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Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform => World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS) => Topic started by: Anonymous on September 19, 2005, 01:12:00 PM
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Some of these programs are nothing more than "dumping" grounds for kids whose parents have the money to afford to keep their kids under lock and key until they turn 18 and can no longer be held against their will in some program thousands of miles from home.
When are the parents gonna step up and take some responsibility for tormenting their children by proxy?
Stop playing the victim card, parents. You may be stupid, but you are no victim.
Your children are the ones who were exploited and victimized. And you paid for it.
How many times did you visit your captive teen?
:flame:
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On 2005-09-19 10:12:00, Anonymous wrote:
"Some of these programs are nothing more than "dumping" grounds for kids whose parents have the money to afford to keep their kids under lock and key until they turn 18 and can no longer be held against their will in some program thousands of miles from home.
When are the parents gonna step up and take some responsibility for tormenting their children by proxy?
Stop playing the victim card, parents. You may be stupid, but you are no victim.
Your children are the ones who were exploited and victimized. And you paid for it.
How many times did you visit your captive teen?
:flame:
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It's the kids' who should be suing these programs, not their parents who conspired with the program to victimize their own kid.
:wave:
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How pitiful is it that these parents want sympathy for locking their kid up in a hellcamp?
Parents .... IGNORANCE is NOT AN EXCUSE.
Why? Because THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR ABUSE.
If you don't know whether your program kid is being abused or not, then at a minimum you are guilty of willfull neglect.
Abuse is not just a black eye. It is a battered soul.
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To be fair, there ARE parents who have rescued their kids from a fraudent placement and taken full responsibility for their actions, even brought lawsuits against the TROUBLED program and hopefully, the person(s) who referred them with no other goal in mind but to MAKE MONEY. Many have even taken a proactive stand in exposing the truth about these boarding schools from hell, which has helped focus attention on the need for federal/state reforms.
It's the parents who abandon their kids to a program with no remorse, no shame, no guilt that no one wants to talk about.
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This is such a complicated mess. There have been kids who have successfully sued some of these programs independent of their parents.
Fred Collins is one rather famous case. He was held illegally as an adult, escaped and just had the good fortune to run into good lawyers who were willing to take his case. You can read all about that in Arnold Trebach's mid `80's book, The Great Drug War. His telling includes some very important information about the fall out in the Collins family after the dust and the lawsuit settled.
That's one major problem w/ "just sue the bastards" or, alternately, "if the program's so abusive, why haven't they been sued out of existance?" There are many reasons.
Another problem that I've heard about from lawyers looking for a good suit is the difficulty in finding quality, highly credible wittnesses. The kids always come at it w/ two strikes against them. Even if they were model citizens prior to their parents having been recruited, they have to overcome the assumption that the parents must have had some kind of good reason to panic. Strike two is the actual effects that coerced thought reform has on the client.
And it gets worse. Look at what has happened historically as a result of all those successful lawsuits. Most of the time, the best you can accomplish is to inconvenience the defendants. It may cost them some money, but the savvy ones already budget for that. They make be forece to toss someone to the wolves, as in the case of Charles Long II, but that's a rare case. Sometimes they have to go to the bother of declared bancrupsy, name changes, location changes and reshuffling clients and staff a la Straight, Inc., CEDU/Brown Schools, Bethel and many others.
At the end of the day I think it's almost, almost a zero sum game or worse.
However, there's one extremely important byproduct from all the litigation, legislation and regulatory efforts. They all generate extremely credible documentation and dialogue. I still think it's up to our prodigal IVth Estate to pick up that ball and run with it. And that's starting to happen. Maia Szalavitz, for example, rocks! :nworthy:
Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions.
-- ALAN BARTH, The Loyalty of Free Men, 1951.
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On 2005-09-19 10:12:00, Anonymous wrote:
"Some of these programs are nothing more than "dumping" grounds for kids whose parents have the money to afford to keep their kids under lock and key until they turn 18 and can no longer be held against their will in some program thousands of miles from home.
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I have remember such a tragic example of this -
There was a girl in my group at Cross Creek Manor (WWASP) who was 12 when her parents sent her there. She was 14 when I got to CCM, and she was still there when I graduated (18 months later). This girl had never done drugs, never had sex, never even smoked a cigarette - her "issues," I guess, were that she was VERY hyperactive (I know ADHD gets thrown around a lot these days, but I honestly think this girl was a classic case of it!) and threw some silly temper tantrums at times... basically, she was a very immature KID whose natural development was stunted at age 12 when her parents stuck her in CCM. She constantly got in trouble with staff for silly rule violations, and after awhile I believe staff penalized her more harshly than others because they viewed her as a problem. Since she didn't have much prior life experience to draw from, she would constantly get reamed in group for "not being real," and if she ever managed to follow the rules well enough to get on phase 2, our therapist would usually end out dropping her back down & sending her to ISO (isolation) for "not working her program." I believe that her father was a lawyer, and from what I understood they were very well off... not once during the 18 months I was at CCM did her parents come to visit her. I sincerely believe that her parents wanted to keep her their indefinitely, and since they had the money to do so, the program staff & our therapist worked to make that happen. It was (is) very, very sad.
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Poor poor girl. I feel for her, I hope she gets out... on a side note I hope the parents pay for their actions.
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Actually, that story sounds very similar to what Virgil Miller Newton did to one of his inmates. Took the poor girl 13 years go physically get away from the cult (her mother was on staff). Took another couple of years for her to come out of hiding. In the end, she sued and won millions.
There's no biochemical test to distinguish the so-called manic-depressive person from the elated or despondent football fan. Nor is there any resan to assume the manic-depressive's inner experience is driven by twisted molecules while the football fan's is driven, at worst, by twisted values
Dr. Peter Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry