10 Years Later, Yet Nothing has Changed

Today marks a decade gone by since my experience in this horrific and shady industry, you can read the whole story about my escape. This was the motive why I started this campaign to expose what the media has failed to report on, and to help lobby reformation for out-of-home placements and the safety of troubled youth.

Since this time, it has slowly woken more people up (My family unfortunately was not reached in time to save me from this ordeal). The real game-changer was Maia Szalavitz's book "Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids" that detailed the history of the abuse and death in youth treatment centers. This prompted a GAO investigation in 2007 to pass federal laws and oversight of these programs. A life-saving bill introduced called "Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Act of 2008" was to put all of this to an end. Sadly, the bill did not become law, it died in the Senate after lobbyist from NATSAP, PSI, and other industry giants fought back. The bill has been reintroduced several times without success by now-retired representative George Miller. The head of the GAO who led the federal investigation Gregory Kutz, has since left the department.

So as a result, the hidden Holocaust has continued. Parents still sent their kids to these facilities despite the warnings. They continued to believe the lies these programs were boasting until it was too late, their children were already severely abused, raped, or even killed. There were a handful of parents that did head the warnings given by survivor groups and advocacy organizations (Such as CAFETY and ASTART, kudos to them) and were coerced by the education consultants, school districts, and Ph.D's to send their child to these programs with recorded death and abuse.

But it doesn't stop there, these facilities and wilderness programs gained even more political power and profit on Wall Street even at the peak of the global financial crisis of the late 2000's. In hindsight, maybe that was their argument against the regulations that would shutdown the repeat offenders in the industry. Since these program owners can't seem to get enough money to fuel their lavish life-style, they try keeping teens detained as long as possible. Teens leaving this industry before completing high school is not the norm. For those who have been following me for a while know that I got lucky on this part. My compassion goes out to the majority of survivors who had to endure a whole lot worse for a lot longer than 3 months.

This issue adds for the reason to homeschool children. This goes double if their struggling in school or have emotional difficulties, so let me introduce the concept of "therapeutic homeschooling". Yes, you may need to quit your job or sacrifice routines in your daily schedule, but keep in mind that your children come first. There are many reasons why temporarily homeschooling troubled children may be the best thing to do before they get any worse.

Many advocacy organizations have argued that home intervention works best for the child because it can easily remove them from whatever the problem is that's troubling them. One organization, HEAL, has been investigating this industry for almost 15 years, and in every case they found that therepeutic residential schools and wilderness programs are abusive.
 One of the reasons is because these kids are so distraught they loose motivation do be productive and turn inwards as a way of coping, so when they are constantly bombarded with demands such as school, homework, chores, ect. they lash out into chaos. Also, a child being away from home for the first time is a very stressful transition to begin with. With that being said the last thing they need is to be sent away in the middle of nowhere where they are forced to do even more work on a busy schedule like hard labor or long one-size fits all group therapy sessions that are not peer-reviewed. And if they don't cooperate or run away, they will be severely punished like being punched in the face, struck with wooden boards, withheld food or water, or aggressively restrained to the point of injury or death. Sometimes this happens for simply having a meltdown or hyperactivity that's a result of a disability they may have.

Advocates, whistle-blowers, and survivors have also done little to help with this issue. They are the David against the unstoppable Goliath, so their voice rarely get's heard as they are written off as "disgruntled parents, former patients and staff" by the industry sockpuppets. Even with Youtube videos, Reddit posts, and blogs like this don't get nearly the attention that promoters do as more advertising revenue is spent. Advocates have been attacked even more outside of review sites like Yelp, Glass Door, and Google Reviews. Youtube Channels have also been under attack by these facilities shady behavior including the abuse in Youtube's copyright system by filing a DMCA Copyright Strikes for exposing the truth in their videos. This explains why channels that have exposes child abuse in the industry such as Kevin Allen's "MasterofManyThings" have been terminated, however the website still exists for the time being. Many programs in the industry have even attempted defamation lawsuits and doxing people who put up survivor group websites and blogs such as DRA Survivors, and many internet radio podcasts are no longer in production.

When will all this stop, probably never unless we put more support and money into this initiative than ever before. The truth is that at this moment, we don't have a lobby, so it's NEVER on any politicians agenda when running for election. This explains why Mitt Romney's ties to Aspen Education Group and WAASPS never made coverage on 90% of media outlets last presidential election. Therefore, know one knew unless they've experienced this awful multi-billion dollar industry. Ignoring a problem will not make it go away, it will become worse unless we do something.