was no one there to ensure the safety of these kids." (CYFD didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.)
By the time Bruce was in elementary school, his family was coming apart: his dad left them when Bruce was 10 and his mom worked long hours at a hospital in El Paso. Bruce spent afternoons alone, playing video games, or riding his bike aimlessly around the neighborhood. "The kid never met a stranger," says his brother Eric, a 27-year-old at New Mexico State University. "He was a really fun, energetic kid, but he didn't really have anybody. He was pretty lonely."
Bruce started skipping school when he was 12, and then fell in with a group of friends who seemed dangerous to his mom. At one point, they robbed her house, and from there Bruce's life unspooled in a classic archetype of teenage angst: black clothes, thrash metal, the musty odor of marijuana trailing him from his room.
When the family moved to the trailer park outside Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, a flyspeck of a town known for farming and meth, in 2010, things got worse. One night the following summer, Bruce came home rolling on ecstasy and shoved his mom. A few days later, he ran away from home; his mom and stepdad didn't hear from him again for two weeks. "I was worried he was going to end up in jail, or even end up dead," Carla Moffat says. "If he ran away one more time I didn't think I'd ever see him again. People don't understand how few options parents have in these situations."
When Moffat heard about Tierra Blanca from a friend, she researched it online and found glowing testimonials from graduates. Even though she was already working 12-hour shifts, and paying for the program would require additional overtime, she felt like it was worth it. On the phone, Chandler explained how the program worked: she wouldn't hear from Bruce for several months and she couldn't visit without permission. "He told me, ‘You're the parents, but we're his family now.' I asked him how we would reintegrate Bruce back into our family and he said, ‘You don't. Because the problems that exist in the family will always exist in the family.' That should have been a red flag right there."
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Despite the violent episode in the Sacramento Mountains, Bruce began to adjust to the strict regimen at Tierra Blanca. By the fall of 2012, just months after the wallet incident, he earned certain privileges for good behavior. In the bunkhouse at Tierra Blanca headquarters, he now ate cornbread, beef stew and the occasional steak that Chandler's daughters cooked. His grades began to improve under Miss Allie too. All signs to Chandler that Bruce was on the path to "real change."
ReplyDelete"He was on my A team," Chandler says. "If there was a job to do that had to be done right, he was one of the first kids I'd pick. And that was a real cool thing to see, just knowing some of the things he was dealing with when he came in, some of the things going on in his life."
When Bruce's mom and stepdad visited him, in the winter of 2013, he seemed like a different person. He had gone in with big gauges in his ears, but now he wore a black cowboy hat everywhere. Bruce also started attending a Baptist church in nearby Hatch with some of the other boys, often lingering in the chapel to talk with the youth leaders who played guitar. Eventually he asked one to baptize him. "The program seemed to be working," Carla Moffat says. "He looked happy. He was polite. He was calm. He had direction."
In the meantime, pressure to regulate the ranch was mounting at the governor's office. In December of 2012, CYFD got a 27-page memo from the father of a boy who had gone to the ranch, alleging potential abuse and neglect. He included statements from boys who had contemplated suicide and at times felt like they were starving, along with details of an incident in which a staffer had allegedly beaten a 15 year old with a night stick for not completing exercises.
Six months later, Pegasus Legal Services for Children sent a letter to the governor and the then-director of CYFD, alerting them that former participants had told police that "children are routinely hit, shackled, and handcuffed, deprived of food…and threatened by staff at Tierra Blanca Ranch if they make disclosures about abuse." Pegasus urged an investigation.
And then tragedy struck. On the night of Sept. 22, 2013, Bruce and a group of boys were coming back from Chandler's parents' house after watching a football game when the boy driving, a recent Tierra Blanca graduate, took a curve on a dirt road too fast and rolled the truck. Because there weren't enough seats in the cab, Bruce had volunteered to sit in the bed of the pick up, and the crash ejected him. The remote location of the ranch and the spotty cell coverage delayed Bruce's arrival at the hospital, in part because calls kept dropping. Not long after being airlifted to a Level 1 trauma center in El Paso, Bruce died of massive internal bleeding.
The crash was the last straw for CYFD and the governor's office. Less than three weeks later, state police raided the ranch, search warrant in hand, only to find no one there. State officials, believing Chandler had been tipped off and fled with the boys, issued an AMBER Alert. Chandler maintained that they were on a camping trip, and arranged to deliver 11 of the 13 teens to their parents (the other two were 18 and decided to return to the ranch with Chandler). A week later, Chandler and his wife, Colette, appeared on theToday show with Matt Lauer. "People don't understand...the type of kids we end up dealing with," Chandler told Lauer. "We care about kids. We want the kids to be safe. We want them to be successful."
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When I visited Chandler this spring, he carried himself like a man under siege. He called the raid and what followed "the burn down," and seemed convinced the governor of New Mexico, Susana Martinez, had a personal vendetta against him. (The governor's office declined to comment.) He said his critics fail to recognize that he deals with kids who have criminal records and were violent with him and his staff. "You're only getting a part of the story," Chandler told me. "Some of the things these kids are saying, they're just flat out not true. You have to remember some of these kids are master manipulators, and a lot of them have some big credibility issues."
ReplyDeleteChandler speaks with a slight drawl, which depending on his mood can come across as friendly or slightly intimidating. When we stopped at a local Mexican restaurant for lunch, nearly everyone there seemed to consider him a close friend. Many Tierra Blanca graduates speak of him fondly; some consider him a mentor or surrogate father and still keep in touch, sending wedding invitations and birth announcements.
Growing up in Central Texas, Chandler's parents had taken in teens from "broken homes" and he'd seen the difference it made in the kids' lives. After his dad allowed a wilderness program to operate on portions of his ranch in the late 90s, Chandler decided he could do it better, and cobbled together a "common sense" approach to reforming troubled teens. When I asked if a particular methodology governed the ranch, Chandler seemed amused. "People keep looking for a formula for our success, but it doesn't work like that," he said. "It's not something that's easy to replicate."
Chandler says he doesn't practice what he calls the "medical model" of treatment. And while he's contracted with therapists in the past, he's never hired one on staff. "Our philosophy is you can replace the things drugs are trying to do with just work, exercise, get the endorphins going, you know, try and teach," he says. "We've become such a pill society, we mask our emotions. We don't just learn how to resolve a conflict, they have to have something else to control their emotions up and down."
Fiercely individualistic, Chandler subscribes to a sort of libertarian idealism common in the West. Spend a few minutes with him and he's sure to bring up parental rights, which is his way of saying that the government has little to no business telling parents how to raise their kids. "People don't understand what we do," Chandler says. "We were trying to make productive citizens out of a group nobody cared about, and now we're getting burned at the stake. My family has been through so many lies, distortions and mischaracterizations."
During my visit, we drove out to Camp Lockwood with his wife and two of his daughters (all of them help on the ranch), and Chandler introduced me to several program graduates still there. All of them disputed the allegations made in the lawsuits: namely, that staff had encouraged boys to beat Bruce. "This is all based on hysteria," a staffer and former camper named Tim Roberson told me. "If they had any evidence, why hasn't a single charge been filed against anybody? I've known the Chandler family for about six years and they are the most amazing family I've ever met. They've tried to help every person that's come through here, even those who are now trying to hurt them."
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That evening as we drove back towards town, I asked Chandler about some of the most troubling allegations against him. He didn't deny subjecting kids to intense exercise or cuffing them. And when I asked if a former staffer had used a night stick to punish a boy, Chandler said, "It didn't happen like that." But he strongly rejects allegations that he encouraged his kids to beat each other. Those who did, he said, were immediately disciplined.
ReplyDeleteWe drove in silence for a few moments, and then his wife spoke up from the back seat of the truck. "Let's just say this," she said of the incident. "Do you remember when you were a kid in the school yard and there was some kid out there who just drove everybody crazy and a few of the boys got together and just gave him a little dose of medicine?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Things like that happen sometimes," she said.
As for Bruce, most of what happened was "out of earshot" and the exercises he imposed as discipline during that period were roughly similar to "what guys do in the military," he said. But he did acknowledge that sometimes "kids took matters into their own hands." (In a subsequent interview he denied ever being aware of other kids beating Bruce.)
"If we had really done something wrong," Chandler said. "Would we really be sitting here two years later without a single charge filed against me or any of my staff?"
Chandler's supporters, and there are many, are intensely loyal (after the raid, he says, a petition he prepared got over a 1,000 signatures). A half dozen graduates Chandler put me in touch with said the program literally saved their lives. One of them, Pecos Cook, today a 28-year-old oil field worker in North Dakota with a wife and two kids, described similar experiences to those now suing Chandler: grueling physical exercise, being so hungry he ate grub worms and staffers who enforced strict rules. And yet, Cook says, those very tactics made the program work. "At times that place was hell," Cook says. "But looking back on it, I needed it. There are certain types of kids where that's the only thing that's going to work."
Other program graduates, now in adulthood, told me the same thing: that they went in adrift, with no work ethic or sense of purpose, and left with a sense they could do just about anything. "If somebody you love has a terminal illness, you're going to do whatever it takes to get them treated, and that's how I see the ranch," says Matt Griffoul, who sent two of his kids to Tierra Blanca. "These parents who are complaining now, they knew exactly what they were getting into. So I think some of the blame has got to fall on them."
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Last year, Chandler reached a civil settlement with the state, allowing limited oversight for one year. But he still faces a lawsuit from parents who say their children were abused at the camp. A criminal investigation sparked by the raid is still under review by the state attorney general's office. Their findings could determine the fate of the program. For now, however, Tierra Blanca is open for business.
ReplyDeleteA week after Bruce died, his family and friends gathered for a memorial service at the church were he had been baptized. Many of those in attendance came from Tierra Blanca, including Scott Chandler. Afterwards, the boys from the ranch approached Carla and Jim Moffat and presented them a baseball they had all signed, a small way to memorialize the good times they'd had playing games on the ranch. When Carla realized the boy who was driving the truck during the accident hadn't signed the ball, she found him in the crowd and asked him to sign it.
"I hold no malice for these kids," Carla says. "I see it as Animal Farm, orLord of the Flies. It was that kind of environment where you had kids turned against kid. It wasn't their fault."
The long-term answer, Szalavitz and other advocates say, is federal legislation that would put the industry under a uniform standard. Former California congressman George Miller twice sponsored bills that would do just that, banning programs from withholding food, water and medical care "under the guise of discipline or therapy," and reserving the use of handcuffs, shackles and other physical restraints for emergencies. The bill also would have created a national hotline for kids to report abuse, but it was never signed into law. A similar piece of bipartisan legislation, introduced in July, is currently in committee.
Earlier this year, I drove out to Truth or Consequences to meet with Bruce's mom, Carla. We sat on the porch of their doublewide, and she showed me the last of Bruce's possessions: the black cowboy hat he wore everywhere, the blue T-shirt he'd earned once he attained privileged status and the Bible he had marked up after his baptism.
Carla says the abuses Bruce suffered at the camp came out slowly, in emails and phone calls from different boys. Her husband Jim has asked her not to read some of the details. And while the incident that claimed her son's life was an accident, Carla says it's a direct reflection on the way Chandler runs the ranch, and his refusal to comply with safety guidelines suggested by the state years earlier. "It's a wonder no one has died out there before," Bruce's stepdad, Jim Moffat said. "There are kids who attempted suicide, kids who ran away in the desert, and it's in the middle of nowhere, kids who felt like they were starving to death. That place was an accident waiting to happen."
Carla showed me the truck Bruce used to drive, and the horse Chandler had promised to give Bruce upon graduation. Instead, he gave her to the Moffat family, and Jim now makes a point of riding her as often as he can. "There's nothing I can do to bring him back, and honestly, there are days I don't know if I can go on," Carla said. "But if it can result in some kind of lasting change, if it saves another kid's life, maybe some good can come from all of this."
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/life-and-death-in-a-troubled-teen-boot-camp-20151112
NOTE - THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE PROVIDES FURTHER INFORMATION ON "NEW BEGINNINGS GIRLS ACADEMY" DISCUSSED IN THE ARTICLE ABOVE POSTED BY Perry Bulwer November 2012 at 16:02 "Religious exemption at some Florida children's homes shields prying eyes" By Alexandra Zayas, Tampa Bay Times Staff Writer October 28, 2012
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The terrifying entry conditions for abusive Christian reform homes
June 10, 2016 by Jonny Scaramanga, Leaving Fundamentalism
If you’ve read this blog, you’ll be aware of abuses at Christian ‘troubled teen’ reform homes. These places call themselves educational facilities but are more like prison camps. Some are surrounded by barbed wire. -
Despite all the evidence that has come forward, despite the dozens of independent testimonies from former detainees, all of which describe similar situations and similar abuses, and despite successful prosecutions for abuse in some of these homes, there are still people who accuse the survivors of lying or exaggerating. So I’ll tell you what: just for today, let’s not listen to the survivors. Let’s listen to the homes themselves. Or rather, one home in particular: New Beginnings Girls Academy.
Let’s look at the “Enrollment Agreement” from New Beginnings Girls Academy (NBGA) that the activist network HEAL posted online. This, remember, is what parents agree to on sending their children to the home. This is the stuff that is not even contested.
The document is undated, but the address on it is La Russell, Missouri. According to the survivor website, NBGA moved to La Russell in 2007, so this document is less than ten years old. A 2013 Change.org petition appealing to the state of Missouri to stop abuse at NBGA also lists the location as La Russell. So this document is probably from between 2007 and 2013.
What do we find?
Extreme censorship
“The staff has complete discretion in determining the appropriateness of all mail.”
NBGA had more postal censorship than anywhere this side of Stalin’s Russia. The “Mail Policy” states that all incoming and all outgoing mail will be censored by NBGA staff: “The staff has complete discretion in determining the appropriateness of all mail.” The only correspondence allowed is with family members. Photographs will be censored if the people in them do not meet the NBGA dress code. References to and photographs of old boyfriends will be censored.
No newspaper articles, clippings, Internet or e-mail clippings, church bulletins or school newsletters are allowed. Any letters containing references to the student’s homecoming, i.e., “When you get home…” will not be permitted and will be returned.
The “Telephone Policy” is just as restrictive. Residents of the home cannot make any outgoing phone calls.
The only people who may call them are parents. These phone calls are restricted to 15 minutes in length, and if the child expresses negativity about NBGA, parents are instructed to end the conversation.
Visits from parents are not allowed at all in the first six months, and then only at six-monthly intervals. Students are required to spend their first Christmas after enrollment at NBGA. Then there’s the list of prohibited items:
“The following items WILL NOT be allowed at New Beginnings:
Books
Videos
Candy
Magazines/catalogues
Posters/wall hangings/calendars
Video or board games
Baggy style clothing
Gangster, grunge, camouflage or faddish clothes
Newspaper articles, clippings, Internet or e-mail clippings, church bulletins/newsletters
Anything containing Scriptural references from any source other than the King James Bible
NO ALL BLACK CLOTHING ALLOWED”
These policies are a clear violation of the detainees’ human rights. The policies mean that if detainees were being abused, it would be almost impossible for them to tell anyone about it. US felons on death row are afforded more freedom of speech and communication than these teenage girls. It is a policy characteristic of a totalitarian regime, not an educational institution.
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Cruel and unusual punishment
ReplyDeleteThe “Discipline Policy” begins with a section lifted almost word-for-word from page 115 of the Accelerated Christian Education Procedures Manual (this being the curriculum used at NBGA):
Discipline is what is done FOR a child, not what is done TO your child. It is a preventative action.
Training a student for leadership requires consistency in love and discipline. By nature, young people rebel against controls that suppress their carnal desires. Unchecked by discipline, these desires will lead to a life of heartache and negative consequences. With discipline, young people experience productive achievement.
From there, it goes on to get even more extreme than the (already abusive) recommendations of past editions of the ACE manual. NBGA survivors have described being forced to do hard physical labour as punishment, and also being put on ‘Redshirt’: “a punishment which requires the detained girl to stand all day with the tip of her nose on a wall with her hands at her sides or behind her back and her feet flat on the floor”. It turns out parents were agreeing to punishments like this in advance:
Various forms of physical training which include but are not limited to the following: jumping jacks, push-ups, sit-ups, squats, hops, leg lifts, crawls, running, carrying cinder blocks, or all of the above.
Standing with your child nose touching the end of your child bed for a time period of 1 hour with a 10-minute sit-down break each hour. This is excluding any regularly scheduled activities and school time.
An altered menu of bland foods will be issued at the discretion of the New Beginnings staff in conjunction with the above referenced discipline measures.
And this is before we get onto the beatings. According to the enrollment form, students may be paddled for any of the following:
physical fights, talk of running away, running away, or any attempts thereof, direct disobedience to be defined as a student’s refusal to follow a directive given by any adult staff member of New Beginnings; defiant and disrespectful attitude and actions as determined by New Beginnings staff; and the third offense for cheating in school.
The reason I’ve put some text in bold is that this is so vague as to be a licence for beating over almost anything. The chances of justice being done with such a code are minimal.
NBGA survivors have described being hit over and over again. The enrollment agreement says the number of ‘swats’ will be limited to five (5), but there’s a caveat: the swats must be “correctly received”.
Incorrectly received swats do not count towards the five-hit limit:
A maximum of five (5) consecutive correctly received swats upon the buttocks may be administered. Correctly received swats are those in which the student exhibits a submissive attitude, as determined by the administrator of the corporal discipline. This submissive attitude must be exhibited throughout the discipline session. A maximum of fifteen (15) swats of any kind, whether correctly received or incorrectly received, may be administered in a twenty-four hour period.
That is far beyond the limit of what even the most conservative paedatricians consider acceptable. The beatings are administered with a “flat paddle”, which the American Academy of Paediatrics is clear should never be used. And these girls were teenagers, and even spanking advocates acknowledge that spanking teenagers is counterproductive. This is abuse. In fact, in 1996 the AAP convened a conference on spanking.
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In their consensus statements every attendee agreed that spanking “older children and adolescents is not effective and is associated with increased risk for dysfunction and aggression later in life.” They also unanimously stated that corporal punishment should never be used in school:
ReplyDeleteData indicate that corporal punishment within the schools is not an effective technique for producing a sustained, desired behavioral change and is associated with the potential for harm including physical injury, psychological trauma, and inhibition of school participation.
(“Consensus Statements”, Paediatrics, vol. 98 issue 4, p. 853)
Silencing tactics
Not content with abusing children and preventing them from telling anyone about it, NBGA made parents promise not to discuss conflicts with NBGA:
At no time should the parent(s)/guardian(s) discuss any differences or conflicts that they might have with New Beginnings with their child.
Then they required parents to sign waivers absolving the school of responsibility for harm to children, and requires them to promise not to sue the school. The statement of faith, to which parents agree, states:
We believe that Christians are prohibited from bringing civil lawsuits against other Christians or the church to resolve personal disputes. We believe the church possesses all the resources necessary to resolve personal disputes between members.
The accompanying release form states:
I/we agree that I/we will hold harmless and not bring suit against New Beginnings or its agents or employees for any injury, harm or other dangers, whether caused by its agents, employees, or by third parties. Nor will any action be brought for the acts of the child named.
So parents agree to allow their children to be abused, and then they promise not to sue over the resulting harm.
So we can stop debating whether New Beginnings Girls Academy was abusive now. Even if it only stuck to what parents were told (and survivors say it didn’t), their official policies were brutal and unethical.
This is not a secret
The world of ‘troubled teen’ homes is vast, and once you start researching it, profoundly distressing. One of the organisations devoted to opposing them, SIA (Survivors of Institutional Abuse) has a video of a two-hour Congressional hearing on the subject as well as a link to a US Department of State document about ‘behavior modification facilities’. People in power know about this, and still nothing has been done.
There are parallels here with the horrendous abuses in Canada’s residential schools for aboriginal children in the 20th century. There the abuses have only been acknowledged, and steps taken to compensate the detainees, now that all the schools have closed. There are still troubled teen homes operating in the United States, sometimes with the knowledge and assistance of the state. We could put this right today. I can think of nothing more to do except continue to raise awareness.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/leavingfundamentalism/2016/06/10/the-terrifying-entry-conditions-for-abusive-christian-reform-homes/
Rapes, Daily Beatings and No Escape: Christian School Was Hell For These Boys
ReplyDeleteBlue Creek Academy was an abusive hell on earth, former students say—and the principal who ran it is now heading up a new Bible school in another state.
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by Brandy Zadrozny, Daily Beast June 11, 2016
[*Names of children and parents have been omitted or changed to protect child victims of sexual abuse.]
Jacob* dressed himself in a camouflage jacket and a matching beanie on the summer morning he ran away into the West Virginia hills. At 14 years old, he was one of the youngest, smallest, and longest-attending students at Blue Creek Academy, a religious reform school for boys from which he was desperate to escape.
Blue Creek Academy was made up of an old schoolhouse and several cabins situated on a remote campground in central West Virginia. A mission of the nearby Independent Fundamental Baptist church, pastor James Waldeck advertised Blue Creek as an “alternative to today's degenerate, secular culture and education methods,” and took in boys who had been in trouble at home—both locally and from as far away as Texas—to be reformed. Its principal, 35-year-old JR Thompson, had reopened the church’s campgrounds in 2010, renamed it Blue Creek
Academy, and marketed the boarding school, which he ran with his wife, Hannah, as a godly answer for “at-risk” teens with emotional and behavioral disabilities and Christian parents with $1,000 a month to spend on their salvation.
“We can’t wait to watch God move as he helps us snatch troubled souls out of Satan’s hand,” Thompson wrote on the school’s now-defunct website.
What the boys found when they got to Blue Creek Academy was something else entirely—an all-too-common story for victims of Lester Roloff-inspired homes, which thrive as part of the unregulated religious teen reform industry.
Along with a strict Bible-based curriculum, boys at Blue Creek Academy were allegedly subject to isolation, physical beatings and mistreatment, and at least two students reported sexual abuse by another student, according to court documents from a pending civil case brought against the school by one boy’s guardian; complaints and reports from West Virginia's Department of Health and Human Resources obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by The Daily Beast; and interviews—with a lawyer representing three Blue Creek Academy students, three other former students, one parent, and the Kanawha County Sheriff's Office.
Once at Blue Creek, the boys were cut off completely from the outside world, former students and their representatives claim. Bunkered in dilapidated quarters that were infested with rats and mice, the boys weren’t permitted to speak in public unless it was to sing hymns for local churches and the elderly. They weren’t taken to the doctor, and their calls home were monitored to intercept any unhappy tidings. When the boys weren’t going to church, doing manual labor, ormemorizing Bible verses, they were in a kind of school—seated in desks facing the wall, completing Bible-based academic workbooks for hours.
Staff at Blue Creek Academy educated children using the Accelerated Christian Education (A.C.E.) curriculum, from a homeschooling supply company whose workbooks promote the Bible as a literal history book and stress Creationism as science. (At one time the company even usedthe Loch Ness Monster to “disprove” Darwin’s theory of evolution.)Following A.C.E. guidelines, desks faced the wall, and were usually surrounded by dividers to block out any distractions.
“They basically handed you a book and said, ‘Learn,’” one former student, who asked not to be named, told The Daily Beast.
In lieu of teachers, ACE only requires “facilitators” to check students work and record grades, but even that was neglected at Blue Creek, according to several students who told The Daily Beast their time at Thompson’s school had to be made up once they returned to public school because none of their work “counted.”
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Even the directors adopted son 19-year-old Justin Thompson, who lived at Blue Creek starting in 2010, told The Daily Beast over Facebook chat, “I passed high school but [JR Thompson] never kept a lot on record, so I have no proof.”
ReplyDeleteBut the educational neglect was nothing compared to the punishments given by Thompson, former students allege.
Boys who acted out, or refused to obey, might have their heads shavedlike Jacob. Attempts to run away were allegedly penalized with food: an all-bean or asparagus diet or being made to chug water then denied use of the bathroom. They were all allegedly beaten—with bare hands, paddles, and boards. Jacob—whose new guardian is now suing Thompson and Waldeck for the maltreatment the boy allegedly endured there— said he was thrown into a wall when he wouldn’t confess to breaking a bench.
“Mr. Thompson was very aggressive when it came to paddlings,” said one former student, reached through Facebook, who says he was sent to Blue Creek Academy for drinking and smoking pot. The boy, who asked not to be named because of his remaining ties to Blue Creek staff, said that he was hit nearly every day with Thompson's bare hands or a two-inch thick wood plank with holes they called “The Hillbilly Hot Seat” for lying, or cursing, even singing a secular song in the shower.
“It was hell,” he said. “They forced unwanted religion on us, made us do labor that we hated, and made us run up and down the driveway. They used a board to hit us if we didn't do what we were asked,” he said.
At least two of the boys there were the victims of sexual abuse. As detailed on an intake form from the division of Child Protective Services, obtained by a FOIA request from The Daily Beast, a 17-year-old boy—who was sent to Blue Creek from another teen reform school in Wisconsin where he had been originally placed and subsequently booted for molesting boys—was sexually abusing two of the younger students in 2012. Thompson—whom two former Blue Creek familiesfault with failing to supervise a known abuser—did report the older boy to police. When questioned, the older boy admitted to Thompson and police that he had raped one boy and molested another; he was arrested and sent to a juvenile detention center, where he was charged with four counts of 3rd degree sexual assault and three counts of 1st degree sexual abuse.
A separate allegation of sexual assault by a different boy at Blue Creek Academy is still currently under investigation, according to Sgt. Brian Humphreys, the public information officer for the Kanawha Sheriff's Office.
Blue Creek administrators had their own personal history with CPS: one had been investigated for the alleged sexual abuse of his biological children, while another had been reported for unspecified allegations against his adopted son. Both investigations were closed as “incomplete.”
On the intake form, the CPS investigator noted there was not enough supervision at the school and took issue with the policy of corporal punishment, but neither concern was enough to remove the children. Besides, where would they go? “The parents of all the boys do not seem interested in coming to get any of them,” the worker wrote.
But Jacob wanted out. So he waited until the morning of June, 10, 2014 when Thompson would be off campus. As the other boys gathered for prayers and school, Jacob went back to his cabin, telling them he had forgotten to brush his teeth. Then he made a run for it.
When the staff at BCA realized Jacob had run, they called Thompson back to look for him. After hours of fruitless searching, Thompson called local law enforcement, who helped him search the surrounding woods—but Jacob was gone.
The next evening, a man found Jacob begging for change at a neighboring county supermarket 10 miles from Blue Creek and called Clay County Child Protective Services. Jacob smelled foul and the soles of his shoes had been worn bare from running. He was hungry, dirty, and scared, according to the CPS intake form.
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Jacob begged the sheriff not to send him back.
ReplyDeleteKanawha County Child Protective Services went out to investigate Jacob’s abuse allegations and interview the boys at Blue Creek. When they got past Thompson, who initially refused to let them in the door, they found seven boys who all disclosed allegations of abuse and neglectby Thompson. The caseworker wrote that, in her interviews, the children told her Thompson had left marks from beatings and his poor supervision allowed for the molestation of several children; guns, drugs, and alcohol were also being brought on campgrounds. The official finding was maltreatment.
“There was a lack of oversight,” said Troy Giatras, the attorney litigating a case for Jacob’s guardian against Thompson, Waldeck, and Blue Creek Academy. “The corporal punishment, the manual labor, the isolation, and the allegations of abuse that were never investigated? Other kids have reached out to us, so I know this isn’t an isolated incident.”
“You have a place that is operating without a good charter and not well supervised by the Department of Health and Human Resources, and parents with troubled kids who are expecting a religious school to help.”
No one from Blue Creek chose to comment for this story. Calls to Wadeck and Bible Baptist Church, and calls and emails sent to JR Thompson, his wife Hannah, and two other couples who worked at the camp during the time of alleged abuse were also not returned. In answers to a number of pending lawsuits, however, including one on behalf of Jacob, Waldeck and Thompson deny all charges of neglect or mistreatment of the boys at Blue Creek Academy.
After her interviews, with the help of the Kanawha County Sheriff, the Child Protective Services caseworker brought the kids to a pizza parlor while they organized a return to their homes.
While the children could be removed—because Blue Creek was unlicensed as a residential home—the Department of Children and Families had no power to shut the boarding school down. Like thousands of other religious private schools around the country—many of which become havens for abuse—Blue Creek Academy operated unlicensed, unregulated, and wholly unmonitored by the state. The only avenue for closure rested with the Board of Education, an entity that until then, had also had minimal interaction with the school.
As in many other states, religious private schools in West Virginia aren’t held to the same standards as their nonreligious counterparts. Thoughthe ways in which they are exempt varies from state to state, for many schools that operate with a religious mission—80 percent of private schools nationwide—accreditation or licensing, the hiring of certified teachers or the approval of curriculum, or even simply notifying the state as to its existence is completely voluntary.
“It’s a little scary when you think about it,” Betty Jordan, executive assistant to West Virginia’s Education Superintendent told The Daily Beast, explaining Blue Creek’s “Exemption K status,” a category that simply requires any religious school to send a letter to the state of its intent to operate and file annual test scores.
“There is very very limited oversight. Actually there is no oversight. So basically if I wanted to tomorrow, I could write a letter to the state saying I want to open a school and I could open a school.”
There are 130 such schools in West Virginia. Jordan said the exemptions are “hardly ever” revoked.
State superintendent Michael Martirano did initiate Blue Creek’s closure, by revoking Blue Creek’s exemption status shortly after the children were removed. And in his September 2014 revocation letter, Martirano ostensibly put an end to any ideas of Blue Creek reopening. He wrote: “Due to the egregious nature of the non-compliance, children's health, safety and welfare, any future attempts by the school to seek reinstatement of the exemption status will be denied by this office.”
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Notably the superintendent had shuttered another school 75 miles south of Blue Creek Academy the month before, after 26 years of operation. Martirano forced Miracle Meadows, a Seventh Day Adventist boarding school for “at risk” boys and girls from 6 to 17 years old, to close after a DHHR investigation found that school officials had failed to report an instance of sexual abuse of one student by another and that a school janitor had restrained students in handcuffs until their wrists bled and choked others who misbehaved.
ReplyDeleteThe Department of Health and Human Resources had received 13 formal complaints about the school since 2009, four of which alleged sexual misconduct, according to an Associated Press report on records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Miracle Meadows’ former director Susan Gayle Clark, 69, pled guilty this year to three misdemeanors counts of child neglect creating a substantial risk of injury, failure to report by a mandated reporter, and obstructing a law enforcement officer. She was sentenced to six months and 30 days in prison.
Abuse at religious schools like Blue Creek Academy and Miracle Meadows is underreported and frighteningly prevalent, according to Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and author of God vs the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty.
“These small institutions can be very dangerous to kids because they are isolated and fly under the radar,” Hamilton told The Daily Beast. Because some fundamentalist parents agree with physical abuse as discipline and sexual abuse is often dealt with internally or covered up, Hamilton said, it can be “easy for these groups to get away with it for quite a while, while endangering a series of children.”
“This is a common problem, which calls for a National Commission on child sex abuse and for states to work more cooperatively on tracking entities that permit and foment child sex abuse and neglect.”
Indeed, a lack of cooperation by states is the very thing that allows abusive Christian teen reform homes closed by authorities in one state to be reopened in another, sometimes using the same name, and frequently run by the same operators.
After Olin King pled “no contest” to charges in South Carolina stemming from the isolation, imprisonment, and beatings of children in his care at The New Bethany Baptist School for Boys in 1984, he packed up and moved, opening the aptly-named Second Chance Ranch in Danbury, North Carolina. A state bill that would have licensed such boarding schools proposed in response to New Bethany’s closing was protested by local pastors who called it an “intrusion into freedom of the church’s rights.” Today South Carolina is one of the states that exempts religious schools from licensing rules that govern other residential youth homes.
In 2009, a Lester Roloff disciple, Pastor Jack Patterson, was forced to close his tough-love boarding school, Reclamation Ranch in Alabama, after allegations of torture and a police raid that turned up guns and shackles. As part of a plea deal, Patterson traded in a felony aggravated child abuse for a verbal harassment misdemeanor and a $500 fine. Though he did close Reclamation Ranch, Patterson opened a home for adult men in its place, maintained his school for girls nearby, and told aMother Jones reporter in 2011, he planned to open more homes in Ohio, Florida, and Michigan.
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In 2012 Alexandra Zayas a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her reporting on religious boarding schools in the state, wrote that Florida preacher Clayton "Buddy" Maynard was housing five children when, just two years earlier his isolated Heritage Boys Academy had been closed after a state investigation found that boys had been abused there, including one boy who was whipped 1,330 times. “None of the state agencies that oversee such facilities were aware the church was caring for children,” Zayas wrote.
ReplyDeleteAnd Florida pastor Russ Cookston’s Lighthouse ministries school was closed in 2013 after being plagued with allegations of physical and sexual abuse and solitary confinement. According to his Facebook and LinkedIn pages, though, one month after he closed up his shop in the small town of Jay, he was working as an associate pastor at a Master’s Ranch, a home for troubled boys in Missouri, a state with notoriously lax child welfare laws.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Master’s Ranch administrator David Bosley confirmed Cookston’s position as a senior staff member, praising him as “almost too gentle for this job,” “extremely kind,” and “extremely patient.”
“I do know when you get in this business—and I've been working with kids for almost 30 years—that you will always be accused of abuse by someone,” Bosley said. “I firmly believe every student should be heard and every allegation thoroughly investigated for the safety of all kids, but you're always going to have one or two disgruntled kids or parents who are trying to find a way out of the program or who just hate you for trying to help him.”
The Government Accountability Office found thousands of allegations of abuse at teen reform homes and camps from 1990 to 2007, some of which involved the death of a young person. The 2007 report was unable to provide a specific number however, as “it could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, or other entity that collects comprehensive nationwide data.” In fact, the only tracking of these types of homes and the abuse that often occurs in them, comes from bloggers and advocacy groups.
Angela Smith, 42, runs HEAL, one of the most prominent organizations working to expose and ultimately close abusive youth facilities. Blue Creek Academy is one of some 500 past and present residential programs in the U.S. that currently make up HEAL’s watch-list of fraudulent and abusive programs in the U.S.
“Abuse is rampant because many of these facilities operate with little or no oversight and accountability,” Smith said. Even in the states with licensing boards like Montana and Utah, she said, ”the people who own and operate these youth programs are the ones doing the oversight.”
“The fox is watching the hen-house so to speak.”
Nobody seems to be watching JR Thompson.
By the time the Department of Education mailed the revocation letter to Blue Creek Academy, principal Thompson had moved to Montana, to a three-bedroom single family house on 11 acres in De Borgia, a six-mile-wide town near the Idaho border that, as of the last census count, was home to 78 people. Within a year, and with the blessing of his “sending church” in West Virginia, Thompson had registered his new home as Canaan’s Land Baptist Church with the Secretary of State. By August 2015, the Canaan’s Land Boy’s Ranch, a non-public secondary school, was registered as a business.
“Even though our name is Canaan’s Land Boys Ranch, we are not currently in a ranch setting,” Thompson says in a video advertisement for the $900-a-month boarding school running out of his new home. “We do plan to expand and move to a location where we will be able to acquire animals for the boys to work with.”
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There is space for eight children according the Canaans Land Boys Ranch website, and so far, two boys, ages 14 and 15, currently live, go to church with, and are educated by the Thompsons. The minors both appear in promotional videos for Canaan’s Land Boys Ranch, where they decry their past lives of “doing the wrong things,” and being disrespectful to their parents. They’re wearing bowties in Facebook photos as they sing hymns with the Thompsons for a church audience.
ReplyDeleteThe existence of Thompson’s new endeavor came as a surprise to Montana school officials.
“This is the first I’ve heard anything about Canaan's Land Boys Ranch,” said Mineral County Superintendent of Schools Mary Yarnall, who explained Thompson has yet to fill out the minimal paperwork the state requires from the operator of a boarding school.
“I will try figure out an address and send him a packet. If he doesn’t acknowledge that, I can send the sheriff to at least make him sign, but in Montana there isn’t a whole lot of consequence for not registering.”
Montana’s negligible yet unenforceable education requirements for religious private schools no doubt appeal to Thompson, who according to his pseudonymous activism on social media, seems particularly keen on separating himself and his boys’ home from any more government meddling.
Thompson blogs under the the alias Nehemiah Flynt, “a Christian author determined to expose the evils of Child Protective Services,” according to his Facebook page, which he made private following a request for comment for this story. In a YouTube video reading from his book, “Legal Discrimination,” Thompson—speaking as Flynt, with his face blurred, but with his characteristic southern drawl intact—does speak to the controversy at Blue Creek saying, “Flynt took charge of a successful Christian-based facility for at-risk youths. He soon, learned, however, that the government of the United States is so narrow-minded that they would stop at nothing to close any facility operating under moral or religious principles differing from their own devilish agendas. ”
“One allegation from a non-credible source changed everything," he says in the video.
Now, attorney Troy Giatras says he’s representing at least three former students and their parents, who are hoping someone at Thompson’s former boarding school will have to answer for what went on there.
Since being reunited with her son after the raid at Blue Creek, one of Giatras’ clients, Carolyn*, 32, from Evansville, Indiana, has written and called every local, state, and federal law enforcement office and lawmaker that she knows, looking for someone who will hold the operators of Blue Creek Academy accountable for the abuse she says her son withstood there for 17 months, and to make sure it doesn’t happen to other children.
“They dodged my calls,” she said. “They told me that me and my son should be lucky, that I got him back and they don’t have time to do anything else, that their work is for active cases.”
As for her son’s well-being, she said, “It’s a process. The damage is overwhelming. He’s been in counseling ever since he left.”
Meanwhile, Thompson is being careful with his new school. The website for Canaan's Land Boys Ranch used to have his and his wife’s names on it, but they’ve since been scrubbed clean and a warning for prospective parents has been added: “Our Ranch Isn't For Everyone!” it says, along with the caveat that boys with a history of “sexual acting out (molestations, rapes, etc)” and “students who come from families who would not be supportive of the day to day operations of Canaan's Land Boys Ranch” will not be admitted.
read the numerous links embedded in this article at:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/12/rapes-daily-beatings-and-no-escape-christian-school-was-hell-for-these-boys.html
Girls tell of terror and abuse at Missouri Christian boarding school under investigation
ReplyDeleteBY JUDY L. THOMAS AND LAURA BAUER, KANSAS CITY STAR, SEPTEMBER 06, 2020
Their daughter was nearly 2,000 miles away in a Christian boarding school in southwest Missouri and Brian and Michelle Stoddard knew they needed to get her out.
The couple had been reading social media posts from women who had once been at Circle of Hope. And they had watched a video taken in March that appeared to capture Boyd Householder — who runs the school with his wife, Stephanie — endorsing the use of violence between the girls.
“We were going to bed one night, and just both of us, in our hearts we knew,” said Michelle Stoddard, of the Seattle area. “God was like, ‘Get up and start driving.’ And we did. We dumped everything in our refrigerator into a cooler and drove 32 hours straight.”
That was in late July. About two weeks later, after their 17-year-old daughter Emily told a Cedar County Sheriff’s deputy stories from inside Circle of Hope, authorities removed 25 girls from the reform school.
Now, emboldened by recent events and the involvement of local and state officials, more former residents are coming forward to share similar horror stories they say have played out at the school that has close ties to the independent fundamental Baptist church.
“I can confirm there is an ongoing investigation in this matter,” Ty Gaither, Cedar County prosecuting attorney, told The Star.
Gaither said his office expected to receive “investigative” reports from local law enforcement and state departments “in the near future.”
On Thursday, Gaither announced that a search warrant was executed at Circle of Hope on Tuesday “pursuant to an ongoing investigation.” A source with knowledge of the investigation said items authorities were seeking included computers and electronics, such as hidden cameras and surveillance equipment.
The boarding school has been investigated many times before. In fact, it has had four substantiated reports of abuse and neglect since it opened in 2006, The Star has learned.
But because faith-based Circle of Hope Girls’ Ranch is exempt from state licensure, the Missouri Department of Social Services “does not have authority” over the facility’s operations, said Rebecca Woelfel, an agency spokeswoman.
In response to questions from The Star, Woelfel said the boarding school has had one substantiated report of neglect, one substantiated report of physical abuse and neglect, and two substantiated reports of sexual abuse recorded in the state’s central registry. She did not say when the reports were made or whom the allegations were against.
The Star talked to several young women who have lived at Circle of Hope and parents who have sent their daughters there. The former residents described in vivid detail a place that sounded more like a maximum-security prison than a Christian school for troubled girls.
They told of punishment that included withholding food and water and being forced to stand against a wall for hours on end for even the most minor infraction. They explained how they were restrained — a procedure in which they said that after shoving a girl to the floor, Boyd Householder would kneel and press his knee on the back of her neck while four other girls or staff members were required to push as hard as they could on the pressure points on her arms and legs.
Girls said they were told they would go to hell if they ever wore pants and were allowed only two changes of clothes per week. They were allotted four squares of toilet paper when using the restroom, and their rare phone calls with parents were strictly monitored and cut off if they complained or didn’t say the “right” things. School was not a priority, they said, and at times they had no teachers.
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The Householders could not be reached for comment. They did not respond to emails, and the phone at Circle of Hope went unanswered. Their attorney, Jay Kirksey, did not return phone calls requesting comment.
ReplyDeleteIn a June 15 letter to pastors of churches that have supported the Circle of Hope, Boyd Householder — whose Twitter handle is Gunslinger4God — said he wanted to explain “the attacks being made against us on Social Media.”
He blamed the problems on his daughter and mother-in-law, who he said had turned their daughter against them. Their daughter, he said, “has determined that she will force Circle of Hope Girls Ranch to shut down.”
“...We know that the devil hates what we do and he will stop at nothing to stop us,” he wrote.
In her two years at the school, Emily Stoddard said state child protection workers — referred to as “Satan’s soldiers” by Boyd Householder — came to the property multiple times. Deputies often would come along as well.
Girls were told they could speak to the child protection workers if their parents approved. If they did, though, girls said they knew that the Householders would be listening in a nearby room or grill them when it was over to learn what was said.
And if the couple didn’t like what girls said to the workers, they knew they would be punished.
By the end of July, Emily’s parents arrived at the school — which they paid $1,500 a month for her to attend — to take her home. They wanted to show up unannounced to get their daughter, but during their drive from Washington, the Stoddards got a call from Householder, who said Emily needed to go home now.
In recent weeks, the teen had begun to understand that what was happening at the ranch wasn’t right and she had been standing up to Householder. And now she worried what her family would think. Would she be in more trouble?
“From what I would hear from Boyd and Stephanie, I thought my parents would be mad at me and they believed the Householders,” Emily said. “I was very scared, like even thinking about, ‘Are they even going to want to hug me?’ … I was like really nervous and fearful. I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
What she didn’t know is that her parents, too, were unsure. As her dad put it: “We didn’t even know if she wanted to come home.”
But she did. And not just for herself.
As Emily left the ranch that late July day, she thought of the paper tucked in the sole of her tennis shoe. It had the names of three girls’ parents and their phone numbers — their hope to get rescued, too.
LACK OF OVERSIGHT
The ranch is located less than seven miles from Humansville on Highway N in Cedar County. Next to the main buildings, a Trump 2020 flag waves alongside American flags and a nearby white warning sign:
“SMILE YOU ARE ON CAMERA,” it reads.
Below are the “Campus Rules:” No weapons, except authorized persons. No smoking. No cursing. No alcohol and no drugs.
The last rule: “You must speak English America’s language.”
The Circle of Hope Girls’ Ranch opened its doors to three girls on July 1, 2006, according to the school’s website. Since then, the reform school has expanded to more than 20 girls.
“The girls come from all walks of life, some have been in gangs, drugs, alcohol, boys, etc,” the website says. “Some have been physically violent with their families and some have been abused. Most of them have been adopted, or come from broken homes and do not know how to deal with the past.
“Circle of Hope’s goal is to help young ladies who were destroying their lives through poor choices and behaviors, change their future. ... We use the BIBLE to teach them that they are to obey their Parents and the authority over them.”
The Circle of Hope website has two sections containing testimonials from parents and former students, many praising the Householders for turning their daughters’ lives around.
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“We are so grateful to Circle of Hope and God for giving us our daughter back,” wrote parents identified only as “I” and “G.”
ReplyDelete“I honestly do not know what would have happened to her if not for this wonderful ranch and caring people! Our daughter loves and cherishes the Householders as well as we do for the love and care that they show and have shown. I recommend Circle of Hope for anyone that is at the end of their rope with their daughter.”
Circle of Hope has a strong connection to independent fundamental Baptist churches, which teach followers to separate themselves from worldly influence. Some of the former residents said their parents attended IFB churches and their pastors recommended that they send them to the Missouri school.
The school isn’t registered with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
“We don’t have purview over non-public schools,” said an education department spokeswoman. “We don’t regulate private schools in any way.”
In correspondence with parents, Boyd Householder makes it clear that he is in charge.
“I need to address a few items, the first being the reason your daughter has been placed at Circle of Hope,” he wrote in an Oct. 19, 2007, letter. “She was misbehaving and disrespectful and you felt that you had no other choice. You wanted her life to change and her behavior to change. I cannot understand why I receive so many phone calls questioning my decisions and rules, when what you did at home did not seem to work.”
He told them he realized the letter seemed harsh, “but as the contract states, I have a Non-Interference Policy.”
“It is my job to get her to change her life, if you do not allow me to do this then you are wasting my time, your time and money and your daughter’s time ... I will NOT argue with another parent about how I do things at Circle of Hope, if you do not agree with me you have a choice deal with it or take your daughter back.”
A DAUGHTER SPEAKS UP
Amanda Householder was 15 when her parents opened Circle of Hope. Before that, the family lived in nearby Stockton, where her father worked at Agape Boarding School, a Christian home for troubled boys.
She said “Brother House,” as Boyd Householder was called, required girls to wear different shirt colors to distinguish their rank, which he determined based on their behavior and attitude.
“When I was there, when you came in, you were an orange shirt, and then you worked your way up,” said Amanda, now 29.
There were few adult staff, Amanda said: “They used the older teenagers. So the teens were literally running that place.”
Each day, Amanda said, the girls performed manual labor.
“They would go out and clean the horse pens,” she said. “Rarely would we get to ride the horses or anything like that. They would just do farm work. Digging holes for posts, moving brush from one place to another.“
The school curriculum they used, Amanda said, was Christian-based and required students to work at their own pace.
“You basically teach yourself,” she said. “Getting school taken away from you was a punishment. And my dad would use that a lot.”
On Sundays and Wednesday nights, she said, everyone was required to attend Berean Baptist Church in Springfield, an independent fundamental Baptist church about an hour’s drive from the school. The church’s pastor, Jeff Ables, sits on the Circle of Hope board of directors, according to its most recent tax form.
A few months after the school opened, Amanda, still 15, ran away with two of the residents. The trio ended up in New Mexico. After learning of the girls’ location, Boyd Householder and Amanda’s grandmother flew out and brought her home. When they got back, Amanda said, “he threw me up against the wall and told me I will stay there until he says.”
“The Wall” was one of Brother House’s favorite forms of punishment, Amanda said.
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“I don’t remember a time when somebody wasn’t on the wall,” she said. “The only thing you can do is look straight ahead with your nose touching the wall or look down reading a Bible. You don’t get to sit down. You’re not allowed to eat, and you can’t use the restroom until they let you.”
ReplyDeleteAfter that, Amanda said, she looked forward to the day she turned 18 so she could leave.
She didn’t have to wait that long. Her parents kicked her out at 17, she said, after she was reported for trying to console a young girl who was crying because she was afraid her mother was going to hell for wearing pants.
Amanda went to live with her grandparents in Florida, but left after a month because her grandfather died. She soon found herself in a bad relationship and then a marriage that didn’t work out. She eventually moved to California, where she now lives with her sons, ages 5 and 8.
STORIES OF ABUSE EMERGE
In 2010, Amanda said, some of the girls from Circle of Hope started coming forward with stories of physical and emotional abuse. At first, she said, she wasn’t supportive.
“And then I had my own kids, and a lot of stuff just started coming back and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this was really wrong.’ So in 2015, I reached out to a lot of them, and we started working together.”
Amanda said her therapist called to report the concerns about Circle of Hope to the state in 2015 but never heard back. She called the child abuse and neglect hotline herself in 2016, she said, but didn’t get a return call. In 2018, she said, a woman whose sister had been sent to the Circle of Hope contacted a Missouri Highway Patrol officer.
“And he did a huge investigation,” she said.
When the investigation appeared to go nowhere, Amanda said, “We kind of got discouraged. A lot of girls backed away. They stopped talking about it, which is totally understandable.”
Then in March, Joseph Askins, a friend of Boyd and Stephanie Householder, contacted her. He’d just gone to see them, he said, and was so upset at the way Boyd Householder had treated the girls that he secretly took video on his cellphone in which Householder could be heard telling some of the girls to assault another.
“It shook me up so much,” Amanda said. She showed it to the former residents she’d been communicating with.
“I told them, ‘I can’t be silent about this. If you guys want to join me, you can join me.’ So the majority of them joined. And we have been going public since.”
Amanda posted the video on Facebook, and it got about 3,000 views. Then she put it on TikTok. It went viral, and a Cedar County Sheriff’s deputy reached out to her soon after.
Amanda said though she and the former Circle of Hope residents are excited about the current investigation, “they’ve probably had an investigation at least once every year for the past five years.”
She said the Missouri Department of Social Services investigated her parents as far back as 2007, the year after Circle of Hope opened.
“My parents told me, ‘When CPS (child protective services) comes out, you take the girls outside and you get them to work.’ Looking back, I realize it was to hide the girls from the CPS agents so the girls couldn’t talk to them.”
‘THEY TOOK MY SOUL AWAY’
Teresa Tucker was at the end of her rope.
“My daughter was 16,” said the single mom from Texas. “She was doing drugs, she was running away.”
On Dec. 4, 2014, the troubled teen bolted again. Police took her to a drug rehab center, but they wouldn’t keep her. Desperate, Teresa called her pastor. He made some calls, and a missionary in Missouri recommended Circle of Hope Girls’ Ranch. So two days later, the pastor and his wife drove Tucker’s daughter, Ashley, to southwest Missouri. It was just for a visit, they told her, to check the place out.
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Boyd and Stephanie Householder met them at the door.
ReplyDelete“They said, ‘We’re going to counsel this girl, we’re going to get her all the help that she needs, we’re going to turn her into a completely different person,’” Ashley told The Star. “And my preacher and his wife, they were all for it, because I was going down this horrible path.”
Then they left her there.
The first 30 days, Ashley said, she wasn’t allowed to speak to her mom. Nor could she participate in school. It was almost impossible to make friends, she said, because girls weren’t allowed to talk to each other.
She said punishment for things like failing to say “yes, sir” or being “disrespectful” was common and often severe. One girl, she said, was put in a neck brace because she wouldn’t stop looking from side to side.
“They put it on her really tight,” she said. “She could barely breathe. And so she wouldn’t take it off, they handcuffed her to the table for the rest of the night. She cried and cried and cried.”
The worst punishment Ashley said she received was when she was told she wasn’t properly cleaning a wall. After ordering her to do a series of pushups, then accusing her of being disobedient and rebellious for doing them “wrong,” Householder “grabbed me and threw me to the floor,” she said, “and I ended up being restrained.”
Ashley said Householder shoved his knee into the back of her head and called for several staff members to hold down her arms and legs, pushing on her pressure points while someone else twisted her ankles.
“They did it as hard as they possibly could,” she said. “I was screaming because it hurt. And Stephanie and Boyd were laughing at me.”
After an hour, Ashley said, Householder demanded more pushups, but she was so exhausted that she couldn’t get up. So they got back on top of her, she said, and restrained her again.
Later, she said, she was summoned to Householder’s office. When she walked in, she was stripped of her orange shirt and given a black shirt — signifying the lowest ranking, she said. Then Householder shouted something to his dog in German.
“And it bit my leg and hung on and would not let me go,” she said. “I was terrified that if I fell down, this dog was going to eat me alive. And I’m screaming, ‘Get it off, get it off!’
“They just sent me back to bed. They said, ‘Duchess doesn’t like rebellious girls.’”
Ashley said she showered, but the blood from the bite continued to run down her leg. When she went to bed, she asked to go to the restroom so she could use her four allotted squares of toilet paper to wipe it up.
After that day, Ashley said, “I was terrified. ... they were starving me and I saw everything they were doing to the girls and I was just like, ‘I have to play the game.’”
Teresa Tucker said she called Stephanie Householder every day to check on Ashley.
“They would tell me she didn’t want to do her school work, she was being bad, she got restrained. I said, ‘What do you mean, restrained?’ She said, ‘Oh, we just hold her down.’ She told me that they were in school every day and they were in counseling every day.”
But the second time she was allowed a phone call with Ashley, her daughter shouted that she was starving and had lost a lot of weight. Then the call was cut off. Teresa said she called back but when Ashley tried to talk, the phone went dead again.
“I called back and told them I would be down there to pick her up on Saturday,” she said. On Feb. 14, 2015, Teresa Tucker drove to Missouri with a neighbor to retrieve her daughter.
“When we walked in the door, she was crying,” she said. “She was really skinny.”
Teresa Tucker said the Householders made Ashley sign a form before leaving.
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“It says, ‘I acknowledge that I have not been physically, sexually, emotionally or mentally abused by Stephanie Householder and Boyd Householder,’” she said. “They said, ‘If you don’t sign this, you can’t leave.’ My next-door neighbor told Ashley, ‘Do what they want; let’s get the hell out of here.’”
ReplyDeleteWhen they got home, Teresa Tucker said, she called the Humansville police.
“They told me there’s nothing they could do,” she said. “They tried to put it off because I live in Texas. Then I called CPS. CPS said they went out and investigated and there was nothing they could do because nobody would talk.
“It just blew my mind. I kept being told they weren’t doing anything about it because they’re a religious entity and they fall under a different government law.”
Earlier this year, Ashley started seeing the videos and posts on social media by former Circle of Hope residents. Teresa Tucker had eventually given up calling authorities, but decided to try again. She said she got the same story from the Missouri Department of Social Services.
But a Cedar County Sheriff’s investigator listened, she said, and recently interviewed Ashley.
“He talked to me and asked me what happened, and I just started crying,” said Ashley, now 22. “You could tell he cared.”
Still, she said, it opened up old wounds.
“I’ve never got to heal from all this,” she said. “It feels good to be out of there, but nobody ever gets away from the trauma.
“I had just kind of got my life together. Now, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I have nightmares that they’re coming after me. My anxiety is back, my depression is back, my PTSD is back.”
That day she was restrained, she says, still haunts her.
“Before that, I was bad, but I had a soul,” she said. “That day, they took my soul away.”
A SECRET VIDEO
Joseph Askins couldn’t believe what he’d just been told.
The Pennsylvania trucker had known Boyd and Stephanie Householder since he was 14 and a resident of the Agape Boarding School in Stockton when “Brother House” was on staff. After getting out in 2004, Askins had stayed in touch with the couple over the years.
In February, Askins sent a message to Stephanie to see how things were going. She said Boyd was dying.
In early March, he rented a car and drove 17 hours to Missouri. But when Boyd Householder came out to greet him, Askins was surprised.
“He looked fine.”
Askins stayed at a motel in Humansville that night, then returned to the ranch the next morning. Brother House sat down in the dining room with the girls, he said, and read “write-ups” — notes written by the older girls, or “higher ups,” about the rules the younger girls had broken overnight.
“He hands out the discipline,” Askins said, “and I started to see how he really acted toward these girls.”
Householder would humiliate the girls, Askins said, by letting everyone know why they’d been sent there.
“One girl had sex for an iPhone in high school. He’d say, ‘This is why you’re here, because you did this at home.’ Or ‘Stay away from that girl, because I know you’re a lesbian.’ It was a constant belittling, a berating.”
That night, he said, the girls were goofing off in the dorm.
“He gave them all about an hour-and-a-half-long workout, watching them on the security cameras,” he said of Householder. “There was this one girl in particular that I noticed he really had it out for.”
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The other girls knew that, Askins said, so they tried to get in Householder’s good graces by being extra mean to her.
ReplyDelete“She got punched in the face by one of the girls when I was there,” he said. “This girl had been having to work out all day long. She’d been doing pushups with a jacket on and it’s like 70 degrees, so she’s sweating even more, outside in horse s---, no gloves. So she was thirsty. And they kept telling her, ‘No water, no water, no water.’ So during this dorm-wide workout, she came up to the higher-ups and said, ‘Can I please have some water before I go to bed?’ And they said no.”
In the living room that night, Askins said, some of the residents were talking about the girl, whom he estimated to be 13 or 14. And Householder gave them instructions, Askins said: “If she gets out of hand, he said, ‘Knock her out.’”
Stunned at what he was witnessing, Atkins secretly recorded the conversation on his phone.
The next morning, he said, the “higher-ups’‘ reported that after the girls had gone to bed, one gave the thirsty girl some water. Householder ordered the girl who provided the drink to do pushups. But the punishment for the other girl, Askins said, was appalling.
“He said, ‘Go find me the biggest glass that you have and fill it up with water.’ They found this big container and he made her drink it in front of everybody. This girl’s 100 pounds — not even.
“He said, ‘I’m gonna make it so you’re never thirsty again.’ She said, ‘Sir, I can’t do any more. I’m gonna puke.’ He said, ‘Good.’
“He made her drink three of those. Then he made her go outside and run around the field three times. She came back inside, and he said, ‘I just want to make sure that you’re not thirsty anymore.’ And he made her drink some more. One of the higher-ups said, 10 pushups now. When she was doing the pushups, she threw up on the floor. And then he took her by the back of the head and rubbed her face in it like a dog.
“She was crying the whole time. She was basically saying, ‘I can’t breathe. My stomach’s too full.’”
A couple of hours later when everyone was outside doing chores, Askins said, he saw Householder grab the girl’s jaw.
“And he says, ‘Look at me in the eyes.’ And he slapped her across the face and he said, ‘You will call me sir. Do you understand me?’ It wasn’t just a love tap. It was a clunk. Then he made her get down in pushup position, and she was just bawling.”
Askins left for Pennsylvania the next morning — sickened, he said, by what he saw.
“As soon as I left, I called the state police. They said, ‘Is it an exigent circumstance?’ And I said, ‘It is. This girl could have died. And the squalor that these girls are living in, and the things that these girls are going through…’”
The Highway Patrol told him to call the Missouri Department of Social Services, he said, and he was put in touch with a worker familiar with Circle of Hope.
“She said, ‘I have personally taken a vested interest in Circle of Hope.’ But she told me, ‘No matter what we do, we can’t put our thumb on this guy. We can’t touch him, due to the laws in Missouri, due to his reach.’
“She paid an emergency visit that night to Circle of Hope. And she called me and she said, ‘I can’t even talk to the girls, because legally, he’s their guardian and he’s saying you can’t talk to any of my girls.’”
The DSS worker told Askins to call the Cedar County Sheriff.
“And that detective on duty called me back on a Saturday from his home number,” he said. “The deputy told me, ‘We don’t want this place up and running. We hear all kinds of stuff about it.’”
Askins contacted Amanda Householder soon after that and sent her the video. Since then, Askins said, he’s received two calls from Cedar County Sheriff’s detectives telling him the prosecutor now has the case and asking if he’d be willing to come back to testify.
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“I want it shut down,” said Askins, who has a 13-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter. “It’s OK to have a private school. It’s OK to teach them about Christ and whatever your agenda is. But you guys need to be certified to run these schools. They need to be inspected. And there has to be an accountability system for when there is an abuse allegation going on.”
ReplyDeleteBoyd Householder sent a letter to parents on March 14, telling them about Askins’ visit and saying DSS workers “arrived at 5:00 with abuse allegations” on the day he left.
“The next day we were informed that he had taken a video in our house, and had cut and doctored it to make it look like we were trying to incite 26 girls to attack 1 girl,” he wrote. “It is clear that it is doctored and we now know that he was trying to ‘get dirt on us,’ although we are not sure of his reasons.”
A TIME TO HEAL
The Facebook page, named “Circle of Hope Recovery,” went up last month. It’s Brian Stoddard’s way of reaching out to parents and their daughters who suffered at the Cedar County reform school like they believe Emily did.
He hopes former students and their parents reach out to him and he can use his training and resources as a pastor to help them heal and get the guidance they need.
Another goal is to serve as a warning, something he and his wife didn’t have when “we did our homework” after their daughter’s counselor recommended Circle of Hope in late 2017. They didn’t know then that the school wasn’t licensed by the state or that so many girls said they had suffered emotional and physical abuse at the school.
“God forbid if they are open again,” Brian said. “... Two years ago, if there was another parent who had written these things, I would have paid attention to that.”
Michelle Stoddard said she looks back now and feels “so stupid.” And she doesn’t want that to happen to others.
“We have to let people know about it. There are places that aren’t safe. Are other kids trapped in these hellholes?”
Boyd Householder asked the Stoddards to sign forms similar to the one Ashley signed. He wanted Brian to say they were removing their daughter because of her poor behavior and for Emily to sign a form saying she was never abused at the ranch.
“When I refused to sign them, I heard him tell his wife, ‘You need to call the attorney then,’” Brian Stoddard said.
In late July, the family drove away from the Circle of Hope for the last time. Emily’s parents told her they were headed to the sheriff’s office, that authorities needed to know what was happening at the ranch.
The teenager was able to describe what life was like at the reform school. So much of what investigators had been told was from years ago. What Emily detailed was from present day, and it corroborated what girls had said before, the Stoddards said.
A worker with the Children’s Division called the Stoddards last month, before authorities went to the Circle of Hope and removed two dozen girls living there.
“You need to go get your daughter,” the worker told Michelle. “We’re moving the girls.”
The family had been home for more than a week, something the state worker hadn’t been told.
When they got back to Washington, Emily’s parents called the numbers on the paper hidden in their daughter’s shoe when she left the boarding school. Two of the three parents were concerned for their daughters and had wondered if something bad was going on at the ranch.
The third parent wasn’t concerned, the Stoddards said.
Watching her parents get involved and try to spread the word about the damage done by the school, as well as trying to help girls in their recovery, makes Emily happy. She sees it making a difference.
“Look at other girls who tried to do the same thing,” Emily said. “A lot of those girls were rebels without a cause. They didn’t have parents like I do to help them.”
https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/missouri/article245266215.html
This 1970s Cult Inspired Abusive Teen Rehabilitation Methods Still Used Today
ReplyDeleteHow Synanon became a blueprint for problematic “tough love” rehabs.
Teen vogue
BY RAMIN GANESHRAM AND NICOLE CARPENTER
JANUARY 8, 2024
The dark side of aggressive rehabilitation programs that use “tough love” to treat substance use disorder, and purport problematic "conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ people, has gained attention in recent years. But the roots of these “tough love” treatments go back to the 1950s, and an organization called Synanon.
For nearly 25 years, the program was nationally lauded for its allegedly “successful” treatment programs, until the public turned against Synanon in October 1978. That was when its supporters put a 4-foot rattlesnake in the mailbox of Paul Morantz, a California attorney and investigative reporter. Morantz had been pushing for investigations of Synanon—which by then had declared itself a religion and gained nonprofit status. Morantz accused the group of abusing members and advocating violence against its “enemies.” Prior to the attack, the Synanon program had been praised for its groundbreaking treatment of people with substance use disorder as well as the treatment of troubled youth. The public attack on Morantz outed the Synanon for what it really was: a violent cult.
Created in 1958 by Charles Dederich, a former Alcoholics Anonymous member and speaker, Synanon purported to help those suffering from substance use disorder to rehabilitate themselves through “self-reliance and making the person responsible for his own actions.” The program first began as a small community in Venice, California calling itself the Tender Loving Care Club. Members met in a small storefront to play “The Game,” a verbal exercise where anyone was allowed to say anything to debunk excuses given by people for their substance use disorders. “Anything” could include mockery and degradation. Only threats and physical violence were not tolerated.
Dederich envisioned Synanon as a two-year residential program. Attendance grew rapidly and, to accommodate its swelling ranks, Dederich moved the operation from the Venice Beach storefront to a house in Santa Monica in 1962. Neighbors quickly protested having a drug rehabilitation facility in their backyard. The conflict ended with Dederich’ arrest because he didn’t have a health license.
In what was a cunning publicity move, Dederich chose to serve jail time for the violation while still refusing to move his facility. The highly publicized case drew the attention of some high-profile people who praised Dederich’s “revolutionary” program. Soon, public outcry on behalf of Synanon was significant enough that California Governor Edmund Brown, Sr. actually signed a bill exempting the group from health licensing laws. Donors nationwide began to support the group, supplementing the financial payments already being received by those in the program.
As Synanon's star rose, Hollywood A-listers including actors Leonard Nimoy, Robert Wagner, and Ben Gazzara would stop by the house to play “The Game.” In 1965, Columbia Pictures released a film partially written by Charles Dederich entitled “Synanon,” starring Eartha Kitt and Chuck Conners.
Synanon’s publicity and financial windfall allowed the group to expand again. Setting his sights on the East Coast, Dederich purchased an 18-room Victorian Mansion located on four acres in Westport, Connecticut in February 1963#.
At first, everything seemed rosy for Synanon’s foray into the other side of the country. With ample local support, plans to use Westport as a stepping stone into the Northeast were underway. Connecticut’s United States Senator Thomas Dodd championed Synanon calling it, “one of the most dynamic and vital programs that I have experienced.”
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Residents in Westport and the neighboring towns of Norwalk and Bridgeport supported the non-profit with donations of food, supplies, and fundraising. The Sponsors of Synanon, a group founded by Westport resident Betty Sobol, helped underwrite and champion the organization. But not everyone on the East Coast was happy about Synanon’s growing presence. Residents complained "[Synanon] is in the wrong place”# and balked “at the spectacle of criminals and addicts living in ‘respectable’ communities.”#
ReplyDeleteBy January of 1966, the Westport facility faced legal trouble that reached the Connecticut Supreme Court because the building was zoned for single-family residential use only. Synanon claimed its 30 residents were a “family” since they were all united in the single pursuit of remaining clean and sober. The Court disagreed and a month later ordered the non-profit to vacate the property.
The year after Synanon departed from Westport, Synanon began to change dramatically – converting from rehabilitation to a fully fledged cult. Members were no longer allowed to “graduate” from the program because Dederich had become convinced that, without the pressure of the community, they would relapse. Couples were now separated, and children were raised communally, with infants living in what was called “the hatchery.” Despite this, juvenile agencies and the California court system continued to send teenagers labeled “juvenile delinquents” to Synanon’s “Malibu Re-Education Camp” throughout the 1970s. At this detention center, teenage attendees were called the “Punk Squad.”
Organizers soon found that Synanon’s hallmark methods, including participation in “The Game” had little effect on the Punk Squad teens who, unlike willing adult participants, had not consented to rehabilitation. In the meantime, violence began to be a hallmark feature of Synanon at large. In 1973, in what some members would cite as a seminal moment, a session of The Game ended with Dederich pouring root beer over the head of a member. In 1973, teenagers were required to take part in The Game and became subject to escalating physical abuse.
Soon young people began to escape from the cult. Alvin Gambonini, a neighboring rancher to Synanon’s Point Reyes facility, sheltered many who had managed to escape. In retaliation, cult members beat Gambonini in front of his family.
By the time Synanon sought religious status in 1974, with Dederich as its leader, the organization numbered 1,300 members and had more than $30 million in assets. It was the largest property owner in Santa Monica and had a chain of gas stations and an airstrip by 1976. Dederich had fully abandoned nonviolence within Synanon and created the “Imperial Marines” to maintain order—within and outside of the community. Members were brainwashed, mentally tortured, and barred from leaving. Those who escaped were physically attacked if recaptured. In 1977, former member Phil Ritter was nearly beaten to death when his skull was fractured while trying to free his child from the cult.
By October 1978, Dederich’s mania and Synanon’s violent tactics reached a boiling point with the rattlesnake attack on attorney Paul Morantz. Although Morantz survived, he sustained long-lasting injuries from the highly venomous bites. Dederich was arrested on December 2nd, 1978 in connection with the attack as well as multiple other violent crimes. He avoided jail time by pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and agreed to step away from Synanon entirely. As a result of the incident, Synanon’s non-profit status was revoked and the cult slowly collapsed before filing for bankruptcy in 1991.
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While Synanon may be gone, the group’s “tough love” approach of scaring or shaming individuals into rehabilitation, inspired programs that continue today. One such program is the infamous Élan school in Maine, which modeled its “general meetings” after Synanon’s “game,” with teens yelling at one another for any real or fabricated slight against anyone in the Élan house.
ReplyDeleteÉlan also took inspiration from the work assignments Synanon put in place for residents. Adolescents in Synanon were observed working in “the medical laboratory, in the kitchen, in the news office, in the law office, on the ranch, and in the warehouse.” Likewise, teenagers were responsible for everything from cleaning to cooking to enforcing and policing their dormitory. In both cases, adults – who were former members themselves – were meant to oversee the teens, but were rarely present. Additionally, Élan allowed physical abuse in the form of a boxing ring between teens. The “treatment center” closed in 2011 amidst charges of abuse.
Joe Ricci–Élan’s founder–attended Daytop Village, a rehabilitation program funded by former Synanon supporter Daniel Harold Casriel. Daytop staff included Synanon members and the program still operates today, though distancing itself from abuse allegations. According to a 1982 training textbook assembled for the National College of Juvenile Justice, Daytop Village and other similar centers including, Topic House, Phoenix House, Harmonie House, Odyssey House, Gateway incorporated Synanon principles.
Another program, CEDU Educational Services, was created by Synanon sponsor Mel Wasserman. The program's group therapy “rap” sessions resembled The Game. CEDU operated until 2005, but was promptly purchased by Universal Health Services (UHS) a private-equity firm which owns multiple teen rehabilitation centers today. One such school was the Provo Canyon School where Paris Hilton was allegedly abused.
In a 2007 hearing about residential treatment programs where teenagers had died, the Forensic Audits and Special Investigations Unit in the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found many of these programs had "staff with little or no relevant training,” and engaged in manipulative and “misleading marketing practices” and “negligent and reckless operating practices.” The GAO further elaborated on the complexity of potentially abusive teen rehabilitation programs, noting that since the early 1990s the increasing number of residential treatment programs across the country operated without federal regulation. The investigation noted, “common names for these programs include boot camps, boarding schools and wilderness programs...which are typically in the mountains, the forest or the desert...All of these programs offer in some way to reform the lives of very troubled youth.”
Despite reports like these, there remain rehabilitation organizations which have continued to use “tough love” methodologies created by Synanon to allegedly cure substance use disorder, deter undesirable behavior, or force LGBTQ+ individuals into heteronormativity. Little action was taken until recently toward federal regulation of these programs and protecting the youth who find themselves inside them—in part because of the profit created by these institutions for the private equity firms that own them.
In April of 2023 the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act was introduced to the Senate by Senator Jeff Merkley [D-OR]. Exposing these programs and ensuring open communication about their practices is a key step toward providing better and safer mental health services for America’s troubled youth.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/this-1970s-cult-inspired-abusive-teen-rehabilitation-methods-still-used-today
The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping Exposes the Troubled Teen Industry
ReplyDeleteDirector Katherine Kubler’s reexamination of her own trauma led her to discover a broader system of abuse.
BY ROXANNE FEQUIERE February 21, 2024
In the years since filmmaker Katherine Kubler left The Academy at Ivy Ridge, she struggled to grapple with the trauma she endured there. Long accustomed to documenting her life on camera, she decided to make a film that would reify her experience. What she discovered was much bigger than the abuse enacted at Ivy Ridge. The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping is Kubler’s new docuseries that explores the unsettling and ever-evolving troubled teen industry, which continues to endanger children while promising parents that they can “fix” the so-called wayward youth of America.
What happened at The Academy at Ivy Ridge?
From the pressures of juggling academics and social hierarchies to the general awkwardness of adolescence, high school rarely ranks among the best days of our lives. For Kubler and her classmates at The Academy at Ivy Ridge, high school was more akin to a prison experience. Advertised as a boarding school designed to rehabilitate troubled teens, Kubler was one of countless students who arrived on campus only to find that her freedoms were drastically and immediately curtailed. Not allowed to talk, smile, go outside, or communicate freely with the outside world, the school operated on a Byzantine system of merits that all but ensured the students wouldn’t be able to leave the school until they turned 18.
In the years since Kubler left The Academy at Ivy Ridge, she struggled to grapple with the trauma she endured there, as well as her father’s reluctance to accept just how harmful her time at the school had been. From coercive marketing tactics to outright abuse and a sprawling network of copycat companies, The Program dives deep into the horrifying realities of what happens when a child is entrusted into the care of the disciplinary school system.
The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping premieres on March 5.
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/the-program-cons-cults-kidnapping-release-date-trailer-news
“The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping": The 8 most harrowing revelations from Netflix’s series
ReplyDeleteThe three-part series spotlights several survivors who suffered mental and physical abuse at the cult-like program
By JOY SAHA, Staff Writer, Salon MARCH 8, 2024
In 2001, an institution called Academy at Ivy Ridge was officially founded. Marketed as a boarding school that would help troubled teens, Ivy Ridge claimed to use therapy and recreational activities as reformative tactics. In reality, however, it wasn’t anything close to resembling an actual school. Those who attended endured years of mental, physical and sexual abuse until the school shut down for good eight years later.
Survivors of Ivy Ridge recounted their horrific, cult-like experiences in Netflix’s latest docuseries “The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping.” The three-part-series spotlights Katherine Kubler, an Ivy Ridge student turned filmmaker who exposes the mistreatment and brainwashing that occurred within school grounds. Kubler is joined by several of her former peers who recall what it was like attending the pseudo disciplinary school. The series also features their family members, along with journalists, attorneys, legal experts and a few former staff members at Ivy Ridge.
"They stole my childhood": Paris Hilton on the horrors of the "troubled teen" industry
Here are 8 harrowing revelations from the series:
01
Children were pulled straight out of their beds and brought to Academy at Ivy Ridge
Kubler, who was sent away to the so-called boarding school at the age of 16, recalled being handcuffed by two individuals, who took her to Ivy Ridge.
“My parents had hired two strangers to forcibly escort me to Academy at Ivy Ridge in the small town of Ogdensburg in Upstate New York,” Kubler said. She arrived at the institution at 3 a.m. Upon entrance, she was greeted by staff and told by her escorts that she wasn't allowed to go outside anymore.
“This was the first time I started realizing, ‘This isn’t a normal school,’” Kubler said. “Like, ‘What’s going on?’ Then two staff members flanked me on either side, linked arms with me and walked me off to the dorms.” They took Kubler to a bathroom, where they strip-searched her, and had her sleep on a mattress in the hallway.
“That’s most people’s first experience at Ivy Ridge is just hearing these doors click locked behind them. And you can never leave.”
Janja Lalich, a sociologist and author of “Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships,” said, “Many of these kids are taken in the middle of the night out of their bedrooms by these so-called ‘transport services,’ where these big guys come, all dressed in black with their handcuffs. Your parents are standing there at the doorway, watching. It’s 3:00 in the morning. You get woken up out of bed. These guys grab you. You don’t know what’s going on. You’re saying ‘help’ to your parents. They are just standing there. They take you off somewhere. You have no idea where you’re going.
“That alone is going to be a lifelong trauma.”
02
School rules controlled everything, even eye contact
Ivy Ridge had an obscene number of school rules. In fact, there were so many rules that it was impossible to learn and memorize all of them in just a few days.
Notable rules were as follows: Students were not allowed to talk without permission. Students couldn’t look out the window. Students weren’t allowed to make eye contact with other students (female students weren’t allowed to look at male students and vice versa). Students weren’t allowed to touch anyone. Students had to pivot around every corner and maintain a strict, military-like structure. Female students had to wear their hair in a braid. Makeup and shaving were both prohibited. Students weren’t even allowed to look in the mirror. Bathroom stall doors also had to be open at all times.
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ReplyDeleteThe program ran on a points and level system. Everyone started on level one with zero points and had to collect points to move up a level. Points were earned by following the school rules on a daily basis. Students who broke a rule received a correction, which removed points from their total number. Negative point values could become positive by writing “meaningless” essays or writing the school rules for hours.
Students who reached level two were allowed to have a candy bar twice a week. Students who reached level three could have a 15-minute phone call once a month with their parents. Staff, however, listened in on those calls and were allowed to disconnect the phone if anything negative was said about the program.
Levels four through six were upper levels. Students could now talk, shave, wear their hair down, wear makeup, look out the window and hold an unpaid staff job. Completing level six was synonymous with graduating from the academy. However, the institution made it almost impossible for students to attain such a high number of points.
03
Ivy Ridge was just one program under an umbrella organization called WWASP
WWASP stands for the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, an organization based in Utah that described itself as an umbrella organization of independent institutions for education and treatment of troubled teenagers. WWASP contained multiple sister facilities, including ones in Jamaica, Samoa, Czech Republic, Mexico and Costa Rica. When one facility was shut down, the children in that facility were transferred to a sister facility.
That’s what happened with Casa by the Sea, a now defunct WWASP school/treatment center in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico that was shut down by the Mexican government in 2004. Those enrolled in Casa by the Sea were moved to Ivy Ridge, which was incapable of housing such large numbers of children. Six children were crammed into each dorm room. The lack of space also meant some children were sleeping on mattresses on the floor and in the hallway.
Foot fungus, pink eye and viruses spread rapidly throughout the facility. Medical neglect was also rampant.
04
Jail is a “five star hotel” compared to Ivy Ridge
Fed up with their mistreatment, the teens at Ivy Ridge took part in a May 2005 boys’ riot in hopes of shutting down the institution for good. Quintin Pedrick, one of the primary instigators of the riot, was arrested for first-degree riot, third-degree assault, as well as fourth-degree criminal mischief. He was arraigned in the local Oswegatchie Town Court before being held at the St. Lawrence County Jail on $2,500 cash bail. Pedrick was 16 at the time.
When asked how jail was in comparison to Ivy Ridge, Pedrick said, “like a five-star Hilton Hotel.”
“I loved jail. Jail was freedom to me. It was freedom compared to what we were going through here.”
The riot failed to shut down Ivy Ridge. The program’s spokesperson, Tom Nichols, said at the time that Ivy Ridge would be reviewing the incident and looking at procedures to prevent a similar occurrence from happening in the future.
05
The “emotionally abusive and humiliating” seminars
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Allison Chee, who was sent away at 15 and was in the program for 22 months, explained that seminars were two-to-four day events that took place every four to six weeks at each of the WWASP programs. Students had to get through one seminar in order to progress to the next one.
ReplyDeleteSeminars are essentially “the backbone of the whole program,” Chee said.
“In order to graduate [from] the program, you had to complete the seminars, and there were a lot,” said Kubler. “Completing the seminars meant not questioning their [the program’s] ideology and conforming to the groupthink of the program.”
The seminars used the teens’ physiological experiences to manipulate their mind and thought processes. Kubler, whose mother died of cancer a week before she turned two, was told that she was at fault for her mother’s demise. Same with Diana Nowak, whose father died in a car accident when she was a toddler. No one called Nowak by her real name at the institution. She was referred to as “The Mistake.”
The program was essentially brainwashing its so-called students, who were deprived of sleep, food and personal time. Every single seminar also involved “some type of physical exertion component,” said Alexa Brand.
In one seminar, students were forced to repeatedly hit a towel wrapped in duct tape on the floor and scream. If they stopped or “chose out of the seminar,” they were sent to a new seminar called breakpoint, which was meant to mentally break those participating. In breakpoint, students had to repeat a series of phrases over and over again for the entire day to the point of dissociation.
Other seminars publicly humiliated students by having them cross-dress in front of their peers and perform a specific song. Sean, who was in the program for two years, said he had to perform “I'm Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred while wearing a red dress and prancing around in a cult-like circle.
06
Family reps were incentivized to keep teens in the program longer
Each “student” was given a family rep, who was the sole liaison between child and parent. Family reps were the teens’ “only communication and lifeline to the outside world, to our parents and to our family,” explained Kubler.
Family reps would monitor the teens’ letters and phone calls to their parents. Reps would have weekly phone calls with parents, where they assured them that keeping their children in the program was the best thing they could do. Family reps also received talking points for how to address abuse allegations. They told parents that the allegations were not credible and said that the program didn't use isolation or brainwashing tactics.
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Students were under the impression that family reps were there to help them, but that was far from the truth. Family reps were incentivized to keep students in the program longer. A file from the program reveals that reps were awarded $25 for each student in the program who was over the age of 18. They also received a $500 bonus for every student who graduated.
ReplyDelete07
Despite making millions, Ivy Ridge spent a measly $4 on each student
“If you actually are providing decent psychiatric care for children, it’s very difficult to make money because you need incredibly trained staff, and everybody’s gotta have a master’s-level degree or above,” said reporter Maia Szalavitz. “Now, these places convince parents that, because their regime is so well-designed to modify behavior, ‘We don’t need any trained staff. We just put them through our own training.’ And that’s all they need to be able to fix your kid.”
After retrieving several uncovered files, Kubler learned that some Ivy Ridge staff were being paid only $5.50 an hour to take care of students. The average tuition at Ivy Ridge was $3,500 per month. So, at peak enrollment, the institution was bringing in more than $1.5 million a month, she explained.
Despite the high profits, Ivy Ridge spent only $4 per teen on their daily meals. They also saved money by utilizing child labor. When students reached level three, they were allowed to work in the kitchen where they cleaned the facilities. Kubler said she believes the program never had a formal janitorial staff.
At Ivy Ridge, there were 500 students, 240 staff members and just one certified teacher. The institution itself used a Bible-based home study program to teach. Amid the early 2000s, a behavior modification program — which is what Ivy Ridge was classified as — didn't need to go through any kind of oversight or licensing in the state of New York, explained John Sullivan, a former regional director at the NY Office of Attorney General. That means that those who graduated from Ivy Ridge between 2001 to 2009 never received a legitimate high school diploma.
08
Ivy Ridge officially shut down in 2009
In March 2009, it was announced that Ivy Ridge would close until fall 2009 in order to “restructure” following a slew of legal troubles. At the time, there were approximately 60 enrolled students who were ultimately sent home or transferred to another institution. A Delaware-based corporation bought the property in April 2009 and announced that the school wouldn’t reopen.
Although Ivy Ridge and several other WWASP programs have managed to shut down for good, troubled teen rehabilitation programs are still popular today.
“This story does not have a happy ending. And this story is far from over. The troubled-teen industry is still alive and thriving,” said Kubler. “They’re still out there institutionalizing children with little to no oversight or regulation.”
see the links embedded in this article at:
https://www.salon.com/2024/03/08/the-program-cons-cults-and-kidnapping-the-8-most-harrowing-revelations-from-netflixs-series/
District Attorney: dozens of Ivy Ridge abuse complaints pour in after documentary
ReplyDeleteBy Lexi Bruening, WWNY March 11, 2024
CANTON, New York (WWNY) - Complaints of abuse are coming into the St. Lawrence County District Attorney’s office every day from students of the former Academy at Ivy Ridge near Ogdensburg.
The DA, St. Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office and State Police held a news conference Monday afternoon in Canton.
District Attorney Gary Pasqua says his office has gotten dozens of complaints of sexual, physical and mental abuse at Ivy Ridge when it was open between 2001 and 2009.
The calls come after a Netflix documentary, “The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping,” was released last week.
While promising to investigate the complaints, Pasqua asked the public not to trespass onto the Ivy Ridge property, call the DA’s office to ask about the investigation or harass others.
“I understand the reaction that is going to come from watching some of the things that were on those videos. But it is not a reason, it does not give you a free pass to go and harass anyone, whether it be a person or a business,” said Pasqua. “Please. Let us do our job.”
Pasqua says he is working with the alleged victims as his investigations into potential charges continue.
As for whether the statute of limitations will apply, Pasqua says he’ll have that conversation with the alleged victims of each specific case.
“It is going to take time. We’re talking about incidents that happened, in some cases, over 20 years ago. So this is not going to be a quick resolution,” he said.
The former academy in the town of Oswegatchies is now blocked off and plastered with no-trespassing signs. Curious onlookers have been driving to the location to get their eyes on the property but Pasqua says that will only cause more trouble.
“We are still trying to get documentation out of there. I’m imploring people, please do not go there. There comes a certain point where we can only ask nicely so many times, please do not go there,” he said.
Another issue: former Ivy Ridge staff members are being harassed, Pasqua says. The documentary doesn’t name many but people have turned to social media to put up pictures, names and contact information. 7 News has learned of some threats of violence against former workers.
“I can tell you there have certainly been calls around the county for individuals who have said they are being harassed whether that’s online or in other ways. I’m not sure if any arrests have been made at this point,” said Pasqua.
Pasqua asks anyone who has been a victim of abuse at Ivy Ridge to call his office in Canton.
https://www.wwnytv.com/2024/03/11/district-attorney-dozens-ivy-ridge-abuse-complaints-pour-after-documentary/
Dozens allege child sexual abuse in Maryland treatment program under newly filed lawsuits
ReplyDeleteBy LEA SKENE, Associated Press March 12, 2024
BALTIMORE — (AP) — More than three dozen people allege in two lawsuits filed Tuesday that they were sexually abused as children at a Maryland residential program for youths that closed in 2017 following similar allegations.
In the separate lawsuits, atorneys detailed decades of alleged abuse of children by staff members of the Good Shepherd Services behavioral health treatment center, which had billed itself as a therapeutic, supportive environment for Maryland’s most vulnerable youth.
The program was founded in 1864 by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic religious order focused on helping women and girls. It began at a facility in Baltimore before moving to its most recent campus just outside the city.
Tuesday's lawsuits add to a growing pile of litigation since Maryland lawmakers eliminated the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse cases last year.
Many of the plaintiffs — almost all of them women — reported being injected with sedatives that made it more difficult for them to resist the abuse. Others said their abusers, including nuns and priests employed by the center, bribed them with food and gifts or threatened them with violence and loss of privileges.
The claims were filed against the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services and Department of Human Services, agencies that contracted with Good Shepherd and referred children there for treatment. The lawsuits also named the state Department of Health, which was tasked with overseeing residential facilities. The Sisters of the Good Shepherd religious order wasn’t a named defendant in either suit.
In a joint statement Tuesday afternoon, the three state agencies said they had not yet been served with the court papers.
“However, the Departments of Health, Human Services and Juvenile Services work to ensure the safety and well-being of all children and youth placed in state care. We take allegations of sexual abuse of children in our care seriously,” the statement said.
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Many of the children referred to Good Shepherd were in foster care or involved in the state’s juvenile justice system.
ReplyDelete“The state of Maryland sent the most vulnerable children in its care to this facility and then failed to protect them,” said Jerome Block, an attorney representing 13 plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits filed Tuesday.
Good Shepherd was closed in 2017 after state agencies decided to withdraw children from the program, which had been cited the previous year for not providing proper supervision after one patient reported being sexually assaulted and others showed signs of overdose after taking medicine stolen from a medical cart, according to The Baltimore Sun.
“The sexual assault of vulnerable teenagers by state employees is horrific, but the fact clergy were also complicit is one of the many truly sickening aspects of what transpired at Good Shepherd Services,” said Adam Slater, an attorney representing 26 plaintiffs in the second lawsuit.
One of the plaintiffs said in that suit that she told a priest during confession about being abused by two women employees at the center, telling him she was afraid “God would be disgusted” with her. She said that instead of doing anything to help her, the priest sexually assaulted her and kept abusing her every two weeks for the rest of her stay, according to the suit.
Since the state law change that went into effect in October, a flurry of lawsuits have alleged abuse of incarcerated youth. Lawmakers approved the change with the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal in mind after a scathing investigative report revealed the scope of the problem within the Archdiocese of Baltimore. But in recent months, an unexpected spotlight has settled on the state's juvenile justice system.
While attorneys said they plan to file more complaints under the new law, their cases could be delayed by a widely anticipated constitutional challenge that’s currently winding its way through the courts.
A Prince George’s County Circuit judge ruled last week that the law was constitutional in response to a challenge filed by the Archdiocese of Washington, which also spans parts of Maryland, but the decision is expected to be appealed. The underlying case accuses the archdiocese of failing to protect three plaintiffs from clergy sexual abuse as children.
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/national/dozens-allege-child/NOUTXWJCMT2ULC27BH3KYWI4XA/
Missouri boarding school closes as state agency examines how it responded to abuse claims
ReplyDeleteThe allegations are the latest against people associated with Christian boarding schools in Missouri.
By Jim Salter, Religion News Service March 28, 2024
A rural Missouri boarding school at the center of abuse allegations has closed its doors, and a state agency is trying to determine if it adequately responded to previous concerns about the facility in calls to an abuse hotline.
The closure of ABM Ministries’ Lighthouse Christian Academy in Piedmont, Missouri, follows criminal charges filed earlier this month against owners Larry Musgrave Jr., 57, his 64-year-old wife, Carmen Musgrave, and a teacher, Caleb Sandoval, 22. The Musgraves were charged with first-degree kidnapping for allegedly locking a student in a room. Sandoval was charged with abuse or neglect of a child, accused of injuring a 15-year-old boy while boxing.
The Musgraves and Sandoval all face court hearings next month. Phone messages were left Wednesday with their attorneys.
“As of March 6th @ 5:00pm, 2024 ABM is officially closed. All staff have also been dismissed,” ABM wrote in a letter to the Missouri Department of Social Services. Agency spokeswoman Baylee Watts provided a copy of the letter to The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Watts said in an email that the Department of Social Services is looking at “the handling of the complaints to the Child Abuse & Neglect Hotline.” She didn’t elaborate or offer a timetable for the internal inquiry. Former ABM students have said they’ve been raising concerns for years, to no avail.
ABM Ministries operated the private Christian boarding school for boys in Wayne County, about 130 miles (209 kilometers) south of St. Louis. Its website claimed success in helping boys who were troubled, learning-impaired or dealing with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or other disorders. The website is now shut down.
Sheriff Dean Finch began investigating several months ago after a former student living in Alabama contacted him. The Musgraves are accused of keeping that student locked in a small room against her will nearly two decades ago, at a time when the school served both girls and boys.
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The alleged victim in that case, Juliana Davis, now 34, said the closure of the school is “validating” and something she had hoped to see since her days as a student.
ReplyDelete“Every day we woke up there, we hoped that somebody was going to barge in and shut it down and keep us safe,” said Davis, who now works as a trauma therapist. “Obviously, that never happened. But knowing that I had a role in giving that to the boys that were there – that was a really, really cool feeling.”
Finch said his office received reports of five runaways from the school in the first couple months of this year. In one instance, two boys were picked up by a neighboring resident and taken home. The boys asked her to call 911.
A federal lawsuit in 2009 that accused a former principal of sex acts with a female student also alleged that the Musgraves failed to take action to protect the girl. Court records show that ABM Ministries and the Musgraves agreed to pay $750,000 in a settlement, and the principal agreed to pay $100,000.
A probable cause statement said Sandoval bloodied the nose of a 15-year-old. Sandoval initially told investigators he was teaching the boy to box in preparation for a Mixed Martial Arts camp. But he later said the sparring took place about a week after the boy made sexual comments about Sandoval and his wife, the statement said.
The allegations are the latest against people associated with Christian boarding schools in Missouri.
Agape Boarding School in Stockton, Missouri, closed in 2023 after years of investigations and allegations of physical and sexual abuse. Abuse allegations at Agape and at the nearby Circle of Hope Girls’ Ranch prompted a state law in 2021 requiring stricter rules for such facilities. Missouri previously had virtually no oversight for religious boarding schools.
Criminal cases are still pending against Agape’s longtime doctor and five other employees. The former owners of Circle of Hope are scheduled to go to trial in November on 100 child abuse counts. They have pleaded not guilty.
see links embedded in this article at:
https://religionnews.com/2024/03/28/missouri-boarding-school-closes-as-state-agency-examines-how-it-responded-to-abuse-claims/
Beatings, humiliation and loss of self-worth: how Edinburgh Academy victims were scarred
ReplyDeleteFormer schoolboys at the private school give raw testimonies about abuse meted out by John Brownlee
The enormity of the abuse suffered at the hands of the Edinburgh Academy teacher John Brownlee became clear when the first witness was asked a simple question about the moment his mother left him alone at the boarding house of the elite private school.
John Graham, now a trim 56-year-old with a goatee beard, was asked: how did he feel? Until then fluent and factual in the witness box, Graham froze. His face crumpled. In that moment, Graham again became the eight-year-old boy who had felt “not good” that day, but with the awful adult hindsight of the abuse he would endure there.
“I didn’t know these people. I didn’t know this place. It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.”
Graham’s graphic account at Edinburgh sheriff court earlier this month, of being a child repeatedly assaulted, beaten and abused at Brownlee’s hands set the scene for nine harrowing days of witness accounts which exposed, in their words, a vicious sadist who relished inflicting pain.
According to a lengthy indictment, Brownlee, now an 89-year-old with advanced dementia, terrorised young boys over a 20-year period: both at Dundas House, where he lived with his own family alongside boarding pupils, and at the Academy’s junior school, where he rose to the position of deputy head.
Declared unfit to stand trial on health grounds, the 36 charges against him were heard in a rare quasi-trial process known as an “examination of facts” overseen, without a jury, by Sheriff Ian Anderson.
Witnesses including Nicky Campbell, the BBC journalist and broadcaster, recounted the weapons Brownlee employed over those two decades. Those included the clacken (a spoon-like bat Brownlee repeatedly used “with a golf swing” to strike the boys’ backsides), a cricket bat, a broken snooker cue, metal and wooden rulers sometimes brought sharp edge-down on a child’s knuckles, his own brogues, fists and open hand.
“He had a hair-trigger temper on him,” Graham said. He witnessed another boy being “annihilated” once in the junior school dining hall. “Smashed him down on the floor, just laid into him; he was kicking him, just battering him.”
Frazer MacDonald, 54, a former Christian missionary who arrived at Dundas House aged eight, recalled Brownlee had a method for choking boys by inserting his knuckled fist inside the back of a boy’s collar, and twisting as he flexed his fist. “You felt like you were being strangled; it happened to many boys.”
Others testified to that technique; Campbell told the court Brownlee, who at turns could be charismatic and at others arbitrarily violent, once rained blows on his head like “a knuckle dance down on my skull”.
Giles Moffat, 51, described being locked in a garden shed with two other boys over a weekend for a minor infraction, and being fed on bread and milk by Brownlee’s wife. He also described one shocking incident where a six-year-old had a garden hose pushed into his anus by Brownlee as a punishment for bedwetting.
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Moffat, who co-founded a support group for survivors of Edinburgh Academy abuse, was clear that for those who witnessed the abuse of their fellow pupils it could be as traumatic as being abused themselves.
ReplyDelete“He enjoyed the psychological torture, there was no doubt about that,” said another witness, who has asked not to be named. During one assault, Brownlee slammed the folding door of a blackboard on his head “spraying spittle” as he did so. “He enjoyed the fear, knowing that the violence could happen at any time.”
“The pain of the beating passes,” said Graham Macleod, a day pupil who had Brownlee as a teacher at junior school, “but the humiliation of being beaten in front of your peers, the class, that lasts,. So humiliation is very much part of the experience.”
Others described routine humiliations: cold baths for boys who failed to brush their teeth; children’s underpants paraded in front of their peers; a metal comb dragged painfully across their scalps in the morning.
Witnessed described a culture where violence, fear, silence and shame were so normalised that bullying was “institutionalised”, as the children turned against one another to act out their distress.
The loss of self-worth was a recurring theme. A number of the witnesses have survived alcoholism and opiate addiction; some struggled to build careers; others know classmates who killed themselves in adulthood.
Neil McDonald, a former army major, said self-loathing drove him to reckless, suicidal conduct in war zones. “I hate myself,” he told the court bluntly. “I see myself as a loathsome piece of shit. I can’t stand being me. Because I was taught that that was what we were.”
The witnesses were repeatedly pressed by Andrew Seggie, the Brownlee family’s lawyer, to explain whether they had told their parents about their experiences. Many said they did not; some feared retribution in the school; others said they thought Brownlee’s behaviour was normal, or that they, somehow, deserved it.
Campbell, who also alleges other abuses including a serious sexual assault by other Academy teachers, never told his parents. “You thought, this is happening. It must be OK,” Campbell told the court. “I must have put myself in this situation, for this to happen.”
But the court also heard Brownlee routinely censored the weekly letters boys were expected to send home: “If he didn’t like what was in, you would be made to rewrite it.”
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These men, now stout with their hair grey or receding in middle age, say privately that telling their story in court – even without Brownlee in the dock to hear them – was an opportunity to break the hold this man had on them. Some wanted the chance to speak for longer, but others described the mental strain of returning to their vulnerable younger selves in public.
ReplyDeleteThe question of why no other staff member intervened became another recurring theme of the hearings. Brownlee’s wife, Margaret, and his sons Neil and Graeme also lived in Dundas House. Did they ever intervene?
They did not, said the witnesses, and instead appeared for the defence to vigorously dismiss the allegations of more than 30 former pupils as “ridiculous”, “lies” or “distortions”.
Margaret, an immaculately presented 83-year-old, insisted Dundas House was “run along family lines”.
Her elder son, Graeme, at 56, of an age with many of the victims, described it as “a happy house” where he grew up “cheek by jowl” with the other pupils and witnessed no evidence of beatings or other excessive punishments.
“The truth is you are here to protect your father’s legacy and you will never and can never accept these things happened,” the fiscal put to him at the conclusion of his evidence.
“That is correct,” he replied.
The evidence exposed a wider culture of complicity. Other teachers were keenly aware of the abuse but it appears none took action, and some were directly complicit in Brownlee’s violence.
Indeed, Brownlee is one of numerous former teachers facing prosecution for violent and sexual assaults on their pupils. Many of these charges stem from the work of the long-running Scottish child abuse inquiry, which has commended the work of the journalist Alex Renton, whose BBC Radio 4 documentary series In Dark Corners about abuse in Britain’s elite private schools prompted Campbell to reveal his own abuse. It resulted in a flood of other former pupils coming forward and encouraging the inquiry to take detailed evidence on the school.
But one boy did summon up the courage to report Brownlee, to the headteacher’s wife one evening. Then about nine or 10 years old, Graham Macleod recalled “a very tearful conversation” with her about the abuse and trauma he had suffered. “She seemed to be obviously distressed by it. I didn’t hold back. My impression after that was things did improve, at least for me.”
That conversation took place in 1967. Brownlee remained on Academy staff for another 20 years.
see links and photos embedded in this article at:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/27/edinburgh-academy-john-brownlee-abuse
3HO's Boarding Schools Were A Living Hell
ReplyDelete"The boarding schools were just one part of what several people born into 3HO describe as a nearly 50-year-long child-rearing experiment gone horribly wrong"
by Philip Deslippe and Stacie Stukin, Baaz News March 27, 2024
During the monsoon season in the fall of 1981, a group of American children, some as young as five years old, traversed deep puddles full of leeches on a treacherous walk to their new school in the Himalayan foothills. They had travelled thousands of miles away from their parents; white Sikh converts and followers of Yogi Bhajan, a former customs inspector in New Delhi who arrived in the United States in 1968 and transformed himself into a yoga guru.
Norman Kreisman, then known as Baba Nam Singh, helped escort the children to Guru Nanak Fifth Centenary School in Mussoorie, India. He remembers the children crying a lot and needing help with everything.
“They were totally shell-shocked, like basket cases,” he recalls. “One of them said their parents didn’t even say goodbye.”
That year marked the beginning of a practice where children raised in Yogi Bhajan’s Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization (3HO) were sent to residential boarding schools in India.
“We were on the other side of the world from our parents, hungry and underfed, dirty, sick, supervised by bullies and alcoholics, and often left to forage for food on our own,” said S.K. Khalsa, a combat veteran in their 40s who went to India in 1991.
Baaz conducted 86 interviews with 49 people over a period of nine months, including survivors, current and former 3HO administrators and community members, lawyers, and subject matter experts. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity. The reporting uncovered the identity of two alleged pedophiles within 3HO, along with first-hand testimonies of abuse and evidence that, for decades, the organization chose to handle cases of malfeasance internally rather than contacting law enforcement.
The boarding schools were just one part of what several people born into 3HO describe as a nearly 50-year-long child-rearing experiment gone horribly wrong. In 3HO ashrams, summer camps, and Indian boarding schools, they suffered sexual, spiritual, and psychological abuse, as well as physical assault, malnourishment, medical neglect, unsanitary conditions, corporal punishment, solitary confinement, hazing, and bullying.
The abuse went unaddressed until 2020 when adult survivors came forward to tell their stories. Two years later, the Siri Singh Sahib Corporation (SSSC), which oversees 3HO, acknowledged harm caused within their schools and institutions and established the Independent Healing and Reparations Program for the Sikh Dharma Community, which ended in December 2023. Nearly 600 survivors filed claims alleging thousands of incidents of abuse.
For some, the program represented an overdue reckoning and a chance to receive financial settlements. Others described the process as retraumatizing, a way for the organization to stay out of court and avoid adequate financial and reparative accountability for decades of systemic abuse.
The SSSC declined requests for comment.
The man who later became known as Yogi Bhajan came to Los Angeles via Canada as Harbhajan Singh Puri in late 1968. He attracted counterculture Hippies seeking spiritual wisdom from the East by teaching what he claimed to be an ancient, previously secret form of yoga he called Kundalini Yoga and combining it with New Age thought and Sikhi. As his follower base grew, they established residential ashrams and yoga centers around the country and promoted his teachings.
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Yogi Bhajan called himself a master of Tantra and a Saturn teacher. His mercurial and often abusive behaviour was seen by his students as a path toward spiritual growth. He legally incorporated his form of Sikhi, “Sikh Dharma,” as a religion in the state of California in 1973 and claimed the title of “Siri Singh Sahib” or leader of Sikh Dharma in the Western Hemisphere.
ReplyDeleteThe following year, he established the Siri Singh Sahib Corporation (SSSC), which gave him temporal authority over the assets of Sikh Dharma, and encouraged his followers to donate money and sign over their homes, businesses, and inheritances. Through the SSSC, Yogi Bhajan soon controlled an array of non-profit entities and for-profit businesses.
Yogi Bhajan used his religious authority to give his followers a prescriptive lifestyle. He gave them spiritual names, arranged their marriages, and told them to dress in all-white clothing and how to eat and sleep.
As 3HO members began having children, Bhajan described their offspring as saints, sages, and little yogis—heroes who were blessed to be Sikhs in a community that practiced Kundalini yoga. These children, he said, were destined to lead humanity.
But he also told parents they were too neurotic and ill-equipped to raise their own children and risked harming them by being too affectionate and attached. The solution: separate parents from children in what he called “distance therapy.”
As early as 1974, distance therapy included separating parents from their kids by sending them to live with other 3HO families in the United States. Later, the children were sent to school in India, where Bhajan advised parents that their children would be protected from the corrupting influence of a materialistic American society full of violence, drugs, and sex.
In 1981, the first children sent to India went to Guru Nanak Fifth Centenary School in Mussoorie. From 1989-1993, they went to Guru Ram Das Academy in Dehradun, and in 1996, after several transitional years at various schools in Amritsar, 3HO opened its own Amritsar school.
Miri Piri Academy (MPA), built on land owned by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), was leased to 3HO at nearly no cost for a 99-year period. According to its website, MPA is still a boarding and day school.
Representatives from the SGPC and MPA declined to comment.
Deva Kaur Khalsa started practicing Kundalini yoga at 17, and Yogi Bhajan arranged her marriage. She sent her son Siri Amrit Singh Khalsa to live with another family when he was 17 months old. Years later, he and his sister, Guru Amar Kaur Khalsa, were sent to school in India, a decision Deva Kaur now regrets.
“The amount of trauma my kids and all the kids have endured, I now know it was typical cult behavior to separate children from their parents,” she said. “It was a warped philosophy, and he (Yogi Bhajan) used our lives like chess boards.”
For Siri Amrit, this meant years of absence from his parents. At eight years old, he was sent to Guru Ram Das Academy (GRD). He was bullied, malnourished, lacked access to clean water, and suffered medical neglect that continues to affect his mental and physical health.
“At GRD, I was starving,” he recalls. “I would drink water even though it gave me diarrhea, and I would eat rose petals. If someone had a ramen cup, kids would beat the shit out of each other for it. Food was like gold; food was everything.”
Yogi Bhajan claimed that the harsh conditions of the India school program would instill independence and grit. In 1991 Bhajan told the Khalsa Council, comprised of high-ranking 3HO members and Sikh Dharma ministers, many of whose children went to India, “I like one thing in that program [sic] it is sending our children to a living hell and making them to survive so no hell will be hell for them ever.”
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After Siri Amrit graduated high school in India, like many born into 3HO, he was encouraged to work for 3HO businesses and institutions for substandard wages and discouraged from enrolling in college. Eventually, he continued his education and graduated from university with honours and a business degree. Today, he is a business consultant in British Columbia.
ReplyDeleteIn 2010, at the age of 27, Siri Amrit got a job as a bookkeeper for MPA. There, he saw first-hand 3HO school administrators who had no formal education credentials or training in child development. Many were former Indian school students raised within the 3HO system who continued an existing culture of abuse by inflicting the same kind of mistreatment they experienced as children upon those in their care. During Siri Amrit’s time as an MPA employee, a student died in a drowning accident on a supervised field trip, a Chilean teacher named Satya Amrit Singh was found dead in the bathroom, and a boy was sodomized with an object by fellow students.
When he became the school’s Chief Financial Officer in 2013, Siri Amrit described frustrating attempts to get the SSSC to adequately fund the school, improve the curriculum, hire adequate numbers of qualified administrative staff, and finance infrastructure improvements.
“A lot of other religious communities have amazing schools because they believe kids are the future, and they will fund that,” Siri Amrit said. “3HO has never invested in their children on an institutional or leadership level. Our school system was just another con to steal money from the families in the community, to splinter and fracture it so more families were dedicated to Yogi Bhajan and his institutions.”
Siri Amrit’s younger sister Guru Amar, now a digital creator in her 30s, was sent to MPA in 1999 at eight years old. As an adult, she learned there were high levels of lead in the school’s water system and that a river of sewage ran through the campus. She recalls mold in the dorms, pictures of Yogi Bhajan on the walls, and education priorities that emphasized Kundalini yoga and meditation over academics.
During her first year at the school, she and others in her dorm allege they were sexually abused by Kirpal Singh Khalsa, a 3HO white convert, who is named as the school’s Academic Director on Guru Amar’s report cards. He and his wife, who was a designated caretaker, lived across the hall.
Kirpal Singh declined to comment.
“We were nine years old when he started molesting and grooming us,” Guru Amar said. “I was too young to know something was wrong, but one of the other girls was extremely aware, and she started wearing a swimsuit under her clothing.”
In 2002, when one of Guru Amar’s classmates told a 3HO staff member in India about the sexual abuse committed against her and others, Kirpal Singh was sent home to the United States, and Guru Amar said they were told not to talk about the abuse.
Over the course of 16 years, Deva Kaur and other mothers tried to make the organization address the abuse of their children. They wrote letters to and met with 3HO officials expressing concern for their daughters and the safety of other girls in the community but were discouraged from talking publicly about the abuse.
“The situation was handled pathetically,” Deva Kaur said. “We sacrificed our children’s childhood and trusted a spiritual school, and to have our kids sexually abused was just enraging. I feel the guilt for having agreed to it.”
The SSSC Office of Ethics & Professional Standards (EPS) did not officially acknowledge the harm until 2018, when Guru Amar and some of her classmates filed a formal complaint.
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It took until May of 2023 for the EPS to publicly state on their website that Kirpal Singh committed “misconduct with minors.”
ReplyDeleteOver the decades, Kirpal Singh was one of at least five alleged pedophiles in 3HO who preyed upon children inside and outside the 3HO community.
Additionally, Baaz confirmed the reparation program settled no less than three claims for harm caused by a man named Narayan Singh Khalsa, who joined the Los Angeles 3HO community as a white convert in the early 1980s.
According to survivors and their families, he allegedly abused boys over the course of several decades as a volunteer guide at 3HO summer camps, as a caretaker during the Winter Interim program in India, and at his house in Phoenix across from the 3HO Gurdwara where he had a playground in the yard and video games inside.
Karta Singh, now in his 40s, grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and was sexually abused by Narayan when he was nine years old. Karta alleges that while he was sleeping at Narayan’s house, he made him watch pornography and then assaulted him. “I really didn’t know anything about sex,” Karta said. “I felt very ashamed afterwards. I hid it because I didn’t want anyone to find out.”
For Karta, the trauma of those formative years led to depression, drug addiction, and being homeless for nearly a year. “Using drugs felt like a warm safe blanket,” he said. “It was a protection I never felt before.” He is 13 years sober.
Karta accepted a settlement from the reparations program. “Money can be great, but it is not going to heal anything,” he said. “Something that would help would be getting abusers off the street and making sure that they can never do this again.”
Interviews with parents, survivors, and other members of the Phoenix 3HO community revealed that numerous adults and authority figures within the organization knew about Narayan’s predatory behaviour, yet he continued to live in the same house within the 3HO community for decades.
Narayan Singh declined to comment.
Handling the abuse of children internally within 3HO was a pattern. Children were sent to 3HO therapists, incidents were handled by ashram heads or senior Sikh Dharma ministers, and abusers were counselled by Sikh Dharma therapists and Yogi Bhajan himself.
“There was always a bigger emphasis on covering up problems rather than solving them,” said Ajai Singh Khalsa, a lawyer who became CEO of Sikh Dharma International for several years after Yogi Bhajan’s death in 2004. He described 3HO as having a pervasive, unspoken culture of not going to outside authorities. “The real sin was taking problems to the world.”
Details of abuse suffered by 3HO children and the school’s poor conditions have been online for decades on forums and message boards run by ex-3HO members. Narangkar Glover, an artist in the Pacific Northwest, has been blogging about her experiences growing up in 3HO for over 15 years and today maintains the site Rishiknots.
In early 2020, 3HO was publicly forced to face its history of abuse when a former high-ranking 3HO official named Pamala Dyson self-published a memoir entitled Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage that revealed her illicit, abusive affair with Yogi Bhajan, who was married and claimed to be celibate.
The book did not document harm done to other women or to the children raised in 3HO, but the timing of its release at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was homebound and connected via Zoom, allowed others to tell their stories publicly.
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During an April 2020 Zoom meeting for the Khalsa Council, men and women shared testimonies about the abuse they experienced in the community while their parents and peers listened. An agenda item slated for 45 minutes turned into a 12-hour call. This was one of several Zoom calls that took place that year. For many second-generation adults, this also began a series of private, difficult conversations with family, community members, and peers.
ReplyDelete“Growing up, we had no voice at all,” Guru Amar said. “In 2020, we were finally given the space to share the awful things that had happened to us and realize they were truly awful. We no longer had to be quiet and pretend it didn’t happen.”
For older 3HO second-generation adults like Sat Kartar Kaur Khalsa, who went to GNFC at seven and is now raising her own children, speaking out became imperative. “We were watching our own kids at the same age that we were when we were sent to India. When it comes to your own kids, you can’t lie to yourself. We knew how harmful it was (for us),” she said.
Around the same time, other second-generation women who were groomed from an early age to become part of Yogi Bhajan’s staff, many of whom had sexual, and sometimes nonconsensual, relationships with him, also came forward with their stories.
Subsequently, the SSSC commissioned a third party, independent investigation by a Buddhist organization called An Olive Branch. Their report concluded “more likely than not,” Yogi Bhajan used his spiritual authority to perpetrate a range of abuses against women, including rape, sexual battery, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment.
As the community struggled to move forward with the report's revelations and rectify the harms experienced by the second generation, the SSSC announced a reparations program in April 2022.
In recent years, reparations programs have emerged to settle claims of abuse between survivors and organizations in lieu of a trial or a lawsuit. Notable examples include the Boy Scouts of America and USA Gymnastics.
Carol Merchasin, an attorney at the British-American law firm McAllister Olivarius who specializes in defending survivors of abuse within religious communities, said, “A reparations program can help a larger group of survivors than the justice system can because the legal system doesn’t always give us a path to accountability.”
For survivors, a reparation program can provide recourse where there may not be a way to pursue accountability under the law and without lengthy and retraumatizing civil or class action lawsuits.
For organizations like 3HO, a reparations program allows for multiple claims to be settled for less than victims would be awarded in lawsuits. The claims are also settled without the organization being compelled by a court to produce evidence or have members testify under oath. Once survivors sign an agreement, they can never file a future lawsuit.
Kim Dougherty, a lawyer with the firm Justice Law Collaborative who represented over 150 claimants who grew up in 3HO, said the SSSC and their lawyers from the firm Lewis Roca represented that the program would be trauma-informed and no limits would be placed on the monetary settlements. Additionally, she was assured by the IHRP that claimants’ requests for non-monetary reparations, such as institutional reform to prevent future harm, would be prioritized.
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When the SSSC raised funds for reparations, the board had progressive members who believed survivors and wanted to make amends. According to several sources with direct knowledge of the allocation, approximately $40 million was set aside from 3HO businesses to fund a program that anticipated about 100 claims. When nearly 600 people filed claims, more funding was necessary to compensate claimants, yet board members described by many as hard-liners who revere Yogi Bhajan, denied increased funding.
ReplyDeleteEven though claimants widely understood that the independent administrators tasked with assessing their awards would have no monetary restrictions, settlements were limited by that fixed $40 million pool of funds, resulting in reparations that ranged from several tens of thousands of dollars to slightly less than several hundred thousand dollars. For many, this was less than one-tenth of what they expected.
Dougherty said the program was misrepresented and woefully underfunded. “The program was a bait and switch,” Dougherty said. “The most egregious part is that the highest amount of payment is not enough money to provide a true reparation for past harm and future healing, and that’s the reason people participated.”
The reparation program was also designed to institute non-monetary requests, such as ongoing therapeutic support, a restorative justice program, public acknowledgements of harm, apologies from the SSSC and its affiliates, and institutional changes and safeguards at Miri Piri Academy and other 3HO facilities.
Several sources with direct knowledge said that discussions of safeguarding were negligible during the reparations process and to date few, if any, of these non-monetary requests have been honored.
“What matters to survivors more than monetary reparations is real meaningful institutional change—and that has not happened,” Dougherty said.
Numerous claimants also describe the program as retraumatizing and insensitive. The application asked claimants to “please further describe the nature of your harms,” which prompted many to write long testimonies, some as long as 70 pages, in hopes of making a strong case for monetary and non-monetary reparations.
Lewis Roca, the law firm hired by the SSSC to administer the program, denied requests for comment. Meena Allen, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based attorney and the SSSC program compliance advisor hired by Lewis Roca declined to answer questions but said, “The program is pleased that it has reached a lot of people to provide compensation.”
While a large number of claimants did accept their reparation, in December of 2023, four women who were on Yogi Bhajan’s staff, three of whom were born into 3HO, rejected reparation settlements. Instead, they filed a California lawsuit against the SSSC and their affiliated business for damages alleging negligence, sexual harassment, emotional distress, and sexual battery.
One plaintiff, Kathleen Hayes, said, “The reparations program was about mitigating potential liabilities for those choosing to cover up the years of corruption.”
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The lawsuit reads in part: “This complaint seeks recourse on behalf of four Plaintiffs whose lives have been permanently scarred by Yogi Bhajan’s sadistic sexual abuse and the failure of the entities herein to prevent, investigate, and respond to the sexual abuse. Yogi Bhajan’s tendencies were widely known and persisted for decades, but nobody protected the women in his midst. Plaintiffs seek recourse from the specific entities that failed to protect them during Yogi Bhajan’s reign of abuse…”
ReplyDeleteDaniel L. Varon, of the California-based Zalkin law firm representing the plaintiffs, said the lawsuit enables survivors to pursue all remedies under the law in a public forum. “Reparation programs are not designed to give survivors of sexual assault a voice, so filing a public lawsuit is a way for people to reclaim their voices,” Varon said.
As the reparation program was winding down, conservative members of 3HO, who still support Yogi Bhajan and deny claims of abuse, took control of the SSSC board. Changes that began in 2020, such as removing Yogi Bhajan’s name and image in yoga studios and on websites, were reversed.
Sahaj Singh Khalsa, a former SSSC board member who was born into 3HO and attended boarding school in India, resigned after fellow board members harassed his wife and children, and one community member told his daughter at Gurdwara: “Get your Dad in line.”
Sahaj helped to facilitate the Zoom calls and worked with the board to develop the reparations program and honour the non-monetary requests. However, his efforts were thwarted when conservative members took control of the SSSC board.
“I have been attacked, threatened, and abused for telling the truth and advocating for change,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “...In the past three years, we have denied, minimized, rationalized, and justified abuse of children.”
Sahaj said of the current SSSC board, “These are people who should not be in any position of authority or have respect. They defend pedophiles and refuse to see the experiences of people who have been harmed. This does not align with my understanding of what it means to be a Sikh. The teachings of the Gurus are to not ignore or dismiss people who ask for help. Inaction is going to harm people who have already been harmed.”
Siri Amrit, who accepted a monetary claim, said that the reparations program fell short of its claimed goals.
“If the intent was to acknowledge the abuse and create healing, it ended up as a partial acknowledgement, a partial healing, and it turned into another form of abuse. We lost dozens of kids to suicide, addiction, prison, or depression.”
“There’s a saying here in Canada with the First Nations residential schools,” he added. ‘First truth, then reconciliation.’”
Stacie Stukin is a Los Angeles-based arts and culture journalist. You can find her on Twitter at @staciestukin
Philip Deslippe is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. You can find him on Twitter at @PhilipDeslippe
see links and photos embedded in this article at:
https://www.baaznews.org/p/3hos-boarding-schools-abuse-yogi-bhajan
Jamaica pulls U.S. boys from troubled teen school after allegations they were abused
ReplyDeleteThe children have been held in Jamaican custody, waiting to find out when they’ll be allowed to return to their parents in the U.S.
By Tyler Kingkade, NBC News March 27, 2024
Seven American boys are being held in the custody of Jamaican child welfare authorities, more than six weeks after they were pulled from a school for troubled teens because of abuse allegations.
The boys were attending Atlantis Leadership Academy in Treasure Beach, along the island’s south coast, which advertises itself as a faith-based school serving teenagers who are struggling with substance abuse, anxiety disorders and defiant behavior.
Then, according to an email the Jamaican Child Protection and Family Services Agency sent parents last month, the agency received information that children at the program “were being mistreated, amounting to abuse,” and as a result had removed them. The agency planned to work with state child protection services to return the boys to the U.S., according to the email, which a parent shared with NBC News.
The children are being held in Jamaican group homes, according to attorneys working on their behalf.
The Child Protection and Family Services Agency in Jamaica did not elaborate on the type of alleged abuse and said it cannot comment due to the ongoing investigation. It’s unclear how the allegations came to light.
Atlantis Leadership Academy did not respond to requests for comment. In a letter to parents, Randall Cook, the program’s director, said: “With our reputation and transparency, no one could believe something like this could have occurred, nor that we are in any way an abusive organization.”
Tarah Fleischman, 59, whose special needs son, Cody, is among the boys pulled from the academy, said she’s frustrated by the long wait to bring her son home to Wisconsin and upset by the mistreatment she alleges her son faced there.
Cody, 16, who is diagnosed with Tourette syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder and ADHD, arrived at Atlantis last May and has lost a significant amount of weight since then, she said. Fleischman was not allowed to speak to Cody while he was at Atlantis, but she was able to see him for about an hour last week, and he told her that he had been beaten at the school, according to Fleischman and an advocate who was present.
She regrets sending Cody to the school, which she said quickly agreed to enroll him last spring after several other programs rejected him. She had hoped placing Cody at Atlantis would help him learn to control his aggressive outbursts, and keep both her son and her family safe.
“I’m just so frustrated with the system,” she said. “Unfortunately, I was a desperate mother who got preyed upon.”
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The situation has alarmed youth rights advocates who have previously raised concerns that many facilities that are part of the so-called troubled teen industry in the U.S. operate with limited oversight. That has allowed abuse to go unchecked for years in some schools before authorities intervene. State and local agencies have even less oversight when children are sent abroad.
ReplyDelete“This is as hidden as it gets,” said Chelsea Maldonado, a consultant with 11:11 Media Impact, the charitable arm of Paris Hilton’s media company, who has been arranging legal assistance for the children and met with Fleischman and Cody last week.
Atlantis Leadership Academy is a small, private facility for boys that lists no accreditation on its website. Cook, an American who previously worked as a consultant for troubled teen programs domestically, established the school in 2016, according to its Yelp page, and registered it as a business in Idaho. The program charged parents as much as $9,800 a month in tuition, records show, and said it would take in boys that others had rejected.
The Child Protection and Family Services Agency removed the boys on Feb. 8. A week later, a judge in Jamaica denied the program’s request to return the boys and has ordered the school to turn over the students’ belongings, according to an email to parents from the U.S. Embassy.
In a Feb. 27 letter to parents, Cook said that he was “working our back channels” and collecting signatures from locals to show that “we are a good program and need to remain in the community as is.”
The State Department declined to comment. The U.S. Embassy in Kingston, Jamaica, also declined to comment on the case, but said it works with local authorities to ensure that the child welfare facilities where American children are held “remain as safe and comfortable as possible.”
At the most recent court hearing, on March 15, the abuse allegations were not discussed, according to Fleischman and two attorneys who attended. The seven boys were present but were not called upon to speak, and the judge ordered another hearing to take place in April.
Fleischman said she learned that her son and others had been taken from the facility when one of the boys called her on Feb. 14. In a recording of the call, which she shared with NBC News, one of the boys told her Cody was frequently beaten by the staff at Atlantis Leadership Academy and sometimes went days without food.
“It just feels so surreal,” she said. “I still can’t believe that this happened.”
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She had already been growing concerned about Cody. Her only contact with him was the photos that Atlantis staff sent her, which showed Cody outside during field trips and picking up trash on the beach. She was alarmed by how pale and thin he appeared.
ReplyDeleteFleischman called the U.S. Embassy, which she said told her its role would largely be as an observer as the Jamaican legal process played out and provided her with a list of Jamaican attorneys.
She then sought help on forums for people who had been placed at abusive youth facilities. She got in touch with Maldonado, who became an advocate after her experience at Tranquility Bay, a troubled teen program in Jamaica that shut down in 2009 following abuse allegations. Maldonado connected Fleischman with attorneys who have handled child abuse cases and flew to Jamaica to assist.
“These children were sent to a foreign country where they weren’t allowed to call or talk to anyone,” Maldonado said. “And somehow, because of one parent reaching out to the survivor community, we were able to discover it and find out what’s been going on down here and actually advocate for these children.”
Fleischman said she was the only parent present at the March 15 hearing. When she met with Cody afterward, he asked why she sent him there.
“I just kept saying I’m sorry,” she said. “And then one time he says, ‘I know, Mom, I know.’ So that’s hard to live with — that guilt.”
It’s unclear when Cody may return to Wisconsin. Fleischman said the first time she spoke with her local social services agency was last week, after she called several times to ask about next steps.
The Marathon County Department of Social Services, in Wausau, Wisconsin, told both Fleischman and NBC News it has not heard from Jamaican authorities regarding Atlantis Leadership Academy. The department declined to comment further, citing privacy restrictions.
The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families said it is “not aware” of contact from Jamaican authorities.
see the links and photos embedded in this article at:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jamaica-troubled-teen-abuse-allegations-atlantis-leadership-academy-rcna144426#amp_tf
Problems at programs for troubled youth
Two programs in Wyoming were accused of forcing teens to do heavy farm work and using humiliating punishments.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wyoming-christian-troubled-teen-ranches-abuse-rcna46112
Utah officials ordered a for-profit academy to shut down after children died in its care.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/diamond-ranch-academy-ordered-shut-child-death-rcna94297
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/taylor-goodridge-diamond-ranch-academy-utah-rcna66069
Former campers described harsh introductions to a North Carolina wilderness camp where a boy recently died.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trails-carolina-wilderness-camp-death-rcna139942
A Private School Promised to Help Troubled Kids. Instead, Some Say, It Was a Nightmare
ReplyDeleteThe New School in Delaware was supposed to provide a safe haven — but some parents and kids allege it was more like a “cult”
by Ed Dickson, Rolling Stone April 23, 2024
In 2004, Bonnie Allen was a 12-year-old girl in Wilmington, Delaware, who loved Spongebob Squarepants, Lizzie McGuire, and the Grease soundtrack. She had fine, corn-colored hair she regularly chopped up and dyed jet black or Elmo red, and a grin that stretched across the entire bottom half of her face, showing off her braces. She was an early-aughts “scene kid” before anyone else in her town knew that was a thing, showing up to church choir practice in fishnets and miniskirts and combat boots. “All of us were wearing Abercrombie & Fitch and Aeropostale,” says her friend Andrea Higgins. “She didn’t feel like she had to dress that way. She wanted to be herself. ”
From early on in her adolescence, Bonnie struggled with mental health issues. Psychiatrists were hesitant to officially diagnose her due to how young she was, but bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder were floated around at various points. “We were very frustrated with different therapists, psychologists. Nothing seemed to work with her or reach her,” recalls Tony Allen, her father.
Bonnie loved to sing and was briefly enrolled at a performing arts school, where she’d “moved people to tears” with her audition song of the national anthem, says Evie Conner, her friend and former classmate. But she was bullied at the school, and after getting into a physical altercation with an older female student, Bonnie’s parents decided to pull her out and look for alternative options. Tony doesn’t remember how, but somehow, he stumbled on the New School.
A sprawling, ramshackle white clapboard Victorian in Newark, Delaware, with Kinex and Nerf guns piling up in the halls and an overgrown yard out front, the New School (which has no connection to the progressive university of the same name based in New York City) was a private institution with an extremely small student body — under 50 kids were enrolled at any given time, from five to 19, according to former students. It advocated for a totally revolutionary approach to education: no grades, no classes, and even no teachers, instead calling supervising adults simply “staff members.” Kids filtered in and out of classrooms, with kids of all ages sitting in the same room and discussing Socratic theory, for example. There was even at one point a smokers’ court for the older kids, a patio outside by the garage. The place was unorganized and unorthodox, and Bonnie fell in love with it instantly.
The Allens signed Bonnie up in the fall of 2004, hopeful it could provide the kind of environment where their only daughter could finally thrive. There was at least one red flag, Tony remembers: At one point, during an early conversation with founder Melanie Hiner, he mentioned his daughter’s potential bipolar diagnosis, and found Hiner’s reaction dismissive at best. “She said, ‘Oh, you could probably call any kid bipolar at that age.’ She kind of brushed it off,” Tony says. “She didn’t take it seriously.”
Still, the Allens were desperate, and so was Bonnie. “She was ready to have a fresh start and be somewhere she was accepted for who she was, and not have her experience be ruined by stories, or people slut-shaming her,” Higgins remembers. “The New School appealed to her because it was a place where she could essentially be herself.”
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When Hiner, a former private-school teacher with a broad smile and waist-length strawberry-blond hair, initially founded the New School in the mid-1990s, she advertised it as a haven for free thinkers and independent minds, kids who didn’t necessarily fit into the circumscribed boxes to which traditional educators adhered. “We are different in that we are not bureaucratic, prescriptive, or therapeutic,” a representative for the New School said in a statement to Rolling Stone, signed “the students and staff of the New School.”
ReplyDeleteIn the statement, the representative referred to the New School as a “small day school” that has “served many families with good results.… Children here learn, assisted by adult staff members” who are reappointed annually by vote among current students’ families every year. “Formal and informal contacts between staff and parents are plentiful.”
According to the most recent version of the New School website, tuition costs about $7,500 a year for the first child enrolled — less than the average Delaware private school, and with the benefit of individual attention for students. It didn’t have grade levels in the traditional sense, grouping kids of all ages in the same classrooms based on shared interests; an eight-year-old with a head for robotics, for instance, could study the subject with a 15-year-old. To graduate, students had to submit a thesis for approval by a small committee of staff members, leading to only a handful of graduates per year.
Parents and kids alike say the school was marketed as something of a bastion of progressive education for those who couldn’t hack it in a more traditional environment. They say they were charmed by the vision of self-sufficiency and independence, says one parent who requested not to be named. “It was fabulous, even better than a Montessori school,” she says. “Some kids slip between the cracks. And they thrived at this place.”
Between the late 1990s and 2012, however, according to more than a dozen former students and parents associated with the school, the New School went from being a progressive, albeit unorthodox, small private school to something completely different. With Hiner’s husband, a charismatic former lawyer named “Big John” Hiner, at its helm, the New School allegedly devolved into a dilapidated, rat-feces-infested institution devoid of adult supervision, where troubled and impressionable young students were inculcated with misogynistic and homophobic ideology.
By 2020, with enrollment declining and the New School community becoming increasingly insular, this ideology would lead one student to violence, according to court documents, allegedly resulting in an FBI investigation. Alumni also came together on social media to commune about their shared experiences, trying to process how the crunchy, quirky utopia they had been sold had metamorphosed into what some described as a “cult.” Many of them had never spoken about their experiences before with other family members, citing the school’s policy of confidentiality.
In a letter sent to Rolling Stone, the Hiners and the New School community declined to answer questions. “Though we do not know all of your motivations, we are confident that prime among them is amusing your readers with an emotive story,” the letter read. “In contrast, high among our interests is the protection of the privacy and autonomy of our students and their families, past and present.” The letter also states that while the New School is “not for everyone,” “we think that everyone who has joined us has gained some good from their time here, however long or short.”
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The former students and parents who spoke with Rolling Stone, however, disagree. “It was advertised as a democratic free school for free thinkers and independent minds,” recalls one former student, Elena, who requested to be identified by a pseudonym and who attended between 2008 and 2011. “You’d probably think it was a hippie, live-laugh-love, flower-child school. In reality, it was anything but.”
ReplyDeleteACCORDING TO THE NEW SCHOOL WEBSITE, Melanie Hiner came up with the idea for the New School, which she co-founded with a fellow educator, when she was just nine, after reading Louisa May Alcott’s book Little Men, which follows heroine Jo March founding a school for boys. The book, Hiner wrote, “led me to say, ‘I’m going to start a school where people can learn what they want to learn.’”
“She really had this way of selling the school and talking about how good it was going to be, and she’s good at speaking with kids in a way where they hear the message she wants them to hear,” recalls former student Wayne Flenniken, who was heavily involved, alongside his mom, Trebs Thompson, in the New School in the early 2000s. “You feel listened to when she talks to you.”
Due to its progressive educational values, the school, which moved from its location in the picturesque Victorian to a sprawling 25-acre farm in 2018, tended to attract a mixture of kids with parents seeking out a more individualized, free-wheeling learning environment, as well as children with learning disabilities or behavioral and emotional issues who had difficulties adapting to mainstream schools. “A lot of us were troubled kids,” says Carly Munroe, 35, who attended between 2003 and 2007.
The New School was primarily defined by its lack of conventional structure. There were rules governing the school, but they were authored in collaboration with students and outlined in a New School “lawbook.” Any disciplinary measures were decided communally via a tribunal process called the Judicial Committee, or JC, in which students of all ages worked together to determine punishments for various infractions.
The lack of structure offered by the New School could be beneficial to some kids who had the necessary resources and familial support to be more self-directed, former students and parents say. But from the school’s early years, many students just used the absence of a strict curriculum as an opportunity to goof off. Some older students would hang out by the smokers’ court all day, while other kids would play video games.
The lack of adult supervision also fostered an environment of drug use, sexual activity, and even violence, multiple former students claim. Teenage students would go off into the woods to get high, then grab a bagel at the shopping complex down the road before coming back into the building, clearly under the influence. Other students remember there briefly being a “Thunderdome” fight club in a geodesic dome in the school’s back yard, where students would occasionally get into physical altercations. “The recurring theme was ‘You don’t stop people from doing stuff at school,’” recalls Jared, 36, whose name has been changed for his privacy, and who attended in 2005.
Very quickly, students who came to the New School realized it was governed by a culture of secrecy and insularity. Two former students tell Rolling Stone that one of the primary rules in the “lawbook” was confidentiality. “The example they would use is ‘Zach plays video games all day. And that’s how Zack learns. And if you tell his mom that he’s playing video games all day, she’s gonna think he’s just wasting her time and pull him out,’” Munroe explains. “‘So in order to learn the way you want to learn, confidentiality is necessary.’ It was painted as protecting us.”
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Sometimes, however, this code of silence apparently manifested itself in children withholding information about their own safety or the safety of others from their parents — and being reprimanded if they failed to do so. One student who asked to remain anonymous claims they were physically attacked by an older male student when they were 11 years old, who they allege hit with a metal pipe. When they told their parents about the incident, they say, Hiner yelled at them, telling them that disputes were supposed to be handled internally. (They say the boy was not disciplined; another student who attended the New School at the same time was able to confirm this student’s account.)
ReplyDeleteThe lack of adult supervision also meant that drug use was not uncommon at the school, says Jason, who we are referring to by another name due to his concerns about professional reprisal: “The neglect of the staff members when it came to us using drugs was pretty phenomenal.” In response to questions about drug use and lax supervision at school, the New School said, in a letter signed by the students and the staff, “for the record, we deny any and all nefarious innuendos which your bulleted queries may seem to suggest.”
It was around the early 2000s, Jason and other students say, that a more authoritative presence started spending more time at the school: Melanie’s husband, John, a.k.a. “Big John.” A large, hulking man in his forties with a bushy gray beard, he was an intimidating presence, perfectly suited to perform the role of the imperious Oberon in the school’s annual Midsummer Night’s Dream festival. A former lawyer, Hiner was suspended from practicing law in Delaware in 2002 for, among other reasons, “failing to file tax returns and pay taxes; failing to maintain proper books and records,” “failing in his representation of a client by failing to represent the client diligently,” and “failing to deliver the client funds,” according to court documents. (A representative for the Supreme Court of Delaware says Hiner never filed for reinstatement and that his license is still considered suspended; Hiner did not respond to questions about his law license.)
Prior to his suspension, Hiner was known for being an occasional presence at school spaghetti dinners, where he spouted libertarian, anti-establishment theories, such as that the government was morally responsible for 9/11, remembers Peter Douthwaite, a student in the early-2000s who briefly lived with the Hiners. “He liked to sit in a room and be the commander of attention and spread his views,” he says. (The New School declined to comment.)
After he stopped practicing law, however, John started spending much more time at the New School. He was an imposing presence, students remember, and was a frequent staple at the various tribunals, which were intended to discipline students with behavioral infractions. Maura MacNamara, a student who attended the New School around 2005, recalls playing with a toy gun during one tribunal and Big John demanding that she stop. (MacNamara is trans and was presenting as male at the time.) When she refused, she alleges, Big John “got pissed and choke-slammed me up against the wall and took it from my hand.”
“He’s a big guy,” says MacNamara. “He was, I don’t know, 400 pounds. So once he has you pinned against the wall, there’s not anything a 15-year-old kid who is only probably 120 pounds can do.” (Two former students, including Munroe and Jared, recall witnessing this specific incident.) MacNamara told her father, who called the police. “The police told us that [John] said that he runs the school and he had the right to do the things he did and restrain her,” her father recalled. MacNamara was pulled out of the school shortly thereafter. (The Hiners declined to answer questions about this alleged incident; a public-information officer for the Newark Police Department declined to provide a police report or any additional information regarding the alleged complaint.)
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One of Hiner’s initial roles was teaching Overcoming Sex, which was similar to a sex-ed class, former students say, but evolved into a platform for Big John to pontificate on his views, which were becoming increasingly conservative. Big John would rant about subjects like the dangers of homosexuality, or make students watch Kesha music videos and criticize her makeup or the way she dressed. “He was against things seen as promiscuous, or hedonistic,” says Elena.
ReplyDeleteDespite his conservative views on sex, Big John was known for being hands-on with female students, having them sit on his lap at meetings or offering parents and students massages on his massage table in the music room, telling them he was officially licensed. (Records show that Hiner did indeed receive a massage-therapy license in Delaware in 1997, which has since expired.) He was also notorious for spending time with particular female students, including, according to multiple students, one then-underage girl who regularly brought him meals, brushed his hair, and sat in his lap. (The student did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Trebs Thompson, the mother of former student Wayne Flemmiken, was once horrified to walk in on this student “straddling” him, though she did not bring it up to Melanie Hiner at the time. “It was so weird that I wanted to believe there was something innocent, like I was wrong, somehow,” she says. “Like it wasn’t really bad. I tried to justify it to myself.”
Most of this behavior was written off as Big John being affectionate with the kids. In fact, at least one parent who spoke to Rolling Stone said they saw it as an asset: “I liked that he gave the little ones hugs,” she says. “[I] just thought the New School was a friendly place to be.”
But there were other instances of inappropriate comments made by Big John that were harder to dismiss, sources tell Rolling Stone. Both Douthwaite and Thompson say they heard Big John making comments about sex with children on at least one occasion. “He was very loudly giving his opinion that he found it very outrageous that the default attitude toward having sex with children is to be against it,” Douthwaite says. “He thought there was no firm evidence it actually harmed them.” (The New School declined to comment about any specific allegations.)
Douthwaite lived with the Hiners from September 2002 through the spring of 2003 after his parents moved to Florida, so he could finish the school year. During that time, he says, he was walking behind Hiner’s laptop when he saw a nude image of a young girl, who he estimated to be about five years old, on the monitor. After telling his parents, they pulled him out of school and told him to report the incident to the police, which he did.
A family member of Douthwaite’s and a friend confirm he told them about seeing the image at the time. The family member confirms they placed a call to Newark police, who then connected them to the FBI. Newark police declined to provide a copy of Douthwaite’s statement. A FOIA request for Hiner’s records was also rejected, on the grounds that they were “part of investigatory files compiled for civil or criminal law-enforcement purposes, including pending investigative files,” according to the Newark PD.
Douthwaite says he regrets that nothing ever came of the call to the police, adding that he was highly intimidated by Big John at the time. “Almost no one who was a student at the time would have had the bravery” to go against him, he says. “Even if you did, he was such a sophisticated speaker that you knew what he would do. He would engage in sophistry and justify it and outsmart you. He is really good at that.”
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There was also a larger cultural shift going on at the New School, which multiple students say was primarily spearheaded by Big John. The school had never advertised itself as politically or religiously affiliated, but around the time that Big John became more of a presence at the school, the Hiners, who are Catholic, started encouraging some students to come to church with them every Sunday, say Elena and Munroe. While church was not mandatory, it was viewed by some students as a way to gain purchase inside the Hiners’ inner circle and to improve their chances of having them approve their final thesis, which was a requirement for graduation. And former parents and students say it didn’t take long for the Hiners’ “weird interpretation of the Catholic faith,” as Munroe puts it, to start seeping into the ideology of the entire school.
ReplyDelete“It wasn’t any version of Catholicism I recognized, that’s for sure,” says one former student. “I’m talking trad Catholic: lace veils for women when they pray, Bible and mass in Latin, trying to bring back pre-Vatican II-type stuff.”
When homosexuality was discussed on school grounds, it was in the context of Big John saying gay sex was “barbarous” and that AIDS was “a punishment sent from God,” says one student who asked not to be named, who was closeted at the time. “Those things made me feel like I had to be on guard and made me feel absolutely not comfortable to discuss my sexuality or explore it or tell anybody about it,” he says. (Two other students who spoke to Rolling Stone confirmed Hiner had a history of making homophobic comments.)
The evils of abortion were also topics of conversation, multiple students tell Rolling Stone. Elena says that during her time at the school, the Hiners would occasionally cheer on students who picketed outside of Planned Parenthood, and shared a list of brands to boycott based on their support for stem-cell research. In her sex-ed classes, “we talked a lot about birth control and condoms and how that was one step away from abortion, which was murder,” she says.
Munroe, who had an abortion at the age of 18 while she was a student at the New School, says she sought guidance from Big John afterward; when she mentioned she wanted to have children one day, “he equated me having children and loving them and holding them when they were sad and tucking them in at night — all while I knew I had killed their brother — to being on par with a Nazi guard, spending his days at a concentration camp, killing Jews, and then coming in and tucking his son into bed,” she recalls.
The comparison turned her stomach and led her to hit a “breaking point”: “I left and I didn’t come back,” she says.
WITH SO MANY TEENAGERS RUNNING around in an unsupervised environment, sex would often come up at the New School, though former students say the Hiners’ teachings around sexuality were confusing and often contradictory. The greatest targets of Big John’s ire, former students say, were young female students who were perceived as having been promiscuous. One of these young women was Bonnie Allen, the 12-year-old girl who had struggled with severe mental health issues before attending the New School.
Despite her initial excitement at getting a fresh start, almost immediately Bonnie had problems, says her friend Evie Conner. Conner told Rolling Stone that Bonnie told her that she was “bullied” by students and staff, and when she complained to a staff member about a male student making her uncomfortable, she was told by the staff member to essentially “suck it up,” Conner says. (The staff member did not respond to a request for comment.)
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When Bonnie started hanging around with some older boys at the smokers’ court, the Hiners took notice, particularly Big John, who sources say would frequently berate Bonnie and another female student. “He would call them sluts, whores, tell them they were too sexual, all kinds of awful things,” says Renata, a friend of Bonnie’s who attended the school from 2004 to 2006. (Several students confirmed that Big John used slut-shaming language targeted at a select group of female students.)
ReplyDeleteWhen, for a school project, Renata and Bonnie choreographed a routine to Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl,” Bonnie put on lipstick for the performance. Afterward, Renata says, Big John walked up to Bonnie and said, “Why are you walking around like a little slut?”
“She was a mess. She was crying. It was awful,” she recalls. “She looked so, so, so, sad.”
A few months into Bonnie’s time at the New School, say her father, Tony, she was caught giving oral sex to an older boy on school property. She was just 12. (He could not remember who the boy was, or exactly how old he was.) Tony says that he and his now-ex-wife, who did not respond to requests for comment, were not informed of this by the Hiners or anyone at the New School, instead finding out through one of Bonnie’s friends. Shortly after they learned what allegedly happened, in spring 2005, they pulled Bonnie out of the school without speaking with the Hiners, though he says they hounded him for tuition payments for a few months afterward.
“They were not providing a safe environment. That to me is a breach of contract,” Tony says. “So I didn’t feel like we owed them anything.”
Bonnie did not tell her friends outside of the New School what had happened, or why she had left. When her choir friends, who would regularly come over for sleepovers at the Allens’ house, asked her what had happened, “you could tell from her tone she didn’t want to talk about it very much,” remembers her friend Andrea Higgins. “I just knew it wasn’t what she thought it was supposed to be.”
When Higgins later learned about what had happened with the older boy, she says, her peers framed it as if it had been Bonnie’s fault, “like she was the problem, when the reality is she was a victim,” Higgins says.
BECAUSE OF THE CODE OF SILENCE allegedly governing the New School, the parents who spoke with Rolling Stone say they were not aware of everything that was happening at the school. When they did find out, according to these parents, it was not uncommon for them to pull their kids out midway through the school year, as the Allens had done with Bonnie.
Some parents say they encountered difficulty, however, when their kids didn’t want to leave. When Elena’s father, for instance, pulled his daughter out of the New School after allegedly witnessing Big John give her a massage in his condo’s swimming pool, she initially refused. Even after she agreed to go to public school, she continued to attend church with the Hiners. Eventually, she says, she got the sense that they were trying to create dissonance between her and her parents. When the movie Tangled came out, Elena recalls, she watched it with the Hiners, who mockingly compared her mother to the overbearing, manipulative villain Mother Gothel. “The closer I was to the Hiners and the staff, the further I was from my family,” she says.
Trebs Thompson also noticed that the Hiners had a tendency to encourage kids to stay even after their parents tried to get them out. “At some point it devolved to the point where if you tried to remove your kid from the school, the Hiners would step in and say, ‘Well, that’s OK, you can just stay here with us and keep going to school,’” Thompson says. When she floated the idea of pulling her son Wayne out, he insisted he didn’t want to leave. “I was terrified,” she says. “[I was thinking], ‘Did I want to lose my kid to these people?’” (He eventually left of his own volition in 2004.)
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Thompson says she considered calling the authorities on the school to try to get it shut down. (The school is not formally accredited, but this is not unusual, as private schools are not required to be licensed under the Delaware DOE.) But she decided against it, focusing instead on calling the parents she knew to try to get them to leave. “We knew we’d be destabilizing the safe haven some kids had,” she says.
ReplyDeleteMost former New School students who Rolling Stone spoke to did not continue to be involved with the community, largely filing away their experiences with the school as an unpleasant memory. Former students would occasionally hear tidbits of information from the alumni community — that the school had moved to another location, for instance, and started running a co-op on a farm, headed by a former teacher. But few of the alumni thought much about the New School, until they heard about what happened with Samuel Gulick.
At approximately 2:16 a.m. on Jan. 3, 2020, Gulick, a slight 18-year-old with a wispy beard and straw-colored hair, drove to the Planned Parenthood facility in Newark, Delaware, and spray-painted the words “Deus Vult” — Latin for “God wills” — on the front. According to court documents, Gulick threw a lit Molotov cocktail into the front window, which exploded upon impact, causing damage to the window and the front porch. He was arrested the next day and charged with malicious damage of a building and intentional damage to a facility that provides reproductive-health services.
According to court documents reviewed by Rolling Stone, Gulick was a longtime member of the New School community, enrolling at the age of 13 after being home-schooled for most of his life, according to a sentencing memorandum submitted by his attorney, Conor Wilson. He was exactly the type of vulnerable kid that the school had traditionally courted: He had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and had a debilitating speech impediment. He quickly became deeply enmeshed in the New School’s inner circle, getting baptized and developing a “hyperfocused and radicalized fascination with Roman Catholicism,” according to the memorandum. (Wilson declined to comment for this story; phone calls and messages to the Gulick residence went unreturned.)
To outside observers, Gulick seemed diligent and hard-working, volunteering at the co-op on the farm frequently. Yet in reality, “he was going farther inward and was increasingly socially isolated,” according to the memorandum. That’s clear from Gulick’s texts and social media posts cited in the memorandum. A search of his Instagram by the FBI found a history of anti-abortion posts using violent rhetoric, including an infographic with the caption, “The Nazis said killing millions of Jews was a national health issue. Democrats are using the same excuse to kill American children.” In another text, he referred to Planned Parenthood employees as “murderous bastards who in my opinion should be shot.”
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In court documents, Wilson argued that while Gulick’s actions were not directed by the New School, they were intended to impress New School leadership. In 2022, after spending 26 months in prison, Gulick was sentenced to time served followed by three years of court-supervised probation and therapy. This sentence was in part due to his young age and his developmental issues, according to court documents. Though the conditions of Gulick’s sentence prohibited him from contacting the Hiners, the judge did receive a letter submitted by Melanie Hiner attesting to Gulick’s character: “Please release Sam to the custody of his loving family, the school that cares so much for him, to his church, and to the volunteer work he does for us all,” she wrote in the letter. “We will do everything we can to keep him secure and support him through this.”
ReplyDeletePrompted by Gulick’s arrest, many New School alumni connected on Facebook to start a private group, aptly dubbed “The Smokers’ Court.” For parents like Thompson, the Facebook group has brought about something of a moment of personal reckoning, particularly after speaking with female alumni from the group who had been made uncomfortable by Big John or the general environment of shame and bullying at the school. She wonders what could have been prevented had she spoken up earlier. “I look back on it and I’m like, ‘Why did I not have better judgment?’” she says.
The New School appears to still be operational, though the Facebook page for the school was last updated in December 2017, and less than 30 students currently attend the school, according to Gulick’s 2022 sentencing memorandum and US News and World Report.
Many of the alumni Rolling Stone spoke with said that shortly after joining the group, they were contacted by the FBI, who reached out in the summer of 2022. When reached for comment, a representative for the FBI said, “We don’t confirm or deny or give updates on specific investigations.” The FBI also rejected a FOIA requesting records of an investigation into the New School filed by Rolling Stone.
Due to the abrupt mid-semester departures of many former New School students, and the fact that many attended before the advent of social media, alumni used the Smokers’ Court group as an opportunity to find students who had left during their time there. One name that was frequently floated around was Bonnie Allen’s. Few people had heard from her in the two decades following her departure from the New School, and there was virtually no information about her online.
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According to her father and Andrea Higgins, Bonnie’s former best friend, Bonnie was briefly enrolled in a local public middle school after she left the New School, and was suspended shortly after having a violent altercation with a female student. Not long afterward, she ran away from home. Higgins spotted her one morning in downtown Wilmington, miles from her house, sitting outside of a corner store. Higgins invited Bonnie back to her apartment, where she took a nap and showered. When her parents called Bonnie’s parents to let them know where she was, Bonnie panicked; by the time her parents arrived to pick her up, she was gone.
ReplyDeleteSeveral days later, Tony Allen says, Bonnie’s mother found her in downtown Wilmington, and she called the police after Bonnie refused to get in the car. They later discovered she had pot and heroin in her bag. From there, Bonnie went to an in-patient rehab, then to a residential treatment facility for troubled teens. “We really didn’t want her to come home,” he says. “We did not feel like we could keep her safe.”
When Bonnie finally came home in 2006, she seemed to be doing better, says Higgins: “She was a bit more mellow. She was like, ‘I am still trying to figure stuff out.’ Shortly after seeing her, I found out she threw herself in front of a car.”
Bonnie’s attempt to take her own life was on July 30, 2006. She survived, but was in a coma for 10 months. Higgins and her friends would get updates from the Allens; some days were good, some days were not so good. “She was suffering more than she was progressing,” Higgins says. On May 27, 2007, Bonnie’s parents decided to take her off life support. She was just 15.
When reached for comment about Allen’s death, the New School said, “It is painful when a student or former student commits a crime or meets [an] untimely death. Sadly those who try to help children achieve maturity have always faced such horrors.”
But when Tony Allen looks back on those last years of his daughter’s life, particularly her time at the New School, it’s with intense regret. “Our thought was ‘This might be something that would click with her, something that would work. She might be able to find herself in this different environment,’” he says.
He does not blame the New School for what happened to Bonnie, or for her death. But, he says, “we were hoping they would give her some support and guidance. And that did not happen.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/delaware-new-school-alleged-abuse-bullying-students-1235008252/
New Senate Report Blasts Residential Treatment Facilities That “Treat Children as Payouts”
ReplyDeleteKids experienced systemic abuse and neglect at the hands of four of the nation’s largest behavioral health providers.
by Julia Lurie, Mother Jones June 12, 2024
The Senate Finance Committee released on Wednesday the findings of a two-year investigation that revealed widespread abuse and neglect at residential treatment facilities attended by thousands of children each year. The report, which looked at four of the nation’s largest behavioral health providers—Universal Health Services (UHS), Acadia Healthcare, Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health, and Vivant Behavioral Healthcare—detailed a system that “optimizes profit over the wellbeing and safety of children” and incentivizes facilities to “treat children as payouts.”
The companies capitalize on per diem payments from Medicaid and other sources of taxpayer dollars by filling large facilities to capacity with children—many of whom are sent by the child welfare, juvenile justice, and educational systems—while reducing the number and quality of staff, the report found. As a result, children suffer physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of staff and peers; experience improperly executed uses of physical restraint and seclusion; and receive inadequate behavioral health treatment.
The 136-page report details graphic cases of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, mostly at facilities owned by UHS and Acadia, both of which are publicly traded companies.
“The experiences and trauma these kids are left with read like something out of a horror novel, and I’ll just mention a few,” said committee chair Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in a statement. He continued:
One facility routinely restrained children, drugged them, and placed them in seclusion, in clear violations of federal rules.
Another child ran away from his program in the middle of the night and was fatally struck by a truck. The staff at the facility tried to cover up their neglect and falsified documents about the child’s whereabouts.
Another child was sexually abused by a staffer on an ongoing basis. When the facility caught onto the abuse, instead of firing the staffer, they simply moved them to a different wing of the same facility and each night, the staffer returned to the child’s window to say goodnight.
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The report urges the companies to comply with existing federal regulations and calls on states as well as federal agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to increase oversight. Wyden noted that he plans to introduce legislation in the coming months to raise safety standards and increase oversight enforcement, but he stopped short of providing details.
ReplyDeleteThe Senate report builds on a long history of government and media investigations into abuse and neglect at treatment facilities for children. A yearlong Mother Jones investigation into UHS, a Fortune 500 company and the nation’s largest psychiatric hospital chain, found thousands of foster children have been sent to the company’s facilities in recent years, where they typically stay for weeks or months, often leaving far worse off than when they arrived.
As we noted in a summary of our story:
Our investigation tells the story of Katrina Edwards, a former foster child in Alaska who spent more than three years during her adolescence at facilities owned by UHS, including 891 nights at North Star Behavioral Health in Anchorage. Medical and court records show that she was repeatedly physically restrained, forcibly injected with a sedative, held in seclusion, and put on potent psychiatric medications. At times, she stayed at North Star for months after she was ready for discharge, simply because there was no foster home available for her. “They got a lot of money from me,” Edwards says. She’s right: Alaska’s Medicaid program paid more than half a million dollars for Edwards’ care at UHS facilities.
Foster children from 38 states were admitted to the company’s psychiatric facilities more than 36,000 times between 2017 and 2022. Over the same period, 31 states spent more than $600 million on the treatment of foster children at the company’s facilities. As one expert put it, to UHS and its competitors, foster kids are a “gold mine.”
The company’s CEO, Marc Miller, declined an invitation from the Senate committee to testify at a hearing on Wednesday. In a letter obtained by NBC News, the company said it had already provided the committee with 12,000 pages of documents, and it worried that the hearing would present an “incomplete picture of the care and treatment” at the company’s facilities.
to see the links embedded in this article go to:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/06/senate-investigation-behavioral-health-residential-treatment-universal-health-services-uhs-acadia-wyden/
‘It was a cult’: Traumatizing troubled teens
ReplyDeleteAn Arizona facility for troubled teens was just hit with a $2.5 million judgment for fraud
By: Jerod MacDonald-Evoy - AZ Mirror July 15, 2024
Outside the small town of Mayer, Arizona, 14-year-old Katie Farran and other teenage girls were engaging in a ritual they had done many times before.
At the Spring Ridge Academy, Farran and others gathered in a room for “Feedback Group,” a pseudo-group therapy that involves shouting grievances at other participants.
The teenage girls were encouraged to participate, told they needed to have things to say to their peers, who were there for reasons ranging from substance abuse, eating disorders or simply being victims of bad parenting.
“It was something you had to do,” Farran, now 39, said in an interview with the Arizona Mirror. “It was really humiliating to be called out in front of everybody.”
This style of “therapy” was born in the late 1950s, connected to a group known to many as a cult and connected to a string of crimes including attempted murder.
Now Spring Ridge Academy is facing legal repercussions after a mother of one of those teenagers filed a federal lawsuit claiming fraud, among other things, and a jury awarded her $2.5 million. But for survivors of Spring Ridge Academy and similar facilities for so-called troubled teens, the victory is just one small step towards greater accountability.
But Spring Ridge Academy, which closed in 2023, is just one part of a larger ecosystem, one that continues to use outdated therapies and procedures born out of a cult from the 1950s. And it’s one that still has roots in Arizona.
“It is easy for people to kind of overlook us and think, ‘Oh, they were just kids,’ or especially, ‘Oh, they were just messed up kids,’ and not take us seriously,” Farran said. “I hope that people start listening.”
From cult to therapy
In 1958, Charles “Chuck” Dederich created Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program intended to combat the rising heroin addictions of the era.
By the late 1960s, the group was attracting media attention and building a fanbase in Hollywood, culminating in a feature film starring Chuck Connors and Edmond O’Brien, filmed at their actual headquarters in Santa Monica.
Synanon began making Dederich $10 million a year as its popularity grew. At the heart of the program was something called “The Game.”
The Game was presented as a therapeutic tool, a form of group therapy in which members humiliated each other and were encouraged to expose each other’s weaknesses and flaws.
The Game is a form of “attack therapy,” a treatment that studies have since found leads to lasting psychological damage. Its efficacy even in the short term is questionable, as other research concluded it even drove some alcoholics to drink more. As Synanon grew, so did the group’s control over those in its care.
By the 1970s, women in Synanon were required to shave their heads, married couples were forced to break up and find new partners, men were given forced vasectomies and some pregnant women were given abortions against their will.
As Synanon grew, so did its legal troubles. Dederich ordered two of his followers to assassinate a critic — the rattlesnake they planted in the man’s mailbox bit him, but he survived — and there were violent assaults against members and those who wanted to free loved ones from Synanon’s grasp. The final nail in the coffin for the organization came in the 1990s, when the Internal Revenue Service revoked its tax-exempt status, ordering the organization to pay $17 million in back taxes.
Dederich was no longer at the helm after the attempted murder, which landed him probation. Bankrupt and without a leader, Synanon dissolved in 1991.
But its legacy remained.
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Other groups popped up in its place, using similar tactics. Former followers branched off into different industries and soon a whole industry would emerge based on many of its initial teachings.
ReplyDeleteThe Troubled Teen Industry
It was December 2003 and Nora Ash was about to experience something called “gooning.”
Gooning is a form of legal kidnapping utilized by what is colloquially referred to as the “Troubled Teen Industry,” or TTI for short. Big men show up at your house, often in the middle of the night, and whisk you away without telling you anything.
Ash was taken from her home in Salt Lake City to a place called Outback Wilderness in the middle of nowhere Utah. The state was being hit by a blizzard that would eventually claim the lives of five people.
At Outback Wilderness, there was nine feet of snow on the ground at a facility that aimed to teach kids “self reliance.” In order to have the privilege to eat, the teenagers first had to make a spoon from scratch, Ash said.
Due to the storm, she was unable to get the things necessary to make her spoon for a day and a half.
Ash, who was 16 at the time, was sent to Outback Wilderness by her parents because she had interest in an older boy. Like many teenagers, she also snuck the occasional drink or smoked marijuana, something she shared with many of the teens sent to TTI facilities.
Outback Wilderness was a type of camp that is popular in the troubled teen industry. The “troubled teens” are forced to live in a wilderness setting, something sold to parents as a “tough love” solution for their teens.
Arizona has its own wilderness programs. Some have even had their own time in the limelight.
Family vloggers Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt were sentenced earlier this year to prison for child abuse. But before Franke’s children were taken away from the abuse, they were being sent to Anasazi, a wilderness program based out of Mesa.
The wilderness programs follow similar programs as those in Synanon and other troubled teen groups.
“Most kids get put in programs because they have trauma somewhere that wasn’t addressed earlier on,” Ash said. She now spends her time advocating against these facilities and trying to steer parents away from sending their kids to them.
“Just about every TTI program is centered on Synanon practices,” Ash said.
In 1999, Farran was learning just what those practices were while at Spring Ridge Academy. Just before going there, she was at a wilderness program and had been told she’d be going home, only to discover she had been sent to the Mayer facility instead.
“It was absolutely devastating, because I never knew exactly how long I was going to be there,” Farran said of the transition from one facility to the next. Many of the programs say they will last between six and nine months, but survivors share similar stories of aging out of the programs.
Lifeboats and duct taped towels
One of the exercises that many survivors tell is of taking towels wrapped in duct tape and hitting them against chairs. Many times, the teens are asked to imagine what they’re angry at or pretend that they’re hitting their parents. The exercise was sometimes coupled with days-long “retreats” where the teens would engage in other activities, including one Farran remembers vividly from Spring Ridge Academy.
It started with a meditation and visuals of a serene journey on a cruise ship. It was a moment of calm for the teens as they listened to calming music and imagined a different life.
Then the sirens and flashing lights started.
“It jolts you out of it and scares the crap out of you,” Farran said.
Suddenly, everyone was being told the fictional cruise ship they were on was sinking and there were not enough lifeboats for everyone. Each teen got one minute to say why they deserved to live.
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Those who didn’t use the whole minute were chastised for not thinking highly of themselves.
ReplyDeleteBut those who used their whole minute? Well, they must be selfish.
Now the teens had to vote on who in the room would live and who would be left to die on the sinking ship and why, often looking a crying friend in the face as they did so.
The lifeboat exercise was just one of the many different kinds of “therapies” that Farran experienced during her tenure at Spring Ridge Academy. She also experienced the “feedback groups,” in which teens as well as the adults involved in the program would shout their grievances at one another in a style similar to Synanon’s game.
“This is why you’re a piece of sh–, but in a veiled way like you are caring,” Ash said of how they were told to participate in these group attack therapy days.
Many of the facilities also give the teens different “levels” that offer them varying privileges. Farran recalled being told she needed to give more feedback if she ever hoped to rise higher in the Spring Ridge Academy ranks.
“It was a cult in itself,” Farran said of Spring Ridge Academy. And at the head of that cult in Mayer was a woman named Jeannie Courtney.
Repeated investigations
Courtney founded Spring Ridge Academy. Her ex-husband is a man named David Gilcrease.
Gilcrease was a facilitator for a group called LifeSpring, which was created in 1974. Some have described it as a pyramid scheme, while others described it as a cult. Ginni Thomas, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was once a member who began crusading against cults after leaving.
Although Courtney and Gilcrease divorced in 1988, the two often worked together doing LifeSpring seminars until the mid-1990s.
Spring Ridge Academy eventually became Courtney’s main focus. She counted among her employees her son and daughter-in-law, as well as Gilcrease’s new wife.
“Not only did they use cult-like practices, but she was this figurehead,” Farran said, adding that Courtney had an “inner circle” of teen girls who often got special privileges. “I wanted her to approve of me so desperately. That was my driving goal.”
That desire to make Courtney happy led Farran to fully dedicate herself to the program. She described Courtney as charismatic, but with a “very high school mean girl” attitude — someone who would be nice or mean at a moment’s notice.
Towards the end of her stay, the veil began to slip for Farran.
She had worked to try to reach the “honor code,” which gave teens extra privileges. Farran had done absolutely everything she had needed to do, but Courtney still wouldn’t let her into the “inner circle.”
“That kind of opened my eyes a little bit,” Farran said. She tried to tell her parents in her letters home, but those were read by staff and her phone calls were always monitored. Her parents also made it very clear that she would not be leaving anytime soon.
Farran’s story is similar to the one told by Kimberly Sweidy, the mother who successfully sued Spring Ridge Academy for fraud.
In her 200-plus-page lawsuit, Sweidy describes much of the same type of abuse and manipulation seen by former Spring Ridge Academy residents. Sweidy tried to get her daughter back from the program, only to have the program go around her to her ex-husband to ensure her daughter stayed.
Sweidy and her family were paying Spring Ridge Academy $9,000 a month in tuition.
Spring Ridge Academy was the focus of several investigations by the Arizona Department of Health Services during the 16 years it was open. It officially closed its doors in 2023, however, Courtney has filed for a business license for what appears to be a new program in Prescott.
Courtney and Spring Ridge Academy’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment or a request for an interview for this story.
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The Arizona Department of Health Services cited the facility for lacking critical documentation and not preventing a teen from trying to commit suicide.
ReplyDelete“I don’t have a plan and I think about it 66% of the time,” the teen said in an assessment form reviewed by ADHS. The form also noted that the teen had said they had been “cutting ankles, wrist, hip with whatever sharp thing I find in the moment.”
The teen attempted suicide multiple times. Another teen resident at Spring Ridge Academy told ADHS investigators that the suicidal teen had told multiple people they had intended to kill themselves.
In total, the department found two administrative violations, two medication service violations, two emergency and safety standard violations, one opioid prescribing violation, two quality management violations, two environmental standards violations and two behavioral health services violations.
Life after
The troubled teen industry has been facing intense scrutiny. Last month, socialite Paris Hilton told a congressional committee her stories of abuse within the system. And multiple documentary films have been drawing more eyes to the industry than ever before.
But what of those still inside and those who may have gotten out of a place like Spring Ridge Academy or Outback Wilderness?
“Keep your head down, do what they say until you get out,” Farran said to those who may still be in a place like Spring Ridge Academy. “Know that it will be OK and there is a whole community that will support you.”
Many survivors, including Farran and Ash, have found comfort in the communities online that have grown out of the troubled teen industry. They share their traumas, give advice for how to move on and advocate for change in the industry.
Farran said that the trauma of a place like that can be hard to shake. She recalled a business trip she took where she felt she had to ask permission to leave the hotel, a reminder of her days at Spring Ridge Academy.
For Ash, it’s about not only educating parents but trying to reach workers on the inside who may think they’re doing right by the children but are just a part of a “larger machine.”
“By the time they see what is actually going on, they stay ’cause they feel they are the only way to prevent what is happening to these kids,” Ash said of some of the workers she’s spoken to.
Both Farran and Ash also stress the importance of not forgetting those who have died at these facilities.
In Arizona, there have been multiple deaths attributed to troubled teen facilities, along with shocking footage of abuse.
But survivors are more hopeful than ever that real change may be coming, whether that be through legislation that prevents “gooning” or by more people becoming aware of the situations at some of these facilities.
However, the industry has been fighting back.
The lobbying arm of many of these organizations, the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs, or NATSAP, has been pushing legislation in states across the nation. Two NATSAP-backed bills that were passed and signed into law this year by Gov. Katie Hobbs.
Spring Ridge Academy and other local TTI facilities are a part of NATSAP, and Courtney was previously on its board of directors.
Sweidy said she could not speak for this story, citing the ongoing litigation against Spring Ridge Academy and others. Farran and Ash both cited the recent jury verdict against Spring Ridge Academy as a major win for survivors of these facilities across the country.
“Somebody saw that things were not right and a jury saw that things weren’t right and it is ok to feel the way that I feel,” Farran said.
to see the links embedded in this article go to:
https://azmirror.com/2024/07/15/it-was-a-cult-traumatizing-troubled-teens-spring-ridge-academy/
I escaped a ‘troubled teen’ program – they deprived us of sleep & controlled our lives, 20 of my friends are dead now
ReplyDeletePeople were labeled 'winners' if the leader liked them, she said
by Sara Alhariri, The Sun U.S. July 23, 2024
A TEXAS-BASED program for troubled teens has one woman speaking out about her experience there.
In an exclusive interview with The U.S. Sun, she recounted the psychological and sexual abuse that took place at the so-called recovery center.
Dulce Malpica, 29, is now a professional photographer and comedian — a far cry from where she once was as a teenager.
"I got in trouble at school with weed and I got sent to a rehab facility," she told The U.S. Sun.
"I was 15, about to turn 16, and while you're there, in treatment, different alternative peer groups come in to try to recruit teenagers to join their programs."
Alternative peer groups, or APGs, are programs that create environments that are free of mind-altering substances such as alcohol.
She ended up joining one program in particular, but her time there took a dark turn.
SEXUAL MISCONDUCT
Celebrities like Paris Hilton have been vocal about their own experiences in the troubled teen industry.
Malpica said she is grateful for A-listers spreading awareness but keeps her own exposure to it to a minimum.
"I haven't listened to [celebrity testimonies] too much because I don't want to relive anything," she said.
She recounted incidences that occurred during her stay.
"There was kids assaulting other kids, like 'guys and girls nights.' There was inappropriate touching, like counselors and kids.
"Everyone was always massaging each other. In my group, there was a counselor that got caught sleeping with one of the teenagers.
"They got caught in one of our wilderness trips, which we were forced to go on every summer.
"They were really hard workouts and really hard physically. I don't think I slept more than six hours for, like, four years.
"I would always cry because I was so sleep-deprived. I think it's designed that way."
After escaping, Malpica recounted times where she became aware of violations against members of the program.
ADMISSION
Malpica said that the odd behavior among adults running the program began almost immediately, although it didn't hit her right away.
"First, you do a newcomer meeting and the first sentence of it is literally, 'We are not a cult,' because they've been accused of it so much," she said.
"Then they walk you through everything and you're supposed to hang out there all week."
She added that the meeting takes place to get teenagers to return, but she quickly found it odd.
"I thought that was kind of strange just to have certain people watching over me," she said.
"They say they love you right when you get there.
"Everyone says they're an alcoholic, even if they haven't had a drink before. They all say, 'I'm an alcoholic.'"
She added that the teens were required to join Alcoholics Anonymous in addition to their program.
CLASSIC MANIPULATION
Malpica pointed out several telltale signs of an abusive environment that she witnessed whenever a member of the program deviated from their rules.
"If a girl liked to dress nice, wear dresses, she would be put on a 'no dress up' commitment for 30 or 90 days where she could only wear sweatpants [and no] makeup," she said.
"And so basically, if you were really into something they would break down your individuality, your personality, and your sense of comfort."
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As Malpica got a bit older and spent more time in the program, she realized the behavior was seriously off.
ReplyDelete"At first I guess I was into it," she said.
"I didn't really notice there was something really wrong until like two or three years in. That's when I really realized I have to get out of [there].
Malpica said it came down to formulating an exit plan that went down peacefully.
"They would make your life really hard if you left on bad terms," she said.
According to Malpica, leaving on bad terms included exiting the program and ceasing contact with members.
WINNERS AND LOSERS
Malpica said that friendships were heavily monitored and favored individuals were classified as "winners."
"You couldn't have outside friends because they weren't 'winners,'" she said.
"They had AA steps, but they would switch some of them.
"So, the second step was to hang out with the 'winners' in order to grow.
"There were these things called 'winners' lists,' where you could only hang out with those people or you were doing something wrong."
Ending up a "winner" entailed maintaining close relations with the main counselor of the group.
"There were no 'loser lists' officially, but you would be seen that way," she said.
"Winners were basically people who, the main guy — the leader, the main counselor — liked.
"The people who got along with him, the people who were working the steps, the ones that would be there all the time, that's who the 'winners' were."
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE
After being approached by a detective regarding the abuse she faced, Malpica found herself at a loss due to legal loopholes used by one of the leaders of the program.
"I just needed more people to talk but everyone was too scared to speak up," she said.
"So all [the detective] did was get them to change some stuff on the website and the wording of like how things operate.
"So they're still operating. They switch up so they can be legal and find loopholes."
Malpica recounted the aftermath of losing friends whose lives were cut short.
"I think a lot of the kids struggle when they first leave. A lot of my friends became prostitutes, strippers, [and] drug dealers.
"And there were a lot of deaths, I think I know, like, 20 people that were in [the program] that are dead now, and they all died similarly. And a lot of them didn't have these struggles beforehand.
"I think they were magnified and traumatized by them and weaponized."
When she finally escaped at age 19, she added that her own road to recovery wasn't an easy one.
"It was a lot of trial and error to get here. I definitely struggled with using drugs or other things to kind of cope," she said.
"It was really hard to go to therapy because I don't trust therapists now because there would be no privacy there. If you talked to a therapist, they would tell everyone everything about you.
"So it took me a while, but, I think knowing that so many people died from it kind of gives me, strength to keep going. And I think that's how I got here."
The U.S. Sun reached out to the program for comment.
to see the photos and links embedded in this article go to:
https://www.the-sun.com/news/11759739/escaped-troubled-teen-program-deprived-sleep-friends-died/
Mother Who Lost Son in “Kids for Cash” Scheme Slams Biden’s Clemency for Judge
ReplyDelete“It stole his youth, his childhood,” said Sandy Fonzo, whose son was sentenced by former Judge Michael Conahan.
By Amy Goodman, DemocracyNow! December 17, 2024
President Joe Biden’s decision to grant clemency to a corrupt former judge has sparked widespread outrage, including from members of his own party. Biden announced nearly 1,500 commutations and pardons last week in what the White House described as the largest single-day act of clemency from a president, but among those whose sentences were reduced is former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan — one of two judges in the notorious “kids for cash” scandal. In 2011, Conahan was sentenced to 17.5 years for accepting nearly $3 million in kickbacks for sending 2,300 children, some as young as 8 years old, to for-profit prisons on false charges. His co-conspirator, former Judge Mark Ciavarella, remains in prison. We speak with filmmaker Robert May, director of the Kids for Cash documentary, and Sandy Fonzo, mother of Edward Kenzakoski, who was incarcerated as a teenager as part of the kickback scheme and later died by suicide. “It’s just reopening wounds that have never healed,” Fonzo says of the commutation. She describes her son as “strong” and “proud” before his time in detention, but says “he came out broken” and never fully recovered. “It stole his youth, his childhood.”
TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: President Biden is facing fierce condemnation for granting clemency to former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan, one of two judges jailed in the notorious “kids for cash” scandal. In 2011, Conahan was sentenced to 17-and-a-half years for accepting nearly $3 million in kickbacks for sending 2,300 children, some as young as 8 years old, to for-profit prisons on false charges.
On Friday, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro criticized Biden’s decision.
GOV. JOSH SHAPIRO: I do feel strongly that President Biden got it absolutely wrong and created a lot of pain here in northeastern Pennsylvania. This was not only a black eye on the community, the “kids for cash” scandal, but it also affected families in really deep and profound and sad ways. Some children took their lives because of this. Families were torn apart.
AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, Democracy Now! spoke to Washington Post columnist Heather Long, who had covered the “kids for cash” scandal as a reporter in Pennsylvania.
HEATHER LONG: This was a huge mistake by President Biden to grant clemency, to reduce the sentence for Michael Conahan, the former judge from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, who was one of the two judges involved in that really heinous “kids for cash” scandal. We’re talking about sending thousands of kids to for-profit detention facilities, many of whom were first-time offenders who probably should have had community service or some sort of slap on the wrist, and instead, they were sent to a detention facility for months, in some cases years. So many negative consequences happened because of that, that many of those young people ended up depressed, addicted, didn’t graduate high school. Some lost scholarships. It was just a chain event of tragedy.
And Michael Conahan willingly did this. He knew about it. He purposely blocked a county government facility being built, so that these for-profit centers could be built. Some of the cash kickbacks were delivered as cash in a shoe box or routed through a Florida condo that he and the other judge set up to funnel money. I mean, there was just so much that was knowingly done that was wrong here, and then an attempt to stymie any attempts to stop it or any attempts to prosecute it. So, it’s just really hard for anybody who lived through this in Pennsylvania — I got my start there as a journalist — to believe that President Biden could do this and, you know, would want to give this particular person, who gave no one a second chance, this kind of leniency.
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AMY GOODMAN: That was Washington Post columnist Heather Long. Her new article is headlined “Biden gave ‘kids for cash’ judge clemency. That’s how broken this process is,” unquote.
ReplyDeleteThe scandal was the focus of the 2013 documentary Kids for Cash, directed by Robert May, who will join us in a minute. This is the film’s trailer.
UNIDENTIFIED: She was a good kid. She was happy.
HILLARY TRANSUE: I was known for being the jokester.
SANDY FONZO: Eddie, he was always a fireball.
HILLARY TRANSUE: We were talking about how funny it would be if we made a fake MySpace page about my vice principal.
AMANDA LORAH: I was trying to stay out of trouble. That’s when everything started.
MARK CIAVARELLA: Whatever sins you have committed, you can’t go back and undo it.
TERRIE MORGAN-BESECKER: Ciavarella was a no-nonsense, zero-tolerance judge. He always jailed kids.
MARK CIAVARELLA: You are going to experience prison. I’ll be glad to put you there.
UNIDENTIFIED: The way Ciavarella ran the courtroom, you could have had F. Lee Bailey there, and the kids would have gone away.
MARSHA LEVICK: There’s a mechanism that takes over that keeps kids in that system.
HILLARY TRANSUE: No one listened, because we were kids.
UNIDENTIFIED: There was never any instance of guilt or innocence. They were locking him up.
MARSHA LEVICK: Really high number of kids appearing without counsel.
SANDY FONZO: We have no rights. He’s in their custody now.
UNIDENTIFIED: It is unbelievable. We’re talking about children.
MARK CIAVARELLA: I wanted them to be scared out of their minds. I don’t understand how that was a bad thing.
MSNBC REPORTER: Former Luzerne County judge faces charges tonight.
GREGG JARRETT: In a scandal known as “kids for cash.”
ABC NEWS REPORTER: $2.6 million.
STEPHEN COLBERT: In return for sentencing kids to juvenile detention.
MARK CIAVARELLA: I’ve never sent a kid away for a penny. I’m not this mad judge who was just putting them in shackles, throwing kids away.
SANDY FONZO: He went there as a free-spirited kid. He came out a hardened man, I’d say.
LAURENE TRANSUE: Here I was saying, “We can trust that judge to be fair.” And that’s not what happened.
AMANDA LORAH: I was scared every day.
CHARLIE BALASAVAGE: I was only 14. All those years I missed.
AL FLORA JR.: This is not a cash-for-kids case.
SANDY FONZO: You scumbag! You ruined my life!
AMANDA LORAH: I still wake up from nightmares.
AMY GOODMAN: The trailer from the film Kids for Cash, directed by Robert May. He’s joining us from Pittston, Pennsylvania. And in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania, we’re joined by Sandy Fonzo. The other judge involved in the “cash for kids” scandal, Mark Ciavarella, sentenced Sandy’s 17-year-old boy to 30 days in a juvenile boot camp for a minor charge of having drug paraphernalia. At the time, Ed was a star wrestler in high school. Sandy Fonzo says her son’s sentence started him on a path to the adult court system that culminated in his death by suicide.
Robert May and Sandy Fonzo, welcome to Democracy Now! And I also — even before we start with Sandy’s story, I want to give out the suicide hotline number. It’s 988. Whenever we deal with suicide, it’s so important for people to know that there are people to talk to. Sandy Fonzo, take us back in time. Talk about what happened to Ed.
SANDY FONZO: This is very emotional, very heavy, just hearing and having to relive all of this. I mean, this has just reopened wounds that have never healed. And this is very, very difficult, very, very heavy. I shouldn’t be having to relive this, especially at Christmastime. I mean, this is just — it’s unacceptable.
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AMY GOODMAN: I’m so sorry, Sandy, that we are asking you to do this. You have been so incredibly brave in talking about this over the years. And I’m so sorry this has been all reopened for you at this moment with President Biden’s pardon of one of the judges. So, if you —
ReplyDeleteSANDY FONZO: And I need to talk about it. I need to defend my son, because he’s not here to defend himself. And I am his mother, and I always will be. So, I am — I appreciate being here and getting to talk to you. It’s just very difficult for me.
AMY GOODMAN: It just shows how brave you are. So, if you could take us back in time and explain what happened? For people who don’t know Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and what happened, why did your son end up in court to begin with?
SANDY FONZO: My son did nothing more than anything that most of us as kids did, you know, experimenting and living his life and making mistakes, that we usually all get to just learn and evolve and grow from. He did nothing more than be at an underaged drinking party with tons of other kids, but he was caught.
And he went in front of Judge Ciavarella because this is the process that they had. And, you know, you’re trusting in this system that these are — this is, you know, good for our kids. And I was told this is, you know, just to scare him, to get him back on track, to make sure everything is well. And he went into the county juvenile detention center for a month.
And in that time, he wanted nothing more. He understood what he was missing in his life. He just wanted to get back home. He wanted to get back. It was his senior year about to begin. He wanted to get back into his wrestling training, just get back into his life. And I had the teachers. I had his coaches, myself, talking and sending letters to the judge’s chambers, you know, of my son’s character and explaining all of this. And I was 100% sure. There was no doubt in my mind that when we went in front of that judge, my son was coming home with me that day.
But that didn’t happen. And he was sent to that juvenile detention center in Pittston, and I believe it was like eight months. He lost his senior year. He never had the chance to wrestle again, any chance that he had for a scholarship. He came out of there very bitter, very angry, pent up with anger. He couldn’t look you in the eye. I don’t know what happened in that facility. My son was a very big, strong, proud boy, and he came out broken. I don’t know what happened. I try to not think about what happened, and he would never talk about it. But something not good happened to him in there.
And it snowballed. He just never recovered. He got into a fight and had to go in front of — back into the court system. And actually, those charges were dropped. They were not found. But because he was on probation from Judge Ciavarella, he sent him away again, even though he was found not guilty of those charges. And this time he was sent to their other for-profit center, which was five hours from our home. It was in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. And he did a year — a year — there, and then was released if he would do this boot camp, which he excelled, and they couldn’t talk more good about my son and his character and the discipline that he showed. But he — it just never ended. It just snowballed. It changed him. It broke him. It stole his youth, his childhood. He would never, ever recover. And it just became too much, and he shot himself in the heart.
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And we were fighting this. We knew something was not right. We could not get into that courtroom with media. Anything that was trying to be done was shot down. Judge Lokuta tried to step up, and she was ousted and thrown out of the court. These judges had this power, and they did what they wanted. And they started their own for-profit centers. And at the time, Judge Conahan was the president judge. So he appointed his friend, Michael Ciavarella, as the juvenile judge, who he knew would send these kids into the system. And they funneled them in and collected the money for every bed that was filled. And until this money line was seen, that’s when the feds stepped in and all this came out. But —
ReplyDeleteAMY GOODMAN: And it was exposed that they were getting kickbacks from these for-profit jails. Sandy, I wanted to go back to when you confronted the former judge, now jailed, Judge Ciavarella, outside the courtroom after your son’s sentencing.
SANDY FONZO: My kids not here! He’s dead! Because of him! He ruined my [bleep] life! I’d like him to go to hell and rot there forever!
SECURITY GUARD: Ma’am, come on.
SANDY FONZO: No! You know what he told everybody in court? They need to be held accountable for their actions. You need to be! Do you remember me? Do you remember me? Do you remember my son? An all-star wrestler? He’s gone! He shot himself in the heart! You scumbag!
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Sandy Fonzo confronting former Judge Ciavarella, who remains in jail, outside the courtroom after her son’s sentencing. Now, the man that President Biden pardoned is the president judge, as you described, Sandy, is Judge Conahan. When you heard about this pardoning, your response?
SANDY FONZO: I was working. I was in my car, and my phone was just going off. And I don’t know. I was in disbelief. I was in shock. You know, you would think nothing could ever shocked me again, but I was numb. I mean, I just pulled over and sat there trying to understand what was going on and how something like this could happen.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Robert May into this. Robert May is the director and producer of the documentary Kids for Cash. Your past films are The War Tapes, the Oscar-winning Fog of War. The first two episodes of your five-part docuseries Bucks County, USA will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this January. When you heard about the judge’s pardon, Robert May, about President Biden’s pardon, your response? And explain the relationship of these two judges, where Conahan was in Florida, and what exactly this means and where Ciavarella is today.
ROBERT MAY: Well, I was obviously shocked. I felt that they would be — Judge Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years in prison, and Michael Conahan was sentenced to 17-and-a-half years in prison, and the difference in the length of time was primarily because of Ciavarella did not acknowledge his full involvement in the scandal. They both did take money for the building of the two centers, but it quickly became known as the “kids for cash,” where they were accused of taking money for each kid that was put in the system, which isn’t exactly what happened. And so, Ciavarella started to defend himself vehemently. And Conahan, more or less, kept his mouth shut, and Ciavarella did not. And then, they had agreed to spend seven years in prison, and they — the judge at the time, Judge Kosik, didn’t accept their plea deal, and primarily because Ciavarella wouldn’t take responsibility for what he did do, although he said he did acknowledge the financial crimes, but he didn’t want to be labeled as the “kids for cash” judge.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert May, they made millions of dollars for putting these kids away, for the use of these two facilities?
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ROBERT MAY: They made — the money was actually tracked. And the way that they did it was the facilities were built by a builder that was a friend of Judge Ciavarella’s and was financed by a friend that was a friend of Conahan’s. And so, they put the whole thing together. It’s true that there was a new facility needed. It’s also true that — to the best of our knowledge, that the county wasn’t going to build a new facility, or at least at that time. So it made it very easy for them to create this new facility. At the time, for-profit prisons and detention centers were something that was becoming more in favor. So, that’s where it all began. And Ciavarella, who sent kids away at very high rates during his entire term as the juvenile court judge, I mean, it seemed to make sense that they would have the facility more full than not, just based on his actual track record.
ReplyDeleteAMY GOODMAN: So, they —
ROBERT MAY: I think — go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: They were found guilty of accepting $2.8 million in illegal payments. And I misspoke: It wasn’t that Conahan, the president judge, was pardoned. He was granted clemency, right? He was one of the many people who was considered to have committed nonviolent crimes, and during COVID, as an older man, he was released to home. And now he was granted clemency by President Biden, along with the 1,500 other people.
ROBERT MAY: That’s right. Right. He had about two more years to go, I think, on his sentence. The thing I think that — one thing that’s lost in all this, which Sandy can attest to, is that kids need special care and treatment. When they’re growing up, they have lots of issues, now more than ever, and literally now more than ever today. But back when this story all took place, I spent a lot of time with Sandy and the other kids and families, and it changed my life. And I have children. The juvenile justice system was broken then. It’s broken now. The way that — the difficulty in getting mental health for kids, it’s problematic, and it’s susceptible to the power of the courts. And I think that is one of the things that isn’t talked enough about. We had another kid that we followed, Charlie Balasavage, who was doing well. He tried — he struggled, and he also was jailed for a long period of time. And he missed his prom. He missed birthdays, and he missed so many things. And he never got the attention and care that he needed. Instead, he was locked up. And eventually, he died of a drug overdose, because he never got the care he ultimately needed and deserved.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Robert May, I want to thank you for being with us. It makes you question whether these are nonviolent crimes, these judges engaged in putting away thousands of children, some as young as 8 years old. Robert May, director of the documentary Kids for Cash. And, Sandy, thank you for taking this time and, most importantly, sharing in this very painful moment for you with everyone. It is a warning to all, what you had to say today. Sandy Fonzo’s son, sentenced in the “kids for cash” scandal, ultimately took his own life. To go back to Democracy Now!’s coverage 10 years ago of the “kids for cash” scandal, you can go to democracynow.org. And again, the suicide hotline is 988.
Coming up, as President Biden enters his final month in office, we’ll talk to Astra Taylor of the Debt Collective about how Biden could deliver debt relief to millions of student borrowers. Then we’ll look at a new film called The Bibi Files. Why can’t it be played in Israel? It’s about Netanyahu, who’s on trial for corruption. Stay with us.
to see the links and video go to:
https://truthout.org/video/mother-who-lost-son-in-kids-for-cash-scheme-slams-bidens-clemency-for-judge/