UNITED STATES
Addicting Info
The Christian Conservative movement is well known for evacuating its children to special “camps” should they show the slightest inclination of defying the family traditions, over things like their sexuality. A whiff of rebellion and they are disappeared for anything from a semester to a year. Newsweek has this week covered the story behind Escuela Caribe, a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic that’s the subject of a forthcoming documentary called Kidnapped for Christ -which reveals an epidemic of child abuse at these camps.
Like so many of these ‘schools’, Escuela Caribe is viewed as a sort of last resort by many parents whose children are failing to embody the fundamentalist Christianity they espouse — a faith where homosexuality, depression, schizophrenia, and anxiety disorders are frequently written off as “rebellion” or “demonic possession.”
The stressful environment coupled with no true accountability or regulation often creates an environment of systemic abuse, as the Newsweek report indicates:
By her second day at the school, [Deirdre] 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.
“When I was there, at 17, I was a high ranker, and it was my job to make sure [low rankers] were properly washing their private parts in the shower. I had to make sure they soaped. That was how I spent my senior year,” she says. Phone calls to parents were recorded, and written letters were monitored. “They would do anything to keep you there.”
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