Help at any cost by Maia Szalavitz

Author:Maia Szalavitz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Juvenile detention homes -- United States, Behavior modification -- United States, Youth -- Services for -- United States
Publisher: Riverhead
Published: 2006-06-15T05:00:00+00:00

HELP AT ANY COST

cess of tough love residential care that would meet even the most basic scientific standards.

While this played itself out in the media, I attended one of the most spectacular trials ever related to the use of tough love on teenagers. 3 Lulu Corter had been held in a New Jersey Straight-descendant program called KIDS for thirteen years: from age thirteen to age twenty-six. She had lost not only her adolescence to it, but her early adulthood as well. She represents the worst-case scenario (short of death) of what can happen when such programs are not held to account—and for what happens when they believe they have the right to hold adults indefinitely. The Corter case would also reveal what had become of many former participants decades after their treatment. In the absence of follow-up studies, it was one of the few existing windows on these outcomes, and they proved to be shocking.

Lulu’s tale begins when Straight’s national clinical director, Miller Newton, left Florida and opened his own virtually identical program in New Jersey, KIDS of Bergen County, in the early ’80s. The only major difference between KIDS and Straight was that KIDS added eating disorders and “compulsive behavior disorders” (including “sex addiction”) to the conditions it believed it could treat—just as twelve-step programs had started with alcohol and had come to be seen as treatments for other compulsive and addictive disorders. (Note: Some identifying details regarding witnesses and their relatives in this section have been changed to protect their privacy.)

Lulu Corter wanted a pleather outfit. In the fall of 1984, like most seventh-grade girls, she listened to pop stars like Madonna and wanted to look like them, too. Lulu was thirteen, living in Wanaque, New Jersey, a rural town of some 10,000 people. She wanted, above all, to fit in. The black fake-leather outfit was the closest the daughter of a single mom of four who worked in electronics factories was going to get to dressing like an ’80s icon. She and her best friend found identical black pleather vests

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at the mall. Lulu also bought black pleather pants to match, her friend purchased a skirt of the same material, and they planned to wear Capezio shoes, skinny ties, and white shirts to complete their look. Lulu was tall for her age, chunky, big-boned, and blue-eyed, with feathered light-brown hair.

She wanted to impress some of her older brother Sam’s* friends, who were hanging out a short time later, joking in the Corters’ living room. Lulu was just starting to be interested in boys. She told her mom, Virginia, loudly enough for the other teens to hear, that she wanted to wear her hair in a tail: that whisper-thin braid of just a few longer strands worn with short hair which Boy George had popularized. Lulu added, to sound even more daring, that she wanted to bleach just the back of her hair blond.

But that fall, Virginia had been scrutinizing Lulu’s every move for potential signs of “druggie” behavior.

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