Although the focus of the article is on Suguichi, toward the end of the piece Newsweek brings ut two "interesting" piece of information. The first is the "U.S. Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Act of 2013" which I'll focus on in another post. And the second is the re-opening of Escuela Caribe under new management. "Gay students, he says, are never accepted into the program based on a parent’s problem with their orientation."
Like Sugiuchi, I ain't buying that for a hot minute!!
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Sugiuchi experience fifteen years earlier paints a picture of a consistantly abusive institution allowed to thrive unreported for decades. By her second day at the school, Sugiuchi’s image of a nurturing Christian boarding school was shattered when her “house father” made her perform exercises for hours.
“According to him, I had ‘an authority problem’ at home. He made me do bear crawls, pushups and duck walks. He had me hold my arms out balancing books until I cried from pain,” she wrote on a website dedicated to collecting the stories of survivors of the school. “We had 24-year-old male house fathers in a house full of teenage girls. I had a house father that used to watch me change clothes. I was constantly either being abused or seeing people be abused,” she tells Newsweek.
Swatting, or being struck on the rear with a wooden paddle, was among the disciplinary practices at the school, along with a “quiet room” where students deemed particularly insubordinate would be isolated for days with only a thin mattress. A system of points based on obedience kept students on different levels, and low-ranking students would be forced to ask permission to perform any task, and supervised at all times by higher-ranking students, including in the shower, Sugiuchi says.
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Escuela Caribe was one of many “behavior modification” schools operating with little regulation all over the U.S. and overseas. Many of the students were sent to Escuela Caribe because their parents had determined that they were misbehaving. Many of the girls who wound up there had been sexually assaulted and were acting out at home following the trauma, according to Sugiuchi. Others arrived with anxiety or depression, or learning disabilities that made them “difficult” teens at home. Still others were there because they were gay, and had come out to their parents, who didn’t approve.
Where American Teens were Abused in the Name of God - Zoë Schlanger | Newsweek
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