Tranquility Bay , it's no vacation spot .

[sageridder]

When you have a teenager on the rampage, who are you going to turn to? In America, parents send their troubled offspring to Jamaica's Tranquility Bay - a 'behaviour-modification centre' which charges $40,000 a year to 'cure' them. Decca Aitkenhead, the first journalist to gain access to the centre in five years, wonders if there isn't too high a price to pay.

Two part artical.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magaz...987172,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magaz...987168,00.html

[Chewbacca]

The oxymoron of tough love to the extreme. If your are rich you can have your kids brainwashed and depersonalized. Of course the parents are all blameless.

Instead of facing their children or as they call them, problems, they send them away. Out of site, out of mind.

I had to quote the parts I found most indignant to my conscience and humanity.


What great qualification? a real professional and expert on human psycology. LOL What a promotion from night gaurd to administrator! Controlling people must run in this guys family.

Jay Kay is 33 years old, and the son of Wwasp's chief director. He opened the facility at the age of 27, after four years as administrator of a Wwasp-run juvenile psychiatric hospital in Utah. Previously he had been a night guard there, and before that a petrol-pump attendant, having dropped out of college. He has no qualifications in child development, but considers this unimportant.

Speechless. Imagine doing this to someone you love.

When most children first arrive they find it difficult to believe that they have no alternative but to submit. In shock, frightened and angry, many simply refuse to obey. This is when they discover the alternative. Guards take them (if necessary by force) to a small bare room and make them (again by force if necessary) lie flat on their face, arms by their sides, on the tiled floor. Watched by a guard, they must remain lying face down, forbidden to speak or move a muscle except for 10 minutes every hour, when they may sit up and stretch before resuming the position. Modest meals are brought to them, and at night they sleep on the floor of the corridor outside under electric light and the gaze of a guard. At dawn they resume the position. This is known officially as being 'in OP' - Observation Placement - and more casually as 'lying on your face'. Any level student can be sent to OP, and it automatically demotes them to level 1 and zero points. Every 24 hours, students in OP are reviewed by staff, and only sincere and unconditional contrition will earn their release. If they are unrepentant? 'Well, they get another 24 hours.' One boy told me he'd spent six months in OP. I didn't think this could be true, but it transpired this was not even exceptional. 'Oh no,' says Kay. 'The record is actually held by a female.' On and off, she spent 18 months lying on her face. 'The purpose of observation,' Kay offers, 'is to give the kids a chance to think. Hopefully, it's giving the kids a chance to reflect on the choices they've made.' And indeed it is often in OP that a student decides to stop fighting. In this respect, OP works. In fact, the success rate of OP can be understood as a perfect distillation of Tranquility Bay's ideology. If your son is willfully disrespectful, the most loving gift a parent can give him is incarceration in an environment so intolerable that he will do anything to get out - where 'anything' means surrendering his mind to authority.

I had most these problems as a teenager. The last sentence is the most shocking.

Drugs feature high among reasons for choosing Tranquility, although addicts who need detox are not accepted. Running away from home, sleeping around, or being expelled from school are also typical. Some kids have been in trouble with the police. Others had been in court, where their parents persuaded the judge to let them send their child to Tranquility, rather than issue his own punishment. Other students were sent here for wearing inappropriate clothes, using bad language, or hanging around with the wrong sort of friends.

Group therapy? They may as well call it a mental gang rape.

Challenger family's meeting is the first I attend, and has the appearance of group therapy. The girls sit in a circle on the floor, with an hour to stand up and 'share', or offer 'feedback'. The first to her feet is frightened that her old problem of anorexia is returning. 'I feel really disgusting the whole time. I hate it so much because I feel so imperfect. I just feel so insecure, I didn't think this was going to come back, I don't know what to do.' She casts about, anguish bubbling out incoherently. 'Like, if I was to date a guy, and I was always hating myself, well that would push him away. Being alone really scares me a lot, but I know that's how I'm going to end up.' Now she is crying hard, gulping air, talking randomly. 'Like, if I get a Cat 2, I feel like I'm letting everyone down.' After 10 minutes she sits down. But there is something odd about the atmosphere - hot grief has met ice-cool air. Hands go up for feedback. 'No one else is thinking about you, why do you think anyone notices you?' 'Don't you get it? The purpose of being here, and getting consequences, is to teach you how to pick yourself up. If you don't mess up, you go home.' I am completely taken aback. As they rattle out their spiteful attacks some sound bored, like waitresses running through a menu, but others are imaginatively vicious. After the next has shared, a girl stands up and points at her victim's acne. 'Why is it that you feel so comfortable wallowing in your own crap? That's why you have that stuff on your face. It's because you're hurting yourself on the inside.' The family rep looks on with approval.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING. MASTURBATION WILL LEAD TO PUBLIC HUMILIATION!!!!!!!!!!

Points and privileges are awarded to students who tell on each other. If you don't tell on someone for breaking a rule and get found out, you lose points. 'There is zero trust,' Scott explains. 'You can't trust anyone. It's not us against them. It's everyone against you.' Scott remembers a new boy being caught with incriminating used tissues; masturbation is strictly forbidden. 'And they got him up in front of everyone right after dinner, and the upper-level kids just ripped into him, this little 13-year-old kid. It was kind of the entertainment for the night. That's what I mean about breaking kids.'

[antryg]

It sounds like English boarding school crossed with the Cultural Revolution. I really think it's great that parents are willing to spend so much money so that no matter how much pain or degradation their children suffer, the parents get what they want. Maybe the youth of America should declare war on Tranquility Bay. That way the Red Cross could impose the Geneva Convention rules there. Better yet, Armed Forces recruiters could be stationed ouside the camp. The kids have already undergone torture and indoctrination techniques. Think about the savings for the governemnt.

[Indemaijinj]

Crossed with a cheap scam too.

What would be interesting to discuss here is what legal actions to take in order to bring down the Wwasp imperium and any present future clones.

[Spelca]

Shouldn't there be some child protection laws that prevent the parents from sending their children to horrible places like this? Isn't a child allowed to get legal help, even if they are outside the US?

[Indemaijinj]

Heh, you've hit the nail on the head there.

The problem is that this has to go through the child's legal guardian (usually the parent).

Those "correctional programmes" lives high on the minor's lack of legal status in this field. They get the parent to sign some kind of contract that transfers responsibility for the child to them.

They also make use of the fact that parents desperate enough to seek such measures for their unruly children have very little faith in their children. They would be much more inclined to believe that their children are lying, than the hard truth that they have sent their own progeny to hell willingly. Especially since the correctional programmes sends out information letters explicitly telling them to ignore any outlandish tales their children might write back to them as these are probably just part of the indignant and intransigent child's scheming to escape correction.

It is cases like these that really shows us how legally defenceless a minor really is.

[Spelca]

But who's going to protect these children from their parents? Since it's the parents that are sending them there... The children should have a possibility of reaching somebody who will help them, if they want to get out. But I guess they would stop the letters from ever reaching those people...
It's really sick... Some of the kids in the report weren't even "defiant teens"... Well, at least not what I think of when I hear that. This girl was sent there because her parents didn't like her boyfriend!!!

"Lindsay Cohen is nearly 19. A straight-A high-school graduate, she was heading for Harvard until an unsuitable choice of boyfriend had her sent here at the age of 17."

How sick is that? I think that some of their parents need to go to a camp like this, and not their children... Somebody establish an "idiotic parent camp" please...

From what I have read and these new headlines, Im thinking that the place is definately an excuse for abuse. While Im sure I condone far harsher treatment for "wild" kids than say.... Chewie for example [img]smile.gif[/img] (no offense ment here guy)
I do not condone endangering their lives nor permanent physical damage.

On the other hand. What is to be done with children that the parents just cannot control. I have met kids like this, I know they exist. What is the parent supposed to do? I see a lot of criticism about "depersonalizing" the kids...what about making them fit for civilized society? Some of the actions of the kids that were at this camp...were to me horrific and indicitive of future "monsters" as depicted in another thread in this forum.

[Indemaijinj]

It is not as much a matter of depersonalisation or lack of freedom than a matter of torture.

Even if it could make a kid drop some of his or her more unfortunate habits "drugs, etc." torture is still not a valid choice. Besides violently "straightening" a youngster's life up might leave that person with psychological (or even quite physical) traumas that might ruin their lives later.

Besides you do not want your child to accept everything. These places are teaching children not to stand up when people they care about are being brutalized. They are being taught to silently accept being beaten crippled.

Do any parent want to pay someone for repeatedly telling their children that their parents hate them? I think not.


This organisation must be thoroughly destroyed (preferrably through lawful means).

[Chewbacca]

I plan on asking several mental health professionals I know about the camp's shrink. Nailing him for some sort of ethics violations would be a start.

[ 07-12-2003, 07:20 PM: Message edited by: Chewbacca ]