> For her first six weeks, she would be a Little Sister. She had to stay six feet away from people, including staff. She was not allowed to speak, except to her two Big Sisters
I feel like they're somehow violating Margaret Atwood's copyrights with the naming, nevermind the religious oppression.
I think if anything, it's the other way around. Atwood didn't invent the ideology or the practices; she was speculating about what it would be like if these people actually ran society instead of just being in the orbit of real power.
Semi related: As an adopted person, I was dumbfounded upon meeting my biological parents as an adult to discover how much of ME was genetic. I'm best case scenario adoption. I was 4 days old, no fetal alcohol syndrome, well nourished in the womb etc, placed with a stable educated family. Even with all that going for us, my parents had a rough time with me because of how different I was from them.
Now tweak any of those variables, and the situation just gets more difficult. Adoption is really hard.
My situation is similar. My adopted parents were nice people, but nothing like me. I felt I little alienated growing up, and I attribute at least some of it to this. Of course, there are plenty of biological children that feel that way, too. My brother, who was my adopted mother's biological child, no doubt had a harder time then me because of a learning disability. And I recall a friend who grew up sensitive, artistic, and gay, much to the horror of his macho race-car-driving biological father.
>I was dumbfounded upon meeting my biological parents as an adult to discover how much of ME was genetic. [...] my parents had a rough time with me because of how different I was from them.
What differences are you talking about? In behavior? In intelligence?
My son (adopted) was born highly dependent and high. He spent the first two months of his life in NICU, the first nine months on strong narcotics to survive. And yet, by some happy miracle, so far, at age 3, he's doing wonderful. He is in a healthy, supportive, educational environment. But most of his success seems to be him. He seems to have won the genetic lottery.
I grew up separated from my father and his side of the family, and when I finally met them as an adult it blew my mind -- so that's where I get it from! My mannerisms, my sense of humor... I had always felt like an alien, and getting to know that side of the family was the most validating experience of my entire life.
"Deanna Doucette was the first pregnant girl to attend the home after Teen Challenge took over. She arrived in 2001, when she was fourteen. A few weeks from her due date, she snuck out of a window and ran away to a gas station, where she called her boyfriend, the father of her child. But before help arrived the police showed up and returned her to Teen Challenge. In the car, she told the officers, “Don’t take me back—they’re forcing me to give away my baby.” Five months were added to her program at Teen Challenge, for running away."
Damn, this is some demonic shit. I love all the political connections they talked about in the article which keep this legal
Why is it that everyone seems to be okay with someone having no human rights until they are 18? In the USA people under 18 are viewed as property. What they need is for an entire fraternity of law students to show up and demand to tour their facility.
While you are correct it is not everyone, as an outsider it is still striking how different kids rights are viewed in the states compared to Europe/Oceania. The OP is correct that you hear the "it's my child I have ultimate control over it" is much more expressed by US Americans than pretty much anywhere else. So much so that when there is discussions of restrictions this is considered to impede on the fundamental freedoms of the parents (yes the irony).
From the HN guidelines: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." and "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle"
You seem to be commenting a lot of unrelated, tangential things to create a narrative aligned to your political beliefs. Something to consider.
They mentioned the abuses and crimes of religious charitable organizations in Canada. And the abuses and crimes of religious charitable organizations in the UK...
... in a discussion about the abuses and crimes of religious charitable organizations in the US.
I think they're entirely related. They may not be the same organization, but there's systemic patterns evident in such things, and I think your conclusion is, at the least, a little grasping.
Can't help but feel there's got to be a connection to school shootings here. Perhaps American teens are canaries in a coal mine, where the 'coal mine' is American culture at home, at school, and on the 'net, and the dangerous gasses are those of cruelty, hatred, anger, violence, and fear. Teens are going through a lot, individuating and becoming adults, yet they live in the same confusing stew we all do now, and do not have the tools to deal with these unprecedented cultural toxins.
IMO these re-education camps are problematic, even when done "correctly", because they don't address the underlying cause of teen misery. And in fact they do more harm than good, for the simple reason that the teen is held accountable for our systemic failures. It is the parents' philosophy of rugged individualism acted out for profit using children as guinea pigs.
Another post in the thread questioned why this happens in otherwise "civilized and enlightened" societies. My personal response - because we're not - lead me down a train of thought to Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter. The common thread is a lack of mutual oversight, accountability, and responsibility for others in our communities. Civilization is a wonderful thing that enables any number of deep and extensive value-adds to quality of life for any given individual member of our species, but the specialization inherent in a free society means that people are trusted to attend to their own affairs (and in the case of hierarchy, the affairs of their charges).
As a society, we share responsibility and consequences for the outcomes determined by the actions of individuals. This is the reason that the limits of individual freedom are somewhere in between the capacity and the demonstrated ability to infringe on the rights of others.
What seems to have happened is dereliction of the duty to shape those limits in response to demonstrated infringement in the past. We know - we know - what the status quo wrt, as examples, the penal system and firearms has meant for individual and collective suffering. What you're feeling is the same sense that we're not learning from the past and dooming ourselves to gory, nightmarish repetition.
It's hard to grow your own patch of peace and wisdom when everyone around you is growing nettles and brambles. Even if others don't directly interfere, it's only easy to acquire the supplies that the majority is buying. And life is already a lot of work, and it's so damn tempting to just give up and go with the flow - not only is it less work, but you get a sense of community. Even if it is a community of shared dysfunction, it's better than being alone.
It seems there's got to be a threshold, a critical mass of people who want to live differently than the rest before you can weather the challenges inherent in making non-mainstream choices. This is widely applicable; AA comes to mind, as does things like vegetarianism, homosexuality, Judaism, etc. There should be an -ism for the people who reject authoritarianism blind conformism, and who have a well-defined set of coping mechanisms to deal with misinformation, bullying, cruelty, and dehumanization. And ways to deal with people that embrace such techniques, especially those in power.
Mutual aid is inherently local. It’s someone asking for help on Twitter or Facebook, or at work. It’s someone offering aid, or connecting someone in need to someone able and willing to help. These networks sprung up all across the country last year, mostly in big cities with large protest movements, but also among communities with strong ties. At one point in time churches and governments filled this role, however both have been derelict in their duties for many many decades.
> the teen is held accountable for our systemic failures
That is the crux of the matter.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of former victims of the juvenile Justice system. On the one hand they’ve all demonstrated serious antisocial behaviors. On the other hand they’ve all been severely neglected (or worse) by all the people responsible for their wellbeing: parents, teachers, relatives, siblings, peers, social workers, religious leaders, etc. how can hold a Child accountable for their actions if we are unable ( read: unwilling) to hold the adults who’ve hurt them accountable for their failures?
The children are not mere Guinea pigs, they’re scapegoats for their caregivers failures.
Systematically ruining people's lives for misguided attempts in preserving a society that only exists in their heads. And for fun and profit of course. I truly believe almost all kinds of bad things happening have had their seeds planted in this type of abuse a long time ago.
Shame.
“I still think about it every day,” she told me. “My child was stolen from me.”
This is part of a bigger penal-industrial complex in the US. Besides private for-profit prisons, you also have things like this, and a very similar system for drug rehab, where minor drug offenders may be sent to a privately-run religious "charity", which, rather than providing any kind of counseling or treatment, resells them as indentured labor to various industries, including meat-processing plants.
A judge in a Tennessee county, Donna Scott Davenport, locks up elementary school children (as young as 7) basically at whim for crimes that don't exist. They're given a "perp walk": handcuffed in front of their classmates and teachers, paraded through the school, and off to jail in the back of a police car. She has them put in solitary confinement. She failed the bar exam four times before passing. The children cry and throw up as they're sent away.
I was never sure why we only got all worried about fascism when Donald Trump came around. Articles like all these show that, if you're poor enough or black enough, it's always been here. I wish I felt like I was exaggerating in saying that, but I don't think it's much of a stretch.
> why we got all worried about fascism when Donald Trump came around
It was the transition from fringe to mainstream, along with the acquisition of power. Things like this might go from "isolated incidents" to more widespread to national policy. But yes, it's a change in degree not a change in kind.
I get it, and I agree with you 90%. But I think what we've (wealthier, white-er Americans) learned about race in the last 24 months shows that there's a big difference between "isolated incidents" and "decentralized but widespread behavior". I think that with respect to stuff like this, the second phrase is a better description. Any of these things are Gestapo tactics, the stuff of European and Latin American nightmare; the fact that they're not all coordinated out an office in DC is more an American curiosity than a point in their favor. At least that's my view.
> Any of these things are Gestapo tactics, the stuff of European and Latin American nightmare
Absolutely correct. But there's always a chunk of people who want to be in the Gestapo, or have someone to report their neighbours to.
My use of "isolated incidents" was ironic in that's the phrase always used to cover systematic problems that people don't want to address. You can have a lot of isolated incidents if you refuse to join the dots.
Dragging a teenager off to a prison camp for looking at boys is the tip of patriarchy, but the entire infrastructure of people who thought it was OK is also patriarchy.
Yeah, for sure. For every person I know in the legacy tech hub cities/regions who are considering that trendy move to Texas -- people there's a big article about every week these days, it feels like -- I know 2 or 3 more people who are well-positioned for such a move but ultimately decide against it for what we could politely call "cultural factors" like the stuff depicted in these articles.
(Now, of course, this insane totalitarian bullshit happens even in these friends' allegedly liberal tech hub cities. But they see the Austins and Nashvilles of the world as being replete with such things, and articles like these suggest they're not all that far off.)
The country that has the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world, as well as the highest number of prisoners in total. You know, the land of the free.
It’s one with fifty sovereign states with their own criminal justice and judicial systems. So the question really should be, You can jail children in Tennessee?
The majority of the US states have no minimum age of criminal responsibility. Other ex-colonial federations have states with their own laws and courts, too, yet do not have this problem.
In fact, the US is the only country in the world to lack these legal protections.
The first lines of the article immediately reminded me of Elan school. I'm glad more people are finding out these horrific programs. Who knows how many are still out there. I was shocked especially since I had never heard of them before stumbling upon that website. I highly recommend other users to check out your link.
Holy hell. I'm speechless. Not even by the article - I'm yet to read it - just by this discussion thread. The links posted here by various commenters - the CAAIR labor camps, Elan school, hundreds of children dumped in hidden, unmarked graves - I've seen most of those stories at one point or another, but to be reminded of all of them together here...
I don't know what to say. How do things like these happen - and keep happening - in otherwise civilized, enlightened countries?
I feel like this is such a cop-out response. It lets you dismiss this people's actions because "they're evil" (whatever that means) and disregard any of the larger systemic, sociological root causes that allow things like this to happen in the first place.
That's the point. It gives you a flimsy justification for leaving the systems and structures intact so "your guy" can use them in ways you agree with at some later date.
I can't speak for other countries, but for the US, none of these are aberrations. They're the way we've always done things, and no one with access to the levers of power is really all that interested in changing things. A lot of these stories just boil down to people with power being able to use people without in any way they please: use them as unpaid labor, or just dump them in an unmarked grave if they're no use to you. We call that "freedom", because for the people with the power, it is. And to have an impact on the public discourse, you basically have to accept that as the way things should be, plus or minus a little tinkering around the edges.
I'm probably going to get downvoted, but this article is nonobjective, which, in my opinion, is standard fare for the New Yorker. In fact, I think it presents a delusional worldview. As an aside, I think it's unfair to compare this article to the slave labor camps mentioned in this thread. They are fundamentally different. Anything with Christian theming, obviously, the New Yorker and most of HN passionately hate.
But, the New Yorker, for all the useless people and vapid criticism it employs, could not come up with an alternative to an organization like this. This is a place where children who have severe drug or other problems, possibly violence, can be sent that essentially functions the same as a juvenile detention center but is patently not as bad. I even empathize with the parents in the article. What would I do if I had four children and one of them is doing drugs, sleeping with numerous guys to the point of getting pregnant, and literally working at a brothel (buried in the hit piece, obviously), and the other children are perhaps younger, currently normal, but exposed to this continually? That is a challenging situation. Many New Yorker columnists surely live in a "post-children world", so perhaps that is not something they'd empathize with. The only evidence I saw that made me question if the parents were horrible was when they refused to let the move to a halfway house with the child.
Although I am not a Christian and empathize with not wanting to be in compulsory Christian brainwashing, I'm sorry, the article provided no evidence these kids are being physically or mentally abused. Citing that 13 of them attempted to commit suicide is more evidence about the type of kids, without judging whether their current mental state is due to genetics or a poor break in life, being placed here. Further, I didn't find other criticisms valid, such as declining to raise children resulting from pregnancies. It is not the organization's responsibility to raise children, and to their credit, again, it looks like they would have allowed the girl to transfer to a halfway house and keep the child, if not for the maligned parents. But, other than that, their "case study" seemed like she belonged in a mental hospital and I am skeptical it is entirely the fault of the "system". After leaving the program, she went on a desperate search to find her drug addict mother, before abandoning a husband and new son to live with friends, while literally repeatedly applying to work at "Teen Challenge" (what?!!?).
It is quite frightening to live in an era where we want to dismantle anything that is remotely Christian because someone had a bad emotional experience. This is the psychotic liberal zeitgeist - where the homeless capitals of the world want to dictate solutions to scenarios like this.
51 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadI feel like they're somehow violating Margaret Atwood's copyrights with the naming, nevermind the religious oppression.
Now tweak any of those variables, and the situation just gets more difficult. Adoption is really hard.
What differences are you talking about? In behavior? In intelligence?
Damn, this is some demonic shit. I love all the political connections they talked about in the article which keep this legal
For starters, because these statements are not true [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_young_people%27s_r...
Probably true, but technically because the sentiment is expressed in English. Non-western cultures often take some things a few steps further.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57592243
Perhaps someone should go round the American institutions with ground-penetrating radar and a shovel.
No matter how bad the scandal is in Canada, I'm positive that the crimes in the US are magnitudes worse.
You seem to be commenting a lot of unrelated, tangential things to create a narrative aligned to your political beliefs. Something to consider.
... in a discussion about the abuses and crimes of religious charitable organizations in the US.
I think they're entirely related. They may not be the same organization, but there's systemic patterns evident in such things, and I think your conclusion is, at the least, a little grasping.
https://www.krqe.com/news/politics-government/haaland-leads-...
on a local note: https://sourcenm.com/2021/09/03/indigenous-leaders-seek-an-a...
IMO these re-education camps are problematic, even when done "correctly", because they don't address the underlying cause of teen misery. And in fact they do more harm than good, for the simple reason that the teen is held accountable for our systemic failures. It is the parents' philosophy of rugged individualism acted out for profit using children as guinea pigs.
As a society, we share responsibility and consequences for the outcomes determined by the actions of individuals. This is the reason that the limits of individual freedom are somewhere in between the capacity and the demonstrated ability to infringe on the rights of others.
What seems to have happened is dereliction of the duty to shape those limits in response to demonstrated infringement in the past. We know - we know - what the status quo wrt, as examples, the penal system and firearms has meant for individual and collective suffering. What you're feeling is the same sense that we're not learning from the past and dooming ourselves to gory, nightmarish repetition.
It seems there's got to be a threshold, a critical mass of people who want to live differently than the rest before you can weather the challenges inherent in making non-mainstream choices. This is widely applicable; AA comes to mind, as does things like vegetarianism, homosexuality, Judaism, etc. There should be an -ism for the people who reject authoritarianism blind conformism, and who have a well-defined set of coping mechanisms to deal with misinformation, bullying, cruelty, and dehumanization. And ways to deal with people that embrace such techniques, especially those in power.
1. https://givingcompass.org/partners/ncrp/the-importance-of-gr...
Mutual aid is inherently local. It’s someone asking for help on Twitter or Facebook, or at work. It’s someone offering aid, or connecting someone in need to someone able and willing to help. These networks sprung up all across the country last year, mostly in big cities with large protest movements, but also among communities with strong ties. At one point in time churches and governments filled this role, however both have been derelict in their duties for many many decades.
That is the crux of the matter.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of former victims of the juvenile Justice system. On the one hand they’ve all demonstrated serious antisocial behaviors. On the other hand they’ve all been severely neglected (or worse) by all the people responsible for their wellbeing: parents, teachers, relatives, siblings, peers, social workers, religious leaders, etc. how can hold a Child accountable for their actions if we are unable ( read: unwilling) to hold the adults who’ve hurt them accountable for their failures?
The children are not mere Guinea pigs, they’re scapegoats for their caregivers failures.
Shame.
“I still think about it every day,” she told me. “My child was stolen from me.”
https://revealnews.org/article/they-thought-they-were-going-...
https://revealnews.org/article/they-worked-in-sweltering-hea...
https://www.propublica.org/article/black-children-were-jaile...
A judge in a Tennessee county, Donna Scott Davenport, locks up elementary school children (as young as 7) basically at whim for crimes that don't exist. They're given a "perp walk": handcuffed in front of their classmates and teachers, paraded through the school, and off to jail in the back of a police car. She has them put in solitary confinement. She failed the bar exam four times before passing. The children cry and throw up as they're sent away.
I was never sure why we only got all worried about fascism when Donald Trump came around. Articles like all these show that, if you're poor enough or black enough, it's always been here. I wish I felt like I was exaggerating in saying that, but I don't think it's much of a stretch.
It was the transition from fringe to mainstream, along with the acquisition of power. Things like this might go from "isolated incidents" to more widespread to national policy. But yes, it's a change in degree not a change in kind.
Absolutely correct. But there's always a chunk of people who want to be in the Gestapo, or have someone to report their neighbours to.
My use of "isolated incidents" was ironic in that's the phrase always used to cover systematic problems that people don't want to address. You can have a lot of isolated incidents if you refuse to join the dots.
Dragging a teenager off to a prison camp for looking at boys is the tip of patriarchy, but the entire infrastructure of people who thought it was OK is also patriarchy.
I think that sums it up pretty well.
(Now, of course, this insane totalitarian bullshit happens even in these friends' allegedly liberal tech hub cities. But they see the Austins and Nashvilles of the world as being replete with such things, and articles like these suggest they're not all that far off.)
In fact, the US is the only country in the world to lack these legal protections.
It’s astonishing that no one involved with Élan ever went to prison.
Frankly, I’ve often wondered if the people involved just reopened under a different name to escape bad press.
I don't know what to say. How do things like these happen - and keep happening - in otherwise civilized, enlightened countries?
But, the New Yorker, for all the useless people and vapid criticism it employs, could not come up with an alternative to an organization like this. This is a place where children who have severe drug or other problems, possibly violence, can be sent that essentially functions the same as a juvenile detention center but is patently not as bad. I even empathize with the parents in the article. What would I do if I had four children and one of them is doing drugs, sleeping with numerous guys to the point of getting pregnant, and literally working at a brothel (buried in the hit piece, obviously), and the other children are perhaps younger, currently normal, but exposed to this continually? That is a challenging situation. Many New Yorker columnists surely live in a "post-children world", so perhaps that is not something they'd empathize with. The only evidence I saw that made me question if the parents were horrible was when they refused to let the move to a halfway house with the child.
Although I am not a Christian and empathize with not wanting to be in compulsory Christian brainwashing, I'm sorry, the article provided no evidence these kids are being physically or mentally abused. Citing that 13 of them attempted to commit suicide is more evidence about the type of kids, without judging whether their current mental state is due to genetics or a poor break in life, being placed here. Further, I didn't find other criticisms valid, such as declining to raise children resulting from pregnancies. It is not the organization's responsibility to raise children, and to their credit, again, it looks like they would have allowed the girl to transfer to a halfway house and keep the child, if not for the maligned parents. But, other than that, their "case study" seemed like she belonged in a mental hospital and I am skeptical it is entirely the fault of the "system". After leaving the program, she went on a desperate search to find her drug addict mother, before abandoning a husband and new son to live with friends, while literally repeatedly applying to work at "Teen Challenge" (what?!!?).
It is quite frightening to live in an era where we want to dismantle anything that is remotely Christian because someone had a bad emotional experience. This is the psychotic liberal zeitgeist - where the homeless capitals of the world want to dictate solutions to scenarios like this.