Archive | May 2022
29/05/2022  

894. Presbyterian Children’s Village

Now called “TheVillage” so it does not pop up on Search engines when people look for awful incidents in the past, the facility was involved in placing a child in an abusive foster home, had to fire a teacher for sleeping with one of the children and had to involve the police when a fight took place on campus.

It does not sound like a fun place to be as a teenager. In fact one of the person who were placed there as a child wrote on Reddit.

Hi. I just found this subreddit. As a teenager, I spent a year a Presbyterian Children’s Village (PCV) because I was a sad kid in an abusive home with no where else to go. I have a lot of mixed feelings about my experience there. It has created some trauma of its own that I’ve found hard to process. Here are my experiences.

Sometimes I feel like I’m being petty because my experiences aren’t as bad as they could have been. I had a lot of trauma going into PCV, but I was always treated as if I was crazy and my trauma was not real. This really messed me up. I got singled out a lot in groups by the house Staff as having a good home life, despite the fact that I was there because my parents couldn’t care for me. None of my personal information was ever private. The house staff would share everything with the other kids in the house. Having no privacy had a big impact, because kids will use that against you. I think the house staff knew that too. Theft was also a big issue. And it wasn’t just the other kids. The staff would often steal from me. Everything I owned got stolen at some point. I also had a really hard time at night time. Kids would jump you in the middle of the night and the staff didn’t really care. It’s taken me a long time to process this experience. It was supposed to be therapeutic, but at the end it created more issues for me. It was an environment where nobody believed me and where I was always a liar. I was always presumed to be bad and if something happened, it didn’t matter because I was a throwaway kid.We were all treated as throwaways. I felt like the general feeling was that we weren’t going to be anything. It was like they were preparing us to be criminals and nothing more. That’s always stuck with me and caused me a lot of pain.

Neville1989

Let us hope that they clear their act up.

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22/05/2022  

893. The Putney School

The school was founded in 1935. A large number of important people are listed as alumnis.

They were mentioned in a lawsuit where an old man froze to death after he donated his money to the school.

Recently former students have criticized the school for not protecting the younger student from older students who have felt their sexuality violated.

One incident is the described in an article in “The Commons”

APOPULAR SENIOR BOY cornered me alone in the basement of the dining hall, where I had gone to use one of the school’s few payphones. This boy, 18 or 19 years old to my 14, began pressuring me to have sex with him.

I refused, but he persisted, complimenting my looks, professing his desires, and masterfully laying on the charm. Eventually, feeling worn down and not knowing what else to do, I gave up and schlepped with him across campus to his dorm room.

We had sex. I don’t recall hating it, or feeling much of anything—just numbness. In any case, I must have subconsciously reasoned, he was friendly enough, and good-looking, and it was better than being bullied.

Alison Dean

On Reddit a former student claim that the school withheld food, possibility to sleep and forced students to work hard outside as punishment and avoided using medical care.

It could not have been fun to be there as a student.

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15/05/2022  

892. Fulton

Fulton is a three-masted schooner built in 1914 and also the name of a behavior modification program established in 1970 by Mogens Frohn Nielsen. The purpose was to change the behavior of at-risk teenage boys by letting them work at sea.

Unfortunately corporal punishment was used and this had been outlawed some years before leading the the firing of Nielsen in 1987. The program was slightly changed and continued under new management until it went bankrupted in 2013. Today the ship is still sailing run by another foundation.

It could not have been fun to be there as a teenager exposed to beatings and other forms of corporal punishment.

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08/05/2022  

891. Ocean Life

In 2008 newspapers in both Spain and Denmark reported about an arrest of a Danish captain who commandeered a ship with troubled youth. The reason of the arrest was abandoning a teenager on the island of Islote de Lobos. Marooning is an ancient form of punishment which had not been used in recent decades. The Island while not having any permanent inhabitants were guarded by some officials and by pure luck the boy was picked out. He was not dressed to a life on his own.

The Spanish authorities were shocked by the discovery and arrested the Dane responsible for the act.

In Denmark an inquest was conducted by protected by the social services who had referred the boys to the program but nothing happened as it properly would have embarrassed the case workers who referred the children to the program for not investigating properly what the public funds was use for.

It could not have been fun to be there when they use punishments like this.

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01/05/2022  

890. Mount Cashel Orphanage

Mount Cashel Orphanage also known as Mount Cashel Boys Home was located in St. Johns, Canada. It was open between 1898 and 1990 and operated by the Congregation of Christian Brothers.

Starting in 1975 the authorities began an investigation into child abuse. A number of further investigations resulted in a number of lawsuits and convicts.

It could not have been fun to be there as a student.

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