Great article, Fem!
I think I can answer a couple of points that jumped out at me.
First, the difference between a fast food franchise and the troubled parent industry is mostly about scale and a little about the nature of the beast. Everybody eats roast beast from a fast processed-food-product outlet like McD's or KFC once in awhile. Even if you try to avoid that Monsanto produced, multinationally provisioned mystery-frankenfood-food-like shit like the plague, everyone knows what it is. There's one on every corner, billboards on the roads, ads on every channel and coupons in every newsish-like rag that may go fluttering by your feet on a windy day.
As the industry has grown and the underlying philosophy has taken on adherents, more and more people have some close or first-hand experience with the industry. But it still has nowhere near the exposure that fast food has.
I also think you're spot on that existing child abuse laws, not to mention laws against assault and false imprisonment against anyone, more than cover preventing the most harmful practices in this industry. It's an attitude problem and I think the governments have more than a little to do with that. The way the laws are written and interpreted recently is a lot different from times past. When I was a kid if you skipped school you got suspended. If you got suspended enough you got expelled. If your parents forced the issue, you then got a j-j-j-j-j-o-b. If not you loafed around the house, went to the beach and went on doing whatever you had been doing while skipping school. Either way, you were not treated as a criminal and the parents weren't usually held criminally liable.
Now we have a fucked up situation where law enforcement and other agencies are telling parents "do something, or else!" Worse? You used to have to do
something pretty bad to even get expelled. Now? We let the 2nd graders decide ->
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=30051One of the parent comments to that story was "What were they thinking?" Is it much of a stretch to think that "
Homes Rap" [brothers' keeper, dirt slip, etc., insert your particular program lingo here] or, at the very least, the dynamic of Oprah's or Maury's live studio audience may have some influence?
I think the entire concept that whatever behavior we don't like can be tagged a medical disorder and treated as such needs to be indicted. This is going to take more than one night.