Charges re-filed in Boot Camp dragging case

We have just been notified that the DA has re-filed charges against the staff from a so-called Christian Boot Camp.

The incident at Love Demonstrated Ministries Christian Boot Camp took place in July 2007. The previous trial ended up in a mistrial because the jury could not come to a decision.

We will pray to that the court system will reach a fair decision which will not accept that dragging a boot camp participant behind a car can be an accepted form used in the process of behavior modification.

References:

New Charges Pending For Boot Camp Dragging Case,KRIS-TV, May 28, 2010

Love Demonstrated Ministries Christian Boot Camp, Secret Prisons for Teens Wiki Database

Checking the staff

When you have minors in your care it is important to conduct background checks of the staff. Here in Denmark it is mandatory for even sport clubs to conduct such checks.

If you as manager for a facility or a program fail to have a policy about what kind of background checks employees must pass, tragedy might happen. One of our volunteers wrote a piece about recent findings at a boarding school in California:

A boarding school was infiltrated and children began to disappear

Outside Los Angeles there was once a boarding school for troubled teenagers.

It was founded by a person who worked with a cult.

He saw a market for toubled teenagers and he took advance of it. The methods used at the cult became the basis for modern so-called treatment of troubled kids across the United States.

The name of this school was CEDU.

Several of the cases we have on our Missing and wanted page in our Wiki Database are from the CEDU school in California.

Now we are talking of troubled teenagers. Most people would think that the children just ran off like it happened last week in Old Fort, North Carolina where two girls suddenly were missing from a camp.

But sometimes the truth is so much more awful.

Three kids officially disappeared from CEDU. They were:
John Christopher Inman, Blake Wade Pursley and Daniel Yuen

For many years people believed that they just ran away, but then the police started to investigate a certain James Lee Crummel. He had unrestricted access to the CEDU campus for decades. Based on evidence in another case he is now locked up, but will we ever learn whether the children made it off campus or their lives were cut short in the boarding school?

We must learn from this case. We must learn not to automaticly assume that a teenager missing is a teenager who has run away.

Background checks is almost impossible to do when you are a private business responsible for making profit to the shareholders. As a boss hiring staff you have to go with your feeling alone and they can trick you.

Karl Johanson's reply to a local article in a SUWS runaway case

Karl Johanson wrote in response to this article:

Runaways located after 14-hour search, By Richelle Bailey, The Mcdowell News, May 09, 2010

I am happy that they were found safe.

But I am concerned because knowing the type of wilderness program they were detained in, they were not provided with legal representation as they would have if they had committed a crime.

Most of the so-called clients or detainees, which are a better term, are either tricked by their parents to such program or simply pulled out of their bed at night by private youth transport firms and transported to the wilderness camps in handcuffs and shackles on the orders of their parents.

How come that criminals are better protected that an ordinary teenagers, who may only have problems as little as an ordinary depression or being picky at the dinner table?

What kind of society are we, when we send a message to our kids that you have to commit a crime in order to secure legal protection for you?

As I stated above I volunteer for a NGO where we track records of possible abuse and deaths among minors in treatment. Every year we must acknowledge that we once again can observe how teenagers lost their lives in a treatment aimed to "treat" them. Every year we also most acknowledge that some cannot live on with the memories of the so-called treatment and choose to end their lives prematurely.

When will it stop? We hope that 2010 will be the turning point, but as this story show, it will most likely not happen.

My heart goes out for these girls. May they one day be able to return to their families safe and hopefully without so many scars from the "treatment".

References:

Deaths of minors in residential settings year 2005 - 2009