Prison or Torture Chamber for kids?

I’ve written before about prison camps for teenagers and the abuse that happens there, but this one’s the worst I have seen described INSIDE the U.S. Nothing, NOTHING these girls did could justify this. Never!

AP: 13,000 abuse claims in juvie centers (AP)

from Yahoo! News

AP - The Columbia Training School — pleasant on the outside, austere on the inside — has been home to 37 of the most troubled young women in Mississippi.

If some of those girls and their advocates are to be believed, it is also a cruel and frightening place.

The school has been sued twice in the past four years. One suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department, which the state settled in 2005, claimed detainees were thrown naked in to cells and forced to eat their own vomit. The second one, brought by eight girls last year, said they were subjected to “horrendous physical and sexual abuse.” Several of the detainees said they were shackled for 12 hours a day.

These are harsh and disturbing charges — and, in the end, they were among the reasons why state officials announced in February that they will close Columbia. But they aren’t uncommon.

Across the country, in state after state, child advocates have deplored the conditions under which young offenders are housed — conditions that include sexual and physical abuse and even deaths in restraints. The U.S. Justice Department has filed lawsuits against facilities in 11 states for supervision that is either abusive or harmfully lax and shoddy.

Still, a lack of oversight and nationally accepted standards of tracking abuse make it difficult to know exactly how many youngsters have been assaulted or neglected.

 

When it’s just fine to abuse kids ….

So, if my parents or guardians made me sleep in a room like this

or spend all of my time lying on the floor face down like this …

they would probably get arrested, right?  Either for child abuse or neglect.

But what about if parents outsourced abusing their kids?  What if they sent thm to places where things like THIS take place?

Many who have been there describe a life of pain and fear. They say they spent 13 hours a day, for weeks or months on end, lying on their stomachs in an isolation room, their arms repeatedly twisted to the breaking point.

….

 ”You could hear kids screaming when they were getting restrained,” Mr. Bucolo said. “It was horrible. They would do it behind closed doors. And say the kids were lying if they complained.”

What would you say about parents who spent $30,000 to send their kids to this place?  Or what about this one?

 

Babies in prison

 

Victoria Jaramillo, 40, holding her 3-month-old daughter, Frida, at Santa Martha Acatitla, a women’s prison in Mexico City. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times)

My mom is in prison and has been for more than years. I have thought a lot about what it would be like if she had never been arrested and how different my life would be if she was out and if she was still my guardian. (My life is WAY WAY better now! I wish she could be in a hospital or a drug rehab, but not here in my house.)

But until I read the article below, I never thought of what it would be like to be in prison with her. (I don’t even like going for an hour to visit.)  The kids in the article are a lot younger than I was when my mom was arrested, and the prison they’re talking about is in Mexico and not in the U.S., but still it has me thinking.

Behind prison bars, toddlers serve time with mom

By James C. Mckinley Jr. MEXICO CITY:
Beyond the high concrete walls and menacing guard towers of the Santa Martha Acatitla prison, past the barbed wire, past the iron gates, past the armed guards in black commando garb, sits a nursery school with brightly painted walls, piles of toys and a jungle gym.

Fifty-three children under the age of 6 live inside the prison with their mothers, who are serving sentences for crimes from drug dealing to kidnapping to homicide. Mothers dressed in prison blue, many with tattoos, carry babies on their hips around the exercise yard. Others lead toddlers and kindergartners by the hand, play with them in the dust or bounce them on their knees on prison benches.

 

On the one hand, maybe these moms learn to be better parents than my mother was, and maybe there’s less abuse when there are guards and other people around. Also, I am glad the children there have toys to play with and a nursery school. On the other hand, they don’t have any freedom. What an experience!

 

The Fate of Children in the U.S.

People who know me online, from my other site, or who know me in person, know that I was abused for many years and that my mom is in jail on drug charges. They also know I am very smart and in all honors classes and that I now live in a violence-free home. And that I caused trouble in elementary school and got in a lot of fights. That said, this story from MSNBC hits me a little too close to home.

Boy who slept in trash bin is student of the year

DECATUR, Ala. — Eleven-year-old D.J. Graffree didn’t realize he was a child.

For much of his life, he was a cocky kid who didn’t need any adults to look after him or tell him what to do. He was always in and out of schools in his small town outside of Jackson, Miss. He spent a lot of times out on the streets.

At one point, he slept in a trash bin to stay warm.

Yet two weeks ago, D.J. was named Decatur City Schools’ Elementary Student of the Year.

D.J.’s face was bewildered when the honor was announced at the school system’s annual breakfast May 10. His cousin and guardian Patti Lewis’ face was first joyful, then tearful.

He later said it was simply luck that earned him the award.

When pushed further, he finally conceded it was more than that. “They like my behavior and my attitude,” he said.

The article says this about D.J.’s early life:

“He never had a chance to play or never had a birthday party,” she said. “He’s missed out on a lot of his childhood things.”

When Lewis went to visit D.J. and the rest of her extended family in Mississippi last year, she was shocked.

On that trip, D.J. broke down and told her everything about his life on the streets — about the drugs, being forced to steal to eat, and being whipped with chains. With his mother in jail, he had been shifted around to different relatives several times and had even run away from them.

….

When D.J. came to Decatur, he was placed in CASE Alternative School in Decatur. He had been kicked out of his last school system in Mississippi.

So when D.J. finally left CASE and came to fifth grade at Somerville Road Elementary, neither his family nor school
administrators knew how he would fare. He had a bad attitude, wouldn’t do his work and was disrespectful. Because of all of his time on his own, he resented authority and boundaries.

D.J. is in the news because he changed to a good student very quickly when he got a new family,. That’s great, but why didn’t it happen sooner? I know that the same night my mom was arrested, I got a social worker and a guardian-ad-litem and all kinds of people to make sure that I would be OK. And they stepped in when there were problems with my family later, and I am glad they did. Why didn’t D.J. have that instead of just getting shifted around?

In what other “civilized” country do children live like this? What other country lets them?

 

Honor killings?

I have a boyfriend and my family does not want me to have sex with him. They say I am too young and so is he. (Kissing and hugging are fine, but hands must always stay above the waist.) They want me to be older, to be in love, and to be safe when I do choose to have sex. Maybe I will wait until I am married and maybe I won’t.

If I were to have sex at my age, they would be disappointed in me and angry with me. If I stayed out all night, I would definitely get grounded, lose internet access, and probably have a thousand new chores. But they would NOT kill me and NEVER let other people kill me because of sex, even if I had sex with a person of a different religion.

It is different in the middle east. There, girls can be stoned to death for having sex too early and with the wrong people. Look at what happened to Dua Khalil, a 17 year old in Northern Iraq. (She is the girl in the photo above.)
According to CNN:

Authorities in northern Iraq have arrested four people in connection with the “honor killing” last month of a Kurdish teen — a startling, morbid pummeling caught on a mobile phone video camera and broadcast around the world.

The case portrays the tragedy and brutality of honor killings in the Muslim world. Honor killings take place when family members kill relatives, almost always female, because they feel the relatives’ actions have shamed the family.

In this case, Dua Khalil, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl whose religion is Yazidi, was dragged into a crowd in a headlock with police looking on and kicked, beaten and stoned to death last month. (Watch the attack, and what authorities are doing about it )

Authorities believe she was killed for being seen with a Sunni Muslim man. She had not married him or converted, but her attackers believed she had, a top official in Nineveh province said. The Yazidis, who observe an ancient Middle Eastern religion, look down on mixing with people of another faith.

National Geographic estimates that thousands of women and girls are killed every year, because their families value family honor more than the lives of the women and girls.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of women are murdered by
their families each year in the name of family “honor.” It’s difficult to get precise numbers on the phenomenon of honor killing; the murders frequently go unreported, the perpetrators unpunished, and the concept of family honor justifies the act in the eyes of some societies.

Most honor killings occur in countries where the concept of women as a vessel of the family reputation predominates, said Marsha Freemen, director of International Women’s Rights Action Watch at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

Reports submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights show that honor killings have occurred in Bangladesh, Great Britain, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Sweden, Turkey, and Uganda. In countries not submitting reports to the UN, the practice was condoned under the rule of the fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan, and has been reported in Iraq and Iran.

But while honor killings have elicited considerable attention and outrage, human rights activists argue that they should be regarded as part of a much larger problem of violence against women.

. . . .

The practice, she said, “goes across cultures and across religions.”

Complicity by other women in the family and the community strengthens the concept of women as property and the perception that violence against family members is a family and not a judicial issue.

“Females in the family—mothers, mothers-in-law, sisters, and cousins—frequently support the attacks. It’s a community mentality,” said Zaynab Nawaz, a program assistant for women’s human rights at Amnesty International.

Some organizations that are fighting to stop this violence against girls and women are UNICEF and Amnesty International.

UPDATE: You can also sign this petition and find out more from STOP Honour Killings.

Like most of my political posts, this is cross-posted at Political Teen Tidbits and at YouThinkLeft.

 

Another reason to end the war

    The Republicans who are into “family values” are also against single parent households. I was raised by my mom alone for 6 years and then raised by my brother alone after that, so I know that there can be problems. Single parents need a lot of support if they are going to have healthy families.

    Military families become single parent families during deployments, and there is a huge additional stress of fearing that someone will die in battle or by friendly fire, or that they will be wounded. So it shouldn’t be a big surprise that a recent study published in USA Today found that “Sending soldiers to war puts their children left at home at higher risk of abuse and neglect.“

    According to the article, the kids being abused the most (or reported the most) were under 4 years old, and the “Abuser was usually the parent who remained at home while a spouse was deployed.”

What the article didn’t mention is what the military is doing about it for the kids who are already being abused, but they mention at least one program for the war-created single parents married to soldiers and marines.

At Texas’ Fort Hood, home to about 70,000 military family members, the post is now working with the Military Child Education Coalition to improve community involvement with military families, Boyce said. “The U.S. Army, like many American communities, takes a solid teamwork approach to assisting families who have a soldier deployed,” he said.

Let’s end the war, get the troops home, and get them and their families all the counseling they need to have a healthy family life. If so many have PTSD, they AND their families will need a lot of help.