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February 11, 2006
Food for
Thought re the Death of a 14-Year Old Boy in South Florida
How are most people going to feel after they
read the articles, and hopefully one day see the video, of the boy
who was brutally murdered in a program for troubled youth in
Southern Florida? What will people do? Will the American people wake
up, will they see what is happening to youth?
I think people who read these articles, people
with any heart and soul, will feel a range of emotions from feelings
of anger, disgust, resentment, bitterness, repulsion - what is most
disturbing about this is that so many of us, the ones who know what
goes on behind closed doors of hundreds, if not thousands, of these
programs, will have feelings of hopelessness and helplessness,
fearing that somehow this victim’s death will go unnoticed and
unpunished like so many others. When will this stop? When will
people begin to speak out, and keep speaking out, about the cruel
and inhumane ways in which today’s teens and pre-teens are being
treated while they are basically incarcerated in programs that are
sold to parents, many of them, as a place that will help their
child?
When will people decide they have had enough?
Americans have heard of the abuse that goes on in so many programs …
48-Hours, Inside Edition, Dateline NBC, Fox News, Montel … have all
aired shows. Some more than once. Some people watch them and feel
bad for the moment but once the moment is gone so is their sadness.
And some think the kids deserve what they get … they have fallen
hook, line, and sinker for the belief that these kids are just punks
who should be taken off the streets. They fail to understand the
truth. They support the involuntary incarceration of youth, some as
young as 4, some as old as 22.
What so many people fail to see is that many of
the teens who are incarcerated and who lose their basic human rights
are not punks, are not violent, are not killers, are not the
horrible people they are portrayed to be. (Yes, some teens kill
their parents, some teens kill strangers, but they are small in
numbers. It is adults who commit most of the murders in this
country, not youth, and yet they do get representation and they do
get a fair trial.) These kids don’t!
In fact, most of the kids who are locked up in
what they describe as “hell-holes” suffer from ADHD, oppositional
defiance, gay issues, depression, bulimia, and more. Some have been
abused by the parents who pay $40-100,000 per year to send them
away.
Some, like this child, did something so many of
us did as teens, he took his grandma’s car out for a ride.
Years ago a friend’s teenage son took her car
in the middle of the night and was caught by the police, he was
taken to juvenile hall, spent a few hours there, and was picked up
by his mom. He was scared after spending a few hours there. His mom
punished him by taking away privileges for a month, and he never did
it again. Kids, teens do things, they explore, they misbehave – we
were all teens once and we did the very same thing. Now, many adults
today panic when their child does something that they felt was
acceptable when they were teens but that is no longer acceptable.
And many are hiring teen escort services, some
that are not even licensed and regulated, to abduct their children
in the middle of the night, against their will, and taken to remote
facilities hundreds and thousands of miles from home. They lose
contact with the outside world and lose all their rights. How can
anyone think this is right? It is not. It is wrong, plain and
simple. WRONG!
Something needs to be done. How many more kids
are going to have to die in these places before someone takes
notice?
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