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Back in 2006, “David,” an honors student in Colorado, told his parents that he was gay. One morning shortly afterward, his parents woke him up, restrained him with a belt and bundled him on a plane to the Dominican Republic. He was being sent to Escuela Caribe, a nominally Christian-oriented boarding school for troubled teens located in the mountain town of Jarabacoba, 96 miles west of Santo Domingo. I say “nominally” because what David and others had to endure at that school, until it was closed and sold in 2011, could not be further from being Christlike.

David’s ordeal, and those of several other kids, is revealed in “Kidnapped for Christ,” which premiered in January at the Slamdance Film Festival in Salt Lake City and is now airing on Showtime. However, it didn’t originally start out that way. The film’s director, Kate Logan, intended to film a documentary about the school for her senior project as a film major at Biola University, a conservative evangelical school near Los Angeles whose best-known alumnus is Senator John Thune. She told Newsweek that at first glance, it looked like a “heartwarming story about troubled, underprivileged kids” who were getting the help they badly needed. The school, which was run by New Horizons Youth Ministries of Marion, Indiana; billed itself on its former Website as offering what similar programs in the United States could not offer in order to put wayward kids back on the right path–“atmosphere, culture shock, and distance.”

The centerpiece of the program was “culture shock,” which New Horizons defined as “a form of psychological disorientation produced by a sudden and complete change in one’s cultural environment,” with a view toward making its students “remarkably more dependent upon our Christian staff for direction and emotional support, while also rendering them more malleable and capable of new perspectives.” Whatever one may think about this therapy on paper, it was amply demonstrated that in practice, it amounted to behavior that any fair-minded person would consider child abuse.

New Horizons had actually been under fire since 2006, when freelance writer Julia Scheeres wrote “Jesus Land,” an account of her time at Escuela Caribe from 1984 to 1985. The book prompted other survivors of Escuela Caribe and other New Horizons programs to come forward with their stories. Eventually, 35 people who attended New Horizons programs from the 1970s through 2000s documented their experiences at a Website called “The Truth About New Horizons Youth Ministries.” Their experiences are almost an echo of each other–beatings by staff members, getting spanked with leather or wooden paddles, forced labor, being placed in isolation for several days, etc., etc.

However, it’s one thing to hear about abuse. It’s quite another to witness it first-hand. Logan’s mother has a PhD in psychology, so it didn’t take long for her to realize that there was something rotten in the state of Escuela Caribe. She told the Calgary Herald that not long after she arrived, she noticed staffers were engaging in practices that were unprofessional at best and potentially illegal at worst. Students’ lives were governed by a point system based on obedience; the more points you got, the less abuse you had to endure. Logan told me that the lowest-ranked students had to ask permission from their house fathers for just about everything–even to go to the bathroom.

Besides David, Logan followed two other kids–Tai, who had troubles with drugs and alcohol, and Beth, who suffered from anxiety. Logan told me that they went into considerable detail about the school’s heavy-handed discipline. Even the most trivial infractions–such as being seconds late finishing chores (even though they could not possibly be completed in the allotted time), looking at someone of the opposite sex in the “wrong” way or just “spacing out”–got punished with extended exercise. The students could hardly question these practices; anyone who did so was branded as a “rebel,” and would be punished even more harshly. Beth and Tai frequently spoke about getting painful spankings, or “swats” as they were called, for stepping out of line.

She also told me that school officials went great lengths to keep parents from learning the truth about what was happening. All phone calls and letters back home were tightly monitored, and staffers were even known to redact mail. Whenever parents did ask questions, staffers fell all over themselves to explain away parental concerns and make parents believe that this program would “save” their kids. She doesn’t think that most parents would have kept their kids in the program if they knew what was really happening. From the looks of it, it was all in the name of keeping the money flowing in–at the time of its closure, Escuela Caribe’s tuition ran to $72,000 a year–more than the average tuition for Harvard.

Logan told me that she knew within a week of her arrival that”things were very off” about the school. However, it had been made very clear to her that if she spoke up about what she was seeing, she would be booted off campus on the spot. Although she spoke with some of the heads of the school, she knew that they were “beyond hearing anything critical of their program.” This comes as no surprise at all to me. I was deceived into joining a highly abusive campus ministry during my freshman year at Carolina, and whenever I spoke out against them, the response I usually got from them was that I had no right to say anything unless it was positive.

Considering that Logan was on a very short leash, she did an admirable job detailing the real goings-on at the school. Under the guise of filming daily life, she would frequently sit or stand next to a student with a wireless boom mic in hand while her cameraman, Peter Borrud, rolled on it from far enough away so as not to attract suspicion. The students were the only ones who knew they were being filmed. She used similar methods to film some of the confrontations between students and staffers. While she was never able to get some of the most disturbing practices–such as the “swats” or prolonged isolation–on film, she was able to get quite a few allusions to them. Later, she interviewed several former students and staffers, who revealed that the school had operated in this manner for over three decades with little oversight.

By far the most gutwrenching part of the story is what David had to endure to get out. By the time Logan and her crew arrived, David was nearing his 18th birthday, and he believed that he would be free to go at that point. However, to his surprise, he was told that he didn’t have any rights in the Dominican Republic. Not long afterward, Logan and her crew were booted out–but not before David passed a note to her which she gave to a friend in Colorado. That friend put together a team that went to the Dominican Republic and enlisted the help of the U. S. consulate to free him on his 18th birthday–only to be told (falsely) that David wasn’t there. It took a writ of habeas corpus–the same document used to keep people from being held in jail without lawful cause–to get him out. David’s ordeal lends credence to accusations that the school, and many others like it, deliberately set up shop offshore in order to engage in practices that would never be acceptable in this country. At least 157 kids have died in the last 40 years at this and similar programs.

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By the time Logan finished work on the film, New Horizons had shut down. Another organization, Crosswinds, bought the former Escuela Caribe property and renamed it “Caribbean Mountain Academy.” Crosswinds’ CEO, Mark Terrell, told Newsweek that he felt much of what happened at Escuela Caribe was “tragic.” He did say, however, that five staff members remained on hand after the transition after being extensively vetted.

On the film’s Website, Logan urges viewers to get their lawmakers to support the “Stop Child Abuse In Residential Programs For Teens Act,” which would require greater oversight for these residential programs. Congressman George Miller (D-Calif.), the author of the House version, has tried to get similar legislation passed four times, but it has never come up for a vote. There’s little chance that this attempt will be successful before Miller retires at the end of the year. It’s too bad. After all, David, Beth, Tai and the others who had to endure this hell deserve to get some measure of justice.

Let us know what you think at the Liberal America Facebook page.

Edited/Published by JA

Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.

