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.