Last month Jesus Land author Julia Scheeres, forwarded me a link from ProPublica with a headline that made of us both infuriated. There Were Warning Signs Of Sexual Abuse At a Youth Center. Indiana Kept Sending Boys and Money Anyway. No one wants teenagers to be abused, especially at state-funded Christian facilities, but it was beyond maddening…
Kidnapped for Christ
A User’s Guide to Unreformed/ Moving to Substack
Thank you to everyone who read my Unreformed blog. I’m starting a substack which will occasionally focus on the troubled teen industry but also will include outtakes from my interviews (the next three are Darrin Bell, Emi Nietfield, and Myriam Gurba), what I’m reading, and what I’m researching— I’m currently working on a project exploring…
Religious Boot Camps Explored by the Talk Beliefs Channel
Recently I was contacted for an interview by Mark Torrender, the founder of the Talk Beliefs YouTube channel, which is dedicated to exploring the stories of survivors of religious sects and cults. The goal of Talk Beliefs is altruistic: by sharing one’s story, you can help other survivors and hopefully enact change. Which is basically…
Suffer the Little Children: Mike Pence’s Disturbing Connections to the Teen Treatment Industry
When I was fifteen, my parents sent me to Escuela Caribe, a fundamentalist Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. At this school students were forced to exercise for punishment, sometimes until they vomited or collapsed from exhaustion. Students were beaten with a leather strap for minor infractions. Staff members would slam students into…
Stop Child Abuse in Residential Treatment Programs for Teens
One of the most maddening things about being a product of the dysfunctional family with means complex is knowing that the abuse is still happening. That despite the Congressional reports, despite books like Julia Scheeres’ Jesus Land, or Maia Szalavitz’s Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, or Kate Logan’s documentary…
Where American Teens Were Abused in the Name of God
This past week, Zoe Schlanger of Newsweek interviewed me about Escuela Caribe. The article, Where American Teens Were Abused in the Name of God, is here. This week, Kidnapped for Christ, an expose about Escuela Caribe, premiered on Showtime. I was interviewed for the documentary, though my interview did not make the final cut. An outtake of…
Kids For Cash
There’s lots of money to be made abusing kids, not just by operators of the teen “treatment” industries, but by those who funnel kids into the system. New documentary Kids for Cash tells the story of how two Pennsylvania judges earned millions of dollars for referring their charges into a privately operated teen treatment facility….