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Keeping families close
Keeping children safe
MISSION:
CAICA seeks to expose the abuse and distress of children placed in private
and
state-funded programs including but not limited to residential
facilities, behavior
modification programs, boot camps, wilderness programs,
and boarding schools.
CAICA believes that no
child should be abducted, incarcerated, abused, neglected,
or
stripped of their basic human rights for the sake of profit.
PURPOSE:
The CAICA website is dedicated to promoting awareness of injuries and
deaths
to children and youth in treatment programs, schools, the juvenile justice system,
and other settings, and to increase our resolve to reform programs and promote
safety for all
children and youth. We welcome families, researchers, academics,
media, attorneys, and
advocates to use the information on this website.
We hope that the information on
this website will provide incentive to parents
nationwide to carefully scrutinize programs offered to their children, to demand
better
accountability, and to work for systems reform so that we understand
what is happening, why
it is happening, and how we achieve positive change.
The actual number of incidents
of injuries and deaths due to restraints, seclusion,
aversives, and coercive interventions to children and youth in treatment programs,
schools, the juvenile justice system, and other settings, remains unknown. It is
suspected that
those reported to the media are only the tip of the iceberg and
that the tip of the iceberg
itself is not routinely archived.
The Government Accounting Office
(GAO) 1999
Report on Improper Restraint or
Seclusion Use Places People at Risk
called for the creation of a national database
for better data
collection on the use of restraint and seclusion. To date one has
not yet been
created.
The GAO’s Results in Brief
stated: “Improper restraint and seclusion can be
dangerous to both people receiving treatment and staff, but the full extent of
related
injuries and deaths is unknown. There is no comprehensive reporting
system to track such
injuries and deaths or the rates of restraint and seclusion
use by facility. Because reporting
is so fragmentary, we believe many more
deaths related to restraint or seclusion may occur.
Data on use of restraint and
seclusion are also fragmentary because most facilities are not
required to report
these data to oversight agencies.”
Further, the GAO is currently
preparing a report regarding residential treatment
facilities that is scheduled to be published Winter 2008. According to
the
GAO's
website:
What is GAO? Under
recently passed legislation, we have changed our name from
the General Accounting Office to the Government Accountability Office.
The
Government Accountability Office (GAO) is an agency that works for
Congress and
the American people. Congress asks GAO to study the programs and
expenditures
of the federal government. GAO, commonly called the investigative arm of
Congress
or the congressional watchdog, is independent and nonpartisan. It studies
how the
federal government spends taxpayer dollars. GAO advises Congress and the
heads
of executive agencies (such as Environmental Protection Agency, EPA,
Department
of Defense, DOD, and Health and Human Services, HHS) about ways to make
government more effective and responsive. GAO evaluates federal programs,
audits
federal expenditures, and issues legal opinions. When GAO reports its
findings to
Congress, it recommends actions. Its work leads to laws and acts that
improve
government operations, and save billions of dollars.
CAICA is responding to the GAO’s
call. Until we improve data collection and
achieve a national database, this website is dedicated to beginning that process
by
archiving as much information as we can collect from a variety of sources.
CAICA thanks its many volunteers
for their hard work and dedication to helping
to achieve our goals, and for its many supporters.
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