Fornits

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

We were driving home the other night, and I mentioned that I tend to count things, to maintain order in my mind, as we get home.  Let's see, 13 horses in the front pasture, yes, 6 goats lounging on their play equipment, oops, only 5 porch lights on when there should be 6. Must replace the burned-out one.

My grandaughter told me about one girl at Casa who was classic complusive-obsessive.  She constantly counted things, and HAD to have her numbers come out even.  When the kids were lined up to count out their presence by numbers (??), she would pre-count and frantically scoot back and forth to become an even number. She was a "friend" (although she and my grandaughter could never talk together legally). She was from Israel, and had been adopted by a family from Seattle.  What a new life she had landed in!  

In The Source, there was a picture of a beaming, very-older mother with her TWO sons in WWASPS.  One biological kid frowned as the glowing mom wrapped her left arm around him at Tranquility Bay, and wrapped by her right arm was her 17yo adopted "son" from Russia.  This boy's glowering face told how he felt about his "new life" and "new family".  

Should adoption papers include some sort of protection for kids, disallowing "parents" from shipping them off for at least 10 years after adoption?  The BLM does that sort of protection for adopted mustangs, keeping them from being sold for slaughter if coping with their difficult personalities becomes trying. BLM even makes semi-yearly on-site inspections.  Shouldn't children have the same rights as wild horses?

Are WWASPS parents aware that their children are being tortured with the EXACT methods deemed torture by the International Red Cross?  

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/polit ... f=login&th

Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo
By NEIL A. LEWIS
 
Published: November 30, 2004

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The finding that the handling of prisoners detained and interrogated at Guantánamo amounted to torture came after a visit by a Red Cross inspection team that spent most of last June in Guantánamo.
The team of humanitarian workers, which included experienced medical personnel, also asserted that some doctors and other medical workers at Guantánamo were participating in planning for interrogations, in what the report called "a flagrant violation of medical ethics."
Doctors and medical personnel conveyed information about prisoners' mental health and vulnerabilities to interrogators, the report said, sometimes directly, but usually through a group called the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, or B.S.C.T. The team, known informally as Biscuit, is composed of psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators, the report said.
The United States government, which received the report in July, sharply rejected its charges, administration and military officials said.
The report was distributed to lawyers at the White House, Pentagon and State Department and to the commander of the detention facility at Guantánamo, Gen. Jay W. Hood. The New York Times recently obtained a memorandum, based on the report, that quotes from it in detail and lists its major findings.
It was the first time that the Red Cross, which has been conducting visits to Guantánamo since January 2002, asserted in such strong terms that the treatment of detainees, both physical and psychological, amounted to torture. The report said that another confidential report in January 2003, which has never been disclosed, raised questions of whether "psychological torture" was taking place.
The Red Cross said publicly 13 months ago that the system of keeping detainees indefinitely without allowing them to know their fates was unacceptable and would lead to mental health problems.
The report of the June visit said investigators had found a system devised to break the will of the prisoners at Guantánamo, who now number about 550, and make them wholly dependent on their interrogators through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions." Investigators said that the methods used were increasingly "more refined and repressive" than learned about on previous visits.
"The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture," the report said. It said that in addition to the exposure to loud and persistent noise and music and to prolonged cold, detainees were subjected to "some beatings." The report did not say how many of the detainees were subjected to such treatment.
Asked about the accusations in the report, a Pentagon spokesman provided a statement saying, "The United States operates a safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantánamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism."
It continued that personnel assigned to Guantánamo "go through extensive professional and sensitivity training to ensure they understand the procedures for protecting the rights and dignity of detainees."
The conclusions by the inspection team, especially the findings involving alleged complicity in mistreatment by medical professionals, have provoked a stormy debate within the Red Cross committee. Some officials have argued that it should make its concerns public or at least aggressively confront the Bush administration.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is based in Geneva and is separate from the American Red Cross, was founded in 1863 as an independent, neutral organization intended to provide humanitarian protection and assistance for victims of war.

From an editorial in the Sacramento Bee today:

COSTLY STRIP SEARCHES
Have Deputies Learned the Lesson?

It's both sad and alarming that the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department top brass do not seem to have learned any lesson from the court's recent costly rebuke of the downtown jail's strip-search policy.  David Lind, the chief deputy for correctional services, dismissed the complaints that led to a $15 million settlement, the largest in Sacramento County history, as "wild allegations."  Most of those arrested, Lind told The Bee, "suffered no more indignity than if they changed clothes in a college dormitory or military barracks."

Really?  What college requires students to bend over and spread their cheeks so that uniformed officers can peer into their private parts?  What army requires menstruating women to remove their sanitary napkins and stand bleeding in front of naked strangers while deputies ask them to jump up and down, and then make crude jokes?

The recent settlement requires Sacramento County to pay between $1,000 and $3,500 in damages to suspects subjected to humiliating body cavity searches at the downtown jail.  Higher amounts will go to those who were menstruating or pregnant at the time of their search or who were the targets of taunts.

Not everybody strip-searched is entitled to damages.  The settlement acknowledges that deputies can conduct body cavity searches of suspects arrested for violent crimes, serious felonies and drug offenses, but even those have to be conducted in private.

The women who brought the original lawsuit against Sacramento County had been arrested for refusing to disperse after participating in a peaceful demonstration.  They posed no threat to other inmates or to jail staff.  To require them to strip in front of deputies and other prisoners was a cruel and calculated humiliation.

That's what makes Lind's outspoken and public contempt for the court's order so alarming.  It sends a dangerous message to the deputies he commands.  If their superiors don't respect the law and the court's rulings, why should line officers?  What should the public expect?

Does Lind speak for Sheriff Lou Blanas?  If he does not, Blanas needs to say so.  He needs to make it clear to the public and to the deputies he commands that the law and the justice system will be obeyed.


**********************
For those strip-searched in behavior modification facilities, a legal precedent has been set.  Check with your lawyer.

Someone challenges my "harping" on WWASPS because there are so many other bad programs out there that need attention.  I do so because this is what I know.  Like an author, one must write about personal knowledge to be most effective.  

I am gratified that so many others with other experiences are participating in this Teen Help forum.  The whole business is a very bad thing, and so many instances are "group homes" [particularly in Utah] that house 6, maybe 10 people, and practice the same hurtful/not-helpful "solutions" to parents' problem children.  They can't all be shut down by going after them piece-meal.  WWASPS is the largest, most visible entity right now, and has the slick responses to every parent's questions down pat.  It is harder for a discerning parent to sift through the rhetoric and find the truth, when the truth is hidden by masters of deception. Kill the giant, and the ants that feed on it will also die.

Deborah has experience that she re-tells well, and it involves a credentialed, degree-laden "school" that was as bad as any WWASPS facility.  All the Straight survivors tell stories (anecdotes, really) about their similar experiences and give an older adult perspective on "what happens next".  Cherish Wisdom has recent experience and a fire in her belly against an old school still practicing the same abuse.  The mentality is the same in these places, and it is the *methods* that need to be illegal in order to squash those little fly-by-night places scattered in your own residential neighborhood.  First and foremost, there must be open communication with the students and the outside world.  Sunshine kills a fungus.

I submit anecdotes that I know are true about the daily life in a WWASPS facility.  My goal is to spread the word, to counter the propoganda, to make people remember some small fact that they might use when hearing about these behavior modification plants. Each contributor of stories has a role, and it does no good to harangue one another about "missing the mark because you're ignoring all those ed cons", etc.  EACH STORY HAS A PURPOSE.  

I don't have an "angle" particularly, except that I know that the whole industry is enjoying a "re-birth" which is quite young.  You'd hope that Straight had died a painful death, but these programs seem to be popping up to serve some need of the current wave of parents.  The programs should not be an available option.

We are struggling now with life with a 15yo in the house, with all the baggage of being a WWASPS survivor AND a 15yo AND the personality of this particular child.  That doesn't leave a lot of emotional energy to battle WWASPS windmills, so a lot of my energy goes into this public venue of telling it like it is.  I hope it touches a lot of lives and saves some.  

My grandaughter told me this weekend a story...one of my "anectdotes".  I asked if Ensenada had beaches.  No, it is mostly cliffs into the sea and lots of rocks.  Then she told me about one of the "classrooms" at Casa by the Sea.  It had a huge slider window on the ocean-facing wall, but the kids were not allowed to look out. To do so would earn consequences, most often a whole day in a tiny cubicle listening to very old self-help tapes geared toweard salesmen, played at high volume, and being forced to come up with thousands of words of "analysis" of this inane tape heard many times before.  She said that finally, about 6 months into her stay there, the staff gave up trying to legislate people's wandering eyes, and then allowed a glance out the window of NO MORE THAN 10 SECONDS DURATION...short enough to not formulate "run plans".  The kids saw a man prying abalones off the rocks and capturing baby octopi on a regular basis, and from that glimpse, she learned some of the cultural awareness that WWASPS widely promised in their marketing brochures. I asked if she had told her mom about any of this particular stuff, such petty and stupid rules, and she answered, "No, she doesn't believe me anyway".  Who would make up a story like this?  For what purpose?

FWIW, one of my "little stories".

Unfortunate as it is, we have spent a week beseiged by a kid who thinks it is really cool to disrupt this very public forum with random acts of terror.  This is Friday, Monday school resumes, and we should be able to resume the very valueable discourse that exposes private prison facilities disguised as behavior modification "schools".

I've glanced over the postings from this week, been either disgusted or confused, and have written it all off to an abberration.  How would you like to be known as an abberation?  Anyway, to those Straight-victims-now-parents, to those survivors of current programs, and to those who are yet thinking that this may be the answer when we all know it is not...sanity hopefully returns.  

Please perservere:  a chunk of the next generation may be at stake.  No spammer$1 should ever be allowed to insinutate itself into a conversation for fun, if it means that one more kid must spend years in isolation, degradation, or physical abuse.  Spammer, what goes around, comes around.  This is important stuff.  Please go back to US History, Gothic games, or Internet virus creation.  This is not a game.

On October 13, 2003, at 8:08PM, in a series of responses to blasts about her "snitching", Carey Bock posted on this fourm:

"I have not cashed any check from WWASPS.  You better be careful with what you say.  My opinions and beliefs are not for sale.  Not to anyone.  Your accusations are way off base."

Legally, one might argue that handing over more than 7000 private communications, many back-and-forth emails from a list, including the mailings from Ms. Bock, may not reflect her "opinions and beliefs" which she stated were "not for sale". I do not believe this is so. Please note that this statement was made about one month after said emails had already been delivered to WWASPS.  

On Tuesday, December 9, 2003, Carey Bock gave a deposition on her complicity in forwarding private emails to WWASPS.  A WWASPS attorney flew to Louisiana in September 2003, picked up her hard drive and returned it to Utah where it was copied.  The hard drive was then shipped back to Ms. Bock.  [Let's see, if her computer was out of commission in the WWASPS offices, how did Ms. Bock write the zillions of posts to the Fornits site?  From work?  Would the Resource Bank like to know that?]

She initially offered her cache of private information to WWASPS for $100,000, later lowering her asking price to $30,000.  She ulitmately settled for $12,500.  This money may have saved her house from foreclosure.  Sadly, however, the price of Ms. Bock's Judas gold saved not one child from WWASPS...and we can only guess how many other American teens have made the harrowing journey, handcuffed in the night and slung into some stranger's car, toward a future of a couple of years of terror and humiliation and a lifetime of nightmares and anxiety. Ms. Bock sold her soul while thwarting honest and strong efforts by others to get the message to parents that WWASPS' good schooling, strict-but-fair rewards and punishment techniques, and redirection by loving, caring staffers is really a Crock of Shit.  

Ms. Bock stated in deposition that she doesn't think WWASPS is bad; she only has a problem with Dundee and they aren't affiliated with WWASPS.  

Being a personal victim of Ms. Bock's immorality (my very private email to her one night while my grandaughter was still incarcerated in Casa by the Sea made it to this forum bright and early at 8:30 the next morning), I share with you what she forwarded to the World:

[my email]... Carey, we have "talked" now for a lot of the 9 months my grandaughter has been incarcerated at Casa by the Sea.  This is my personal, fervent, non-anonymous plea to back off Teen Help at fornits.
 
You have your sons back.  They have had harm...possibly irrepairable harm...done to them, but they are surviving.  You responded personally to me when I "stood up" for you on Bridge to Understanding.  I need a pay-back.  This is the most heart-felt communication I can make directly to you.  Please please please don't continue destroying the voice of Fornits!
 
In the greater scheme of things, the world doesn't really give a damn about Sue Schepp or PURE or Coldwater.  We can hardly get the world to give a damn after they read Tim Weiner's reports, or the London Observer.  The small stuff...the details, as it were...you are fighting about, really don't mean squat to the average Kansas cattle rancher or the soccer mom in Florida.  The only way to stop this proliferation of "programs" is to make it illegal to do some of the basic things they need to have done:  illegal to intercept mail, illegal to halt communications with the outside world (this applies to WWASP as well as all those other "legitimate" programs at strugglingteens.com), illegal to make untutored packets the only form of education, illegal to cut off communications, news, independent and inquisitive learning, illegal to isolate in solitary confinement, illegal to withhold everything from food to letters from home to break spirit, illegal to get full control of a growing, maturing mind and tell it that the parents hate and want to off-load this particular problem for a lot of $$$$.
 
Get the hell off Fornits for one day and read voyfourms.  There are kids, full of swearing and tears, foreigners appalled at what we Americans are allowing to be done to our kids, relatives innocently wondering if Casa may be something bad, something harmful that a brother-in-law has done to his daughter.  These people don't give a crap about PURE and the subtrefuge, the hidden/dual personalities, the false postings, the anonymous bickering.  You appear to have lost sight of the forest for the trees.  You continue to try to focus all these folks in the entire universe on a very small technical issue that The World doesn't want to know, doesn't care to know, and wouldn't think twice about if it did know.  
 
I really for the life of me cannot imagine what motivates you in this crusade.  Yes, your kids were hurt.  So are others, including mine...the grandaughter who lived with us as a "daughter".  We have lost her to a cult, to a cult who preys on mentally-unstable parents like our oldest daughter who was always looking for someone/something to bail her out of one mess after another.  Are you after revenge?  On WWASP?  On your ex?  On the anonymous posters promoting WWASP on Fornits (who pretty much shoot themselves in the foot whenever they open their mouths)?  No matter.  Your crusade is injuring countless others...at the least, the 2200 children still in WWASPS, at the most the decent people who abhor injustice, abuse, and want every human to have a warm nuturing path to adulthood. Somewhere in between are the parents caught in the middle, those who, for unknown reasons having to do with stupidity and looking for an easy way out, paid big bucks, got their kids hurt, and will live with guilt, shame, and anger the rest of their lives.  
 
Allow all these people to do their work.  They need to have it done.  Your agenda of proving you are right and PURE is wrong pales in comparison to what is at stake.  Please don't continue this.  If I believed, as some on Fornits, that you have gone over the edge, that your mental accuity is hampered, I wouldn't be writing you.  I think you are sincere in your hatred of this evil thing.  You can't win this fight alone.  Let us all work together, each with his own strengths.  Please don't destroy the Fornits forum, which, after all, is called "Teen Help", not Carey's vendetta to lead us all on the only way to salvation.
 
Sue Kolbo
Rivergait Ranch
Red Bluff, CA

I recently had occasion to go to Canada and Northern Idaho twice in the last couple of weeks.  We drove a looping vacation through the Pacific Northwest and came back through the Idaho Panhandle, on a horse-buying trip. The filly we bought was in Moyie Springs, ID, just 2 miles south of the Canadian border.  So, in the last 2 weeks, I have stayed overnight a couple of times in Bonners' Ferry, ID, home of Lon Woodbury's educational consulting business.

Bonners' Ferry is a lovely little town of 2500, plunked in a small valley of the Kootenai River, full of golden aspens and rutting deer this time of year. On our "pick-up" trip with the horse trailer, we were staying at the Kootenai Indian Casino, a fairly big place right on the river.  We needed grain and hay for the trip home, and went into town to the grain mill.  [Like a lot of small towns, there is the "strip mall" end of newer buildings going out of town, and there is the nearly-dead brick center of Old Town.]  There, two 10-story-tall galvanized metal buildings are busy creating animal feed from local grain, puffing and grinding away at opposite sides of a small square in town.  As we waited for our product, I spy..."Woodbury Reports" on a building near where we parked.  I was astonished at the tiny metal-roofed very shabby blue Victorian house squatting under the shadow of the grain elevator, without landscaping and with junk visible in the yard.  The best part of the place was the wooden sign you see in the strugglingteens.com site.

Now, there is no rule that an Internet business has to look legit to amount to anything; I was just extremely surprised to find this business, which seems to get the most respect of all ed consultants (probably due to its forum pages)  appearing like a place that I would think twice about entering.  I bet a good many "customers" with the bucks to send their kids off for a "fix" expect the decision-maker in their consultation process to be something more like "artisan goat cheese on a sesame water cracker" when it really looks more like "Cheez-Whiz squirted from a can onto a Ritz."

We were there the day of the Rocky Mountain Academy bomb scare.  We knew kids were being shipped here and there (the armory and the fairgrounds), and it was the talk of the staff at the casino.  Surprisingly, the locals really don't know much about the "schools" right outside of town...even the 3rd generation local young person serving our drinks at the bar.  The RMA does "adopt" a stretch of highway, so they apparently do let them out for clean-up duty.  Our server also said the school had a prom at the casino this year, but "the kids were really weird".  The prom-goers were notably silent, not talking much at all...the girls danced with the girls, and the boys stood off to the side. This person's relative even works at the school in a fairly responsible position, yet little or none of the goings-on makes it out of the facility.

The consensus of the locals?  We didn't meet one who approved of the school, even though it meant jobs in this small town.  Mostly, the kids and the parents who sent them from Manhattan, Miami, and other rich enclaves (to experience the beautiful remote wilds, more than 45 minutes down the only highway to Sandpoint, the VERY-tony ski resort where one's parents can stay and refresh themselves while "visiting" their incarcerated children) are disdained.  The best quote was from one young person:  "They're just a bunch of rich kids whose parents send them off to be trained like a dog."

The educational consulting business is certified by a shingle given by this group of self-proclaimed and self-regulated non-pros. Oh, that and $100.  This is a very Mormom community, Woodbury's purchasable book has the back cover sold to WWASPS or Teen Help, and he accepts any advertising WWASPS wants to send his way.  He says he does not recommend their "schools".  Yet a parent would have to be sort of blind to think the expertise of this person is of a caliber and neutrality to really do the best for their child.  Oh well, maybe doing the best for their child is not at all about why they are searching for a private prison in the first place.