CHILD ABUSE TW
"It started as a routine police call. In June 2018, a 17-year-old girl living at a treatment center for troubled teens had hit a staff member in the face during a therapy session involving horses. But when deputies arrived at the small ranch in southwest Utah, staff said the suspect was waiting “in the trough.”
Confused, the deputies walked back to the corral. There they found a girl sitting in a tub of dirty water up to her torso. When the girl stood, they saw her hands were zip tied behind her back.
One deputy yelled for a staffer to get her out of the water, according to the police report. Another cut her loose.
The girl told deputies she had tried to run away from Havenwood Academy, a 16-bed treatment center located a few miles from the horse property. When a staffer had tried to stop her, she had thrown a punch, she told them.
By the time the deputies arrived, she had been in zip ties for about 30 minutes, she told them, and in the horse trough for about 20.
“I could observe red restraint marks on both wrists,” Deputy Mike Hilleger wrote in a police report. “[The girl’s] body was cold to the touch and had visible goosebumps on her arms. Her clothes were soaked through with the dirty horse trough water as well.”
The discovery led to investigations from law enforcement, child welfare workers and Utah’s Office of Licensing, the regulatory body that oversees youth treatment centers. They found that this wasn’t the act of a rogue employee. The facility had used the horse trough as a form of “therapeutic discipline,” for three years, according to state records.
But at the end of those investigations, there were no penalties for Havenwood Academy. No staff member has faced criminal charges. Its license remains in good standing, as does the social work license of the clinical director, Linda Reeves, who was aware of the practice, according to Office of Licensing records. And the equine director who pioneered putting girls in troughs remained in her position until she quit this month.
Public documents reveal how the state handled the whole affair discreetly. Regulators sent a letter demanding the facility stop placing girls in troughs, and its owner — a prominent lawyer in southern Utah named Blaine Hofeling — agreed to end the practice, though he denied in his response to the state that it was abusive, humiliating, or even a form of punishment."
-- If you read my post on the troubled teen industry before, this probably doesn't surprise you. But I was just so disgusted by this story and just how useless the police and child welfare workers can be in situations like this, I had to share it with you all who would understand. There's a lot more to the article if you want to read it specifically too, but above was the main portion of the story.
Maybe so. I consider the industry itself to be its own level of trafficking as well. Kidnapping kids in the middle of the night to go to places where they likely will be sexually abused... Yeah.
Boomer dipshit parents getting high off qanon shit on the internet while sending their kid who smoked weed off to one of these torture camps.
Trafficking being like... hyperemphasized as a rich people thing or "stranger danger" thing was one of the world's worst mistakes. As with any abuse, most of the issues is coming from behind closed doors in otherwise nice seeming places.
It's a great bit of misdirection to get qanon chasing after poor people, immigrants, and fucking satanists as the real movers of child sex trafficking and not their friendly neighborhood police, clergy, ICE agents, billionaire gated community goers who also donate to both Trump and Biden.
Oh don't even get me fucking started on the connection now between the troubled teen industry and the goddamn detention camps for kids. The world is sick. And I cannot find it now, but kids had been sent to facilities like these and not detention camps before too.
I love how every one of them is a money making scheme by wealthy politicians or lawyers. They could get money to just let the kids play Xbox all day, but no, they have to torture and abuse them. Why?
Playing off of parent’s fear pays more.
They could still do that, and not abuse the kids, instead they terrorize and torture them
True. I suppose the real and sad answer is they just enjoy it and think the kids deserve it.
That was my point. These sorts of things are flypaper for pedophiles and their ilk. Everyone who operates them knows it. They all are complicit in the abuse these children receive, some were themselves children abused by the same system.
If they were just doing it for the money, they wouldn't need to go through the work of abusing the kids when they could just feed them school lunches and put them in front of a TV.
And most of them stemmed from or were inspired by Synanon, an abusive cult, so there was really never a chance for them to not be abusive probably. idk. i hate delving into the ‘why’ people do cruelty cause it’s hard to even try to grasp.
Wait what
https://elan.school/
Just peeped a bit of it. Question: will reading that ruin my evening......
It's fucking horrifying. Read like a few chapters a day maybe. Any more and you'll go mad with anger.
Thanks for the heads up. I can only outrage so much in a day without going :desolate:
Yeah, this story is one of those rat in a cage stories. Especially when you tie it to capitalism and how the treatment these kids got was really just a hyper distilled version of what every worker is forced to go through.
yes it will, but read it anyway
I've read this whole comic, and I only have one thing to say:
Wall.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/cult-spawned-tough-love-teen-industry/
Many of the programs are directly inspired
:agony: Of course.
Do you think the troubled teen industry and all its horror is unique to the US and the brainworms that come with it or is it present elsewhere as well?
They have had facilities in places like Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Mexico because the child labour laws tend to be lax. But those are still American-ran and associated with WWASP. But really it's just institutionalized child abuse, which can take place anywhere, especially prisons for children.
I'm not sure about things outside of America I could directly compare it to, but I have not really looked much into it.
Idk, throwing money at the problem of rearing children seems such an American way of doing things. Like in my country anyone rich or poor would be horrified if you suggested this. Not to say there isn't child abuse here(there's plenty), but not of this kind.
It might be my bias speaking so take it with a grain of salt.
What is it with conservatives and child abuse
It's in their blood
also from the article: “In 1971, the federal government gave a grant to a Florida organization called The Seed, which applied Synanon’s methods to teenagers, even those only suspected of trying drugs.” because ofc the government is involved lmao
(ignore the quote next about DPRK. its american news what else can we expect)
Wondered why I knew the name then I remembered: it's the inspiration for a similar cult in Phillip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly.
:foucault-madness:
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They do it for the most boring reasons: Money and incompetence.
Raising kids is hard hard work. Raising kids who are traumatised, mentally disabled and has not received the proper care during their childhood is many times harder. Throw some substance abuse into the equation and it gets even harder. You're going to have more frequent and more intense conflicts than in an ordinary family.
Providing a safe and nurturing environment for these children takes a lot of time from trained professionals. And that is expensive.
But what if instead of qualified professionals you hired unskilled workers? Or what if you ran everything with a skeleton crew? You could save a shitload of money and still offer your services at a competitive price.
So now the owner is happy. His cousin who got a job at the center, despite knowing nothing about child care or developmental psychology, is happy too. The city who sent the kid there is also happy about having saved money from an already strained budget.
The downside is that when the staff doesn't have the skills and resources to handle things properly they'll handle them improperly. They'll try "easy" solutions and use force to handle situations which creates an us vs. them relation between staff and the children. It starts with yelling and rude language and can escalate to sadistic violence if allowed to continue.
And often it is allowed to continue for way too long as the chance of people speaking up is low. The parents, who would otherwise be their children's champions, are either absent or too burdened by their own issues to do something. The social workers who sent the children there are overworked. The politicians and bureaucrats who designs the system are more interested in getting these kids out of sight as cheaply as possible than in helping them.
Stories like these doesn't happen because of a few bad apples among employees. They are the foreseeable consequence of a system that values private profits above everything else.