On 2004-04-25 13:39:00, Anonymous wrote:
"What about the kids that write to friends or extended family and say they're being abused when they're not? Most of them are writing these kinds of letters to the parents and sending it to friends and others who may believe it would only cause problems for the parents.
I know that parents at a WWASPS program can send letters from friends and others. Those contacts cannot send them without the parents approval. I get the reason, and don't agree it causes SS that the kids are in some jeopardy of SS. Their friends are part of the problem and have plenty of time to work that out.
You're looking at this as the friends are their only connection to home. NOT. "
Let me give you an example of how your reasoning is flawed. Kids in WWASPS facilities are not simply dis-allowed from written communication with teen friends (the Bad Influences). WWASPS limits communication with EVERYONE!! This includes limits (and/or the total blockage) of written communication with PARENTS...as well as friends, extended family, government officials who represent them as citizens, reporters, old school teachers. This is Isolation Tactic 101, the basic, first-mentioned technique in first-CIA-chief Allen Dulles' letter to J. Edgar Hoover in 1952, explaining what brainwashing was. It was not called Stockholm Syndrome then, because the Stockholm incident occurred later in the early '60's, but the forced complete reliance on One Single Authority ("there's nobody else on this planet who cares about you, Dude, so you better learn to like us") isn't new. So many survivors repeat the same mantra (so I believe it) that the first "therapy" sessions are a heavy load of "Your parents sent you away because they're fed up with you", and the parents are encouraged by the case managers to write their children, telling them about the wonderful vacation the parents are now enjoying without their lying, manipulating, ungrateful kids. These hateful letters from parents are likely to "get through", whereas parental letters full of angst about whether The Program is really the best thing for the kid will hit the trash as soon as the case manager reads it. I know this from personal experience.
Kids at one WWASPS facility (with which I am terribly familiar) are marched to the computer lab every Monday, and required to produce an email to parents. E-mails are easily tampered with by staff, and the evidence is non-existent, except for an oddly-jumbled, thoughts-not-running-consistently sort of syntax you WWASPie parents may recognize. My grandchild dutifully wrote her weekly email, but her mother (and I, who also received her carefully-worded letters after the staff had censored them) only received 2 letters during the first 6 weeks of incarceration. Now, one year later, it appears I received about 30% of her letters, and she received about 75% of mine (which were progressively more "cautious" in my wording, as I realized she was not seeing a lot of my previous weekly written chats). Most [or all] of my letters (which had to be sent in a large manilla evelope to her mother, and forwarded in turn to the facility) made it through the parents, but were squashed by the facility. About 3 months into her incarceration, I received her letter, apologizing for "being a black hole that sucks the goodness out of our family". This letter from her obviously fit right in with what WWASPS was trying to convince her of. I fired off an answer, in carefully-worded Righteous Indignation, about her precious value to our family, her inate goodness, her special place in our world. For some reason, this mail got through to her...maybe somebody on staff who read it didn't really understand English all that well. I know this because she told me (unsolicited) a year later about how important my letter was to her.
I wrote back and forth to her mother, heaping reams of negative information I was finding...from the Internet, from personal conversations with parents and kids from WWASPS, from inquiries to government and media investigators. When I forwarded the front-page New York Times article about her facility in mid-May 2003, I was abruptly terminated from communicating with this grandaughter who had lived a good percentage of her life with us. I was "not positive and supportive of the Program...", and would be allowed no further communication with her. Oddly, we did receive an email out of the blue on July 8, 2003. It was chatty, and disorganized (and the spelling and grammar had degenerated so far after 8 months in "self-taught" school that it was difficult to follow). She "brought us up to date", so somehow knew that we had not been receiving her *weekly* letters in the last 3 months, as she knew she had not received my frequent letters filled with pictures from home. The last paragraph (the meat of the letter, and obviously why this particular letter was forwarded to us) was her suggestion that I "back off", and forget my political activism against WWASPS. Seems Casa didn't like the heat. As usual, the letter was ended with a whole line of XOXOXO's. A year later, she told us she was directed to write this by the staff at the facility.
She has been living with us now for 5 months, attending high school, and doing quite well. She is at a volleyball tournament this weekend. She awakens sometimes, crying in the night, but simply says "It was a Casa dream". She spent her Spring Break week back in her old home-town, staying with an old friend (one of the Evil Friends whom I really like...and whose family bent over backward to accomodate, their most powerful effort to make up for what they believe happened to her in WWASPS). This long-time friend was not allowed to write her either...nor were her aunts and uncles, her cousins, anybody who was "anti-Proram"...which was the whole world who knew where she was. To more-casual friends, she had simply "disappeared", and she was not able to write to them to tell them where she was. She was not allowed to write to her mother to tell her she was in solitary confinement for more than 2 months straight. She was not allowed to write us (grandparents) to tell us how terrified and desperate she felt without any support system of family in place. She was not allowed to write government officials about seeing friends come back with bleeding sores on their knees from hours kneeling in R&R. She could not write to her mother about girls in her group who had permanent scars on their chins from being hogtied on a cement floor over and over. She could not write to the media about girls finally pushed out the stockade gates at 18, miles from town, alongside a Mexican freeway, with little money and no protection.
You say, "You're looking at this as the friends are their only connection to home. NOT". You are incredibly naive, stupid, or just downright mean to think that isolation is simply to keep these awful kids away from the evil friends from "before". This is terrible short-sightedness (or real idiocy and dismal parental skills) if you think bad friends made all your problems. I can see why you would think throwing money at this scam would solve your problem. If you really can't find the answer, pay somebody to do it for you.
Oh, FWIW, she did have a nice lunch at a restaurant with her mother over spring break. Their relationship is strained and limited. The rest of our large extended family has disowned the mother, who lives her life with the step-father, sadly devoid of friends, one of her two daughters, and the large circle that was her world, previous to WWASPS.
