It’s time to stop institutional child abuse

In my 2020 documentary, “This is Paris,” I revealed that I spent almost two years as a teen at a series of residential treatment facilities that used “tough love” to fix my diagnosed attention deficit disorder behavior.

It takes all my courage to talk about it, but I couldn’t stand knowing that children as young as 8 years old are being sent to these “troubled teen” programs by parents who don’t know and government agencies that don’t care.

Sexual assaults of children

The last stop on my terrible journey was Provo Canyon School, a lockdown facility where I was sent after I escaped a couple boot-camp type places. On my first day, I was forced to remove all my clothes, squat and cough, and submit to a gynecological exam – all watched closely by male staff. Although it was an extremely uncomfortable experience, I was led to believe it was a legitimate, routine check for contraband. But what I couldn’t understand as a 16-year-old girl was why that internal exam would be done to me frequently during my time at Provo, and only during the middle of the night.

I was repeatedly awakened by staff shining a bright flashlight in my face, pulled out of bed and told to be quiet as I was ushered down my dorm’s hallway to an “exam room.” Sleep-deprived and heavily medicated, I didn’t understand what was happening. I was forced to lie on a padded table, spread my legs and submit to gynecological exams.

If we tried to protest or question anything, they said it was a bad dream. They told us to stop making things up. But looking back on these experiences as an adult woman, I can recognize these exams for what they were: the sexual assault of children.

This isn’t treatment; it’s torture

The troubled teen industry has been allowed to thrive without transparency or accountability for decades, raking in tens of billions of dollars while preying on vulnerable families. Private equity firms are increasingly investing. Medicaid, special education and Title IV-E funding for foster kids continues to flow.

Tax dollars help pay for more than 120,000 youth pipelined each year into these facilities, even though studies confirm widespread abuse and fatalities.

Fourteen years ago, members of Congress heard testimony from federal investigators who found “staff hog-tied and shackled youth to poles in public places, and girls were forced to eat their own vomit if they threw up while exercising in the hot sun. Staff routinely broke and wired shut the jaws of youth who showed disrespect in another facility . ... Youth were sexually assaulted and threatened with sexual assault by other youth in some facilities, all without effective intervention from management.”

This isn’t treatment; it’s torture. Survivors are on Capitol Hill this week to continue educating lawmakers about how badly children placed in the troubled teen industry are treated. We will continue to make our voices heard to rally national support in this important election year to urge Congress to finally stop institutional child abuse.