Brutal offshore Christian reform school exposed in new documentary
By David Ferguson

“Kidnapped for Christ” is a new documentary that tells the story of
teenagers sent to an evangelical Christian boarding school outside the
U.S. where school personnel attempt to rid them of feelings of same sex
attraction or other “ungodly” influences.

“They mess your mind up,” said former student Deirdre Sugiuchi to Raw
Story. “Prisoners have more freedom than we had.”

The “school” is Escuela Caribe, an evangelical Christian reform school
that is run like a prison camp by an organization called New Horizons
Youth Ministries.

Many of the students are the children of Christian parents who believe
their sons and daughters’ nascent feelings of same sex attraction can be
eliminated by the school’s program of Bible study, brutally hard work,
exercise and physical punishment to break the students down.

Other students, like Sugiuchi, were the children of well-to-do
evangelicals who were just being normal teens.

“My parents were fundamentalist Christians,” she said, “and they didn’t
like the way I was turning out.”

So, at 15, Sugiuchi was sent to school in the Dominican Republic at
Escuela Caribe. There were only about 40 students at the school at any
given time, she said, and from the moment students arrive they are
placed on a stringent system of punishments and rewards.

Students were broken down into levels, with lower level students
forbidden from speaking or even looking at higher level students.

“When you start at zero level, you then had rules about who you could
look at,” she explained. “You couldn’t talk to members of the opposite
sex until you were on second level and you had to fulfill a wide variety
of requirements to move up.”

“At zero level, you’d have to be three feet away from a staff member or
a supervisor at all times. You had to ask to go from room to room. It
was insane,” she said. “Prisoners actually have more freedom than we had.”

Sleep deprived and worked to exhaustion, the students are fed on a diet
of “sugar and fat,” Sugiuchi said. “It was in no way adequate to the
amount of manual labor we were doing. We weren’t getting the nutrients
we needed.”

While only one student is known to have died at Escuela Caribe in a
flash flood, Sugiuchi said that school officials pushed the students to
the very brink of their physical endurance in order to make them more
malleable and open to what she called a program of straightforward
“brainwashing.”

“They mess your mind up,” she said. “The whole time I was down there I
thought, ‘This is all going to be for the good, I must be living through
this for something,’ but instead I came out incredibly traumatized.”

“People get sent off to these places and it ruins them,” she said. “I’m
lucky. A lot of my friends have serious drug problems, broken
relationships, broken lives, suicides, you name it.”

Treatment of the kids at Escuela Caribe often hinged on the moods and
caprices of staffers, she said, so it would be hard to say who had it
the worst at the school. LGBT students, however, were consistently
singled out for abuse.

“That’s the thing,” she said, “the kids that were gay, most of the time
they were picked on, and always kept on lower levels.”

Sugiuchi is currently working on a book, Unreformed, about her
experience at Escuela Caribe. The film “Kidnapped for Christ” is
premiering at the next Sundance Film Festival. She hopes to raise
awareness of these programs, which have deep ties to groups like Focus
on the Family — who referred her parents to New Horizons Youth
Ministries — and the Republican Party.

“If you follow the money, you’ll see that the Republicans are so, so in
bed with these people,” she said. The Romney family contributes heavily
to the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP), an umbrella
organization for evangelical reform schools like Escuela Caribe — which
was briefly closed down, then reopened under the name Crosswinds — and
their Mormon equivalents.

Someday, she said, she hopes to see legislation against people sending
their children to these types of schools, “but the legislation always
gets stalled,” she said.

http://tinyurl.com/p3b677p
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Hey, if you can't talk kids into being good little obedient, mindless
christians, torture them. I suppose the ones who don't break are hanged
in chains, and then the bodies are drawn and quartered, with the four
pieces to the farthest outposts of christendom.