**************************************************************
The Eighth Step Newsletter Dec. 9, 2004
**************************************************************
Suffering Together
In Lake Worth's Growing Together, kids don't kick drugs. They're
beaten and humiliated.
BY TREVOR AARONSON
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/2004-12-09/news/feature_1.html)
He was 16 and scared. Jason was a newcomer at Growing Together, a
boot camp-style drug treatment center for adolescents in downtown
Lake Worth. During the day, he attended group therapy at the
program's two-story, banana-yellow building, which is equipped with
security gates and barred windows. At night, he'd sleep at a private
home endorsed by the facility.
In February 1997, during one of Jason's first days in the program,
George Johnson (not his real name) arrived to pick up five boys who
were to stay at his place in Palm Beach Gardens that night. Among
them were his son, George Jr., and four others, including Jason.
On the ride home, the boys began to discuss what they would do to
Jason that night. "The Naked Crusader was going to appear," Jason
later remembered one of them saying. It frightened him; he pretended
not to hear.
That night at 10 o'clock, after doing chores and eating dinner, all
five boys went to the bedroom where they were to sleep. They wore
only underwear. The rest of their clothing was kept in a different
room. Three of them lay down on mattresses on the floor. Jason and
another boy wriggled into sleeping bags.
Several hours later, Jason suddenly noticed some noise. The other
four boys were masturbating. "The Naked Crusader is coming," one of
them said.
Then George Jr., naked, suddenly jumped on Jason's back, according
to a statement Jason gave to police. Another boy held down his legs.
Two others slapped Jason in the face with their erect penises.
"Stop!" he pleaded.
They did. But the boys weren't finished. They returned to their beds
and masturbated again. A few minutes later, they assaulted Jason
once more. Again, two boys slapped Jason with their penises. One of
them tried to put his penis in Jason's mouth. Jason clenched his jaw
shut. Then he felt warm liquid on his back. One boy had climaxed.
Another ejaculated in his hand and rubbed the semen in Jason's hair.
Finally, they were finished.
If he ever told anyone about the incident, the boys warned, they'd
do it again. And worse. But three months later, Jason could no
longer stay silent. He told his father what had happened. Together,
they filed a report with the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department on
June 18, 1997.
During the one-month investigation that followed, two of the boys
told the detectives that they too had been victims of "The Naked
Crusader" soon after entering the drug treatment facility. The Palm
Beach County State Attorney's Office filed misdemeanor battery and
indecent exposure charges against the four boys but later dropped
them. The records have since been purged, so there's no more
explanation.
Growing Together's 17-year-old, nonprofit facility treats 25 to 40
children at a time. It rakes in roughly $1 million annually from
donations and fees paid by parents of drug-addicted kids, some of
whom are ordered by judges to attend. It has powerful friends and
donors, including West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel, banker Warren
W. Blanchard, attorney Jack Scarola, and Republican U.S. Rep. Mark
Foley.
Yet physical and sexual abuse appears to be common there, according
to a New Times investigation that included reviews of state records,
police reports, and interviews with about two dozen former patients
and parents. Kids rioted at the facility in April 1997, and last
year, state investigators found that Growing Together was too quick
to use physical restraint on children. Moreover, police have written
more than 800 reports related to the program since 1995.
"I still can't get the screams out of my head from hearing kids
dragged down the hall by the hair on their heads," says a former
graduate of the program who asked to remain anonymous. "The crimes
that were committed there have never been told in public. Nobody has
ever put these people on trial."
Rik Pavlescak, a former investigator with the Department of Children
and Families (DCF), wrote reports on the program in the early '90s
that detailed beatings, restraint, imprisonment, and systematic
humiliation. He alleges that influential outsiders have undermined
investigations of the group.
Growing Together Executive Director Pat Allard denied a request to
tour the facility, citing laws that protect confidentiality of
patients. In three phone interviews in November, she maintained that
children are not abused and claimed not to be aware of any of the
evidence uncovered by New Times. "We would never beat any child,"
Allard said.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------
Every Friday evening, 50 to 100 adults and children, most ages 13 to
17, gather inside Growing Together's facility at 1000 Lake Ave. The
open house begins the same way every week. Parents sit in chairs at
one end of a large room. Their children, who are enrolled in the
program, sit at the opposite end. At first, an accordion divider
separates the two groups.
Then the session begins. The partition is pulled back. The music
starts. The children sing:
I am a promise, I am a possibility
I am a promise with a capital P
I am a great big bundle of potentiality
And I am learning to hear God's voice
And I am trying to make the right choice.
I am a promise to be anything that God wants me to be.
Vicky Butler, a Jupiter woman who enrolled her troubled, 16-year-old
son, John, in Growing Together in the fall of 1999, remembers these
sessions well. "The songs they made these kids sing -- and they were
teenagers -- were songs intended for 4- and 5-year-olds," she
says. "It was degrading. You just had to look at the kids. Behind
their eyes, they would be saying, 'This sucks. '"
Butler says she began to wonder, when she attended her first open
house, whether she'd made a mistake. "My son was no angel," she
admits, "but no one deserves the treatment these kids receive."
During the session, Butler remembers, staff passed around a
microphone to parents, who would tell everyone in attendance about
their children's misdeeds. There were drugs, illicit sex, violence,
theft. The microphone would then move to the other side of the room.
Assuming a child had behaved well during the week and earned
the "privilege" to speak, he or she would then confess.
During one session in October 1999, Butler's son became agitated
before she spoke. He stood up and flailed his arms. "He was totally
flipping out," Butler remembers. John began to walk off. An alarmed
Butler started toward her son. As she did, a large behavioral
therapist parents referred to as "The Enforcer" also headed for
John. Suddenly, the accordion divider rolled across the room and
blocked Butler.
"All of a sudden, I heard my son screaming," she recalls. Butler
panicked and confronted Growing Together staff. "That's my kid
behind that curtain, and I don't know what's going on," she told
them. They assured her that John was fine and that he would see a
psychiatrist soon. Butler returned to her suburban home in Jupiter,
convinced that John was in a safe place.
Meanwhile, she continued hosting other Growing Together children at
night. She had modified her $169,292 home following directions from
the program's staff. All pictures and mirrors were removed from
walls. Knives were hidden. The bathroom was stripped, leaving only
the sink, toilet, and bathtub. The windows and doors of the bedroom
where five kids slept were rigged to an alarm system. Once they went
to bed at 10 p.m., they could not leave the room until the next
morning. "If any of them had to go to the bathroom in the middle of
the night, they would have been in trouble," Butler admits. "It was
like a prison."
Before bed, the children would write in their journals about what
they had learned that day. Often, their entries involved confessions
they had made during therapy. Growing Together refers to these
journal entries as "moral inventories." To advance through the
phases of the program, children must confess to illicit behavior or
abuse they suffered, then describe the incidents' effects on their
lives.
Butler recalls asking the kids about their entries. They told her
that they made up most of their confessions because Growing Together
required such admissions before graduation. Accounts that included
sexual abuse or underage sex were particularly encouraged by staff,
the kids allegedly told Butler.
The children also claimed staff had beaten and physically restrained
them, Butler says. She even met one young girl who claimed a
therapist had broken her arm. Other kids asserted that the building
was always filthy. Growing Together administrators admitted to
Butler (and later in court documents) that the facility had rats and
that several urinals had been backed up for days at a time.
In March 2000, Butler and her ex-husband, Stephen, who shared
custody, removed John from the program. Stephen Butler was moving to
Arkansas and wanted to take the boy. Once free, John told his mother
that he had suffered a sprained wrist at Growing Together when a
therapist slammed him down on a table. Mickey Bowman, then the
executive director of Growing Together, showed little concern for
the injury. In a letter to Vicky Butler dated June 20, 2000, Bowman
wrote: "Regarding the 'purported injury' to your son's wrist, he was
laughing at the issue immediately following."
Soon after, a private psychiatrist examined John and determined that
his problem wasn't drugs. He was bipolar. "You would think that,
being in the program, someone would have said, 'Oh, by the way, your
child is bipolar,'" Vicky Butler says. "Nobody picked up on that
because no psychiatrist or psychologist ever saw him."
Butler later refused to pay Growing Together the roughly $5,000 she
owed for John's treatment. She claimed the facility had billed her
for clinical exams that never occurred. "Kids got more messed up in
there than they were when they went in," she says. The facility sued
and turned the debt over to a bill collector. Butler eventually
forked over a reduced amount.
"My teeth grit every time I hear the words Growing Together," she
says. "They used to say, 'What goes on here stays here.' Now I know
why. They don't want the outside world to know what's going on."
Growing Together Executive Director Allard says today that she has
no knowledge of the "Naked Crusader" incidents or the types of child
abuse alleged by Butler. "Could things like this happen in an
institutional setting? Yes," Allard says. "Would it blemish the
institution? Yes, it would. Would anyone condone it? Absolutely
not."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------
The history of Growing Together begins 28 years ago and more than
200 miles from South Florida. In 1976, Mel Sembler, who made
millions developing strip malls throughout the Sunshine State,
opened a nonprofit juvenile drug treatment center in St. Petersburg
called Straight Inc. His reasons were altruistic: The only
adolescent drug treatment facility in the Tampa Bay area had shut
down, and Sembler wanted to give back. One of his own sons had been
rehabilitated in such a program.
During the late '70s, Straight became a well-known and apparently
effective drug treatment center. Its methods, which were designed by
psychiatrists Miller Newton and George Ross, were a kind of hybrid
of the common 12-step model used by Alcoholics Anonymous; but there
were only six steps and a hierarchical system. Children who had been
in the program for a few months graduated to higher levels and
became "oldcomers." They were then put in charge of new attendees,
known as "newcomers." Newcomers weren't allowed to move around the
facility unless oldcomers held them by the belt in a technique known
as "belt looping."
Privacy was elusive. Newcomers were watched at all times, even in
the bathroom. Boys had to keep their hair cropped close to the
scalp. Girls were not allowed to shave their legs or armpits. During
the day, children attended hours of group therapy. At night, they
went to host homes run by parents of other children in the program.
At its height, Straight operated three facilities in Florida and
others in California, Georgia, Michigan, Massachusetts, Maryland,
Ohio, Virginia, and Texas. They were based on a "tough love"
philosophy that required a minimal staff because children did some
of the disciplining and restraining.
The facility's success, coupled with Sembler's wealth, helped raise
the developer's political profile. In 1980, he donated $100,000 to
the Republican Party and exploited his network of wealthy friends to
raise millions more. Eight years later, though Sembler had no
political or diplomatic experience, President George H.W. Bush named
him ambassador to Australia.
Ross, who would later write about his theories in a book titled
Treating Adolescent Substance Abuse: Understanding the Fundamental
Elements, left Straight in 1980 and formed two similar programs:
LIFE in Osprey, near Sarasota, and Possibilities Unlimited in
Lexington, Kentucky. Soon after Ross' departure from Straight,
allegations of malfeasance surfaced. A state attorney's
investigation shut down Straight-Sarasota in 1983 amid charges of
child abuse. The organization also paid out substantial sums in
settlements and judgments, according to court records and news
reports. One former patient, Karen Norton, won a $720,000 jury
verdict in St. Petersburg after she was strip-searched and
humiliated by staff, then slammed against a wall by Newton. "Dr.
Ross left Straight because he didn't like some of the shenanigans,"
Allard says, alluding to these abuse charges.
One of Straight-founder Ross' new programs also had problems. In
1985, the psychiatrist, who declined to comment for this article,
was charged and acquitted of falsely imprisoning teenagers in
Kentucky.
In 1987, two of Ross' top assistants from LIFE started Growing
Together in Lake Worth. "In the LIFE program, there were so many
people from the West Palm Beach area that were traveling across the
state that they basically asked if they could start their own
program on this side," Allard explains. To this day, Allard cites
Ross' theories as the foundation of her program.
Children generally attend for 18 months. Parents pay a flat $14,000
fee, and financial aid is available. Additionally, a public school
teacher visits every day so children in the program can progress to
the next grade level.
Straight's militant style of drug treatment piqued the interest of
Barry Lane Beyerstein, a professor of psychology at Simon Fraser
University in Burnaby, British Colombia. In 1992, Beyerstein penned
a scathing report on Straight's methods for the Drug Policy
Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates changes to U.S.
drug policy. He compared them to the mind-control techniques used by
communists on American POWs during the Korean War.
"Straight tried to break down individuality," Beyerstein
recalls. "That's what the Koreans succeeded beautifully in doing,
making people dependent on their captors and removing any
individuality and any ability to think about what they're being
told. They never give any time alone. They keep them frantically
busy all the time so they're always exhausted and hungry. That makes
people more malleable. Straight was like a cult."
The same year Beyerstein released his report, Richard Bradbury, a
graduate of Straight-St. Petersburg who had become a staff member
after spending two years in the program, started collecting evidence
of child abuse. In December 1992, the insider provided his findings
to the state Inspector General's Office.
"I was brainwashed," the 39-year-old Bradbury says today. "As
children, we believed it was for our own good when we were beaten or
stabbed. We believed we were pieces of shit."
In April 1993, one month before Acting Inspector General Lowell
Clary was to release his report, Straight closed its Florida clinics
and moved the headquarters to Atlanta.
According to Clary's five-page account, Ambassador Sembler's
political influence had kept Straight in business despite evidence
that staff withheld medication and food, used excessive force, and
deprived children of sleep in an effort to control them. "It appears
that some [state regulators] experienced some degree of pressure to
grant Straight a license," Clary wrote. That pressure included calls
from Sembler and state senators, though the report does not specify
which senators. Additionally, according to the Clary report, a top
state official named Dr. Ivor Groves made it clear to his underling,
Linda Lewis, that she should not take action against Straight.
According to the report, when Lewis expressed concerns about child
abuse, Groves told her, "If you do anything other than what I tell
you to do on this issue, I will fire you on the spot." Groves then
reportedly made the same threat to another state inspector.
Three months later, Straight went under. But some former staffers
went on to form new facilities based on the program's model. Newton,
for instance, formed KIDS of North Jersey, which closed in 2003
after the psychiatrist settled a lawsuit that alleged abuse for $6.5
million.
Growing Together is one of about a dozen facilities nationwide that
continues to employ the controversial Straight model. The program's
parent-patient manual and treatment method are similar to
Straight's. The terms that Straight developed -- oldcomer, newcomer,
and moral inventories, among others -- are used by Growing Together.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------
In 1989, two years after Growing Together had gone into business as
an offshoot of Straight, Rik Pavlescak began to receive complaints
of abuse. The state's director of substance abuse services in the
West Palm Beach regional office of DCF, Pavlescak inspected the
facility during two days in March 1990.
"As a state employee, I had access to all client files, interviews
with staff, and clients," the 42-year-old Pavlescak explains. "I
could make unannounced visits to the program at any time and review
their records for compliance with state laws."
New Times requested all Florida records about Growing Together, but
the state appears to have purged papers related to the
investigation. Luckily, before leaving his job in 1990, Pavlescak
made copies of records related to the program. Among his findings: A
female client complained that she had severe cramping and bleeding.
Staff did not refer her to a medical doctor. Only days later, when
her mother became aware of the condition, did she see a physician.
The girl was pregnant and miscarried.
Another female client was forced to stand in front of a mirror and
yell, "I am a whore, a slut, and a druggie."
When asked what would happen if he reported child abuse, a 17-year-
old male commented, "I'd be ignored and told to shut up." That boy
said he had restrained other children at least 15 times. Once, he
allegedly witnessed a staff member punch a child.
A 16-year-old boy told Pavlescak that he regularly killed
cockroaches during mealtimes and was not given privacy when
showering or using the toilet. The boy said he did not want to
be "brainwashed." Pavlescak wrote in his report: "He believes that
is what has happened to other clients."
An oldcomer told him: "I sleep in front of the [bedroom] door... [to
keep] newcomers from escaping."
A 15-year-old boy attempted suicide while in the program, and staff
never referred him to a psychologist. "The [suicide] issue appears
to have been dropped by the program staff," Pavlescak wrote. Months
later, the boy said he still had suicidal thoughts.
Children were given lessons on how to restrain other kids. (Using
patients to restrain patients is a violation of state law.) "They
said to kick in their knees to knock them down if you have to," one
girl said.
Following his visits in March, Pavlescak issued a probationary
license that required the facility to address the state's concerns
and undergo another site visit within 90 days.
Also in March, Karen Weiss, whose teenaged daughter Dana had been
committed to Growing Together, complained to Palm Beach County
Circuit Judge Michael Gersten. Weiss, who then lived in Coral
Springs, said Dana had been a newcomer for 15 months. Two
psychiatrists who examined Dana alleged the girl had suffered severe
psychological trauma.
Stephen E. Moskowitz, a Coral Springs psychiatrist, told Gersten
that Dana was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. "When
discussing returning to the program," Moskowitz wrote, "she seemed
quite fearful and seemed to project an image of a child whose spirit
and sense of confidence had been totally crushed." Growing
Together's psychological reports on Dana were "incomplete and really
lacked a professional type of organization and presentation,"
Moskowitz stated.
What's more, Moskowitz recommended that Judge Gersten talk to Dana
privately. "One must use the analogy of people who were part of a
cult and felt indoctrinated into the cult and were fearful of
repercussions," Moskowitz advised.
Gersten ordered the girl out of Growing Together, saying in court
that he would refuse to send more children to the program unless its
treatment improved. "Everything I see smacks of child abuse,"
Gersten said.
Growing Together refused to yield to either Gersten or the DCF. In a
letter dated March 30, 1990, then-Board President Warren Blanchard
appealed the probationary license. Blanchard also disputed nearly
all of the state's findings. The only actions Growing Together had
taken, according to Blanchard's letter, were to stop giving classes
to children on restraining their peers and to define more clearly
when staff should use physical restraint.
That's when Pavlescak discovered that Growing Together held sway in
Tallahassee. The group's request for a review hearing went to
Pavlescak's boss, program supervisor Linda J. Giesler, and then on
to Pam Peterson, the state chief of alcohol and drug abuse in
Tallahassee. Both of Pavlescak's superiors attended the licensing
hearing with Growing Together's attorneys. That was unprecedented,
he says. (Neither Giesler nor Peterson could be reached for
comment.)
"We licensed over 90 different treatment centers in the area, and
this was just one," Pavlescak says. "But the entire team was never
involved with any of the issues with any of the other treatment
centers."
The state ignored Pavlescak's reports and gave Growing Together full
license. The buzz at the West Palm Beach DCF office was that the
political push had come from the top. Gov. Bob Martinez was one year
away from becoming the nation's drug czar under President George
H.W. Bush.
"It wasn't until later that I learned that Martinez had ties to the
program," Pavlescak explains, "and that some strange things had
happened." During his investigation of Growing Together, Pavlescak
had personally reported one complaint to the state's child abuse
registry. Upon inquiry, a state official later told him that no
complaints existed.
Pavlescak left state employment in April 1990 following an unrelated
dispute with one of his bosses, who was later chastised for a
financial conflict of interest by the Florida Commission on Ethics.
Even after Pavlescak left public service, the state continued to
document abuse at Growing Together. An August 1993 investigation by
Pavlescak's successor, James Kouba, documented that "there appears
to be a lack of clinical supervision" at Growing Together. Some
staff members couldn't identify their supervisors, state officials
learned, and the children complained about the "lack of adult
supervision."
Growing Together also failed to correct the violations Pavlescak had
cited three years earlier. Among DCF's findings in 1993:
Teenagers would restrain fellow patients by sitting on them.
In two instances, a group of parents who called themselves
the "restraining fathers" kidnapped runaway girls and returned them
to Growing Together. One girl's aunt reported that several men had
pulled up to her house and dragged the girl into a van.
Kids of both sexes were forced to use a jar or pot in the bedroom if
they needed to relieve themselves in the middle of the night.
The rigorous program is also associated with a suicide. Travis
Stone, a 20-year-old African-American who had successfully graduated
from Growing Together and become a staff member, told peers as early
as January 23, 1993, that "he was feeling helpless and overwhelmed."
Those remarks were not passed on to clinical or executive staff
members, Kouba alleged. Six months later, on July 27, 1993, Stone
took a combination of pills and alcohol and then put a plastic bag
over his head.
Kouba blamed Growing Together, claiming that the facility did not
send Stone to a psychiatrist or psychologist. "His feelings were
discounted by peer staff as merely 'manipulative,'" the report
stated. "Only a trained professional should be in the position of
making this evaluation, which, in this case, may have been a life-
and-death assessment."
The state ordered Growing Together to stop using children to counsel
other children. "They are still involved in their own early recovery
process and cannot be expected to take on the role of counselor
while they are clients themselves," Kouba wrote. Allard claims that
today, kids have easy access to licensed mental health
professionals.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------
In the past ten years, Growing Together has filed roughly a dozen
lawsuits to collect fees that parents have refused to pay. In nearly
every case, the defendants have cited Growing Together's lack of
therapeutic value and abysmal treatment of children as reasons for
not settling the debt.
In two cases, parents described a prison-like facility that
emphasizes revenue over kids' needs. Ellen Decter, a single mother
in Jupiter, said her son was examined by a psychologist in October
1999 only after she agreed to fork out the $14,000 tuition upfront.
By then, Growing Together had a financial interest in seeing her son
diagnosed as suitable for treatment, she alleged. The program was "a
concentration camp for clients and parents," Decter wrote in a
letter submitted to the court April 3, 2002.
Cathy Snyder of Fort Myers Beach told the Palm Beach County Circuit
Court on May 21, 1997, that Growing Together misdiagnosed her son's
problems. Rather than being drug-addicted, he had a chemical
imbalance that an independent psychiatrist discovered after she
removed the boy from the program.
Reports from the Lake Worth Police Department, which is located
across the street from Growing Together's building, seem to
substantiate parents' claims. Since 1995, police have written more
than 800 reports related to 1000 Lake Ave. for incidents including
assault, drugs, noise complaints, and runaway juveniles.
On April 27, 1997, at 8:30 a.m., teenaged patients rioted inside the
facility, according to police reports filed that day. Three boys
took chairs and shattered the second-story windows, spraying glass
on construction workers and pedestrians. They then barricaded
themselves inside a room. Police later barged in to regain control
of the facility.
Since 2000, police have written 28 reports related to battery and 22
to missing juveniles. In some cases, officers documented instances
of abuse or violations of state law but declined to pursue charges:
On June 1, 2001, an oldcomer beat a newcomer because he was reading
a book.
On July 6, 2001, an oldcomer slapped a newcomer after finding that
the newcomer had been innocently drawing.
On October 23, 2003, police reported that a teenaged patient
was "enforcing the rules with other patients" -- the same violation
Pavlescak cited in 1990.
On January 2, 2004, police observed Growing Together's 54-year-old
clinical director, Laura Hughes, restraining a teenaged girl on the
ground after she "had been disrespectful and disobedient to Growing
Together staff throughout the day."
While DCF's investigations of Growing Together are less aggressive
than they were ten years ago, the state agency continues to find
significant problems. During the most recent inspection, on December
19, 2003, investigators discovered documents that suggested staff
was too quick to use physical force and that children continued to
sleep on mattresses on the floor. State law requires children to
have a full bed and frame.
Both issues are misunderstandings, Allard says. She contends her
staff does everything possible before using physical force. "I think
what was happening was that the staff wasn't putting down [in their
paperwork] everything that happened before a child was restrained,"
Allard says. As a result, Allard says, Growing Together started
using a form that provides additional space for the
narrative. "There are times when a kid needs to be restrained if
they are a threat to themselves or others," Allard explains. "If a
child picked up a heavy chair and was going to throw it at another
client, I can tell you that they would be restrained... Restraining
is the last resort. No one wants to restrain anyone. You don't want
that for the child, and you don't want that for the adult."
Allard refuses to alter her policy on bed frames, claiming that
children could use the metal to cut themselves. "We can't do that in
good conscience," she says.
On July 27, Piotr Blass, a computer-science professor at Key College
in Dania Beach, sued Growing Together after his 16-year-old son,
David, was court-ordered into the program. In his lawsuit, Blass
alleges that Growing Together "often kidnaps children from their
parents and then employs draconian, sadistic, destructive, and
highly damaging psychological techniques to destroy the relationship
between parent and child, all for their own benefit and financial
gain."
These types of allegations can also be found on an Internet bulletin
board (
www.fornits.com/wwf) used by former patients of Growing
Together and other Straight-based clinics. Most of the messages
detail physical, psychological, or sexual abuse. Allard claims the
allegations are "made up" and written by "people who are still
involved in the druggie scene."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------
It's noon on Friday, November 19, and Jessica Norris sits quietly on
a bench near the fountains at the end of Clematis Street in West
Palm Beach. An anxious, pretty 18-year-old with long brown hair and
a disarming smile, Jessica (not her real name) considers herself a
survivor. At 14, she experimented with cocaine. Her parents placed
her in Growing Together, where she says she endured 18 months of
physical and psychological trauma. "When I first got there, the
other girls were telling me about Naked Crusader," she
says. "Everyone in Growing Together knew there was abuse. But no one
said anything. We were all too scared."
Inside the facility, Jessica says she witnessed beatings and child
neglect. In the "white room," where children were sent to calm down,
clumps of hair lay on the floor and blood was smeared on the walls,
she claims. Every day, staff interrogated the kids, making them give
more and more outlandish confessions about their past. "I made up
that my uncle molested me," Jessica says. "It was the only way to
move up."
Now a student at Palm Beach Community College, Jessica is still
adjusting to life on the outside. During her time at Growing
Together, she claims she couldn't take a shower in private. She
believed she was worthless. She became accustomed to the sight of
staff members throwing children to the ground. To this day, she
hears the screams that rolled through the halls like thunder between
buildings.
"I've tried not to look back," Jessica says, brushing a string of
hair behind her right ear. "What we went through was a terrible
thing."
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar.
Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA ... /gDOolB/TM--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/8th_Step/Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.
--Dan Barker, author and former evangelist
