'Literally kidnapping': Teens taken against their will to boarding schools across US

[Nevilledog]

No paywall
https://archive.ph/HhFrH

Julio Sandoval tells parents he wants to help their wayward sons get on the right path.

He assures them, through the website for his transport business, that he will deliver their children safely to a boarding school. So parents hire Sandoval’s company – Safe Sound Secure Youth Ministries – to remove their so-called “troubled teens” from their homes and transport them to the schools.

Sandoval also is former dean of students at Agape Boarding School and current leader of another unlicensed facility, both in Missouri. His goal with his transport company is to be “a blessing to your home,” and Sandoval shares with parents the philosophy he says he uses with his own seven children: “I don’t care if you like me, I am not raising you for YOU to like ME. I am raising YOU, for ME to like you.’”

Now, Sandoval, 41, awaits his next court appearance, arrested this week after a federal grand jury indicted him for violating a restraining order — issued at the request of a minor boy against his mother — by transporting him against his will to Agape in southwest Missouri. The jury also indicted the estranged mom of the teen, who was dropped off at Agape last summer after a 27-hour drive from California, the indictment says, his hands cuffed behind his back the entire way.

The arrests underscore concerns many have with transport companies whose agents often show up at homes in the middle of the night — with the parents’ consent — dragging scared youth out of bed, sometimes restraining them with handcuffs and threatening physical force if they don’t comply. They then cart them off to boarding schools across the country, including Missouri.

*snip*

[Thomas Hurt]

1. What? No tattoos and patches pinned on their clothes...

[Indykatie]

2. Dealing With a Troubled Teen is Hard for Parents But This is Just F**king Crazy and Scary

The parents need to be arrested too in my opinion.

[Silent3]

15. In many of these cases I'd bet "troubled teen" might only mean...

...not complying with crazy fundamentalist religious bullshit that parents want to force on them.

[Withywindle]

24. THIS

I wonder what percentage of them are LGBTQ, for example. I bet it's rather high.

[RobinA]

3. The Parents

are desparate. Not that I think this is OK, those places never work and often make the situation worse. I don't think our society has solved this problem yet. In fact, I know we haven't.

[Rebl2]

6. The parents

should investigate a bit more if they are going to send their kids somewhere like this.
The Agape home in MO has been under investigation for two + years now. The only reason they said they were closing is they are running out of money. They would gladly stay open if the had the money.

[Dorian Gray]

28. You are absolutely right

I think we can have sympathy here for almost everybody involved. The teens who are acting out. The parents who are at their wits end. (Not the boarding schools that make money off of troubled kids, tho.)

I am the aunt of a troubled teen. There are a lot of reasons why she acts out. She has two learning disabilities. She has alcoholic parents. She has been neglected. She has severe anxiety as a result of her upbringing. I also have sympathy for my brother and sister in law. They are beholden to their demons. They love their daughter. They are capable of severe neglect. They are frustrated with her behavior and don't see the direct line from their actions to hers. She has stolen their credit cards and charged thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of clothing and goods. She has stayed out all night multiple times without letting anybody know where she is. She doesn't show up to school and is failing. She uses alcohol and blacks out.

They have not gone this route (kidnapped in the middle of the night to go to boarding school), and I'm glad for it. But they're frustrated and don't have the tools to deal effectively and lovingly with her. I can see how someone may think this is their only hope.

[hunter]

12. "Those places" are selling something they don't have.

That, and their abusive practices is what makes them criminal.

So long as our society, in general, believes that punishment is an effective form of behavioral modification we are fucked. It isn't.

The way to deal with teenagers who believe they know everything and can support themselves is to provide them with reasonably safe opportunities to prove it.

Our society should provide opportunities like that for children whose parents can't manage it.

As a parent once you've gotten yourself into a power struggle with your teen you've lost. If you feel you have to hire someone to kidnap your teen in the middle of the night, you've lost big.

Two of my siblings ran away from home at sixteen with highly dramatic exits, which is a family tradition, going back centuries as I discern. Fuck you mom and dad, what do you know? All four of my grandparents were like that. But channels of communication always remained open.

Myself, I put my parents through a worse hell, no channels of communication open, leaving them to assume I was taking care of myself which wasn't true in any way. I was learning how to be a feral human dumpster diving for food some days. But I'd long trained my parents, since I was first a psychotic teenager, not to ask whenever I showed up on their doorstep battered and bloody.

What made all the difference was they accepted me, simple food and shelter at first, especially when I wasn't talking.

When I was 12 years old I knew fucking everything, all the secrets of humanity and the universe. With puberty my mind went completely sideways and I didn't gather most of it back together until I was 25 at least.

I think all we humans are the same to some greater of lesser extent.

[lostnfound]

26. I have 'PTSD just reading about being the parent of a difficult teen

Aged me ten years in terms of stress. Serious stress, and joint problems from the stress, at LEAST ten years.

He’s better now but damn I spent a lot of years in despondent misery.

[Mad_Machine76]

4. Last Podcast on the Left

just recently did an episode on the "Troubled Teen" industry. They even link them, historically, to Indigenous boarding schools.

[Bayard]

5. That was my first thought

Similar to what was done to Native children. Except their parents had no say so in the matter.

These aren't, "boarding schools," they're kid prisons.

[dewsgirl]

8. Thank you 🙂

[hunter]

17. Making everyone straight and white...

... or at least inoffensive to straight white society if they are not straight or white.

[Mad_Machine76]

19. And leaving them unable

to exist in either society

[Tree-Hugger]

7. Paris Hilton

Paris Hilton's parents did this to her. They had her "kidnapped" at night. She released an autobiographical documentary (on YouTube) a year or two ago and goes into quite a bit of detail. She works with other women who are part of the same "program" to shed light on what really happens.

[Mad_Machine76]

20. I just heard about this

Awful

[Farmer-Rick]

25. OMG, I'm watching it now.

Last edited Thu Jan 12, 2023, 05:13 PM - Edit history (1)

I feel so sorry for her.

I never thought I could feel sorry for Paris Hilton.

Being born into a filthy rich family is its own little curse. But add in scams like emotional growth schools and you have really dysfunctional families abusing their own children in very expensive and destructive ways.

The faculty beat the shit out of her at the first school after she ran away. And her parents kept putting her back into different emotional growth schools. She's been going to raves since she was 15. Maybe her parents should have stopped that instead of sending her to schools to get beaten up.

But damn Paris really loves looking at herself.

[Aristus]

9. 'Youth Ministries' has become a convenient cover for doughy, douche-bearded schlubs

throughout the conservative evangelical la-la land to harm and abuse children.

What a racket...

[RobinA]

29. Oh, There Are All Kinds

of miscreants hiding behind "ministries" as a way of getting money from desparate people. Evangelicals among them.

[GenThePerservering]

10. Seven kids of his own?

I can't even imagine the lives of these kids he's heedlessly bred - hopefully somebody has tied him off.

[UpInArms]

11. Agape Boarding School will shut down this month after years of abuse allegations

From the news, yesterday

https://www.kcur.org/news/2023-01-11/agape-boarding-school-in-missouri-will-shut-down-this-month-after-years-of-abuse-allegations

Dozens of former students have gone public with their allegations of physical, mental, and sexual abuse at the Stockton-based Christian residential facility, which opened in 1996. For the last few years, Agape has been at the forefront of the state’s reckoning over abuse allegations at unlicensed faith-based boarding schools.

Agape Boarding School, the Stockton-based Christian residential facility under scrutiny for alleged abuse of its students over decades, announced it will shut down Jan. 20.

According to a statement provided to The Independent Wednesday afternoon by John Schultz, an attorney for Agape, the school has “made the decision to stop providing services to the boys in its care.”

“Agape’s decision to close is voluntary,” Schultz said, “and solely due to the lack of financial resources to continue caring for the boys.”

The closure is long-awaited for dozens of former students who have gone public with their allegations of physical, mental, and sexual abuse at Agape, which opened in Missouri in 1996 and has, for the last few years, been at the forefront of the state’s reckoning over abuse allegations at unlicensed faith-based boarding schools.

Allen Knoll, a former student and advocate, said he is “ecstatic for all of the survivors that have fought for so long bringing this issue to the forefront,” and called the news a “huge deal, after two and a half years of fighting.”

In numerous lawsuits, former Agape students detail a range of allegations, from having food withheld as punishment to being forced to submit to physical labor and extreme exercise to being taken off prescribed medications.

… more at link ….

These crazies have been destroying lives for a long time … prison is too good for them.

[hatrack]

31. And in Missouri, this shit has been completely unregulated since forever . . . .

Because, y'know, freedom.

Post-Agape, the legislature finally at least made some squawking noises about inspections and oversight, but not much more.

[malaise]

13. One of these groups actually set up a school here in Jamaica

American parents allowed these fundamentalist monsters to send their kids overseas.
It was exposed and closed down a few years ago

[Lonestarblue]

16. Some right-wing Christian organizations prey on families with troubled teens.

Parents send their children away to these camps or schools, and many of them proceed to abuse the children with corporal punishment, denial of meals, and solitary confinements—yeah, just like prison. It used to be called tough love; I don’t know what it’s called today other than abandonment by parents who most likely should never have become parents in the first place.

[Johnny2X2X]

18. Horrifying

It's child abuse, and these places are run by deranged idiots who get off on hurting people they have power over.

Had a good friend in high school whose parents pulled him out of school and sent him to military school for the smallest transgression. He never forgave them, turned 18, left school/home and never once spoke to his parents again. This was 35 years ago, he's married with kids, and happy, and his parents are still dead to him.

I get difficult teens and how it can be hard to deal with them, but anyone who pays for their children to be traumatized like this gives up their right to have children.

[friend of a friend]

21. Reminds me of when I grew up in Boston.

My parents would not do it but other parents would tell the courts that their children wouldn't behave and the boys were sent to The Lyman School for Boys. It was a school with bars on the windows. There was also a school for girls.

[ToxMarz]

22. These people don't just do this for money

Also because they enjoy it, sick!

[groundloop]

23. Reminds me of THE SEED "rehab" program where I grew up in Florida

We had a few "Seedlings" in our school who'd either been through the program or were currently in it. They came across as being stiff as a board in that they seemed to be afraid to say anything to anybody except for other Seedlings. It turns out there was a good reason for that, The Seed had spies in schools who'd report those kids for talking to outsiders.

And as with this "rehab program" run by Sandoval nothing about The Seed was sanctioned by medical or mental health professionals.

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/373/the-seed

[Duppers]

27. Is there a kind, FAIR religious school anywhere?

By nature, they're anti-democratic, anti-logic, anti-truth.

Besides, some parents should never have been parents to begin with - they'd have been happier with robots.

[RobinA]

30. Yes, But Not For

problem teens.