Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > The Troubled Teen Industry

NY TIMES: Charges of Cruelty at a Jamaica Discipline Academy

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anon:
[ This Message was edited by: KarenZ on 2003-10-16 19:49 ]

Anonymous:
It's the same article pasted on this thread & written by Tim Weiner for the New York Times, only now reported in the Salt Lake Tribune. Hey, I'm just glad it's circulating right back to Utah where these WWASP mind rapists are headquartered.


http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Jun/06192003 ... /67510.asp

Antigen:
Hey Shannon,
  Thanks for posting. Thanks more for waking up. I hope you won't take offense to this. But I'm really trying to understand this and I hope you'll answer.

It would not occure to me, as a parent, to think of a kid who just hates school or would rather go play as a desperate situation. And you're not unusual in thinking like this. There was a pretty well known case of some millionaire who sent his son off to TB because, in a fit of anger, the kid broke a window on his car. Over and over again, we hear from Program parents with the same fairly trivial complaints. Kid said he hated me, didn't obey me, yelled at me, skipped school.

And you seem to imply, like a lot of parents, that WWASP didn't do a whole lot of direct recruiting to reel you in. You went looking for them and found them. So my question is how have we come to this?

My own daughter is 19 now. She hasn't exactly taken a course in life that I would have chosen for her. In fact, there have been moments when I understood with pure clarity what made my parents believe it was time for desperate measures. Of course, I was 14 and hitchhiking around the country at the time. The irony is that the only reason I did this was that I thought they were about to put me in a program for being depressed and I'd learned from years of open meetings that that's just what teenagers who don't go along with the program do.

I understand what happened in my family. My mom got recruited into an obvious cult. It was so obvious to nearly everyone that, by the time I was around 8 years old, the other kids in the neighborhood weren't allowed to play with me because their parents were just freaked out by my mother. Now, it seems, it's become a normal, accepted part of our culture to send kids off to reform school if they put a toe out of line. And I don't really understand why or how the generation that shut down universities to protest a war and ran naked at Woodstock can now be so quick to give up on their own kids.
 


--- Quote ---On 2003-06-19 06:06:00, Anonymous wrote:

"facekhan, i dont feel i was lazy or selfish,that was the hardest decision i ever had to make,  i feel i was a mother trying to do her best in raising my daughter, when she started refusing to go to school, i started searching boarding schools(and guess who popped up time and time again) she was going to have to be held back, it was out of desperation i sent her to costa rica,they advertise 2yr of education to 1 U.S. year, i thought it was the perfect answer, i will now live with guilt over all this, my daughter was only in 2 months, and that was enough, i realized what was happening there when the chaos broke out and she left, the U.S embassy helped get me in touch with her.im thankful she is home, and my eyes are now open,  shannon :eek:   "

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A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special

--Nelson Mandela
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Antigen:

--- Quote ---On 2003-06-18 20:09:00, FaceKhan wrote:

 I noticed that there are actually a few movies that relate to this issue a lot. I was channel surfing and I saw this weird movie called Lost Angels (1989)
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Oh, I find these things every now and again. SciFi channel has a couple of B movies they run every once in awhile. One is a family who moves into a very cliquish, exclusive gated community where, it turns out, they do some surgery on the kids and make them join a group. If the kids don't go along in lock step, they kill them. If the parents won't go along, they get kicked out of the club.

There's another one about a kid in a boarding school who's resistant to the brainwashing because of some acne medication he's taking. Turns out, there's a real life premis to it.

There are a good many songs hitting the radio that might well have been written by program vets, too. I think it's out there. And I think that's why Scary John has such a hard on for the RAVE scene. Reminds me of wounded knee. Can't quite put a finger on the precise dogma or philosophy of totalists. But one thing's for sure, they do NOT like dancing!

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
-- Dave Barry

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Anonymous:
As a two year survivor of Straight, I whole heartily agree with you two parents. I believe you both were taken advantage of, that is, the desperation you had for your kids were preyed upon. Trouble is, it really hasn't been until recently that both survivors and parents alike of these ugly places whether in existence, or no longer in existence, are finally coming together and saying that WE are no longer going to put up with this kind of crap. We are going to hold accountable these people who would dare profit off of ourselves or our loved ones by putting them in horrible prisons with no regard for their well-being whatsoever.  We are going to hold our government, more specifically, the leaders that make up our government accountable to see that young people are protected under the constitution they are obligated to enforce.

I have to agree that there are still parents out there that some 20, 30 years later say that Straight Inc. and The Seed (even though they are both now closed up (in those names) ) are/were still the greatest concepts since sliced bread. Some of these parents still go around 'guiltless' or if they knew there was a problem with a decision they made, would not look at that guilt at all. Mistakes are some of the most difficult things a parent from time to time must deal with. Those that do only come out stronger for it in my opinion.

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