OMG, I'm feeling physically sick watching a special report on CNN by Anderson Cooper called Ungodly Discipline. It looks like it originally aired back in September, but they're re-airing it tonight. It will be on again at 10pm PT/1am ET. If you miss the replay, here's the full transcript of the CNN piece.
One of the segments was about Hephzibah House in Indiana, which is supposed to be a boarding school for "troubled" girls. But what went on inside seems rather horrific.
GARY TUCHMAN: Me'Chelle was only 12 and brand new in the house when she says two staff women told her to take off her clothes and forced her into a closet where a man would give what Hephzibah House claims is a medical examination.
ME'CHELLE DOWLING: They hold both my legs and both my arms down and let him do this to me. Stuck a speculum inside of me, and I was scared. I was screaming. I didn't want him to touch me. There was nothing I could do.
GARY TUCHMAN: Both women talk about being forced to eat a lot of food, sometimes not being given any food, being forced to drink a lot of water. Susan says 28 girls shared three bedrooms on the upper floor of this house. There was one toilet. But --
SUSAN GROTTE: If I stood up to go to the bathroom, "no, you can only go to the bathroom when you're told."
GARY TUCHMAN: These are big girls you were with?
SUSAN GROTTE: Right.
GARY TUCHMAN: What would happen if you went to the bathroom without asking?
SUSAN GROTTE: You would be paddled, yes.
ME'CHELLE DOWLING: I would wet the bed every single night I was there. They made a spectacle of you like you were this horrible person for doing that. I ended up having to wear pull-ups every night. Would watch me put it on every night, and they'd make me show it to them when I would take it off in the morning.
And guess what? Under Indiana law, the state has no legal recourse to do anything.
GARY TUCHMAN: Hephzibah's web site features pictures of girls who have attended and claims there are no spankings or any out of the ordinary punishments. This facility has been around for about four decades. It seems to be a thriving enterprise.
As you can see the people in charge don't particularly want to answer my questions. We're not alone. They don't really answer government either. In Indiana group homes operated by churches and religious ministries are exempt from licensure. So nobody in the government even knows what's going on behind the closed doors. The women say their parents also had no idea what was going on there.
...
GARY TUCHMAN: The Indiana governor's office says there's nothing it can do. The attorney general's office says it doesn't have jurisdiction and the same thing with the Indiana Department of Education.
Notably though the Indiana Department of Child Services said it could investigate providing there was a current complaint and not from someone who already walked out of door.
We talked to a dozen women who say they were victimized at Hephzibah House, and they said they could never make any private phone calls or send uncensored letters while on the inside. Hephzibah House is not the only facility of its kind. Across the country, victim advocates say there are an unknown, but large number of similar programs.
ME'CHELLE DOWLING: I have nightmares of it all the time. Like very vivid dreams like I'm trapped inside this house again and can't get out. That's like the only thing I want is to run out a door, and for some reason I can't.
SUSAN GROTTE: I think I fantasize about suicide those first years out.
More below the fold.
Tuchman was able to find the head of Hephzibah House, but he didn't want to talk to camera.
GARY TUCHMAN: It's been open a long time, lots of people have complained about getting beaten, emotionally tormented, and mentally tormented in the name of religion. And as a lot of us were very religious, we don't believe in hitting people, tormented them and having to wear diapers and making them drink and making them eat things they don't want to. I want to know why you do that?
DONALD WILLIAMS, HEPHZIBAH HOUSE: I prefer not to decline, sir.
GARY TUCHMAN: But why can't you comment if you believe in what you do? This is your chance to tell viewers.
DONALD WILLIAMS: I understand that, but I prefer not to.
GARY TUCHMAN: If you could tell me why?
DONALD WILLIAMS: I'm respectfully declining.
GARY TUCHMAN: Don Williams is also the pastor at the church on the Hephzibah House grounds. A former church-goer gave CNN a CD sold by the church in which Williams is apparently preaching his views about who is to blame when a male whistles at a female.
DONALD WILLIAMS (recording on audiotape): If you girls are walking down the sidewalk and some fellows drive by and they whistle, you better stop and think about that. What drew that whistle? Was it the way I was walking or maybe the way I was dressed or whatever? Did I do something to defraud those men?
Here's the video of the segment. I hope this works on your browser.
This is hardly new. A quick Google search yielded this post from 2008 about the horrors of Hephzibah House.
And yet it still operates to this day. Do the people of Indiana care? Why haven't they changed the law to MAKE these kind of homes fall under state jurisdiction?