the who, your failure to think of, mention, or take intrest in the following point indicates your participation in the industry.
the point..
what needs to be looked at is what kind of environment, conditions, rules, and other factors are more likely to generate staff-student abuse/sadism/powertripping and ALSO student-student abuse.
true, certain people are more likely to abuse kids than others. unfortunately, it's pretty hard to screen out who will participate in a abuse in any given situation. please refer to the stanford prison experiment (for the xthousanth time). No you cant use your data for this, because if the programs were surveyed, the data would be biased, and experiments would involve too many resources, and would never get funding. It must be done by a panel of knoweldgeable psychiatrists, psychologists, historians and philosophers. Most people have the common sense to know that for example, "disclosure therapy", is more damaging than helpfull. you just dont have the moral fibre to understand that prolonged emotional abuse is equal or paramount to actual physical abuse. your statistics dont mean shit when it comes down to emotional abuse.
eliminating child abuse, as with anything, is impossible. what is possible is decreasing the probability of such an occurence. programs have a very very high probability of abuse. there are no official, acurate stats on what kind of and how much abuse happens in, say, prison. but everyone knows that if you go to prison, you risk getting raped, beaten, killed, joining a gang for life, etc. everyone knows it's the prison environment - not all that different from a program environment. likewise, everyone knows that programs are abusive, just not on the same level. it's common sense that you are more likely to emotionally or physically abused in a program than in summer camp, because the environment, rules, ideology, kids, and activities generate a lesser probability of abuse happening.
if you take a deep look into this, and dig deep into your heart for that one little grain of compassion you may have buried in there.....you'll realize that nearly all of these programs perpetuate abuse on every level. screening out people with records and drug testing aint gonna do jack shit.
