On 2006-05-22 06:06:00, Anonymous wrote:
""I am amused by the fact that as soon as a good solid argument is presented the trolls go eerily silent."
What "good solid argument"? In fact, what argument at all, other than posturing. Take bits and pieces of this and that, put them together, and that doesn't mean you have a coherent, or even accurate picture. No, you don't have to go to the desert to see a therapist. No, "wilderness programs" don't accomplish what they advertise for everybody. Medical doctors aren't successful in curing every disease or sick person.
You've got to look at the whole picture, and nobody has done that here - or rather, nobody here seems to have put it all together and posted it. You can show successes and failures of a lot of places. But you can't defensibly claim miracles from a program when a handful of people say it helped them. And you can't defensibly claim "bad" when something went wrong once in four years and with one of hundreds of participants.
There are some places I wouldn't send my worst enemy. And there are some great places that aren't right for some people. But you can't take one or a few examples out of chance knowledge and determine absolute truth for one and all - either way."
On the contrary. There are those of us who have no vested interest in the subject. We have no teenage children. We have no program experience. We have searched the Internet both on the survivors' sites and programs' own sites. We have read the testimonials of those who praise programs. We have read the accounts of abuse. We have sought out the news stories, the studies, and the opinions of experts. We have done our best to remain objective and open minded. We realize that there are no easy answers and the world is not black and white. When weighing in all of the evidence, we have come to the only rational conclusion.
Programs are scams based on new age junk science, overpriced and sold to those who do not do their homework. They are the equivelant of psychological snake-oil.
Program operators are, at best, amoral, at worst sadistic, and likely to be religious-like in their self-righteous opinion that they alone can solve the problem. They are either liars or arrogantly ignorant when they claim to even understand the problem.
These operators prey on parents who have either abused or ignored their own children for so long that the kids are now 'out of control' and cannot be reeled in. Not knowing what else to do, as a last resort, these hapless folk send their kids away to be forced into compliance by cruel strangers in a cult-like environment of oppression and abuse.
The kids themselves have no choice in their own treatment or fate. Many are too young even to understand what is abusive and unacceptable and what is normal and will often accept the programs teachings in the same blind way religious fundamentalists and cult members accept the teachings of their deluded leaders. They become the next generation of narrow minded thinkers.
Those kids that see through the programs' lies and distortions are forced to fake it or be treated with ever increasing brutality until they break and succumb to the will of the masters. They are damaged, but they survive and when they reach safety, either through age or the awakening of their parents, they speak out. They appear here on Fornits', they post in myspace groups, they testify in court. They sometimes stuggle for years in attempt to heal from the misguided abuse they have suffered.
And the program supporters, unable to face the real, hard evidence can only dismiss them as whiners and liars; even when the abuse is caught on tape, or photograhed, or proved in a court of law.
There is nothing so sad for me than to read the words of a young person who was kidnapped, robbed of his possessions, robbed of his identity, denied communication, denied even the basic right to speak out, treated like a prisoner, or dragged through the wilderness, admit that all this happened to him and in the same paragraph claim to never have witnessed or experienced abuse; and believe it. That truly, is an effective conversion; or brainwashing, take your pick.
Absolutely no one has the right to force their own set of values onto another person. Each human being has the right to define their own values and to think for themselves and act for themselves. Anything less is oppression and unAmerican.
