TW child abuse
I’m just gonna put a spacer here.
Probably need another spacer.
So news broke locally last fall about concerns about child abuse* at a religious boarding school in middle of nowhere southwest Missouri.
There’s some religious boarding schools in St. Louis, but they’re not isolated. They have a mix of local kids and kids who are boarding there. They have high college acceptance rates, they play sports in the local high school leagues, etc.
The religious boarding school from that news last fall is isolated in a county that the largest town has 3500 people. This was one of those “parents pack up ‘problem’ children and send them off to Jesus-ey boarding school for their own good” kinds of places.
So, the Kansas City Star has really been doing a fuckton of investigative journalism about this school, and among other things it’s come to light that Missouri is the Promised Land for these sorts of abusive operations.
- No state oversight because of a nearly 40-year-old law that exempts faith-based facilities.
- These “boarding schools” often moved to Missouri when there was scrutiny in other states.
- We don’t actually know how many fucking exist right now in the state, because there is no requirement to even register with the state that they exist. Kansas City Star has identified 13 so far in southern Missouri.
- The state of Missouri has no clue how many of these boarding schools exist, where they are, how many students are there, etc.
- Former students interviewed have PTSD and trauma from their experiences there. In addition to sexual abuse, beatings, spankings, etc, food deprivation, some kids reported things like waterboarding and having their faces rubbed in horse manure.
- Former students have said they were also used illegally as child labor for things like roofing jobs.
- Because of the old legislation/loopholes, even when there was a report of child abuse, the “school” could refuse to let state investigators to see the students who the reports were about.
- Missouri legislators have recently passed new laws that requires these schools to register with the state, perform background checks on their staff, and do basic shit like comply with fucking health, fire, and safety inspections. It was literally no oversight at all. NONE. The new legislation waiting on the governor to sign, based on how fast this blew through our republican-controlled house and senate, it’s expected he’ll sign. I do appreciate that the lawmakers at least are rushing to pass some legislation to close this loophole.
Most of the info for this post came from this KC Star article. It’s got more content than most I’ve seen, and while Washington Post has a good article, there’s a paywall for users I think.
https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/missouri/article250398476.html
*the husband and wife who ran Circle of Hope Girls Ranch are in jail awaiting trial and facing 102 charges, all but 1 of them felonies
I was going to write about this last night, but I was so fucking angry reading about it that I needed to step away for the night from the topic.
I know there are a lot of people on the planet – but what is wrong with so many people? Is empathy being bred out of us through evolution? It just seems like there are becoming more crap people than good people.
I think some of it is more about 24 hour news & social media getting this stuff out. Long ago, you could keep shit quiet forever but that’s much harder now. Religion has always been a haven for awful people. It was created to control people with “the fear of god” & makes victims more reluctant to tell just by its nature.
This is a lot of it. When you consider the remoteness of a lot of Missouri counties, what would kids even do to get away from their abuse? Especially if the parent(s) sent them there from out of state.
In the case of the one mentioned above, two of the sheriff’s deputies also did some work at the school at one point. So like what are those kids supposed to do? Who are they supposed to report the abuse to if a person who works for law enforcement is paid to be there and doesn’t care that it happens?
Also, good people news stories are boring & always get backpage at best.
On the empathy thing, from a Child-Development standpoint anyway, empathy IS something most of us are born with…
“experiments show that newborns are also capable of a basic form of empathy: for example, they react with distress when they hear other babies cry.”
that “basic form of empathy” is why babies & infants/very young toddlers will so often cry when a baby near them does…
But it’s *also* something that if NOT constantly reinforced & re-taught WILL go away in early childhood, once we humans learn that we are autonomous beings who can choose things for ourselves.
Tbh, we can be incredibly selfish at that “learning autonomy” stage–and MOST of us are!😉
That’s why we do so much social-emotional work and why in the Early Childhood & ECSE fields, we *explicitly* teach empathy starting at toddlerhood…
Because the vast majority of folks NEED lessons on how *not* to be a selfish asshat!😉
I also imagine this sort of exploitation is quite lucrative.
If you want to hear the long view of awful people, two major prep schools around me, one Catholic and one more old school, have recently been forced to own up to decades-long problems with teachers going after students.
English boarding schools were notorious for this from both faculty and older boys, and parents would send their kids to the schools they went to where teachers were known for it when they were kids and were still employed there.
A lot of this happens as a cycle of awful, not something worse.
(See also: this, this, this and this.)
its always the religious places…holds true over here in europeland too
well…its always the christians tbh….(tho im not sure if thats actually true…its just that whenever other religions make the news here its either coz they are terrorists or coz somebody bombed/shot them…no room in the news cycle for other horribleness)
We Canada City people did this with native boarding schools to drive the native out of them and make them “white”. A lot of these skules were run by the same people who brought you the Catholic child abuse scandals that rocked every nation with Catholic churches.
It is a disgusting shameful period of our history. More so the fact that we turned a blind eye (left and right) to it.