Yeah, last week I was in Wisconsin and the stupid sketchy hotel, if they had WiFi at all, never gave me the password. Yesterday I helped a friend move. It was kind of a last-minute thing and I didn’t have time to write up a case before I rushed out the door.
But speaking of Sundays, anyone got suggestions for future cases?
People who disappeared from nursing homes, residential treatment facilities, group homes, etc.
I have mixed feelings about residential treatment for minors (I’m not talking about places that just provide housing for foster kids although I do include them on this list). I am especially the for-profit facilities wealthy people send their teens to.
On the one hand, residential homes for children can provide wrap-around 24-hour care for a child to address their behaviors and/or emotional problems, and also provide the family with a respite from the child’s behaviors.
Like, I know a guy whose 14-year-old son is in a psychiatric residential treatment facility, paid for by the state. He’s had behavioral issues since he was a toddler, probably in large part because his biological mom was addicted to drugs (the boy is adopted), and he’s been hospitalized many times. The kid has a lot of very serious emotional/psychiatric problems, some of which can’t be cured, only mitigated. He’s basically too dangerous to keep at home. He threatened his father with a shovel once, and another time tried to crash their car while the father was driving. The boy’s father is (rightly so) concerned that after his son turns 18 he’ll wind up in prison, or worse, for something or other that’s pretty much beyond his control. Obviously residential treatment is necessary in a case like that. He’s been in, I think, two residential facilities so far, and is doing well in his current one. (He did well in the last one too but the state stopped paying after a year and they sent him home before he or his family was ready for it.) Not only is this boy getting therapy and medication and a structured environment at his treatment facility, but the 24-hour observation at the facility (mostly) keeps him from hurting himself or anyone else.
But on the other hand, there’s so much potential for abuse in these facilities, and when they go bad they tend to go REALLY bad. A few children have died in those places, and many more are abused by the staff or other residents. I’m not saying that all of those places are like that, but an uncomfortable percentage of them are.
And with the for-profit homes for wealthy families, a lot of them just want your money (tuition starts at like $5,000 a month and up, and the children can stay there for years at a time) and it seems many of the residents did not need residential treatment in the first places. I’ve heard of cases where a kid was sent to one of those facilities simply because they didn’t get along with their new step-parent. I’ve looked at the websites for those places and some of them are like, “Your child might need residential treatment if he refuses to clean his room or do chores around the house” or “Your child might need treatment if he frequently argues with you and doesn’t get along with his siblings and doesn’t obey the house rules, such as curfew.” Um…I’m pretty sure those are all normal teen behavior. And some of the sites also say things like, “If your child is at our facility and writes home to say there are rats here and the food is spoiled, don’t listen to him. He’s lying.” Yet many times those places have been raided by the state after multiple accusations of abuse, or the death of a child in their care, and they DO find rats and spoiled food and other indications of maltreatment. See the Fornits website for more details, including many testimonies from the alumni of various facilities. I’ve read a LOT about those places — there are dozens — and honestly I can think of only one I haven’t heard ghastly things about.
Anyway. I’m rambling. On to the list:
The Charley Project Blog 