Lols.. Thanks for the bible lesson. I'll post it over on CAFETY for that Judge Roy to share with the rest of his freaky fundie friends.
Or not..
I'm thinking my posting on Cafety is going to come to an end here by my own choice. To many little niggling things that bother me way to much.
It really does have a political atmosphere that fornits thankfully is free of. Here the politics are crudely delightful. Someone calls me a republican I call them a cocksucker in return, and everyone calls The Who a spastic tool.
I was walking home tonight thinking how long all of this came about, but before I elaborate on my thoughts I have to make the following acknowledgements.
There is a certain someone here that wishes their name not to be mentioned. YOU drive me nuts sometimes, but without your persistance this never would have happened.
-This person called Magnolia twice and found out oddles of information. The paddling part is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm going to let the others develop the information further and hopefully it will all go up on ISAC and HEAL.
-This person kept me motivated to persue this when it seemed like so many others had forgotten.
-This same person also pointedly reminded me again and again not to let my temper get the better of me when dealing with Bill Boyles. I have to admit my handling of Bill Boyles could have been better, but then given my tendency to completely unload on others when they are defending programs I'm surprised I didn't flame Bill right into oblivion. Bill nearly had a lemon party waiting for him more than once in his pm box.
-I want to thank Oz Girl who was all roaring to go about being my back up when Judge Roy showed up on Cafety. She actually made an international call to the place and confirmed for a 3rd time that they indeed use corporal punishment.
I was chatting with a friend of mine just a few minutes ago about the whole thing on cafety and she asked me why I wasn't going to persue it any further. My response was simple, "I did my part and now its time for others to take up the charge."
Yes my good friends the rest is up to you. Blow the doors off that place and set the children free. My part in this is finished.
When I was teaching my last class I was reminded of Magnolia their buttwhomping ways. I only have 3 students for this class so its pretty informal and we spend most of the time talking. The owner of the school walked through the door just before class and had ordered me to hit the students if they didn't talk more English. After nodding and dismissing him we went ahead with the lesson. When the lesson was finished I told the students, "Do you think I would actually hit you?"
The only girl of the trio said, "No, because you told us the first day of class that hitting people is wrong."
I replied, "But the school owner said I must hit you if you don't speak English."
The girl said, "You still won't hit us."
Well she was and is right. Something in each and everyone of us must give at some point in our lives. In my own life I came up in a violently abusive household. My perception of a normal childhood was so skewed in favor of routine beatings delivered by both of my parents that it still affects me to this day. Though certainly nothing like it used to bother me. Just recently I walked passed the school next to mine that is a Math Academy and saw a student getting beat with a meter stick. I turned to push open the front door of the school to say something(Big plate glass doors) when the teacher stopped and looked at me. Apparently the look on my face was enough to convince her that I wasn't stopping by for a cup of tea. Needless to say the beating stopped and the young man was allowed to hobble off on his way(Corporal Punishment is very legal and very over used in Korea). Looking back at my employment with Three Springs I'm not at all surprised that I ended up using brute force tactics to control my group.
We are the product of our environments. At Eckerd's such brute force wasn't used. On very rare occasions I saw restraints happen when they shouldn't have and those ended up being addressed by the program directors. In two years of dealing with juvenile delinquints I ended up performing 4 restraints. The rest of the time I managed to avoid those situations by using common sense and building good relationships with the young men in my groups. My last group was filled with the lowest functioning members of all the other groups. It was decided to keep all the really low functioning kids in one group for whatever reason.
Despite this my group never had much in the way of fights, restraints, or anything else. The worst those Juveniles managed to do was run each other's underwear up the flag pole in the middle of their campsite. I found out all about the incident the next day when I returned to work and promptly gave them a verbal reminder to take pictures for me the next time. The program directors wanted a stronger reaction from me regarding the incident, but my point was very simple in the fact that they were boys. Sometimes teenage boys are known to do goofy things like run each others underwear up the flag pole. While Eckerd's was a decently controlled environment there are still problems with the program that like all programs need to be address.
Please don't think I'm endorsing the Eckerd's program, because I'm not. I will elaborate on what I believe is the underlying problems with the Eckerd model of wilderness therapy at a later time.
Back on topic here..
At Three Springs I was thrust right back into the midst of a very violent situation. The old saying, "You can take the boy out of the country, but not the country out of the boy," can be changed to, "You can take the abuse away from the boy, but you can't take it out of him." That was me in 2002 in the middle of Alabama with a group of 10 to 12 year old children. The violence I resorted to to control my group seemed completely normal to me. It wasn't violence like I was exposed to when I was a kid. No punching, no kicking, no choking, no slapping, no whippings, no paddlings, no kids was nearly thrown out of a moving vehicle, no sexual abuse, and definitely no firearms were ever pointed at any of the kids in any of my groups. My actions towards my groups are the palest palest weakest form of what I experienced. It was still wrong no matter how pale the form. However, never once did I actually question it. The outrageous number of restraints, the unreasonable consquences, the humiliation, the verbal abuse, and the mind games all seemed perfectly normal to me. My justification was it wasn't anything like what I experienced, so what the hell where the kids complaining about?
It is funny, in a very sad way, now that I look back on it. Here I was dealing with troubled kids when I was more troubled than almost all of them put together. Yet from that situation I can say I took away a great number of things. First and foremost I now believe more than anything that abuse never goes away. I also endorse the idea that children who are abused have a higher chance of being abusive adults. I used to think it was more a choice, but now I fully believe in the environment a child is raised in having a huge factor in that process. Now that I've had a two year period to reflect on Three Springs I've come to terms with my own role in the program:
Programs aren't divided by staff and residents. Staff is another stage of the program.
Programs don't just seek to warp the minds of kids they go for their employee's minds also.
I've also come to understand the WWASP middle ground movement a great deal more from dealing with Bill Boyles and Kevin August. I really do believe that Bill isn't a sell out. Let me repeat that: I really do believe that Bill Boyles isn't a sell out. He may have shown poor judgement in associating with Kevin August, but then again name the decade that you've managed to with no lapses in judgement. Bill Boyles may have decided to contest my claims on CAFETY out of misquided loyalty to a fellow survivor in the form of Kevin August.
I believe the sense of loyalty Bill feels to Kevin is to be applauded. Not the misguided part of the loyalty, but certain it never hurts to acknowledge a person who didn't run from defending a fellow survivor and from all appearances a friend of his. I could say a great deal more about Bill, but I think my above comments sum up what I feel at heart. Hopefully Bill will learn a thing or two from the events that have transpired. One can only hope he does anyway.
WWASP survivors aren't unique, but they are numerous. They have been abused in such large numbers and in recent years by WWASP that their stories can't help but pop up all over the internet. These stories are so appalling that is it any surprise that a facility that isn't any where near as hard as their own would seem attractive?
Not at all if you take the time to think about it. I'm waiting to see what Bill says now that the corporal punishment part of Magnolia has been confirmed before I put him in the WWASP middle Ground tendency catergory.
Kevin is another paradigm all together. I really do think he knew about the paddling at Magnolia all along. What this says about him is up to your own interpretation.
Either way thus endeth the rant. Needed to get a few things off my chest and hopefully for the poor buggers who read this gibberish it makes some sense.
