Posted on 12/26/2022 10:31:50 AM PST by Morgana
At 2 a.m., teenagers are woken up to strangers in their bedrooms. Then, they’re driven hours away, often to the midwest. What awaits them is abuse, hard physical labor and sadness– all paid for by their parents.
This is the story of many children in the troubled teen industry. The troubled teen industry is a name coined by survivors for the system of underregulated residential youth treatment facilities. Many parents send their children to these programs for drug and alcohol use, mental health, eating disorders, disabilities, conversion therapy and more.
These programs promise to rehabilitate teenagers from their troubles. Instead, the facilities pocket most of the payment, and force the children to endure hard physical labor and verbal, physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
It is estimated that between 120,000 to 200,000 young people reside in some type of group home, residential treatment center, boot camp or correctional facility, according to the American Bar Association. At least 50,000 of these children are placed there by their parents, and stay there for a year or more.
A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office “identified thousands of allegations of abuse, some of which resulted in death, at residential programs across the country and in American-owned and American operated facilities abroad.”
Despite this abuse, the industry receives an estimated $23 billion dollars of annual public funds, according to Breaking Code Silence. Yet, most of these facilities are not regulated by the government. They receive even more money from parents who send their kids to these facilities.
In the past few years, survivors of this industry took their stories to social media, especially TikTok. There are thousands of stories under the hashtags #BreakingCodeSilence and #ISeeYouSurvivor. These stories range from those of wilderness therapy, where children are forced to hike for miles and live in the wild with a lack of basic hygiene and food, to stories of sexual abuse.
Paris Hilton is the most famous of these survivors. The reality star turned DJ became a face of the movement against the troubled teen industry, opening up about her parents sending her to a therapeutic boarding school in Utah in the 1990s.
In an opinion piece for the Guardian, Hilton discussed being sent to “obs,” short for observation.
“It was solitary confinement in a tiny cinderblock room with nothing but a drain and a roll of toilet paper. The room was freezing cold, and I was almost naked. I paced until I couldn’t stand up anymore. Then I huddled on the floor and rocked back and forth, forcing myself to think about the life I would create for myself after I got out,” she wrote.
Hilton also discussed being sexually, physically and mentally abused. Tik Toker Dasogoloff, known as Dasha, stated that as a 14- year-old in a facility, she was frequently dragged by staff members from one building to another, leaving bruises on her arms. She was forced “to sit and listen to my peers and staff berate me for incredibly insignificant things, and would often get called vile names for doing something such as rolling my eyes or daring to point out how screwed-up their treatment of residents is.”
If kids tried to tell their parents what was going on, there was usually a staff member sitting right beside them on the phone. Then, the child would lose phone privileges while the parents were convinced that their child was manipulating them.
Grown up survivors are using the internet and social media to their advantage to bring awareness to these unaccountable facilities. While the industry takes profits, parents and children lose money, and their humanity.
Thanks for posting.
This sounds illegal, and authorities should be involved.
I’ve tried to warn you all for such a long time and gotten backlash. There is a school right now in Missouri called “agape boarding school” that is one of these very schools. They are this bad and WORSE. These kids are scared for life.
Right now Paris Hilton and #Breakingcodesilence is pushing to get a bill passed to regulate these schools but you know how these things go.
You would think!! How would you feel if you were a teen being dragged from your bed at 3 am by strangers and told “you can do this the easy way or the hard way”. You think you are being kidnapped! Then taken to a school and can’t call your parents? These kids are scared for life. What were these parents thinking?
The OTHER OPTION, short of having your teen ‘kidnapped’, is to SPANK (particularly when very young), at least as long that it is legal. And just IGNORE the Dr. Spock types, that will likely show up here.
I knew deprogramming kidnappers in Minneapolis, they were making a lot of European trips to bring back adult children in cults. I believe they worked for a famous deprogrammer of the time.
We were a partying group at the same primary household and they were always after me to help them, the pay and travel were appealing but I never could figure out how they were not arrested either in Europe or here, although the deprogramming seemed popular at the time culturally.
I’ve studied this troubled teen industry thing for over a year now.
Over half were adopted kids and the parents are “rehoming” them. Now that is not all of the kids but that is a lot of them. These are children they would not have had as babies or “very young”. Some adopted from other countries.
This is not the same thing. I know what you are talking about.
I can believe that...I’m just thinking of fellow FReepers who might have wives that read too many ‘Child Rearing’ books and really believe that ‘timeouts’ works.
For the many cases not as clean, it does get far more complicated.
Problem teenagers who are unmanageable by parents; if they had a better alternative the parents would not spend their inheritance trying to save/fux them.
Problem teenagers who are unmanageable by parents; if they had a better alternative the parents would not spend their inheritance trying to save/fix them.
I’ve seen these in both UT and Az - I refer to them a “Bataan Death March Schools”.
Love to see them regulated, most are just well-padded torture chambers.
While I agree there are abusive healthcare industry employees and institutions. You could write this same article about hospitals and senior care or even schools. But the reality is that this industry is needed. Many parents raise kids and through no fault of any party, they become psychotic. Or they develop incredibly bad behavior problems.
Some times the teens terrorize the family. Sometimes they leave, never to be heard from again. Sometimes they show up in jail after jail. What once was a loving child turns into a raving lunatic. A family of means tries to find a humane solution. And that can be very tricky. A psychopath child is not sick. But there are also psychotic children who are. In either case an average parent can’t cope and are in serious threat of danger.
They can’t create their own kids.
They have to steal yours.
You are being gaslighted, don’t you know?
You’re using a left-wing liberal pro abortion website to tell you that right wing conversion therapy treatment centers and other right wing options are evil.
These mental health industry horrors never end. The entire profession is nothing but a huge con game. These people have no working therapies. They should be shut down and all staff locked up in similar facilities for a few years. Vile scum preying on desperate parents.
My daughter was about 4 or 5. She was being bad and I threatened her with a spanking. She continued, seemingly after some deliberation on her part. I gave her a lst warning, which she ignored with deliberation. So I told her it was time to be put over my knee. I spanked her - hard enought to sting. She didn't cry. It was like she was curious to experience what a spanking was. Spanking was not a useful means for me to use with her.
Thete is no one size fits all solution to what appears to be a recognizable problem, especially where your powers of recognition are limited.
Some of these parents are honestly scared that their unmanageable child will kill them or a sibling while they sleep.
What exactly are they supposed to do when they realize they have a violent and sociopathic child?
CPS and foster care isn’t any safer or better.
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