Last week I shared some of my experiences in Los Angeles.
After that, I was invited to Dallas. This was through the introduction of a man who in his youth was in the notorious KIDS (of El Paso, New Jersey, etc.) Program.
Paul Yanez, filmmaker and photojournalist, introduced me to Mr. Marcus M. Chatfield IV, writer of Institutionalized Persuasion.
My prediction for Marcus is that in the future he’ll be considered an expert in the study of coercive persuasion.
In fact, before I read Marcus’s thesis, when people wanted to understand what I was writing about, I had to direct them to 3 very different books:
- Cults in our Midst by Janja Lalich and Margaret Singer
- Snapping! by Jim Seigelman and Flo Conway, and of course,
- Help at Any Cost, by the eminent social scientist Maia Szalavitz.
But Marcus’s book bridges the gap of those works in focusing on his realizations made in the years since he “graduated” from Straight Inc, in Alexandria, VA.And we realized already that other than SIA of L.A., CAFETY, HEAL, and ASTART, there are pitifully few organizations lobbying for the untold thousands still experiencing undue influence (at a minimum), compounded stresses of all varieties as the norm, and what can often be described as physical and psychological abuse!
Marcus, Paul, and I, among many others, are advocating for understanding and ending the practice of putting compounded emotional pressures on teens in closed environments. There’s an entire history of the privatization of residential programs for teens which we now recognize as but one theater of combat where the “war on drugs,” or as I like to say, the fight for conformity, was fought.
As you know, I went to a place in Idaho called Rocky Mountain Academy/CEDU, which might be compared to a cult disguised as a boarding school for misappropriated, or unruly, teens. All three of us were in our programs for successful bids – meaning each of us completed our “program” after very lengthy stays.
Together we met with Dr. Rick Halperin, Director of the Embrey Human Rights Program at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman College. We talked about how our two recent books unzip each other, and present to readers an inside view of residencies for teens within the US (and overseas facilities operated by American corporations) that engage in human rights deprivations and abuses.
In meeting with Dr. Halperin and Embrey Associate Director, Dr. Brad Klein, it became clear that Marcus Chatfield’s research was on the money: our issues are Human Rights concerns. We’d come to the right place to learn about effective advocacy. I took notes, and began to see how all of my conversations in Dallas and Los Angeles were leading me in an important direction.
In off-time we met informally to think about how to entertainingly present to an uninitiated audience some of the subjects contained in our books, and in the programs.
Some great discourse about possible research came up, but Marcus mentioned how unethical it would be to get “empirical data” that mirrored our “high control groups.”
What we experienced in the three programs could not be replicated, under any circumstances, now. In other words: from a scientific standpoint, the accumulation of empirical data on what we – and many thousands more – experienced at different programs, would be even be against the Geneva Code of conduct for prisoners, and cause the potential for long-term harm, even in willing, consensual participants of legal age! (Are you reading this, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, of the Stanford Prison Experiments?)
We determined that advocating, educating, and assisting or causing social science research, and artistic interpretations are the best ways we can all three be active.
So that’s what I’m doing.
I’ll tell you more about that in a few weeks!
