I n a clip from Kidnapped for Christ, Kate Logan’s movie debuting next year, a homosexual U.S. teenager named David describes how men, to “de-gay” him, woke him in the night, dragged him by his belt, and drove him to an airplane which flew him to a Dominican Republic boarding school operated by a fundamentalist religious group based in Indiana.
But conversion therapy—the attempt to turn gay people straight, which is deemed harmful by the American Psychological Association—has been just one of this school’s problems.
As part of the “tough-love,” troubled teen movement, the Christian boarding school, Escuela Caribe, has a long history of alleged abuse, and although a new faith-based Fort Wayne, Indiana, company has taken over its leadership, it has retained most of the same staff appearing in the movie, and former students of the boarding school want answers.
IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS BLOSSOM
Escuela Caribe was founded in the 1970s by Gordon Blossom, a former student of Floyd Starr’s Starr Commonwealth boarding school in Michigan. Under Blossom, his son Tim, and other leaders, New Horizons Youth Ministries (NHYM) operated Escuela Caribe and schools in Michigan.
Inspired by Starr and profit, Blossom used his connections to woo Michigan judges, legislators, and governors, most notably George Romney, Mitt’s father.
In 1973, in fact, Gordon Blossom addressed a gathering at a George Romney-attended event in honor of Floyd Starr’s work with juvenile delinquents, as Keith Fennimore details in his 1988 book Faith Made Visible: The History of Floyd Starr and His School.
How close to George Romney pastor Blossom was is not known, but many past teenagers who were held in the NHYM schools believe George Blossom’s political clout had something to do with why abuses went under the radar of officials.
George’s son, Mitt, of course, is well-entrenched with those in the troubled-teen industry. Recently, Mother Jones’ Kathryn Joyce noted that “key fundraisers for Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns hail from Utah’s teen-home sector.” The co-chairman of Romney’s Utah finance committee, Robert Lichfield, even came under fire for running troubled-teen boarding schools rife with allegations of physical and sexual abuse.
When Blossom lost his Michigan licensing after media exposure questioning his boarding schools’ harsh practices, he packed up and moved to the Hoosier state, operating, besides Escuela Caribe, a school in Canada, and one in Marion, Indiana.
Even though the state was paying NHYM, there wasn’t much instruction at the schools, and students did most of the work on their own, alumni say.
Not only did the Blossoms get some of their students from court-orders, they also duped parents, some spending upwards of $40,000 for services and losing their homes in the process, to send their kids off to NHYM’s various compounds.
Under the Blossom family operation, there were alleged incidents of sexual misconduct, statutory rape, forced exercise to the point of vomiting, beatings, chaining girls to beds, and severe brainwashing at the boarding schools. One former staff member was arrested for fondling a girl.
In 2010, survivors of NHYM boarding schools decided to take action. NHYM alumni from different years started posting horror stories on the website The Truth about New Horizons Youth Ministries.
Here, many speak courageously about “The Quit Room,” where students, locked in complete isolation in a “small concrete cell without lighting or furniture,” were stripped down, had their hair chopped off, and were forced to “sleep on the concrete floor and scrub the cement for hours on end.”
One Marion, Indiana, boarding school survivor writes of how, after she attempted suicide, the leaders beat her, forced her to do hundreds of push-ups, and called her a whore for “fucking her brother,” accusations made because she admitted that she loved her brother in letters she sent to him when he was kept in the Dominican Republic compound. There, her brother was beaten by several men until he was forced to lie that he had had intercourse with his sister.
Another past student alleges that “Founder Pastor Gordon Blossom suggested rape as a means of curing low libido, stating he tore his wife’s underwear off and raped her when she wasn’t in the mood.”
THE SAME LINE FROM LIFELINE
In late 2011, when Fort Wayne-based Lifeline Youth & Family Services took over the NHYM business, forming Crosswinds and renaming Escuela Caribe the Caribbean Mountain Academy, many saw this as damage control over Julia Scheeres’ New York Times best-seller, Jesus Land, a memoir detailing her abuse at the hands of NHYM staff.
A former Escuela Caribe student told me that “the continuation of the same staff as trained by NHYM and from as late as 2005 indicates that the takeover was merely a fancy legal way of trying to dissociate from all the bad publicity.”
In fact, it appears that none of the current school leaders were hired after Lifeline took over, even though the group, on its website, deceptively says that counselor Grant Anderson has been with Crosswinds since 2010, when the company didn’t even exist.
Crosswinds’ new director, Scott Taylor, has been involved with the Dominican Republic compound since at least 2007. While working at the Summit Church in Arkansas before moving to the Dominican Republic, it appears he was associated with the Fellowship Bible Church, too, which gave $10,000 to support the state’s 2004 marriage amendment. Its leader Robert Lewis published one of his books with the anti-gay Focus on the Family press and has appeared on FOF’s broadcast hyping his Men’s Fraternity.
Taylor and two other current Caribbean Mountain Academy staffers, Rachel and Jon Sawyer, once worked at Heartlight Ministries’ teen residential treatment center in Texas, a program that HEAL, one of the nation’s leading watchdog groups, has called a “money-making cult” which controls the entire family of kids in its boarding school and uses mail censorship to possibly conceal abuse.
Heartlight’s program charges $5,000 a month and includes allowing the child to attend public school, if they earn the right. HEAL also questions Heartlight’s practice of forcing kids, under certain circumstances, to sleep in the same room as staff. HEAL suggests that “parents should also investigate whether or not the program is violating child labor laws.”
Under an odd picture of the kids at Caribbean Mountain Academy, Rachel Sawyer, on her blog, writes: “Um - WOW! Nine of our students came to know Christ as their personal SAVIOR last week. In addition, many powerful, wonderful, exciting things are happening within this ministry at this time. Never have I seen more movement amidst such utter brokenness.”
Teen-brokenness brings in money, and one of NHYM’s tactics was to use young and low paid (if paid at all) workers to look over the boarding school. It appears hordes of missionaries are still descending upon Caribbean Mountain Academy.
In 2011, volunteers from the Sagemont Church in Texas arrived to spread “love” at the compound. Besides being known for its 170 foot cross, the Sagemont Church is where Andrea Yates attended a home school support group with her children, all of whom she later drowned in a Texas bathtub. Sagemont’s pastor, Stuart Rothberg, too, describes how gays are like lepers and deserve conversion therapy.
Then there’s this, written in January of 2012, from a 21-year-old missionary named Matt:
I want to share a couple of specific things with my supporters and the churches and groups which have made mission trips or are planning to make trips this year. First, thanks so much for your support through gifts, prayers and friendships. I could not have made it all these years without your support and encouragement. Second, know that Caribbean Mountain Academy is still committed to working with mission teams and ministry outreach. As I prepare to leave the ministry, I have been training and supporting our chaplain and his wife, Scott and Meleah Taylor, to take over the community outreach and mission team’s ministry. Scott has been involved in ministry for almost 20 years as a child-care worker and youth pastor, and is very excited to be a part of the ministry of Caribbean Mountain Academy.
Matt goes on to say that even though “New Horizons Youth Ministries has ended its time as a non-profit ministry and Escuela Caribe has now been renamed Caribbean Mountain Academy… the ministry focus of our campus will remain the same, which is to bring hope and change to struggling teenagers and their families through Jesus Christ.”
As the Taylors and Sawyers hob-nob in pictures with generals and the Ambassador from Columbia in the Dominican Republic, who is looking out for these kids?
LIFELINE, MARK SOUDER, AND THE FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES MOVEMENT
Lifeline Youth & Family Services, the school’s new owner, is also politically entrenched in Indiana.* Besides running the Pierceton Wood Academy boarding school and detention center in Pierceton, they overlook a good section of the family services programs in the state.
Lifeline’s CEO Mark Terrell claims the group doesn’t do conversion therapy, like NHYM, but his friendliness with members of the anti-gay movement is not reassuring.
In 2002 and 2003, Terrell was invited by former Republican Mark Souder to testify in favor of George W. Bush’s “Faith-Based Initiatives” program. In a session filled with questions about pornography, homosexuality, and wife beating, all popular topics for the religious right and boarding school leaders, Terrell said that, in terms of the “community service” his group does,
All of the facilitators that go in are Christians. It is amazing, the results that are happening. That is not by accident. That is truly a belief that is ordained by God that that has happened.
What would it do with the donors? We raise a significant amount of our budget outside of the contracts that we get with probation, welfare, and Department of Corrections. They give to us because they know that we are a faith-based organization and that we are hiring Christians. We are hiring people with faith. They are going to make a difference.
In the American Prospect in December 2001, troubled-teen industry expert Maia Szalavitz criticized Souder and Bush’s faith-based initiative, noting that the president had a history of ignoring deaths and abuses in troubled-teen camps and boarding schools across the country operated by religious extremists, and
in 1997, after Texas regulators had tried to shut down a Christian rehabilitation program called Teen Challenge because its staff failed to meet educational requirements, then-Governor Bush responded by scuttling all the state’s training and safety regulations for such facilities. And in a speech two years later, Bush praised the fact that at Teen Challenge, “’if you don’t work, you don’t eat.’” Now that he’s ensconced in the White House, Bush intends to deregulate Teen Challenge-type programs nationwide.
In fact, Souder seemed to enjoy it when one faith-based panel member from Illinois claimed that the reason why his group became active in Indiana is that there is no regulation.
In 2004, Souder invited conversion therapy promoter Mike Haley and several other Focus on the Family members to the faith-based committee meetings. In response, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State’s Executive Director Barry W. Lynn said that the “so-called ‘ex-gay’ groups are nothing more than covers for fundamentalist indoctrination programs. They don’t deserve one dime of taxpayer support. It would be outrageous if the Bush administration and Rep. Souder are seriously considering giving public funds to this sort of program.”
Haley—who has recently accepted that he is gay–spoke at Bethel College in Indiana on September 28, 2009; Maggie Troyer, whose husband was then running Lifeline’s Center for Responsible Thinking, spoke there, too, a few days later.
Souder is also friendly with Crossing Educational Center, a faith-based group which operates a school and helps hire teachers for Lifeline’s Pierceton Woods Academy. Crossing lists state Republican senator Carlin Yoder, best known for introducing the Indiana gay-marriage ban, as its director in 2010 tax records.
In 2008, Souder awarded Crossing’s founder and director Robert Staley the Appleseed award and even picked one of Crossing’s students to be his Washington aide, before the Fort Wayne lawmaker resigned because of adultery.
Formed by Solid Rock Ministries, Crossing’s school is for high school dropouts, kids kicked out of alternative schools, and others with behavioral problems. Not only does the group receive funding from 20 Indiana school districts, it is also involved in the prison ministry movement, running the Fresh Start program.
ADDING THE BIBLE TO BAD RESEARCH
A recent story in the Goshen News highlights how a juvenile locked in Lifeline’s detention center for being an accomplice to murder reads the Bible, but it doesn’t mention another curriculum the child is probably getting spoon-fed.
For the “Thinking Errors” curriculum, Lifeline runs the Center for Responsible Thinking (CRT), which offers classes at Pierceton and in parent/student meetings throughout Indiana. CRT was until recently directed by Rich Troyer, an ordained minister at Woodburn Missionary Church and motivational speaker who sold his home, rented an RV, and started travelling to motorcycle races across the country to turn people onto Christ.
In his 2002 statement before the Souder panel, Mark Terrell mentions how CRT curriculum is based on the 1970s inmate research of Samuel Yochelson, with a heavy dose of Bible study thrown in.
When Yochelson died, his research partner Stanton Samenow became a conferee for Ronald Reagan’s White House Conference on a Drug-Free America, part of the anti-drug “Just Say No” crusade of the 1980s.**
In the 1990s, Fort Wayne pastor A. Wyatt Mullinax first adapted Yochelson’s research for the Indiana Department of Correction (DOC) to use with the Bible in prisons. Holding a Ph.D. in the Ministry and several counseling certificates, Mullinax serves on Mitch Daniels’ Governor’s Commission for a Drug Free Indiana, and gives speeches for the Indiana Department of Education on school safety.
It appears Yochelson and Samenow’s “Criminal Personality” books were highly favored by religious leaders, and, in the words of one federal prison chaplain, prison ministers “should preach and teach with the Bible in one hand and The Criminal Personality in the other.” The Indiana DOC, in fact, still teaches former prisoners lessons from Samenow’s book in its PLUS faith-based housing program.
Yochelson and Samenow’s “Thinking Errors” theory is extreme, based on the belief that criminals, sex offenders, and drug users choose to be criminals, sex offenders, and drug users and that social factors, environment, bad parenting, genes, brain disorders, etc. play absolutely no part in how people turn out. Samenow, in his 1998 Straight Talk about Criminals, even claims that sexual offenders have not been victims of sexual abuse themselves, but are merely lying about it.
From the get-go, criminologists weren’t buying into Yochelson and Samenow’s one-size-fits-all “criminal personality” theory. Today, the theory holds even less weight, with neuroscience completely revamping psychological research and criminologists finally playing catch-up.
Since Lifeline bases its “therapy” for young drug offenders, sexual offenders, or just troubled youth on antiquated theories, this is a problem.
Mullinax’s anti-bullying program with the Fort Wayne Community Schools has also been questioned, since reports of battery to staff and students, as well as disorderly conduct, almost doubled after the program was put into place in 2007.
Quite shockingly, the Indiana Department of Child Services has even used the “Thinking Errors Worksheet” to train new caseworkers to deal with sexual offenders, and it is a part of DCS’s Day Treatment/Day Reporting programs.
IS TOUGH-LOVE SEEPING INTO THE INDIANA DEPARTMENT OF CHILD SERVICES?
This summer, a special Indiana legislature group will examine the Department of Child Services. The DCS has been under attack recently for failing to remove children from abusive homes, many of them ending up dead.
In fact, from 2006 to 2010, 198 children died from abuse and neglect in Indiana. A WTHR TV investigation found that “in a one-year period, DCS hired 511 new case managers. Twenty-one transferred to other positions during that same time, while 280 simply quit. It created a loss of 18.1 percent agency-wide, roughly the same loss as the previous year at 18.7 percent.”
In 2010, however, the DCS gave back $103 million to the state’s general fund, claiming the money wasn’t needed. That same year, a DCS official in Gibson County was convicted for keeping a teenager in a shelter for 30 months without a court order, and lying about it.
This March, IU’s forensic pediatrician Antoinette Laskey resigned from her DCS role, after declaring that DCS’s death-numbers were misleading.
And this May, DCS took fire when Morgan County judge Matthew Hanson, in a statement, wrote that “It would seem DCS is simply waiting around until the child commits such egregious or dangerous acts that the (juvenile delinquency) system has no choice but to file charges against a child with a mental disease/defect, and then the DCS can simply ignore any pleas thereafter to aid such a child.”
Also, in May, when the DCS said that its caseworkers could not release confidential info on abuse and neglect cases to the courts, Allen Superior Judge Fran Gull called DCS’s behavior “absurd.”
The DCS has an overwhelming large number of workers who hold degrees from Indiana faith-based colleges like Grace College and Indiana Wesleyan, and some DCS people have worked for Lifeline, too.***
Lifeline, actually, plays a major role in DCS, with DCS contracts in 60 Indiana counties, offering everything from home-based services, residential care for kids removed from their families, to court testimony, the latter being a conflict of interest, since Lifeline representatives help determine which kids are removed from homes.****
Lifeline has a lot of power for a group which hires many of its counselors from religious colleges in Indiana who have been indoctrinated with “biblical truths.”
Mark Terrell unabashedly admits that Lifeline only hires Christians, and this Christian outfit is raking in taxpayer money. In fact, in 2010, Terrell was paid $158,457, with an additional $18,774 ( 7) in other compensation. That same year, Lifeline brought in over $11.5 million in welfare fees, almost $266,000 of school money, and only $48,527 from private fees (9).
Lifeline holds contracts with the Department of Education, the Department of Correction, and the Department of Child Services.
A 33-YEAR OLD WARNING
Speaking at the U.S. Senate’s congressional hearings in January 1979, one month after the Jonestown massacre committed by Hoosier Jim Jones, the National Coalition for Children’s Justice’s Kenneth Wooden reminded lawmakers he had warned them about Jones’ dangerous child care facilities, and they refused to listen.
Wooden, at this hearing, pointed fingers directly at NHYM’s Escuela Caribe boarding school, too, as one of several being run that were putting the lives of children at risk (see pages 204-205 in PDF bar). Having visited Escuela Caribe in 1974, Wooden wanted to know, since years earlier he had reported his NHYM findings to the State Department, why nothing had been done to close down the boarding school and why Gordon Blossom was raking in $8,360 of taxpayer money per child to abuse these kids.
After 33 years, nothing has changed. Lifeline and Crosswinds have plans to reopen the NHYM Canadian school, too.
Presently, the US Congress is once again introducing the Keeping All Students Safe Act, which, in 2010, passed in the House but failed in the Senate. The bill would have banned the overzealous use of physical restraints and seclusion chambers like the “Quiet Room,” before it found strict opposition by lawmakers in districts where tough-love schools were rampant, including Mark Souder, as blogger Andy Kopsa noticed.
To the best of my knowledge, Lifeline has never been accused of abusing kids. Nonetheless, a full investigation by the Indiana Assembly and the U.S. Congress needs to take place immediately concerning the Caribbean Mountain Academy, at least. In fact, the Indiana lawmakers looking into DCS should start investigating all Indiana boarding schools, for the Hephzibah House is another with a long list of alleged offenses, as Cooper Anderson has noticed.
Lifeline’s Pierceton center must get more than a brief positive review by Indiana’s Faith-Based office, which it has lately. Hoosiers and former boarding school students also have a right to know whether Lifeline intends to use our tax money to ship more kids to the compounds in Canada and the Dominican Republic, where US laws don’t matter.
Kids continue to die in these compounds all across America and in other countries. Indiana and U.S. lawmakers must not sit around as another child becomes the next “troubled-teen” statistic.
NOTES
* Mitch Daniels, too, is well aware of Lifeline. In 2007, while a non-profit management major at Christ-centered Huntington University, Adam Shoemaker was picked to be the youth member on Indiana’s Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) board, a new office started by the governor. In 2010, Daniels selected Shoemaker, while he was employed with Lifeline, to be a commissioner with the Indiana Commission on Service and Volunteerism (ICCSV), a program now in the hands of Indiana’s OFBCI. In 2009, OFBCI awarded Lifeline a grant through its Good Works Indiana Initiative. Shoemaker, who now works with the Indiana Youth Institute, was Lifeline’s Family Consultant from 2008 to May 2011.
** Samenow’s connection with Reagan is not surprising, given that many “troubled-teen” programs were spawned out of the Nancy Reagan-supported Straight, Inc., started during the anti-drug and anti-gay crusades of the 1980s.
*** Not everyone receiving a degree from a religious institution is an extremist. Actually, Oral Roberts University has its own LGBT organization. I, personally, have met many highly-qualifed and professional therapists who have went to faith-based universities. Questions concerning Indiana’s DCS, nonetheless, need raised.
**** Or maybe not, since under Indiana’s Safely Home-Families First program, kids are often kept in abusive environments. South Bend’s Tribune and other media outlets not known for investigative reporting have published many stories pointing out that, among other things, DCS has been notorious for leaving kids with parents who are beating them.
EMAIL THE DCS COMMITTEE:
Here are email addresss for the four Indiana House members on the committee examining the DCS this summer.
Department of Child Services Interim Study Committee:
Rep. Cindy Noe h87@IN.go
Rep. Kevin Mahan h31@in.gov
Rep. Gail Riecken h77@in.gov
Rep. Vanessa Summers h99@in.gov
If you want to write your representative in the Indiana House and Senate, here is the list.
photo credit: http://www.managemyown.com/2011/02/21/new-horizons-youth-ministries/
Hi Doug,
Unfortunately, children have no guarantee to civil rights in this country. I was reminded of this at a meeting of the Northern Virginia chapter of the ACLU last year when I expressed concerns about the way I saw children of immigrant parents being treated in public schools. First, a lawyer from the Department of Education reminded me that students surrender many of their rights when they walk onto a school campus. I reminded her that I was talking about children with the extra protection of special education services. That’s when another lawyer suggested I take my message to a Hispanic/Latino group. They moved on to the next item for discussion, which was a letter from an incarcerated man who wanted conjugal visits from his wife. Children whose parents put them in places like you described are even less likely to find someone to advocate for them. Thanks for taking the time. Now, if only someone out there would listen. If we do not care how children are treated, what does that say about us as a nation?
Nice job on the article Doug. I took the opportunity to write to Crossroads. Told them that if they are abusing children (or worse), then God has some very bad news for them when they get to the gates of heaven (this I know is true). That they may be able to hide the things they do from man, but they cannot hide from God. In fact, abusing children while professing to be ministers of God multiplies the penalty exponentially.
Chimos are the worst of the worst. Let them think they’re so smart they can get away with it. They won’t.
The State of Indiana has failed to monitor and set guidelines for Christian therapy programs and in addition seems to enjoy the revenue Christian therapy programs generate by encouraging educational facilities that train and license such practices. The state of Indiana accepts known abusive programs & has a long history of failing to sufficiently monitor abuse that was successfully identified in shut down by the State of Michigan as well as Haiti. If Haiti is able to identify abuse & monitor it’s facilities & abuse better than the State of Indiana, acceptance of the states failed practices is in itself self imposed negligence. The State of Indiana is just as negligent for permitting abuse as these facilities. The use of your federal tax money for these abusive facilities calls into question the role of our Federal government in operating as ministries.
For more than forty years students at this school have been abused in the name of treatment. When I attended the school in 1990, it was named Escuela Caribe. It had two other names before that—names changed because of allegations of abuse (unreformed.blogspot.com). It’s very disturbing to hear of yet another name change, especially when the same staff have been rehired. The Indiana Assembly and the US Congress need to immediately open a full investigation of Caribbean Mountain Academy. Children are in danger.