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|
 The Second International Conference on Adolescent Treatment Abuse
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| Click here to listen to WMNF interview. |
| Click here to register or make donation. |
| Click here for Lodging Information. |
| Click
here for Word version of
program document.
|
THE
PURPOSE OF THIS CONFERENCE
Earlier
this year Charles Long II, the director of an Arizona
boot camp for boys, was arrested and charged with
second degree murder stemming from the death of 14 year
Anthony “Tony” Haynes who died, apparently,
after being made to stand for hours in 111 degree heat.
Tony’s photo is on the cover of this syllabus.
Two years ago a counselor at an Oregon wilderness
program was charged with criminally negligent homicide
after a 15 year-old boy died while being restrained for
exhibiting "defiant behavior". In 1999
an overweight teenage girl dropped dead in a South
Dakota, state-run boot camp after being made to jog
while in Arizona a nurse in an Arizona boys ranch was
charged with manslaughter and child abuse in the death
of a child. The last 30 years has shown an almost
exponential rise in the number and types of
treatment programs which have been designed to treat
affluent American and Canadian kids (and wards of the
state) for such things as drug addiction, eating
disorders, sexual issues and behavioral problems often
using thought reform, often employing aversion therapy.
There are no standards for some of these programs,
and owners and counselors who get in trouble in one
state just pop open in another. Programs are run
out in the dessert and in remote mountainous areas.
Professional escort services kidnap kids (with their
parents knowledge) and carry them to remote desert and
mountain areas in America,
and to treatment facilities in Canada,
Mexico, Samoa, the Czech Republic. Some
programs may even be run on Indian reservations.
Many former clients from some of these programs are
claiming they were maltreated and abused.
Legal
problems are often complicated because:
·
there
are few standards by which to gauge newage1
treatment methods
·
duped
parents are often willing endorsers of the treatment
methods
·
program
officials often exaggerate the extent of a child’s
problem
·
some
wealthy program owners have lobbied state legislatures
to laws to force kids into treatment with the force of a
court order
·
parents
and kids alike participate in powerful thought reform
classes to keep them under control
·
of
the various jurisdictions and countries where the kids
were treated.
And
the problems are not confined to the newage,
non-medical providers of treatment either.
Kids are a very marketable commodity when it comes to
hospital beds, and
since the 1980s there has been an upsurge in the number
of hospital beds made available to treat kids for drug
addiction and other disorders.
In 1999 a 14 year-old boy being treated for
mental illness died after being restrained by three
counselors at a residential treatment center in
Orefield, Pa.
The
Trebach Institute in association with Survivors of
Straight, Inc. have seen a common pattern of abuse in
many of these diverse newage treatment programs,
and other patterns of abuse, and sometimes greed,
in some more traditional, medically licensed programs.
The major purpose of this conference is to
re-examine the destructive role that certain highly
approved treatment programs have had on the children
they were supposed to help. Thus we are turning
conventional logic on its head and purposely coining a
new phrase, treatment abuse. There are good
reasons for doing so.
Last
summer The Trebach Institute took a leading role in
exposing juvenile treatment abuse by sponsoring the
first ever International Conference on Treatment Abuse
in Bethesda, Maryland.
That conference was a resounding success.
In this year’s conference we will review the
record of the harmful impact that these treatment
programs have had on their young inmates, discuss
methods to close these destructive institutions, examine
the reasons why these programs have received such high
level support, and suggest better, more effective
methods for helping children with problems of all kinds.
In addition, we will seek to provide guidance to those
children already harmed by these programs so that they
may obtain redress or compensation in a court of justice
either through civil law suits, filing criminal
complaints, or both.
More
vehemently, we oppose any program which will not allow
free access to kids in treatment by parents and other
family members, and by outsiders of good rapport
including state health workers, friends, clergy, bona
fide treatment specialist, and attorneys—by mail,
telephone and by personal visits.
We feel strongly that juveniles should not be
made to be counselors to program newcomers and, we feel
that it is inappropriate behavior to let kids scream at
one another in synanons or restrain one another.
We particularly abhor any program that causes
immense harm to the physical and mental health of our
children in the name of saving them from drugs, eating
disorders, sexual promiscuity, or any other calamity,
real or imagined by the hysterical among us. We will
fight any attempt to apply to our own children the
perverse notion sometimes expressed and acted upon in
the Vietnam War – we had to destroy the village and
its innocent inhabitants in order to save it.
For too many of our children, of course, it is
now too late to prevent that dire outcome. Their minds
and their bodies have suffered immense harm at the hands
of those who tried to save them. Not a few have
committed suicide, apparently as a result of their
treatment experiences.
From just Straight, Inc. alone there have been
over 25 documented suicides of former clients.
Fortunately, there are hundreds, even thousands,
of these children who have gone on to healthy and
productive lives despite the destructive torment
suffered at the hands of their alleged healers. Many of
these survivors are now attempting to develop common
strategies for seeking justice for themselves and for
closing down the destructive institutions that have done
so much harm to them and to others.
We
view the this second conference as the seed to build an
effective organization which will seek to provide
justice for the survivors and also that will start a
re-examination of the entire approach to addiction abuse
treatment in a society claiming to be compassionate and
civilized.
Straight/Seed/Kids Reunion. The Trebach Institute is conducting this conference in association with survivors from Straight, Inc.—the largest juvenile drug rehabilitation program in the world from 1976 – 1993. Those survivors and survivors from Straight-descendent programs such as Kids of North Jersey, and survivors from Straight's predecessor program, The Seed, will use the occasion of this conference to also hold a reunion of Straight and Straight-descendent survivors.
[1]
Newage,
one word combination form of “New Age”.
Coined by the magician The Amazing
Randi.
The word rhymes with “sewage”.
|
CONFERENCE PROGRAM June
8 – 9, 2002 |
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|
9:00 |
AM |
Welcoming
Remarks |
Michael
and Rhonda Sherman, Conference
Hosts.
Mike is a survivor of a
destructive juvenile treatment
cult. |
|
9:15 |
AM |
Highlights
and summary from last year's
conference, and purpose of this
year conference |
Arnold
Trebach, Conference Chair:
Arnold S. Trebach, J.D., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, American
University |
|
9:45 |
AM |
A
survivor’s story |
TBA.
A former member of a
destructive juvenile treatment
program will tell his story. |
|
10:00 |
AM |
Straight
History: The Seed, Straight,
Inc., The Miller Newton Thread,
The George Ross Thread |
Wesley
Fager, author and Straight
parent, talks about Straight,
Inc. one of the largest and most
successful of the destructive
treatment programs. |
|
11:00 |
AM |
Coffee
Break |
|
|
11:15 |
AM |
Boarding
Schools, Boot Camps, Specialty
Schools and Escort Services for
Boys and Girls |
Alexia
Parks, author and crusader for
children’s rights. |
|
12:15 |
PM |
Lunch |
Mattison’s,
The Plaza Tower, 111 Second Ave.
NE.
Cost included in
registration fee.
(Keynote speaker TBA) Click Here to browse the menu or take a virtual tour of Mattison's |
|
1:30 |
PM |
Survivors’
Panel |
Survivors
from various treatment programs.
Panelists TBA. |
|
2:30 |
PM |
New Horizons, A California boarding school for "defiant teens" |
Elii Chapman A.A., B.S. spearheaded an effort that led to the closing of a K-12, "boot camp" style private school in the Mojave Desert. |
|
3:00 |
PM |
Coffee
Break |
|
|
3:15 |
PM |
Recovery
from Cults, Part 1 |
Carol
Giambalvo, Director of Recovery
Programs & Project Outreach
for American Family Foundation
and President, reFocus. |
|
4:15 |
PM |
Coffee
Break |
|
|
4:30 |
PM |
Recovery
from Cults, Part 2 |
Carol
Giambalvo, Director of Recovery
Programs & Project Outreach
for American Family Foundation
and President, reFocus. |
|
5:30 |
PM |
Dinner
Break |
On
your own. |
|
7:00 |
PM |
Open
Discussion |
Arnold
Trebach will moderate an open
discussion for all conference
attendees. Attendees will
suggest topics form the floor.
Topics might include: ·
How
do we promote congressional
hearings and legislation? ·
How
do survivors attack the hurtful
institutions and still maintain
good relations with their
parents? ·
What
is the best way of filing
criminal complaints? |
|
Sunday June 9 |
||
|
|
9:00 |
AM |
Successful
lawsuits |
Panel
of Attorneys.
Review of successful
lawsuits against destructive
treatment programs. |
|
10:30 |
AM |
Coffee
Break |
|
|
10:45 |
AM |
Legal
strategies for future |
Panel
of Attorneys.
Legal strategies for the
future to help survivors and
their families put their lives
back together. |
|
12:00 |
PM |
LUNCH |
|
|
1:15 |
PM |
Strategic
Planning session
|
Dr.
Conrad will facilitate
conference participants in
building an effective
organization for broad social,
political and legal reform. |
|
2:45 |
PM |
Coffee
Break |
|
|
3:00 |
PM |
Strategic
Planning session continues |
|
|
4:45-.5:00
|
|
Closing
Remarks |
Arnold
Trebach |
SPEAKERS
Elii Chapman,
A.A., B.S. has worked with at risk youth for more than a decade in numerous capacities including art instruction, research on the constructs of gender within dating relationships, and youth and family crisis intervention. From October 2000 to February 2001 she spearheaded an effort that led to the closing of a K-12, "boot camp" style private school in the Mojave Desert. New Horizons had been in operation formally for 5 years after the owner lost lisences to conduct foster care and in-home day care. Articles have been archived at Project No Spank. http://nospank.net/n-h54.htm http://nospank.net/n-h43.htm
Elii flunked out of High School in 1987 and graduated a year ahead of time at a wonderful continuation school. Elii attended UCLA's School of Fine Art from 1990 to 1992 and ultimately earned a B.S. in Sociology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where she lives with her husband, son and daughter. Michael
Conrad,
Ed.D. Dr.
Conrad has thirty-six years experience in designing,
developing, and implementing learning systems as adult
educator, Army Chaplain, Land Use Planner, Training
Manager, Publisher. These have included teaching how to
design systems of education for the US Army Chaplains working out of the Pentagon, University Instructor for
Florida State University, Barry University, University
of South Florida, and Indiana University, Bloomington,
Indiana. He was graduated with a doctorate in Adult
Education from Indiana University. He has written 20
Ebooks between 1/2000 and present with titles ranging
from "How to Introduce Spirituality at Work Without
Blowing Up the Place" to "So You Know You Are Going to
Die, Now What?" He recently founded his own
self-publishing company. He, along with other colleagues from the Department
of Community Affairs, feeds the homeless once a
month. He is a member of the Florida
Publishers' Association. Publishers Marketing Association, Society for Organizational Learning, and
Tallahassee Chapter of the American Society for Training
& Development. He has counseled countless Army
Veterans and their families suffering from Post
Traumatic Shock Syndrome and substance abuse. Dr. Conra