Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

Hey all,

Sorry I havent been around lately, miss you guys! But I've been trying to focus on other ventures. Just wanted to let you know I've created a website WWASPSurvivors and we just set up some forums... You're welcome to join us, although we are just starting out and we don't have a ton of threads, feel free to recommend any that may have some significance to you.

WWASPSurvivors isn't just for survivors of WWASP, all are welcome and all are encouraged to share their stories. Our intention is to reach out to parents and give them the information they need in order to make an informed decision when looking for a program (hopefully not to send them at all!) I'm constantly updating the site and the forums are really just a way for everyone to suggest things to be added to the main content. As well we are planning on building a new program database and the forums could be a good place to collect info on each program, particularly survivor testimony. In any event there are general forums and healing and dealing forums so feel free just to drop by and chat.

I'm not HUGE on moderation, I do support free speech but we think it's important to require registration to post in most of the forums and we will moderate any threats, attacks or severe trolling.

Please lend us your support and wealth of knowledge so that we might be able to work together to reach the parents and save these kids!

Thank You

 :hug:

http://http://motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/cult-spawned-tough-love-teen-industry

The idea that punishment can be therapeutic is not unique to the Rotenberg Center. In fact, this notion is widespread among the hundreds of "emotional growth boarding schools," wilderness camps, and "tough love" antidrug programs that make up the billion-dollar teen residential treatment industry.

This harsh approach to helping troubled teens has a long and disturbing history. No fewer than 50 programs (though not the Rotenberg Center) can trace their treatment philosophy, directly or indirectly, to an antidrug cult called Synanon. Founded in 1958, Synanon sold itself as a cure for hardcore heroin addicts who could help each other by "breaking" new initiates with isolation, humiliation, hard labor, and sleep deprivation.

Today, troubled-teen programs use Synanon-like tactics, advertising themselves to parents as solutions for everything from poor study habits to substance misuse. However, there is little evidence that harsh behavior-modification techniques can solve these problems. Studies found that Synanon's "encounter groups" could produce lasting psychological harm and that only 10 to 15 percent of the addicts who participated in them recovered. And as the classic 1971 Stanford prison experiment demonstrated, creating situations in which the severe treatment of powerless people is rewarded inevitably yields abuse. This is especially true when punishment is viewed as a healing process. Synanon was discredited in the late 1970s and 1980s as its violent record was exposed. (The group is now remembered for an incident in which a member placed a live rattlesnake—rattle removed—in the mailbox of a lawyer who'd successfully sued it.) Yet by the time Synanon shut down in 1991, its model had already been widely copied.

In 1971, the federal government gave a grant to a Florida organization called The Seed, which applied Synanon's methods to teenagers, even those only suspected of trying drugs. In 1974, Congress opened an investigation into such behavior-modification programs, finding that The Seed had used methods "similar to the highly refined brainwashing techniques employed by the North Koreans."

The bad publicity led some supporters of The Seed to create a copycat organization under a different name. Straight Inc. was cofounded by Mel Sembler, a Bush family friend who would become the GOP's 2000 finance chair and who heads Lewis "Scooter" Libby's legal defense fund. By the mid-'80s, Straight was operating in seven states. First Lady Nancy Reagan declared it her favorite antidrug program. As with The Seed, abuse was omnipresent—including beatings and kidnapping of adult participants. Facing seven-figure legal judgments, it closed in 1993.

But loopholes in state laws and a lack of federal oversight allowed shuttered programs to simply change their names and reopen, often with the same staff, in the same state—even in the same building. Straight spin-offs like the Pathway Family Center are still in business.

Confrontation and humiliation are also used by religious programs such as Escuela Caribe in the Dominican Republic and myriad "emotional growth boarding schools" affiliated with the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP), such as Tranquility Bay in Jamaica. WWASP's president told me that the organization "took a little bit of what Synanon [did]." Lobbying by well-connected supporters such as WWASP founder Robert Lichfield (who, like Sembler, is a fundraiser for Republican presidential aspirant Mitt Romney) has kept state regulators at bay and blocked federal regulation entirely.

By the '90s, tough love had spawned military-style boot camps and wilderness programs that thrust kids into extreme survival scenarios. At least three dozen teens have died in these programs, often because staff see medical complaints as malingering. This May, a 15-year-old boy died from a staph infection at a Colorado wilderness program. His family claims his pleas for help were ignored. In his final letter to his mother, he wrote, "They found my weakness and I want to go home."

Posted this on /b/ today...

Greetings fellow /b/tards... Once again it is time to take on a new rival, a multi-billion dollar industry that illegally incarcerates teenagers, denies them even the most basic of human rights and physically and mentally abuses (brainwashes) both these kids and their families. The Troubled Teen Industry has been escaping accountability for their crimes against humanity for over  4 decades. Originating from a cult called The Church of Synanon (also linked with Scientology) it has spawned into a multi-billion dollar child raping industry. I myself was a child prisoner of these money hungry shit for brains religious nuts and I can honestly say they ruined my life and the life of countless others. We've been working for years trying to shut these places down but they keep popping back up with the same staff, same cult doctrine and the same abusive techniques. How can we continue to let this happen when there are children being abused as we speak? It's time we took them down for good! /b/ I desperately need your help! We need to take over their websites, hack their emails, bank accounts, records, get every piece of dirt we can find and go after every last one of these sick and demented pieces of shit and DESTROY THEIR LIVES like they have done to thousands of families! If we can’t take them down now, and Mitt Romney gets the Repub. candidacy WERE FUCKED! Robert Litchfield is the head of one of one of the most notorious troubled teen organizations, WWASP (no defunct) or Teen Revitalization (they had to change their name to escape the reputation we have given them) and was Romney's campaign financial co-chair before Mitt had to publicly distance himself from Litchfield due to the massive class action lawsuit against WWASP. I believe they still have financial ties and if Mitt Romney gains any power in our government, our efforts to change government policy to protect the rights of children in residential treatment programs will be a loss. There is so much more to this than I can write on one message board and there are so many different programs and organizations, this would have to be a full scale strategic take over. If you give a shit about human rights… please help us.

I'd like to start a anti-TTI blog... anyone want to contribute?

I could really use people willing to write articles, personal stories and help collect content to add to the TTI database.

so if you give a shit, holla. (pm if you would like to keep your involvement anonymous)

Funny, I'm actually participating (as a kind of sobriety coach) in my friend's recovery from a Heroin addiction.

This is what I believe is working.

He is in a court mandated program which regularly drug tests him and basically threatens to throw him in jail if he comes up dirty.

He moved into my house. A change of scenery was a very good move for him as it became clear that even visiting his house (where hes been getting high for many years) was a strong enough trigger to lead him to relapse.

He has my constant support and companionship. He also knows I know when he's high and I'll kick his ass.

We often have talks about how being sober has to be his decision, nothing we do could realistically stop him if he wanted to do it, he has made an agreement with himself that he wants nothing to do with dope.

I regularly give him chances to prove he is trustworthy and show him he has my respect and to me, he is not a heroin addict. I make it a point to indicate that the "addict" part of his disorder is separate from his personality and can be overcome with time and will.

We talk about the voice in his head that convinces him to use, we say "that's your addict talking" We've found it helpful to encourage an inner dialog by identifying the excuses "your addict" makes and prepare realistic rebuttals to convince him not to use.

We talk about strength, that a feeling of weakness is not an excuse to relapse and partaking in a substance is a choice that in his case comes with heavy consequences.

He also plays WoW a lot. lol. (staying busy/ entertained is a good way to ward off cravings)

No weed yet, he can't in his program but I have all confidence that he will partake after his program ends. I think it is a positive thing in his case as he has always smoked weed before he started H, so for him it is simply a return to normalcy.

We've only had one small slip in the last 60 days... I think he's doing very well.

Now that ISAC is gone our cause is lacking in a comprehensive research database.

We've been twiddling our thumbs long enough its time to get back on the database project.

Lets start here, I have already made a folder system that will help us organize the files we all already have... I've got a ways to go before I will be able to build this site from the ground up so lets just do what we can do for now.

We need to get some volunteers, build a few teams and each team tackle a different subject (ie: Original programs like Synanon, CEDU and other clones, Modern day programs like WWASP, ASPEN and clones, Related Articles and scientific research on techniques used by the TTI... and the list goes on, you pick whatever you have experience in) and just collect as much information as you can find on google.

My main goal is to SEO the SHIT out of www.troubled-teen-industry.com so that we can rank over the programs... especially in the "behavior modification" and "Help my teen" key words... this will be very possible if we can bulk up our content.

I am currently studying web design, including php and mySQL... a database is definitely something I will be able to build down the road, and we already have some plans in the works to build our own private server. So its really important that I get everyones help here, I just don't have the time to do it all myself.

Anyway, sorry for my recent absence, I've been really busy but I will always make time to bring an end to institutionalized child abuse...Thanks Everyone!

PS... is there anyway to recover the content from our fallen ISAC.org? Can someone contact Shelby and see if she has hard copies she can give to us?

The real reason EVERYONE should support this "stoner stimulus" is because commercializing the sale and distribution of pot is going to dramatically decrease the crime rate. Look at mexico for example, a large percentage of the cartel's profits come from smuggling weed through the border and I think we can all assume, a significant amount of legitimate criminal activity takes place in this process. Cutting off the cartel's main source of income can essentially cripple their drug trade, and reduce the amount of money tax payers are currently paying to manage the borders, and the street sales of marijuana.

Think about it, every cop that didn't need to pull over, search, harass and arrest every teenage stoner might be able to be out solving real crimes?... haha what a concept!

 :rasta:  :rasta:  :rasta:  :rasta:

Danny B quotes for epic lolz... anyone?