Traumatic Homeschooling: How Evangelicals Use Education to Totalize by R. L. Stollar May 7, 2022

Friends,

Wow! This was an eye-opener. I am reading this in the context of my earlier post today on "unschooling." There is much to know about these suspect movements. I would never want to say that all homeschooling or unschooling is bad, but rather that the growing evidence and first-person accounts like this one by R. L. Stollar, are deeply concerning. 

Based on these burgeoning stories and evidence, particularly of horrific stories of child abuse that range from actual harm to children in an unregulated system of education to the "totalism," or indoctrination that is killing children's wills, is resulting in a growing choir of individuals calling for legal and policy reforms to protect children.  Stollar's entire paragraphs on "totalism" is worth reading:

"Totalism is a concept first developed by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Totalism is related to totalitarianism, and signifies a psychological form of totalitarianism — the totalitarian monitoring and control of another individual’s behaviors and thoughts. Lifton uses the term to describe the attributes of ideological movements and organizations that aim for total control over people’s behaviors and thoughts. While these movements and organizations may vary in design and goals, they follow common patterns and cause predicable types of psychological damage to those within them."

The evidence gets even more grim as one learns of the cases of child torture where according to a study by pediatrician Barbara Knox (2014) finds that 

“47% [of the tortured children] who had been enrolled in school were removed under the auspice of ‘homeschooling.’” “Homeschooling,” Knox observed, “appears to have been designed to further isolate the child.”

This is terrifying. I am glad that more people are speaking out. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Traumatic Homeschooling: How Evangelicals Use Education to Totalize

Posted byR.L. StollarMay 7, 2022

The following is the text of the speech I gave at the Conference on Religious Trauma on April 30, 2022.

I’d like to begin by thanking Janice for inviting me to speak here and I’d like to thank my fellow panelists as well as Caleb for moderating. Religious trauma is such an important topic and childhood education is a key vehicle for passing that trauma on from generation to generation.

I will speak to you today about homeschooling, specifically evangelical homeschooling. I will speak about homeschooling because homeschooled children and alumni are intimately familiar with religious trauma. This is because the vast majority of homeschoolers are evangelical Christians. Consequently, many homeschooled children have experienced corporal punishment, threats of eternal hellfire, educational neglect, molestation and rape, and other human rights abuses—all in the name of glorifying the evangelical god. 

In fact, due to the intentionally deregulated state of homeschool laws in the United States, homeschool parents have nearly absolute power over what they can do to and teach their children. Homeschooling has thus become a tool for what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called “totalism.” Totalism is the end goal of authoritarian and totalitarian movements and organizations: it is the total control of human action and belief.  By enabling homeschoolers to use homeschooling totalistically, deregulated homeschooling has created the perfect storm for abuse and neglect to thrive in homeschooling communities.

To understand how this became the case, a short history lesson is in order.

“If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine.” Police reports and call logs reveal shelters housing immigrant children are deeply disturbing.

The world needs to know about this abuse.  It's all such a horrible, atrocious violation of children who are already victimized.  The second story has more detail. The source for this story is Propublica.

-Angela

‘If you’re a predator, it’s a gold mine’: Inside the abusive immigrant youth shelters

According to logs obtained by ProPublica, some immigrant youth shelters are a hotbed of sexual abuse.

REBEKAH ENTRALGOJUL 27, 2018, 5:08 PM

“If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine.”

Police reports and call logs reveal shelters housing immigrant children are deeply disturbing.

MICHAEL GRABELL AND TOPHER SANDERSJUL. 27, 2018 3:03 PM

This story was originally published by ProPublicahttps://www.propublica.org/. 

Just five days after he reached the United States, the 15-year-old Honduran boy awoke in his Tucson, Arizona, immigrant shelter one morning in 2015 to find a youth care worker in his room, tickling his chest and stomach.

When he asked the man, who was 46, what he was doing, the man left. But he returned two more times, rubbing the teen’s penis through his clothing and then trying to reach under his boxers. “I know what you want, I can give you anything you need,” said the worker, who was later convicted of molestation.

In 2017, a 17-year-old from Honduras was recovering from surgery at the shelter when he woke up to find a male staff member standing by his bed. “You have it very big,” the man said, referring to the teen’s penis. Days later, that same employee brushed the teen with his hand while he was playing video games. When the staff member approached him again, the boy locked himself in a bathroom.

And in January of this year, a security guard at the shelter found notes in a minor’s jacket that suggested an inappropriate relationship with a staff member.

Pulled from police reports, incidents like these at Southwest Key’s Tucson shelter provide a snapshot of what has largely been kept from the public as well as members of Congress—a view, uncolored by politics, of troubling incidents inside the facilities housing immigrant children.

Using state public records laws, ProPublica has obtained police reports and call logs concerning more than 70 of the approximately 100 immigrant youth shelters run by the U.S. Health and Human Services department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. While not a comprehensive assessment of the conditions at these shelters, the records challenge the Trump administration’s assertion that the shelters are safe havens for children. The reports document hundreds of allegations of sexual offenses, fights and missing children.

Continue reading here.

Important, if grim, sobering report on Child Protective Services in the state of Texas.  A shocking close to 800 children died in Texas in less than five years of abuse or neglect.  This is the first of a three-part series about those deaths and CPS' responsibilities therein. 

"Texas is not publicly reporting hundreds of abuse- and neglect-related child deaths each year. Between 2010 and 2014 the Department of Family and Protective Services did not publicly report 655 child abuse-related fatalities, even though the department confirmed that those children had been mistreated prior to their deaths.
Nearly half of the children who died were already on CPS’s radar. Of those 380 fatalities, 144 families — more than a quarter — had been the subject of a CPS investigation at least 3 times. In 12 instances, CPS had seen the family 10 or more times. CPS had contact with one family more than 20 times before the child died."

A constructive response to this should save lives.

-Angela

Missed Signs.  Fatal Consequences.

---

How Texas missed deadly patterns and key pieces of information that could have helped protect vulnerable children.

In 2009, the Legislature ordered Child Protective Services to publicly record every abuse- and neglect-related death in the state in hopes of identifying patterns and discovering ways to prevent abuse deaths. But the Statesman has learned that CPS has not systematically analyzed those reports, meaning that in important ways, Texas’ child protection workers effectively have been operating with blinders, missing deadly patterns and key pieces of information that could help protect kids.

For the last six months, Statesman reporters Andrea Ball and Eric Dexheimer analyzed each of those 779 reports and uncovered a series of troubling findings:

• Texas is not publicly reporting hundreds of abuse- and neglect-related child deaths each year. Between 2010 and 2014 the Department of Family and Protective Services did not publicly report 655 child abuse-related fatalities, even though the department confirmed that those children had been mistreated prior to their deaths.
• Nearly half of the children who died were already on CPS’s radar. Of those 380 fatalities, 144 families — more than a quarter — had been the subject of a CPS investigation at least 3 times. In 12 instances, CPS had seen the family 10 or more times. CPS had contact with one family more than 20 times before the child died.
• In 125 instances, a child had been previously separated from the home prior to his death because of safety concerns. In 41 cases, the child who eventually died was the one removed from the home.
• Even though the agency has a unit dedicated to finding missing families, at least 15 kids died after they dropped off CPS’s radar.
• Since 2009, more than 50 CPS workers have been caught lying to prosecutors, ignoring court orders, falsifying state records or obstructing law enforcement investigations, according to an American-Statesman review of state and court documents. At least four former CPS employees are currently facing criminal charges for their alleged misconduct.
• Of the nearly 300 child abuse homicides and suspected homicides analyzed, some cases unaccountably drug out for years. The paper also found that one of every five child abuse beating or strangulation deaths — the way most children are killed — has been left unsolved, leaving relatives, law enforcement and local communities bereft of closure or justice.

Read on here.