Imagine there was a person in your community who had been a mentor and safe harbor to struggling kids and teens for decades. Through the years, you’ve known him to take kids into his home whose parents didn’t want or did not know what to do with them. This helpful, wise individual taught them obedience, life skills, and responsibility. He saved them from being abandoned by society and gave them the care they needed. So it seemed from the outside, so the community believed.

Now imagine you were to learn that this person was not who they appeared to be at all. Imagine you learned that many of those kids he claimed to help had been instead tortured in that home. That he was leaving the kids isolated in dark rooms, and forced them into silence. Denied them toilets until they wet themselves. Berated them and convinced them they were broken, unwanted. He cut them off from any hope of honest contact with the world outside his walls.


When they were injured or ill, he neglected them. Some even died from the neglect and brutality. You learn this man routinely forced kids to bend to his will by any means necessary. Physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological torture, drugging. All because HE believed he knew what a child must look, act, and think like. Imagine he was making money doing this.

And unsurprisingly, many of the kids grew up haunted… some would commit suicide to escape the pain.


What would your reaction to this be? What would you think should happen?

Would you say, “Well, he did help SOME of the kids. So it had to be done.”?

Not a chance, right? You’d say this man should never be allowed to be near another child. You may say he should be locked up for his crimes. He would never be seen the same by your community again.


We have a tendency as a society to give leniency to corporations and organizations which we would never afford a regular person. There is some separation, which too easily allows us to forget that evil done by a business is just as bad if not worse than by an individual. If we are to ask better for our children, and protect the next generation, we have to break through this barrier. There are programs, businesses, and corporations which have caused immeasurable harm to thousands of children and teens over the past 50 years. Behavior modification centers, “therapeutic” boarding schools, wilderness programs, religious programs, and more.

They have put profit over kids, and the kids have paid the price. The accounts of abuse are staggering in their numbers. Investigations, GAO reports, lawsuits, and legislators have attempted to expose and change this abuse over and over again. But because businesses are more elusive than one man, and because money feeds corruption, these efforts have always fallen short.

We need everyone together. We need the public to learn about the “troubled teen” industry so that together we can create the change needed.

No more leniency on child abuse for profit. It has to end with us.

www.breakingcodesilence.net

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