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We have a chance to save a girl from a fundamentalist prison camp
Turns out you’re a miserable lot, readers of Leaving Fundamentalism. Monday’s blog post was the biggest piece of good news I’ve ever posted, and it was the least popular blog of the year. So alright, fine. Have some bad news. And some good news: you can help.
14-year-old Skyler is being held at Marvelous Grace Girls’ Academy in Pace, Florida (MGGA). Her parents are divorced, and her father has put Skyler in the home against her mother’s wishes. Her mother, Silke Matero, has a custody/visitation order to see her daughter. MGGA, however, refuses to let Silke see Skyler. It’s a residential reform home for ‘rebellious’ girls, and during their year-long stay, girls have no contact with outsiders except through letters and phone calls which are monitored by staff.
EDIT: Silke informs me that girls can receive visits from family after four months, if they have received no demerits. My own experience in an ACE school suggests that going four months without demerits is no mean feat, however.
MGGA is one of the ‘troubled teen’ reform homes I’ve blogged so much about. The existence of these homes is a stain on the free world. In fact, if people who are supportive of normal ACE schools would speak out against them, it would do their cause a great deal of good. Right now, their silence (and ACE’s supplying of curriculum to places like Marvelous Grace and Hephzibah House) looks a lot like complicity.
The home is on the grounds of the former New Beginnings Girls Academy, a place with survivor stories that will make your blood alternately boil and run cold. This is from the first entry on the “Stop NBGA” survivor stories page. It doesn’t get better from here:
There was a little girl with serious mental health problems. She was about 12 when she came in and was on a bunch of medication for her problems that she truly needed. They took her off all meds and said they could help her better than the medicine. She always looked like she didn’t know what was going on and she didn’t understand why they were treating her the way they did. I remember one time where myself and other girls and staff members were made to stay up with her until about 4 in the morning and force her to stand in a circle of masking tape on the floor. If she got out of the circle or didn’t comply then we had to push her back in.
If she kept misbehaving then we had to put her into an ice cold shower with all her clothes on while she screamed. She was always in trouble and yelled at for no reason at all. You could tell that there was something wrong with her and that was not the place she needed to be. She couldn’t even talk that well and we could barely ever understand what she was saying sometimes. They pretty much just treated her like crap and blamed her for it because she wasn’t “right with God” according to them. It was awful and I felt very bad for her.
A handy guide to ‘tough love’ teen reform homes
I spent some of 2013 collecting information about ‘troubled teen’ reform homes. These are usually compounds surrounded by barbed wire, where at-risk teens are sent ostensibly for a godly education. They have always been surrounded by shocking allegations of abuse and torture.
Many of them use the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum. Those are the ones I’ve come across in the course of my other research, so they’re the ones I’m writing about here, but they are by no means the only ones. My emphasis on ACE is not meant to imply that they are the worst or that the others are less important. If anyone has information on the others or can share a survivor story, I will gladly post it here.
In meantime, here’s a compilation of my findings so far. I trust this will be a useful resource for people seeking to raise awareness about these places or to get justice for the survivors.
ACE: aiding and abetting child abusers
If you’ve been following my series on Christian reform homes, you’ll have noticed the name Lester Roloff popping up. It is, as Abigail McWilliam puts it, the common thread uniting reports of abuse from ‘troubled teen’ homes across America. Everything comes back to Roloff. Almost all of the homes we’ve discussed were founded by him or one of his former employees and associates, and all of them run on the model of Roloff’s original Rebekah Home.
If you haven’t been following, the reform homes have a pattern: They are single-sex boarding schools on compounds surrounded by chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. Punishments are extreme: extended periods of solitary confinement; kneeling on hard surfaces for hours, sometimes with pencils under your knees; and whippings and beatings of the cruelest kind.
And they all use Accelerated Christian Education. In return, ACE produces educational materials specifically praising the convicted felon and his reform homes.
Remember the Christian Alamo
I think I’ve already played the “if you only read one story about Christian reform homes, it should be this” card, so I won’t say it again. But, if you only read two stories about Christian reform homes, this should be the other one. Pamela Coloff’s 2001 article captures the history of the Roloff homes, as well as the contemporary situation. You’ll need to read this as background for the post I have planned for this Monday, which I think will shock even longtime readers of this blog.
It’s long, so here are some excerpts (though I do think the whole thing is worth reading). Be warned, it features descriptions of extreme punishments used on children. For space reasons I’ve edited out the stuff about how George W. Bush aided and abetted the Roloff homes on their mission, but those of you who already love Bush for the great legacy left by his presidency will find more to appreciate here. In short, Bush passed a law that allowed places like the Roloff homes to operate in Texas without state accreditation.
The Rebekah Home for Girls sits on a lonely stretch of south Texas farmland, a solitary spot where, amid the switchgrass and sagebrush and fields of cotton, young sinners are sent to get right with God. On a warm Saturday in May 1999, a sixteen-year-old named DeAnne Dawsey unexpectedly found herself at its doors. Her mother had said only that their family trip to Corpus Christi would last the day, and DeAnne had no reason to doubt her. Summer felt within reach, and DeAnne was relieved that her sophomore year of high school, which she was in danger of failing, was about to end. She was a slight girl with blue-gray eyes and dark brown hair who always wore a diamond-studded heart necklace. An inveterate flirt—”All she thought about was boys,” her mother would later lament—DeAnne never ignored an admiring glance. Normally she was too restless to stay still for long, but that morning she was in a dark mood: She and her boyfriend had quarreled the night before, and she sat brooding in the back seat of her mother’s car, lost in thought.
She was so preoccupied that she shrugged off a telling remark that her grandfather, who was traveling with them, had made after leaving Houston. Like DeAnne’s mother, he did not know much about the Rebekah Home for Girls or its history: that it was the most famous, and infamous, of the homes for troubled teenagers founded by the late evangelist Lester Roloff; or that punitive “Bible discipline” was the method used to chasten girls who had fallen from grace; or that the home had been the center of an epic, twelve-year battle between church and state—culminating in a standoff that Roloff called the Christian Alamo—in which the maverick preacher and his successors fought to avoid regulation by the State of Texas. But DeAnne’s grandfather felt guilty enough for lying to her about the purpose of the day’s trip that he turned in his seat to face her. “I’m sorry we’re doing this to you,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
Biblical Reform School Discipline: Tough Love or Abuse?
From ABC News April 12, 2011 by Susan Donaldson James. Difficult reading, as all the material on reform homes is, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore this.
Anne’s rebellion against her large Christian family — she was one of 10 children — began after she was gang-raped last year while jogging in her Maryland neighborhood.
“Because of that the trauma, she started spiraling in every way possible,” said her mother, Jeannie Marie, who did not want their last name made public.
Anne, now 18, said she numbed the pain with drinking and rebellion, which terrified her mother.
Desperate, Jeannie Marie turned to her church for help, learning about a Christian reform school that she says promised to “get right” her wayward daughter.
But neither was prepared for the ordeal they say Anne experienced from November to January of this year at New Beginnings Girls Academy, an Independent Fundamental Baptist boarding school in La Russell, Mo.
The school, according to its website, serves troubled teens so “through Jesus Christ, they can overcome their addictions, mend their broken relationships and get their lives on the right path.”
Instead, Anne said she was told the rape was her fault and was subjected to harsh discipline — ridiculed, restrained and deprived of proper nutrition and adequate clothing.
As punishment for misbehaving she says she was forced to wear a red shirt and stand facing a wall, sometimes for 8 to 10 hours a day with only 15-minute breaks for food. “I was so achy it hurt,” said Anne.
She said toilet paper and sanitary pads were rationed, despite Anne’s urinary problems after the rape. She also said no one offered to get her medical care.
“We thought maybe Anne would go there and hide out and pull herself together,” said Jeannie Marie. “We thought it was a safe place to go and we wouldn’t have to worry…We trusted our church.”
Anne left the school in January, but said the punitive approach left her with no self-worth and anxiety attacks so bad she cannot breathe.
Ungodly discipline at Hephzibah House
I’ve recently posted a lot about Christian reform schools, but most of the ones we’ve discussed have been closed. Here’s one that’s still operating. Got seven minutes? This video from CNN will bring you up to speed.
Related posts:
Questions abound as more horror stories emerge from New Bethany Home for Girls and Boys in Arcadia and Longstreet
You also need to read Jo Wright’s comments. She is one of Ford’s victims; the first one is here: http://louisianavoice.com/2013/09/18/questions-abound-as-more-horror-stories-emerge-from-new-bethany-home-for-girls-and-boys-in-arcadia-and-longstreet/#comment-17354
Do it in the name of heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
—One Tin Soldier by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter
As more and more revelations come to light about the treatment of residents of the New Bethany Home for Girls and Boys in Arcadia and similar homes run by Rev. Mack Ford and wife Thelma in other localities, many serious questions remain unanswered.
- Why, for example, have the Fords and employees of the home never been charged with felony child abuse?
- How can a man (and dozens more like him scattered across the U.S.) mete out such barbaric treatment of children in the name of a Savior who’s every utterance of love, peace and forgiveness is in direct contradiction to the policies of these institutions?
- How can the doctrine of separation of church and state trump state laws enacted to protect children who are unable to protect…
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Horror stories from tough-love teen homes
If you only read one story on “troubled teen” Christian reform homes, Kathryn Joyce’s piece for Mother Jones is probably the most comprehensive choice. Joyce is a tireless campaigner for survivors of religious abuse, having also released books on the “Quiverfull” Christian patriarchy movement, and the evangelical adoption industry.
Once you’ve looked at this, along with the previous things I’ve posted, you’ll get the picture on fundamentalist reform homes.
The compound at New Bethany. No one got in or out without Mack Ford’s permission
Check it out in full here, or see a few choice quotations from me below. As usual, trigger warnings all round.
Religious exemption at some Florida children’s homes shields prying eyes
Excerpts from a Tampa Bay Times article, by Alexandra Zayas, October 26, 2012. Read it in full, and see the Times’ video.
Trigger warning: Almost everything.
They shaved him bald that first morning in 2008, put him in an orange jumpsuit and made him exercise past dark. • Through the night, as he slept on the floor, they forced him awake for more. • The sun had not yet risen over the Christian military home when Samson Lehman collapsed for the sixth time. Still, he said, they made him run. • The screaming, the endless exercise, it was all in the name of God, a necessary step at the Gateway Christian Military Academy on the path to righteousness. • So when Samson vomited, they threw him a rag. When his urine turned red, they said that was normal. • By Day 3, the 15-year-old was on the verge of death, his dehydrated organs shutting down. • Slumped against a wall, cold and immobile, Lehman recalls men who recited Scripture calling him a wimp. And he thought: Maybe, if I die here, someone will shut this place down. • Not in Florida.
In this state, unlicensed religious homes can abuse children and go on operating for years. Almost 30 years ago, Florida legislators passed a law eliminating state oversight of children’s homes that claim government rules hamper their religious practices.
Today, virtually anyone can claim a list of religious ideals, take in children and subject them to punishment and isolation that verge on torture — so long as they quote chapter and verse to justify it. Read the rest of this entry
Neil Riser campaign worker linked to defunct church girls’ home, accusations of sexual abuse by father-in-law minister
In America, there was a string of “Christian” (I use the term loosely) reform homes, where children were subjected to horrifying abuse. Some of them still exist; most of them use Accelerated Christian Education. This is the tip of the iceberg.
© 2013
Two men with ties to a defunct church-operated home for girls and boys in Bienville Parish—and to the Baptist minister and accused sexual predator who ran the facility—currently are actively involved in the congressional campaign of State Sen. Neil Riser (R-Columbia), LouisianaVoice has learned.
Timothy Johnson of Choudrant in Lincoln Parish, who was fired earlier this year as a vice president at Louisiana College after leading an unsuccessful coup against President Joe Aguillard, is married to the daughter of Rev. Mack Ford who ran New Bethany Home for Girls and Boys south of Arcadia in Bienville Parish for several decades.
Timothy Johnson performs work on behalf of the Riser campaign, Riser’s campaign headquarters confirmed on Monday. His son, Jonathan Johnson, Ford’s grandson, worked for about a decade as State Director for retiring 5th District Congressman Rodney Alexander at $75,000 per year and is currently a paid employee…
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Leaving Fundamentalism 