Looking back on the last few years

It all started with Brat Camp being broadcasted on Danish Television. It all was so wonderful. Teenagers were going down the wrong track and some helpful people took the teenagers out in the wilderness or to a ranch where they guided the teenagers back on the right track.

But something alarmed me. I live in Denmark where we also have so-called troubled teenagers. But the criterion’s labeling who is troubled or who is not were entirely different in our two cultures. Drinking alcohol in Denmark does not make a troubled teenager. In fact when I was a child there was no lower purchase limit. Today it is 16 for alcohol with a percentage below the safe limit of 16.5 but back then there was no limit.

In fact the young adults I as a CIO in a larger publishing company would have difficulties to hire would be those who restrain from drinking alcohol because the human resource tools we have at our disposal is a beer or a glass of wine Friday after work and 5 minutes development conversation every 18 month. If I don't learn my employee to know Friday after work what would I have to talk about when we sit down and I dictates the employee’s career? Nothing and when times get rough guess I would have to let go first. Second what about the relationship between this individual and the colleagues? This individual would be isolated and I would not dare to offer such a work environment to anyone.

A troubled teenager in Denmark is a teenager who isolates her or himself. I know that because I have suffered a personal tragedy in my own family. I have a child who is not living at home because the authorities was concerned about her life staying at home after school instead of hanging out in the alleys behind the public run youth clubs where the youth learn to drink alcohol and socialize.

So when I saw Brat Camp I started a research about the subject. I met people online on Fornits back when sick people didn't try to destroy its reputation by posting porn and intentionally insult people just to scare them away from the board.

I was not interesting in starting a fight. I saw a problem. Private companies and various religious organizations did actually pay for results which could scare parents to lock their children up and politicians to make laws which criminalized the entire rite of passage for every teenager becoming an adult.

So together with the founder of Fornits, we created Fornits Wiki, where we gathered all the news from the industry on a worldwide basis. Today there are articles about behavior modification from 41 countries.

Times have changed. Many of the teenagers who were locked up at youth facilities in the 1990's are now adults and the internet has helped them to understand that they were not subjected to isolated incident when they were raped, beaten, humiliated and subjected to other inhumane so-called treatment methods. There were no laws protecting them. Troubled teenagers are not recognized as equals when they end up as victims in courts.

In fact they still are not in Denmark. What kind of punishment should a counselor get when he force a teenager to oral sex? I can state that a Danish court gave such a counselor suspended sentence 60 days in prison to serve if he ever repeated his actions once again. And this incident was caught on tape because the teenager taped the counselor on a hidden mobile phone when he took advantage of her. It is not fair but given the state of the laws which should protect children placed in care, the court did nothing wrong. They just could not punish him further even if they gave him a punishment to the full extent of the law.

But while we still have a distance to go in Denmark there are positive news from the States. Today the activism has moved from an isolated message board to Facebook and to 100 of websites. The former teenagers are no longer silent. They have created national wide network where they monitor the group homes, wilderness programs and boot camps. They are in the process of changing the general view on troubled teenagers.

In New York Post there is a story about the new “Teen Trouble” show. A self-taught counselor has sold the concept of a show to Lifetime – a major television network in the States. In every episode the counselor approach a so-called troubled teenager, put the teenager through some situation like jail and arrest to show what would happen if the path the teenager has chosen would continue. In the end the teenager ends up in a residential facility which has chosen to sponsor the show.

It is not a new concept. There have been dozen of such shows like Dr. Phil, Jenny Jones, Maury and Wilkos. There are many private “treatment” facilities which are willing to sponsor such shows because they don’t care whether the teenager is suited for their treatment approach or not. They don’t care about the problem. They care about how many they can house for the least expenses.

I who have been a professional businessman for more than 20 years have often wondered why they don’t care about who they serve because I know that a satisfied customer is a returning customer. I have come to the conclusion that they don’t realize who their customer is. They believe that their customer is the person who pays them the money, so they care about the parent. It is short-lived business. It would fail once the teenager exits the program because the next generation of this family would certainly not use this business again.

If I should run a youth home I would first entire that I have a qualified staff because I recognize the limitations I have. I am not a certified counselor. In Denmark there are a number of titles I could take which don’t require certification which would make me look like a counselor and when I look at the homepages of Danish group home I can see a lot of un-licensed employees who have taken these titles. It would be a scam if I tried this and I have to ask why parents put up with this?

In Denmark there are few if not no parents who seek out of the home placement on a voluntary basis. My child is not living outside my home at my choice but my mother has non-Danish origin so I was already rated low as a parent when the social worker first saw our case. Second we have been hit hard by a life-treating illness among us adults, so we accepted the “offer” given to us. It is generally a horse head placed in your bed. If you say no, we will find an unqualified group home or a foster family only caring about the money. If you say yes, you can better a better place for your child and visit it more frequently.

Because of the ordeal my child has to go through I cannot involve myself with Danish group homes and foster families. If I engaged in any activism my child could suffer if the authorities took revenge on us as a family. It has happened before here so I have remained focused on running and updating Fornits Wiki.

But my investment has paid up because others have picked up the axe and using the same tools developed by organizations like CAFETY and HEAL-online, they are charting the Danish group homes and foster families. It has led to a number of cases in Danish courts. The television channels have broadcasted documentaries about the most abusive facilities and legislation has been introduced in our parliament to ensure a safer environment for children in placement. Group homes have been closed; employees have been punished for their wrongdoings.

Today the most active organizations in Denmark are Domestic Prisoners of Consience (US-based) and Minors in residential placement research center (Sweden). As I have stated above I have to stay out their work in Denmark, but it does not mean that I cannot praise their excellent work.

My webpage was started in 2006. Many years have passed. Results have been reached by the timeless efforts of many volunteers. I want to thank them because I am a happy man today even given the fact that my child is not at home because I know that there is caring persons around my child because many of the people in business who were only present due to the money have been put out of work.

Thank you very much.

We are however not finished. There is a lot of work ahead of us. I hope to contribute for many years to come.

Sources:

• Fornits message board
• HEAL-online
• 'Abused' teens take aim at Lifetime reality show (New York Post)
• Domestic prisoners of conscience
• Minors in residential placement research center
• Pædagog dømt for sex med anbragt pige (Ekstra-Bladet - in Danish langugage)

Sometime the fight for human rights feels like a lost cause

As it has happened so many times before, a teenager approached the U.S. message board Fornits for help. The parents of a teenage girl called Morgan had given up any chances for local counseling and looked into an enclosed boarding school which markets them as a treatment center. Let me state. I have not visited the boarding school. I will not doubt that the mother of the girl visited a nice campus with horses and well-kept buildings. The specific treatment center called Academy at Sisters has two campuses. A campus they can use as a kind of showroom and a campus where new clients are kept until they adapt the guidelines of the school.

But as with all residential centers there are well-kept secrets. In Denmark a TV-program followed four teenagers at a Danish residential treatment center called Schuberts Minde. We saw one restraint and we saw how the teenagers were forced to remove personal items like earrings given to them by a parent as a very personal gift, clothing which are generally accepted in the public to be worn by even adults at work and we saw how they and their luggage were searched as if they were entering a prison. At the Danish residential treatment centers the psychological break down of the teenager was done calmly over an entire day. They did use hours quietly stating what they want and in the end they were able to persuade the teenager to lose his identity. Now they had a teenager with no resistance they could shape into their little enclosed world.

But there is a problem with this method. The teenager will need time to adjust back to the society now where his identity is nowhere useful in a modern workplace. Some of us are old enough to remember what happened once the wall came down and the two Germany’s united. The western Germany took over entirely. The main reason was that you had a population in East German who was like the teenagers at Schuberts Minde. Not ready to engage into their own destiny, with no long-term plans for their future. They were able to follow rules only.

The answer the residential centers give is that it will take time. It is a good answer – for the residential treatment centers. Residential treatment is 5-10 times more costly that any outpatient treatment. Places like Schuberts Minde charge the Danish society around 8-14,000 dollars per month to the Danish society. It can be done cheaper even in Denmark but then you replace trained counselors with untrained employees. In Denmark everybody can start a residential treatment center if they unite themselves with a few trained professionals. The cheapest of the residential treatment facilities tend to locate themselves in areas with large unemployment. There is oversight by the local authorities but the real security for the children is the local department of social security back home. The most skilled visit their clients to ensure that they don’t end up more damaged after the treatment than before. Sadly there is a lot room for improvement. A manager for a prison on Zealand told the press that the children in many cases could do better with time in prison because there are no national minimum standard and the teenagers he receives are destroyed and unable to function properly in a normal community.

But the parents of Morgan faces even bigger trouble than the parents typically face in Denmark. While the children in Danish residential treatment centers have a watchdog in the local department of social security the teenagers in U.S. treatment has none to come and visit them. The parents are given this task but often are they involved too closely in the treatment so they are unable to step back and look at the process from the outside.

The persons who should ensure human standards for the child placed in the program by holding on the only thing a residential treatment center respects – the money – are suddenly also a patient.

It is not wrong to treat the parents. Very often the parents are raising their child based on 20 to 30 years old experiences. 20-30 years back we had no internet, no cell-phones, no twitter etc. We didn’t have to worry about an earthquake on the other side of the world being thrown into our face in real-time. I remember my 2 year old daughter asking me why the towers fell on 9/11. Is people jumping out of a building to their deaths something to let a two year old watch? No, of course not but she saw it at a supermarket while we were shopping as I as a parent failed to realize that televisions were sold next to the toys. I was not aiming to destroy my child’s world that was built on a Disney like morale. It wasn’t the time where I wanted to tell her that humans can be evil too. But I failed as a parent that day and I had to take the consequences and teach her a lesson I was spared for until later in my life when I was child.

As a parent I early realized that I had to learn to parent a child after the millennium. I could not use the methods from my childhood, only the values I was raised by. It is here that many parents go wrong. It is possible to keep your values as a family while the methods are changed. You don’t need to throw it all away. An example is destruction of property. It was not acceptable to destroy property just it was boring when I was a child. It is certainly not acceptable for my children to destroy property just they are boring today. When I was bored I had to figure out that I could take my fishing rod and use some hours to angle. If my children are bored they have to figure out that they can turn on their computer or game console and spend some hours using them.

We can agree upon that childhood ends too soon. In many residential treatment centers we often hear of 15-17 years old children who play like in the old days. The childhood is artificial extended and it can be done because they are locked out of the real world. It does keep them safe, but it does not make them citizens ready to face the challenges of the modern world. The risk that they will go out in the world and act their adolescence out, when they are aged 20 or more is huge. Statistically people in the 20’s are more at risk in a modern society than teenagers.

You may ask what is wrong by delaying the chemical process teenagers go through with 5 to 10 years and the main problem is that the brain of people at that age does not accept mortality. Once they are legally adults they fool themselves to believe that they have to make it without parental guidance. They have access to things that demand a brain which has been through the restructure of the brain a teenager undergoes. To operate a car demands a mature brain. It demands that the driver has cured the curiosity of experimenting with alcohol. Otherwise we risk experiments with driving under influence and tragedies when people are killed as result of these experiments.

Once a child reaches the age of 18 certain aspects of live has to have been experienced if we want to create a responsible adult. The task of a parent is to give guidance through this tough period of the entire family unit. Guidance is many things and it is not friendship. It is a mix of giving consequences, empathy, teaching and love. It is properly the toughest task any human can take on. You have no guidebook, you have no answer book.

Morgan’s parents are in the middle of it and they reached out. We must all praise the parents who accept that they have limitations and reach out for help. It must never be shameful to ask for help. We are talking of the most costly resource our society produce – our children. No effort can be too much to help a family unit to function. The optimal solution would have to be to look at the family unit at the very place where it should function – at the home. Only when we are talking of illness among the adult members of the family unit or the parents choose to opt out of the role as a parent the question should be asked whether it is the right place for the children to live. In any other situation the problem started in the family unit and it should be solved in the family unit.

The parents of Morgan reached out. They got poor counseling which recommended them that Morgan should be removed from the family unit. Morgan found out because her parents in general were among those who have good values which enables them to include Morgan about the advices the professionals gave them. It is important as a parent to be honest. If you are angry with something your child has done tell them why you are disappointed. Don’t shout it. It is not a good idea to teach your child how a good barrier of communication is constructed. There are parents who cannot engage in communication. In the United States parents with little or poor communication skills can hire a firm to remove a child from the home in handcuffs and shackles and send them to a residential treatment center of their choice.

Morgan also reached out by use of Yahoo Answers and Fornits. Morgan seems to be a teenage girl with plans for her future. She has plans for her career; she was plans for visiting foreign cultures. While she like most teenagers are challenged by the chemical changes in her brain, she has sent signs through her writings letting the readers know that she is doing more than just living in the present. She might make poor choices in the daily life but it is exact there where the guidance comes into the picture. It was clear for everyone that there was something to build upon; something which could excel over time.

Sadly she got far from good counseling. At Fornits you find many who have been sent to residential treatment centers when they were children. But it is not all. They were guinea pigs for treatment methods where many have since been banned and sadly also many treatment methods which were just refined but still included methods which would be a criminal offense in many countries. It did cause damage. Fornits does also include poster working for the industry trying to downplay the history of residential treatment. It is difficult to explain how frustrated the survivors are just because they don’t have physically evidence of the damage the so-called treatment has caused. Had they just received a lobotomy then it would be like clear evidence before the court of time.

The problem with Fornits is that the present of the lobbyists from the modern industry is like a red cloth before their faces. The most extreme of the survivors do hold their parents accountable because they pay for their torment. They fail to realize that their parents failed their jobs as parents because they were poorly guided by not only the professionals at the program but also by politicians using youth crime and so-called antisocial behavior to be re-elected. The last 30 years of experiments at residential programs will be something the society will have to pay for the next 50 years.

Some show Morgan’s parents as evil and they decide to create a page targeted against the parents. I have difficulties how to find words for this action. I cannot condemn it enough. While the parents have received poor guidance they don’t need to be attacked in this way.

Morgan came for help. She wanted to know what kind of boarding school the Academy at Sisters is. She wanted to know what to expect. Here is some basically guidelines:

Once you arrive at the residential facility the staff needs to ensure that you focus on the subculture they want you to live in. It is restricted compared to what you have been used to. Things like music, television, cell-phone and Internet you have been used to at home will not be present in the facility. It will be called contrabands regardless of how innocence your use of these items is. You have to understand that they want you to focus on their guidelines and it means that every kind of distraction must be removed. Because the student manual unlike normal boarding schools is missing on the homepage we cannot tell you if earrings and your own clothes will have to be removed also in order to ensure complete focus. We also don’t know if they believe that contraband can be hidden inside the body. At some residential treatment centers they check for it, at others not.

Your parents will be told that you need some time to adjust and the contact to them will be a distraction for you. At some treatment centers this time can turn out to be months or even close to a year, at some places this time may be a months. General guidelines from professionals here in Denmark are that no child can keep out their appearance for more than 14 days. At some point they will test the boundaries. It is this test the professionals wait for because they want to replace the structure of communication you have at home with the structure used at the treatment center.

The treatment center wants to secure that your parents also involves them in your treatment so the home you return to are changed to modeled after the subculture at the treatment center. The treatment center acknowledges that the wish for a change which led your parents to this decision was created by their own actions. They have to learn at least as many rules as you do. First they have to learn that the rules of the center always apply – even their home. The treatment center is the judge. If you complaint you parent will learn that they should not take your words for it. Only the treatment center! Once they have learned their lesson they can be allowed to speak to you in person. If you have family members who are critical towards the treatment they will be denied access to you. The peer group you may have known all your life will also be cut off.

You are sent to the treatment center for a problem may not acknowledge. It may not be real or diagnosed by a professional which treat people without financial involvement with the treatment center. It is quite normal for professionals to get referrals from treatment centers. But you have to learn how to deal with the imposed issue. It is a tough real life lesson. When you are adults you will be faced with decisions you have no influence on. We are talking economy where your work can be lost regardless of how good you are doing. You may be involved in a high jacking or car accident as passenger. You still have to deal with them and go on from there. While you may have some kind of agreement with your parents about how long you will be staying there is no upper limit beside your 18 years birthday. If your parents become too involved with the treatment they can be caught up at it.

It is hard to tell what you can take with you from such a stay. It might even restrict your present dreams about a future. A miss-diagnose are dangerous even when we are not talking surgical treatment. In general we can read from prison-statistics that once the problems at adolescents has reached the need for residential treatment the later life will be challenged by not only the original issues but also issues created during the residential treatment. Even at normal hospitals mind-based transfer of diseases are known. It is a huge risk at residential treatment centers because you live so close to the other residents.

Morgan. I can only once again deeply regret that both you and your parents didn’t get the help you should have gotten at Fornits.

I cannot tell you how to ease the burden and how you can get to talk to someone who can give you access a proper grievance protocol. There are no adult professional which can pull you if the treatment is not proper for your needs.

Sometime the fight for human treatment of children is a climb up of a steep road.

References:
Academy at Sisters, a thread on the Fornits message board
Looks like somebody posted Morgan's parents to ED, a thread on the Fornits message board
Academy at Sisters - Fornits Wiki