Last week NUVO, Indianapolis’ alternative weekly, published the first in a series of articles exposing the rise and fall of the fundamentalist boot camp I attended, New Horizons Youth Ministries. Alumni Theresa Rosado writes that NHYM had its license revoked in 2009 for failing to comply with state policies. They did not provide background checks for sex offenders. They did not provide 24 hour wake supervision for the students they boarded, even though some students arrived with a histories of sexual perpetration and self-harm.
This is all true. During the 1990s, no staff was ever awake at night to watch over students, which is standard operating procedure in long-term treatment. And there were definitely sex offenders working for NHYM.
The founder of NHYM, Gordon Blossom, was a pedophile who raped his own daughter. Blossom still continued to work for the program, even after he revealed his disorder to his family and the staff, delivering sermons on sexuality to gender based groups. One alumni (me) wrote, “They separated boys from girls for that sermon. He told us that God gave us curves and boys loved curves because boys loved cars, which also have curves. It was okay to let boys fondle our curves, leering of course while he said this, but not to have sex with them because every hot blooded American male wanted a virgin and why buy the cow if you could get the milk for free? I was still a virgin at the time of this sermon. Very confusing.”
Better that than the boys’sermon, in which Blossom exhorted them to view masturbation as a form of prayer to God.
Rosado also discusses the reasons why NHYM was kicked out of Haiti, and concludes with an explanation of the extreme isolation students were subjected to from their families, which lead to PTSD.
Rosado has spent years researching the numerous investigations leading to NHYM‘s closure. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of her series.
I was there in 1980 and I cannot speak of what happened to me . Why can’t we get our day in court ? You see all these cases prosecuted from Years and years after the fact. They were the beginning of the end of my inasence.