olivia

From 2016-2017 I was in an all girls rehabilitation center for fourteen months. My goal here is to share my own story and what I experienced living there for so long. I’d like to say that not everyone’s experience was necessarily negative or the same, by any means. People were treated differently there based upon the staffs feelings towards them at any given time, and every TC center differs slightly in rules/regulations. Here I am specifically referring to my own experience in Teen Challenge, Kansas City. This facility housed an average amount of 25 girls (more or less) at any given time.

Upon coming there you are separated from your parents almost immediately. I was lucky enough to have been driven there by my parents, however some girls are “transported”. This is when your parents and staff arrange for you to be picked up in the middle of the night unexpectedly, only being told that you are “going to your new school”. Staff transports you in a van to the center, the ride being sometimes ten+ hours long since there are girls arranged to be taken there from all over the US. Even a majority of the girls driven by their parents have no idea what they are getting themselves into or where they are actually going, myself included. On the website it is advertised as a boarding school or an academy, but the sign on campus refers to it as a nonprofit group home. Almost as soon as you arrive, you are obligated to strip down in front of a staff member to show that you are not hiding any drugs or paraphernalia. Students also searched through every item I brought with me, labeling my names on things, and putting things aside I am not allowed to have. Immediately after your parents leave you are given a binder including a set of rules, nineteen pages long, and several other pages including Bible verses and other paperwork. For the first two weeks, you do not focus on school at all regardless of when you arrived, and you are not allowed to communicate with anyone outside of Teen Challenge, family included. You can only speak to staff (sometimes) and two other students called your Big Sisters, who are supposed to guide you in how to act there and what is expected of you. These first two weeks are considered “orientation”. Those girls who help you are chosen and given to you based upon who has been there longest and who respects the rules. You are required to fully hand write the rules and other paperwork in your binder onto notebook paper. Along with this, you are required to memorize bible verses, among a binder of other paperwork, in this two week time frame. If you do not comply, you will not progress in the program and you will never be allowed to talk to anyone.

There is a “level” system there, which is mainly based upon how long you have been in the program. You are required to continue following the rules and continuing memorizing Bible verses, among many other religious focused paperwork given to you. The higher level you are, the more privileges you have. Privileges being, what you wear, who you communicate with, how long of family phone calls you have, and what you are allowed to do at any given time. During the whole program you cannot use a cell phone, wear makeup, speak or write to anyone outside of your family, or speak while staff is not monitoring the conversation. As well as this, no “secular” things are tolerated. You may not listen to music that is not Christian, or swear, or really do anything that is not under the Christian religion otherwise there are major repercussions. You must ask to do anything at all, including getting up for the bathroom. You are to never be in a separate room from the other students or staff your whole program. No privacy is given. Anything you do, you are told to do. You may not ask for “special privileges” like what to eat or how much shower time you have, etc., or you could be disciplined. Even when we would go to church once a week, we were not allowed to socialize with anyone outside of the program. No physical contact is tolerated whatsoever the whole program. This level system lasts your whole program.

During the whole time you are there you only are allowed outside the center about every two to three months. These are referred to as “passes”. The first pass is on campus, and is only several hours long, with staff monitoring the conversations a majority of the time. The time you have outside of the center increases the longer you are there, however you are still required to comply to the Teen Challenge rules no matter what, even around family. The longest pass you are allowed at the very end is ten days. Until then you are not allowed to use phones or makeup, even outside of the facility and with your family present. If you do not comply to their rules in general, they frequently threaten to take away these passes and any time with your family. If they are aware you are trying to contact friends or use a cell phone or wear makeup while with your family, there will be a huge punishment.

I’d also like to include several punishments they give you which are not included anywhere online or in paperwork they give to your parents before arriving. First is the written disciplines. I have had a few, and they can be given to you for very little logical reason. There is a lengthy list of “character qualities” in your binder given to you, which are words/traits you should “strive” to be. Included in this is a definition of the quality, along with two bible verses having to do with the quality. These qualities are things like “respect” or “integrity”. A majority of the disciplines include writing these over and over, paragraphs, until you are finished. No free time whatsoever is given until you finish, including on weekends. Now, most of the time you have to write these paragraphs hundreds, if not a thousand times on notebook paper if you are to get one. A girl I knew had to write the nineteen page rules 20 times, along with a great amount of other written disciplines. I can remember one of the times she was given a discipline solely because she did not close her eyes during a group prayer, which staff deemed disrespectful. They picked on her among plenty others for not having “faith”. The more religious you were, or the more you sucked up to staff, the less likely you’d be given a discipline.

Next is “Full Restriction”. In this, you have no privileges. You are given a set of navy blue sweats to wear at all times and to speak to no one including staff unless they feel like it. You cannot have perfume, jewelry, scented lotion, or a majority of your normal clothes (besides one set of pajamas) that you brought with you. You sleep on a top bunk. Anything you can think of you do not have. You are given the bare minimum to be alive. You do not have free time and you are only to be writing disciplines at all times. If you are not given a discipline to write then you are to write down full chapters of the Bible until you are off of Full Restriction. This can go on for however long they wish. I have heard of girls being on this for a year straight. The minimum I have seen is one month. They threaten you with this discipline very, very often, and usually add on more punishments afterwards or during.

There is also “Isolation”. It is similar to Full Restriction and can last weeks to months. The only difference is that you get your own clothing and perfume. You cannot sit at a desk with other people, much less speak to them. You sit in your own corner with your own desk and work on written disciplines or writing the Bible.

Next is R&R, “Relationship Restriction”. Most of the time this is a consequence of getting “too close” to the girls you are living with, or having a “toxic relationship” with them. Personally I was put on Relationship Restriction with a minimum of nine girls during my program. Several of those girls I was not allowed communication with simply because we hugged during my program when staff was not around. They told me to pretend they are dead. Not even eye contact is tolerated. If you slept in the same room as them, you were relocated. This was very difficult for me when there were less than twenty people I was allowed to talk to on any given day. I left Teen Challenge STILL being on this discipline, and was not allowed to ever say goodbye to my closest friends because of this, even when I was walking out the doors.

Now, on the contrary, there is also I&I. If you do not get along with a girl, or get into a fight, you can be forced to be at a separate table from everyone else, with them only. I knew of two girls that hated each other and they were forced to do absolutely everything with the other person. They were given pacifiers to wear around their necks and wore pigtails and matching T-shirt’s at all times. As a result this humiliated them on purpose because they were told they were “acting like babies”. I believe they were stuck on this discipline for months.

Another is Daniel Diet. They may give you this for many reasons such as if you steal extra food, if you are “ungrateful” for what is given to you, or sometimes if they just feel like you deserve it. You are given one cup of meat, one cup of fruit, and one cup of veggies per meal (literally measured out). For breakfast you eat a raw slice of bread and one cup of milk also measured. There have been girls that have had to be taken off of this “diet” because they were so malnourished from being on it for months at a time.

If you even talk about wanting to leave whatsoever, especially running away or hinting at it to your parents, they threaten you with shackles, “the boot”, or any number of punishments. I have seen girls shackled behind their backs even in their beds at night.

They also give you “projects”, which are not disciplines but are given to prove a point. Several of us, myself included, had to wear a child’s animal mask for four days straight, as to prove “social media is a mask”. Another girl had to wear a backpack with forty pounds in it at all times, even while working out. This was supposed to be a correlation to the “weight” that holding onto your depression gives you. Another girl was blindfolded for several days straight because she needed to learn to “only rely on her faith”. There is truly no “list” of disciplines I could provide you with, as they can really give you anything they think you deserve at any given time. They have been very creative with these.

There is an online school in another building on the property, which essentially is just a room with computers in it and three teachers to ask school related questions to. Outside of this building, you are not allowed to focus your time on school. You are to only work on your disciplines or memorizing bible verses and furthering yourself in the program, etc. This personally was detrimental to my credits and learning experience. Prior to Teen Challenge, I was already behind. This way of schooling made it much more difficult and ruined my credits further, on top of the mistakes I had previously made in public schooling.

Anything they did “for” us, there seemed to be a catch. I remember a time we all got to go out to pizza because we had helped the director with their own yard work (which was not optional). Another time we got to go out in public to eat because we had helped a staff member move their furniture to another house. Most often if we were ever allowed to go into public or eat out it was paid for by our parents or church. Rarely, if ever, it was funded by Teen Challenge. At one point we all went on a trip a little over three hours away in the middle of nowhere to the directors family farm. We stayed at their local church and slept on mats on the floor in a room which barely had enough space to fit us all. The showers barely worked, and they got mad at us for using the bathroom too much (STAFF also had the only comforters). Every day we went to the farm and worked on building a fence all day, several days in a row with no bathroom. We were told this was an educational experience and would help us. We would also frequently watch over the staffs kids for them while on campus, and their kids would run around the facility while we had to sit at tables in the main room 24/7. I remember a student telling me that the director’s child told her she could tell her to do whatever she wanted, just because she was in a program and her mother was the director (this was coming from a nine year old).

Staff themselves did not communicate much with our parents and we were not allowed to contact family without staff surveillance. They kept our parents in the dark intentionally. I also believe the purpose of having “mentally unstable” girls in the program was for their benefit, as you can easily convince parents their child deserved the cruel treatment. Some parents were told that the girl was not “ready” to go home at the end of their program, convincing parents they needed more time there and pumping more money into the program as a result. A friend of mine had to stay at the program eighteen months instead of fifteen because she “still needed to work on herself”. I have also met girls that had stayed there two to three years.

Little therapy is done. I believe I saw the counselor less than ten times my whole program. I was also told I would have counseling with my family before I was ready to go home near the end of my program, and once it got to that point the director herself told me she does not want to “deal” with my mom. The staff is not counselors or therapists by any means. Most staff have substance abuse problems or are former students. Some staff went to jail while being employed there and that info was kept from us. There were only two trained therapists that I saw very, very little the entire time.

The reason my parents sent me there was because they were afraid I was going to kill myself, and I had been self harming and fighting with them. I had no history of drug abuse or gang violence, like they advertised the program was for. There were several violent and mentally unstable girls there. However, I believe they would take in any girl they could.. anyone willing to pay for it is welcome, and forced to stay, even with no history of violence. Once again, there is a clear and intentional lack of communication. I have seen girls disappear/sent away in the middle of the night because of “bad behavior”, sent somewhere they would not disclose. If we asked, we were told to mind our own business. I have seen girls seizing on the floor and having panic attacks, among other health related issues, and we were told the girls were doing this so they do not have to be here. Like it was an act. I have seen staff accused of sexual acts which they claimed were fake and only to get out of the program. Even if it was, there should be a red flag right there that girls were desperate enough to create a scene in order to get out. In fact, we did not have toilet paper springs at all because a student had previously stabbed herself in the leg with one in order to go to the emergency room and be released from the program. Health issues were ignored. One student had a 106 degree temperature and instead of going to the hospital, she was forced to take ice baths in front of staff because she was too weak to walk. Her family was not informed until a week afterwards and it turned out she had a kidney infection. Since it was not properly treated, this resulted in scarred kidneys and she now has chronic kidney disease for the rest of her life.

I’d also like to bring up that the area surrounding this facility was extremely dangerous. In fact one time there was a shooting, nearly ON the property. We had to go on lockdown in the middle of the school day and we were not told what was going on. They vaguely told our parents what had happened, and threatened us with full restriction if we were to tell our parents our side or even bring it up at all on a phone call. As a result of enduring this, they gave us soda and an extra snack. They would frequently use food to shut us up, it seemed. We were also told plenty horror stories of girls running away (the surrounding neighborhood was extremely high in crime). One girl ran away and went to a house in the same neighborhood, and we were told when she came back she was pleading to be let in because she had been kidnapped and raped repeatedly and burned with cigarettes. We were told of stories like this frequently because they didn’t want us to question running away.

We were also required to work out for an hour a day, minus weekends. We were not allowed to work out at any time besides this even in our rooms because they packed six girls to a bedroom. These workouts were run by an almost 70 year old man, who was previously a football coach. We were not allowed to give up. If one girl told them she could not finish the workout, we all were punished physically. I can think of several times where we ran up and down a hill forty times. It was also common to run 4 miles in an hour for this daily workout. It was extremely grueling. I believe the 70 year old man running workouts was later fired for sexual comments to a staff member. As well as this, I remember a 20 year old staff member snap chatting videos of us working out, zooming in on our faces, making fun of us. I have no idea who those videos were sent to and never gave permission to be recorded in the first place, not that we had a choice. If I was to complain about it I am sure I would be punished.

As well as a $50,000 requirement for attending this program, they accept donations online. There is a horse therapy that we went to for an hour, twice a week for seven weeks in our program, which is an extra cost to your parents. Food is donated. Clothing and toiletries are paid for by your parents. Staff complains about being paid very little. Once again if we go into public, this was mainly paid for by our parents. If our parents paid for it, they were required to pay for everyone’s meal and not just their child, so it happened very little. According to staff, there are “fees for housing minors”. However I can’t help but wonder where a majority of the donation/ and tuition goes. In fact, to save costs, they installed cameras in the hallways and at “school”, which a staff member was to monitor at night (including male staff members). We had no idea when we were actually being watched. It was a lockdown facility, and so it was scary to be alone at night without staff, as we had no way of getting out in an emergency. One time the fire alarms went off in the middle of the night, thankfully on accident, but we had no way of getting out and no idea what to do and had no cell phones. I also recently learned this campus raised upwards of $100,000 for “Covid relief”, whatever that means.

I urge you to not send any child here, as it only amplifies any mental instability they already had. It is hard to know what to do, and what your options are, but I promise there is no valid excuse to send your child here. My first thought was to include other specific stories in along with mine, however I don’t want to put other girls in a stressful situation where they are going to be harassed by staff afterwards.