This is a false choice. It is not a choice between some phony nirvana in a program and completely tolerating a teen who is off track, violent or deliquent. There is another way.
Parents do not have to be afraid to keep working it out at home.Families can and do successfully seek help in their own communities, within their own family, social, and community networks, in a way that keeps the family together and helps the child
and the family to work out their problems. The child may clearly need help, but that almost always means the parents need help parenting, too. Families can and do survive the teen years!
Adults are accountable because the adults have the power.The reason children are not held to the same account as adults is that the adults are the ones with the power. The legal definitions of various kinds of abuse or violence all turn on the power differential. If one party is more powerful physically, mentally, or economically or with regard to legal standing, or otherwise have greater power, then they are prohibited from using that power to harm or take advantage of the other person.
Parents are legally and morally obligated to protect children from abuse. Furthermore, parents are legally and morally obligated to protect their children, to
protect them from the type of abuse that commonly--
commonly--occurs in programs, including deprivation of food, water, shelter, medical care, liberty, and education, and deprives them of the ability to report these abuses to the authorities and, in fact, to their own parents.
We may disagree about what constitutes "protecting"...Arguments like these between pro-program parents/family members/supporters and anti-program survivors/youth/advocates/defenders seems to get stuck fighting about two competing views. One view is that sending children to involuntary placements in programs thousands of miles from home and family for confrontational "therapy" is somehow "protecting the child." The other view is that doing so is abuse, pure and simple. Obviously you can count me in the latter camp. I do make an exception for the family members who are deceived and/or railroaded by programs into enrolling their children.
...but there is documentation of widespread abuse, and deceptive marketing practices at programs.Just because
some families report a good experience with a program does not in any way excuse or rationalize the acts of child abuse committed against other children. Parents are right to be deeply concerned about the health, well-being, and safety of a child placed in a program.
There is detailed credible documentation of widespread reports of abuse, maltreatment, death, and deceptive marketing practices as reported by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office in their foresic investigation reports issued in October 2007 (
http://edlabor.house.gov/testimony/1010 ... timony.pdf) and April 2008 (
http://edlabor.house.gov/testimony/2008 ... egKutz.pdf).
Auntie Em
