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Funnily enough, they also have as a contributor a person who sent kids to WWASPS programs. For those who haven't seen my threads on the issue in years past, I'll give a cliff notes version of this, then you can decide of you want to stomach the thread: For some 40 years now, we've had a small but highly profitable industry of "reform schools", "therapeutic boarding schools", and "emotional growth schools", or whatever the gently caress they call it that day, which center around making bad kids disappear and come back dead or brainwashed. Think of it as brat camp meets one flew over the cuckoo's nest sometimes meets Reagan. The Comedian? Straight Incorporated Arguably it started earlier with something called, scarily enough, The Seed, but sources are spotty on the matter given it's age, the US Senate sealing records on it, and the fact that it only took off when Straight got off the ground. "Straight Inc" was the brainchild of a career Republican, Mel Sembler. An otherwise successful banker and diplomat and fundraiser, apparently he didn't have the chops to treat kids with drug problems, or somehow proactively prevent drug problems by torturing kids suspected of maybe sometime doing a drug. Being the 1980s, people were flipping out, and being Florida, people were and are still loving idiots, so not only did it take off, but Nancy Reagan even toured some of these places, and you know who thought that Mel and Straight were each one of those thousand points of light. "Therapy" consisted of complete milieu control and being made to sit on a blue chair - always blue - and wave your arms frantically to be called on during 18 hour group "LGAT" style emotional torture sessions, in which you would then stand up and talk about how you did humiliating things because you wanted or were high on drugs. One quickly ran out of poo poo to talk about and had to keep making poo poo up, else you weren't going with the program, and tended to be held down in sloppy pain compliance holds for hours on end. If you yelled, the rest of the group sang nursery rhymes or as a chorus said "We love you, $name, and we're going to help you!" Kids died in these places, came out hosed up, and of course the whole environment one slept in wasn't great either. Parents of kids in the program took someone else's kids home with them and basically held them like hostages, except they weren't allowed to read anything, not even billboards or cereal boxes. Conditions in the homes varied but were some level of "lovely." Escapes did happen but kids who were further progressed in the program were made to control the newcomers, so a lot of the more mundane physical violence happened in this part of the program. Straight eventually faded away and the people involved founded DARE - yes, that DARE - so if you felt weirded out by your drug essays in the 5th grade, you had good reason to! However, captive brainwashey abusive rapey kidnappey poo poo didn't stop there, or we wouldn't have a thread! WWASPS (World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools; they take WASP kids but Mormons tend to run them, how about that) WWASPS schools started to pop up in the 90s and marketed themselves to affluent parents, sometimes for drug related things, sometimes for nothing at all. Want your kid to just be gone because you're a moneyed gently caress and want to party? Your kid not religious? Kid not performing in school? Is your adopted kid not lovey dovey enough? Is your kid gay? Did you just happen to be friends with someone in a program who wants to sell it to you as a good private school so they can get one of their $5K monthly tuition fees waived? Sign here and have hired fucks show up to kidnap your kid at 3am, drive or fly them across the loving country to the middle of nowhere, and in a few months when your kid earns a phone call, they'll call you! If they try to say help me or take me home someone will mash the button to hang up on them and throw them in the pokey, though! WWASPS was and is more re-education-ey than Straight. Most of your typical day is spent doing menial chores and busy work, physical or otherwise - listening to self help tapes and writing about it, or teaching yourself out of a book and taking the same test out of the book until you got an A (to say you did self paced learning) kept you from forming escape plans. Also, looking out a window was forming escape plans, which means pokey time. They did have "seminars" which were more organized versions of the arm-flailing poo poo Straight did, led by David Gilcrease, but it was more refined in terms of making you have emotional breakdowns and become thoroughly exhausted. I won't go into too much detail - not that you can't google this - but things like making kids who are victims of sexual assault dress up and act "slutty" to "deal with the trauma" are their idea of help. Or make everyone form a big circle, turn down the lights - long after you're beyond exhausted, of course - and pick two or three people out of dozens to save. For the people you do not save, scream DIE in their face as loud as you can! Sure is some emotional growth here! In such environments physical brutality is par for the course. OP, Observation Placement, was "lie motionless nose down on the floor or assume a stress position. If you fidget or falter, you're not doing as told, so we're going to put you in sloppy joint locks and pain compliance holds and listen to your scream all night." Sexual assault and simple beatings were and are common. Some places even shot kids up full of thorazine and haldol. The Internet They did and do advertise themselves to parents, either directly, or through "educational consultants" who will refer you to programs and 'escorts' - the kidnappers - online. Survivors also started meeting eachother online and working from there. Funnily enough, a former edcon for WWASPS who then decided to change her business model to "WWASPS is bad but I know good programs", Sue Scheff, is also on huffpo! Hah! Where things get interesting is where we see things like Sue making ReputationDefender (now reputation.com) a lot of money by paying them to stamp out people speaking up about what she did, or things like anonymous decided to poke their nose into this and make ineffectual hacks and attempts to disseminate knowledge about the matter. Well, that and poo poo like suing a woman for slander who was in a FEMA trailer and thus you won by default because she couldn't make it to court, but I don't care to give Sue-Sue any attention beyond the fact that she's evil and really needs to get taken to task. Right now gently caress if I know. A lot of the information compiled about this poo poo was on a website called ISACCorp, which was the "International Survivor's Action Committee" which was threatened into disappearing. There used to be extensive records of the financial bullshit, who did what, court records, and survivor testimony. There's also the fact that our tweeting teens and tumbling twentysomethings have a very different outlook and vocabulary sheet than program kids, who come out very much opposed to groupthink for obvious reasons! I can't wait to see a program kid shouted down for their problematic language and privileges! More fundamentally, though, they tend to distrust any kind of group at all, both for the groupthink, and the individualistic stance one gets after being held captive by what is by all accounts a loving cult. Many are libertarians. They don't trust the government to fix this since they've been in bed with the people running these places, etc. I'd like to think this might get traction since the current aggregator of poo poo that matters says it matters, and there's an actual lawsuit about it, but time will tell. I'm at work so I'm surely leaving poo poo out. Ask away! Poke holes in me! If anyone needs sources for this info, I'll dig it up tonight and put it in a post to follow this one.
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Oct 23, 2014 15:01
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Reserved for a big fat list of links to proof and whatnot.
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Oct 23, 2014 15:04
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Chamale posted:Do you have more information on the government corruption that allows these places to keep running? How much of it is from the places technically not violating child abuse laws, and how much comes from police deliberately overlooking them? ISAC's stuff is either lost or just held out of the public eye, since a lot of moneyed scary people never left them alone. If it ever surfaces again the people who had it will want no connetion to it. For shame wikileaks wasn't around at the time. In short, they are violating the laws. Tons of them. The problem is kids in programs have no way to speak to an attorney, contact the police or their parents, or anyone - they're basically held with as many rights (or fewer, in many regards) than people in gitmo. It might as well be a "grey site" - it's not a black site with CIA torture and drugging, but you're tortured and drugged, and you still can't reach out to any legal representation, and you don't exist as a person. The police do turn a blind eye to it, especially since a kid has no way to reach out for help short of deliberately getting injured to the point they need to go to a hospital, or trying to commit the most violent act they can to go to jail, both of which has happened! Nevertheless, in some programs that keep kids a long time, cops do pay a visit around the time kiddo turns 18 and suddenly exists and has rights. Various websites have fragments ISAC's stuff, even today. There's also a thing I helped write a while ago which has some info and broken links: http://www.askquestions.org/articles/teens I did like, 99% of the reserach here. I also met 'Grace' in person. At the time she was a RN and quite successful despite the poo poo that provo did. Also jesus christ this was ten years ago  Luigi Thirty posted:They're still finding dead bodies from the Florida School for Boys that closed only three years ago due to "budget concerns" that was investigated for over 50 years. And that's just the black cemetery, they don't think they've found the white cemetary. I will never miss this state and if that one atlantic island has that land slide and a tsunami wipes it out my only regret is that it will probably not cleanse the poo poo on the gulf coast as equally as the atlantic. quote:Ciavarella was sentenced in 2011 to 28 years in prison for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the builder and co-owner of two Northeastern Pennsylvania private prisons. Kids in the single digits have died in programs from positional asphyxia. Once for gargling and blowing bubbles in her milk.
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Oct 24, 2014 14:37
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Pope Guilty posted:Didn't we have a thread about this back in like 09 or 2011? I want to say it was made by somebody who'd done some time in one, but I might be thinking of HidingFromGoro. I had posted about it for a while then got sick of thinking about it. Interest also tends to wane because people don't like to stomach this kind of nasty poo poo, but do like to stomach feel-good activism about themselves and slacktivism that's #trending! HFG and I collaborated a little but not just on SA.
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Oct 24, 2014 17:22
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RPZip posted:Do you have any more information on this, or an article to read? It sounds interesting. The only thing written about this left is on Encyclopedia Dramatica, since everyone else got scared shitless by . I'd rather not link to that from here but you're welcome to read facts peppered with offensive bullshit ED style if you like. The links to ISAC which were on it are now broken, of course. OTOH I can paste an awesome bullshit letter! quote:-------- Original Message -------- I realize that we now actually take "internet death threats" ""seriously"" but people, yanno, lie about them. This is one of those times they loving lied. I also love the loving narcissism here - I won so much money, I'm gonna be on TV, bla bla bla. Also the fake rear end case number is, in fact, fake. I could make a whole megathread on Sue's bullshit and how awful she is to kids, including her own, but I'd rather not give her any more attention.
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Oct 24, 2014 17:27
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