Since we have a growing number of PV survivors on Fornits now, spanning from the late '90's to the present, I'd like to re-post excerpts from Kat Ricker's excellent paper The Crime of Being A Teenager. This is an insightful work, one of the first I read on the troubled teen industry. On first read it hit home, but as time passes and I return to it, I see what a concise look at the origin and nature of teen programs Kat's essay is.
A word of encouragement to Mokara, our man in Venice Beach DYS, the mysterious informant Kreflo, and SettleForNothing...PV is getting itchy, long-timers are leaving, and the Hand of Fate - the Stark Fist of Removal - is winding up to pimp-slap PV into a coma. The sword of Damocles is hanging over their heads...who's got some wire cutters?
Settle, you've been like a shot of adrenaline, and I want to thank you again. We've been friends for a while, you were great support when my wife and I were struggling to get our daughter home and afterwards, too. You got through some tough times, and I know thinking about PV stirs up the memories and old anger. You've focused it, though, and you're becoming the hardest working lady in activism.
Here's an excerpt from Kat Ricker's The Crime of Being A Teenager.
(Emphasis added by ZA):
GOOD HELP IS HARD
There is no way these programs can blame aberrant employees, because this is systemic.
The staffers are as much products of the programs as the incarcerated teens in their
charge.
Where do these employees come from? A quick, random visit to program websites shows
that most are constantly looking for “field staff”, and most do not ask for degrees in
psychology, medicine, nor any college education at all. An ad for a Utah-based program
posted on Oregon Craigslist just last month asked only for “primitive living skills”, while
promising the most rewarding job of your life. North Star hired Bacon’s counselors
literally off the street by men who pulled over in a pick-up truck and offered them a job
taking kids camping for a few weeks.
As in any industry, workers move from business to business within it. Twenty-six year-
old Eric Henry was among those convicted of child abuse and neglect in Bacon’s death.
He was ordered not to work for similar programs for nine months, yet six months later, he
was on staff at Sage Walk. The next year, he was on staff at Obsidian Trails.
But more acceptable hiring policies do not guarantee improvement. Recently, the nation
has been riveted by the televised, videotaped deadly beating of 14 year-old Martin Lee
Anderson, just hours after he was admitted – not into a private program, but a
government one – Bay County Sheriff's Office Boot Camp. A nurse took the boy’s pulse
as guards beat him for 90 minutes, long after his body had gone limp. Documents show
the punching, kicking and pressure-point techniques the guards used were routine. Lee’s
second autopsy showed that he died of suffocation; the guards held their hands over his
mouth and forced him to inhale ammonia sticks to keep him conscious (which finally
failed). Staff regularly used these sticks to force teens to keep exercising (Miami Herald,
coverage ongoing since January 2006).
UNDERSTANDING THE ABUSERS
While the sadistic sociopath may well find his way onto program staffs, most arguably
sadistic staffers are made, not hired. “If you can’t beat them, join them” is a cliché for a
reason - these systems are designed so that the only way to survive the abuse is to
become an abuser. Programs are full of staff that “graduated” the program, and some put
deviating staffers back into the program as patients, until they’re fixed.
Judge K. L. McIff ruled that the North Star program was “fraught with a desensitizing
mentality” which contributed to the death of Aaron Bacon. This mentality is critical to
these operations, and it is systematically created. Staffers are conditioned to see their
prisoners as less than human: they have done bad things, deserve to be punished, and will
“manipulate” staffers in order to escape their deserved punishment. So staffers disregard
any cry for help or complaint of pain. That’s why Bacon, whom his fellow captives
recognized as seriously ill, was accused of faking, right through his death. That’s why 12
year-old Mikey Wiltsie was accused of “playing possum” when he claimed he couldn’t
breathe, and his 320-pound counselor crushed his 65-pound body to death (Eckerd Youth
Alternatives, 2000). That’s why the body of 15 year-old Erica Harvey lied dead for 45
minutes after dehydration and heat stroke killed her – because the counselors thought she
was “faking it” (Catherine Freer Wilderness Program, 2002).
It is difficult for most of us to understand the mindset of the people in charge at these
programs. How can you tell a girl held 13 years, as Lulu Corter was, who’s gnawing a
hole in her arm, to go ahead and hurt herself? How can you insist she face her sexual
predator and take responsibility for her pre-pubescent molestation, tell her she is obsessed
with sex, stand over her on the toilet and dictate the number of times she may wipe? How
can you tease a 15 year-old girl like Michelle Sutton, moments before she went blind and
died of dehydration, that her parched white mouth makes her look like she’s been eating
marshmallows? How can you force a remarkably intelligent and peacemaking boy like 16
year-old Aaron Bacon to hike without pants after he repeatedly loses control of his
bowels from a perforated ulcer; how can you take away his blanket in freezing
temperatures, deny him food for days on end, laugh and tell him he’s faking it when he
collapses again and again; how can you mock him while his head beats the window of the
pick-up in the final, gruesome moments of his young life? How, for that matter, can you
convince someone who’s never abused drugs, alcohol, food or sex to confess to all these
perversions and more, under the verbal assault of scores of peers, and how can you
convince this victim and parents that this “treatment” saved the person’s life?
By brainwashing.
HOW IT WORKS
To explain thought coercion in teen treatment programs, Maia Szalavitz outlines the work
of professor Robert Jay Lifton in her book Help at Any Cost. Lifton was the first
Westerner to classify mind-control methods, after interviewing prison survivors of
Chinese prison camps from the 1940s and ‘50s. At the risk of oversimplification, the
system works like this – to extreme degrees: subject people to constant surveillance;
control their environment (induce sleep and food deprivation, restrict communication);
exhaust them; break them down physically and psychologically; elicit confessions (real
or invented); and finally reprogram their life perspective via “mystical manipulation”:
convince them that everything in their lives has led them to this program
(there are no coincidences), and that the program represents THE ultimate power of good in the universe
(so that any means justify the ends).
It is no accident that these programs have continued for decades and produce both people
who swear it’s the best thing that ever happened to them and people who refuse to talk
about it at all, and it is no accident that survivors who end up in court typically come with
genuine diagnoses of depression and post-traumatic stress. These are the outcomes this
system produces, and there are no studies on the effectiveness – nor the longterm effects
– of these “therapy” programs.
From a 1999 expose series by Lou Kilzer, Donna Burke sued WWASPS affiliate Teen
Help, alleging that the Tranquility Bay subjected her sons to "the most sadistic and
unwarranted physical and psychological abuse. ... Both are changed from the wonderful,
spontaneous young men they were before Tranquility Bay into robotic victims, afraid of
any authority figure," the suit says. "They have lost their individuality, their spirits are
broken, and their characters ruined. Instead of independent men, they are afraid, haunted
by nightmares, subject to panic attacks and refuse to go anywhere near a beach." (Read
Desperate Measures in the Denver Rocky Mountain News,
http://www.denver- rmn.com/desperate/site-desperate/day2/2front-pg.shtml.)
BRAINWASHING CYCLES
There is no eery resemblance here to the abuse perpetrated on prisoners of war; it’s the
same thing. These program founders aren’t inventing the wheel. They are following
established methods of brainwashing and torture. These are techniques of military
interrogations, including American forces torturing Muslim prisoners today; insane
asylums a century ago; drug rehabilitation programs, beginning with rehab-turned-church
Synanon in the ‘60s and ‘70s; and in every successful cult, religious and/or commercial.
Beginning in the 1970s with Straight, then KIDS, SAFE, numerous derivatives, to
today’s corporate giant WWASPS/Teen Help, the troubled-teen industry is just the latest
face on the movement to psychically destroy people and reprogram them into compliant
subjects devoid of critical thinking.
The difference in this cycle of institutionalized thought coercion is considerably easy to
manage, and profit margins are huge. While cults typically have targeted adults, juveniles
have no rights. The profit is earned up front, fees are set high, overhead and staff costs
are low. And anything goes, from marketing – typically programs have pretty names and
advertise teens doing fun activities in idyllic settings, like a vacation – to the treatment
itself, done in secret, without any legal interference. The occasional court challenge from
scarred survivors is generally settled out of court for exuberant sums, and when programs
are forced to shut down and people ordered out of the industry, they simply reopen and
change names. The day after Straight Inc. was forced to close, SAFE opened, with the
same model, the same building, and the same staff (See Help at Any Cost for details).
It’s difficult to know how many programs are operating in the U.S. Some programs have
religious themes (Mormon is common), some disciplinary, others drug rehabilitation, and
more. Since the linking of Straight, Inc. with the War on Drugs in the 1980s proved so
successful, programs have addressed whatever problems society deems most frightening
– at the moment, ADD, ADHD, and sexual promiscuity, for example.
What this amounts to is a cult industry gone wild. Without governmental oversight, it has
managed to slip through legal challenges time and time again, and is burgeoning with
success.
What is most sickening about this suffering is how unnecessary it is. People are paying
for their children to be institutionalized. And whether they are obviously tortured or not,
what does it say about a society that accepts the kidnapping and incarceration of its
children, who are not yet fully formed, and who have committed no crime?
I'm posting these excerpts because I'd like for PV survivors (and any other program survivors) to read it over and tell me how Kat's observations relate to your experiences at PV or any other cesspit. I don't want to post what I think, because it doesn't matter - you guys lived through it and know how programs function in a way that I (thank God) never will.
A few of you spent time in other programs, either before or after PV. How did they compare to the pricey and "highly successful, widely respected" pit of gastrointestinal virulence, Penicillin Villi?
Please read Kat's article in it's entirety here:
http://www.isaccorp.org/documents/ricker.pdf Also, check out her web page
http://www.mightykat.net/ , Kat's a Renaissance woman.
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"Allah does not love the public utterance of hurtful speech, unless it be by one to whom injustice has been done; and Allah is Hearing,
