A New York woman has revealed why her parents hired kidnappers to take her from her bedroom in the middle of the night when she was just 16 years old.
Natasia Pelowski he wrote in an essay for Newsweek that she was a depressed teenager and that well-meaning parents listened to the advice of her high school principal and decided to send her to a residential treatment center.
Her parents decided that the best way to get her to attend one of these facilities for “troubled teens” was to forcibly remove her from her bedroom in her family’s home in Northern California on the night of November 23, 2014.
That night, Pelowski wrote, a strange man and woman burst into his door and demanded, “Come with us.”
When she refused, the man grabbed her arm and said, “I wasn’t asking.”
Natasia Pelowski has revealed why her parents hired kidnappers to take her from her bedroom in the middle of the night when she was just 16.
Pelowski described how she tried to free herself and called for help before she was handcuffed face down on the carpet and taken downstairs, where her mother was standing by the front door.
She said her mother uttered the word “I’m sorry” before Pelowski was shoved into the back of a car and driven away from her Silicon Valley neighborhood.
The teen was then dropped off at an unidentified camp in the wilderness, where she said she spent 54 days without power or shoes, and was repeatedly strip-searched, prevented from speaking to her friends for weeks, and forced to work in the fields.
One morning, Pelowski said staff at the center for troubled teens woke her up before dawn, blindfolded her and told her to “follow the sound of their drums.”
When staff members later removed the blindfold, Pelowski said he came face to face with an open grave.
She was then placed in the six-foot-deep plot while staff members read a eulogy to “represent the end of my old life,” she said.
From there, Pelowski said she was transferred to another residential facility in Utah, where she was placed in solitary confinement for 24 hours, subjected to so-called “attack therapy” and witnessed multiple suicide attempts, and later members The staff reprimanded those who tried to do it. commit suicide.
She explained that she was a depressed teenager and that her well-meaning parents sent her to a residential treatment program.
Pelowski was eventually freed from the ‘troublesome teen industry’ before turning 18, but said: ‘a part of me has been in that grave ever since.’
He said he developed post-traumatic stress disorder during his stay in these facilities.
“For 10 years, I struggled to understand how my family could have abandoned me,” he wrote. ‘It has always haunted me that children continue to be subjected to brutal treatment programs like mine.
“Today I know that my kidnapping was not unique,” Pelowski continued, describing how “bullying” or forcibly transporting minors to these treatment facilities is how most are brought.
He stated that the network of juvenile mental health institutions targets wealthy families, who can afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to have their children.
Parents who choose to send their children to these facilities, which receive more than $23 billion in public funds each year, according to the American Bar Association – tend to have genuine concerns that their child will hurt themselves or others if not confined to a controlled environment, reports the New York Times.
They also tend to assume that because residential treatment is more expensive, it must provide a better quality of care.
However, residential adolescent mental health treatment facilities are largely unregulated, with no federal licensing requirements for staff, no federal mandates to use evidence-based therapies, and no requirements to report the use of seclusion or restraints.
Many parents also don’t know what treatment their child will receive, and some facilities give minors only a few hours of therapy a week, while others provide none, according to the Times.
‘I don’t blame my parents anymore. Instead, I wonder why lawmakers who have the power to save vulnerable young people don’t do it,” Pelowski wrote.
Pelowski said he developed post-traumatic stress disorder during his stay in these facilities.
In 2007, the federal Government Accountability Office released a report that “identified thousands of allegations of abuse, some of which resulted in death, in residential programs across the country and at U.S.-owned and operated facilities abroad,” according to the American Bar Association. Association.
He urged reform, and the following year, Representative George Miller of California sponsored legislation to regulate congregate care facilities, but the bill was never passed.
However, in more recent years, issues with the ‘troubled teen industry’ have gained greater attention after Paris Hilton, herself a survivor of the system, detailed the abuse she suffered in a 2020 documentary, a memoir and a 2021 Op-Ed in which she wrote that she was “smothered, slapped, spied on while showering, and deprived of sleep” at the four facilities she was sent to as a teenager.
Last year, he spoke in favor of the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, which sought federal oversight of these facilities, but that, too, ended up stalled in Congress.
And in April, Paris Hilton testified in support of a California bill that would require greater transparency about disciplinary methods in short-term residential facilities.
The issues surrounding the ‘troubled teen industry’ have gained attention after Paris Hilton spoke out about what she endured.
Still, some in Congress are fighting for industry reform.
On June 12, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon held a hearing and released a report of a two-year investigation into existing residential programs that receive government funding from Medicaid or the child welfare system.
The report documents taxpayer-funded “sexual, physical and emotional abuse, unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and inadequate provision of behavioral health treatment,” the Times reports.
It also describes “routine” systemic harms that “are the direct and casual result of a business model that has incentives to treat children as payments and provide insufficient safety and behavioral health treatment to maximize operating and profit margin.”
At least two of the networks investigated were also ordered to pay more than $1 billion in damages related to statutory rape last year alone.
Later in June, Hilton also testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over various child welfare programs, about what she endured.
“These programs promised healing, growth and support, but instead they did not allow me to speak, move freely or even look out the window for two years,” she said. according to the New York Times.
“The staff forced me to take medication and sexually abused me.”
He then ended his testimony by promising not to “stop until America’s youth are safe.”
‘If you are a child in the system, listen to my words: I see you. I believe you. “I know what you’re going through and I won’t give up on you,” Hilton promised.