Cross-post from the thread discussing Maia Szalavitz's recent article on this bill:
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The legislation would prohibit sexual, physical and emotional abuse and would ban the use of deprivation — of food, sleep, clothing and shelter, for example — as punishment or for any other reason. The use of physical restraint would be permitted only for safety, and all programs would be required to provide residents with "reasonable" access to a telephone. It would require staff to be educated about what specifically counts as child abuse and how to report it, and mandate programs to disclose staff qualifications to parents.
My main problem with with this bill, at least with how it is summarized by Maia, is that it omits psychological coercion from the list of prohibited abuses. Also, that it leaves a wide open loophole for TBSs and other programs of that ilk to market themselves as being basically "schools," and hence not subject to the constraints of this bill.
In programs utilizing substantial degrees of psychological coercion, students have been convinced that physical abuse and sexual abuse that they've been subjected to is actually their own fault. These students may not even think to complain or make use of something like an easily accessed phone, let alone call a hotline. By the time they wake up to this fact, they are long past their time in program. Some folks never quite wake up to it.
This is not to say that the net effect of such coercion is minimal. Far from it. In some cases, the damage has been life-long. To subject someone to coercion is to regress them, which is hardly beneficial to anyone, let alone an adolescent in the process of determining his/her self identity. Although this has been known for several decades, for some reason the APA has been loathe to take a stand on it, at least as to how it pertains to programs intended to modify behavior.
Ursus, I agree with what are pointing out. I am not very familiar with this bill, but if it avoids the topic of psychological coercion then it is not addressing the heart of the matter, I believe. Generally, people know that physical, verbal and sexual violence is wrong and it can be identified and addressed so long as it is out in the open. But psychological coercion is a kind of violence that most people are not aware of. To me this is the most important issue because it is abuse that goes hidden and unprovable and this kind of covert coercion, historically, is a pretty big subject of study. It should be given serious attention to preventing it from occurring. I don’t believe we can rely on a system that requires proof of someone’s intent to coerce or brainwash, not in the case of programs. It needs to specifically identify situations, structured environments etc. that CAN support undetectable, covert coercion, and try to eliminate those possibilities. I imagine getting something passed that appropriately could protect against this threat would be enormously challenging, and require major changes in the TTI. But unless it happens it will be pretty hard to trust that any program is safe.
(also, I am curios how “emotional abuse” is defined in this sense, quite a variable imo).
