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Officials to Investigate 'Tough
Love' Facility Here
January 17, 2003
By Tim Rogers
Tico Times Staff
It's not exactly the traditional "happily ever after" storybook
ending, but Carey Bock is calling last week's court battle in the
U.S. against her former husband a "victory for the family."
Three months after liberating her twin sons Garred and Geoffrey, 17,
from the controversial behavior modification program at Costa Rica's
Dundee Ranch Academy, a Louisiana judge ruled Jan. 9 that Ms. Bock
did not violate a court order by busting her kids out of the
program, and the boys will not be forced to go back.
Rosalia Gil, Minister of
Costa Rica's Child Welfare Agency (PANI), told The Tico Times this
week she was "worried" about reports on Dundee Ranch and is taking
steps to open an official investigation.
Bock's former husband,
Mike Bock, originally wanted his sons returned to Dundee, a former
hotel located on a 40-acre campus surrounded by cattle farms on the
Central Pacific slope near Orotina (TT, Oct. 25, 2002). Both boys
have a history of drug abuse and severe discipline problems, and
their father thought the academy's extreme "tough-love" methods
might get them back on the right track.
But following court
testimony from psychiatrist David Clark, who has been counseling the
twins since they returned from Dundee last October, the judge and
even Mr. Bock ultimately agreed the boys should not be sent back to
Costa Rica.
"The boys are not going
back to Dundee; they are going to stay here and get the help they
need," said a relieved Ms. Bock during a phone interview this week.
Dundee Ranch Academy - the newest affiliate of the Utah-based
WorldWide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP) - is home to 163
troubled teenagers, mostly from the United States. The WWASP's nine
programs in the U.S. and abroad have come under fire and repeated
lawsuits from critics who claim the facilities are run more like
prison camps than educational institutions (TT, Oct. 25, 2002).
Boosters of the WWASP
programs argue that extreme disciplinary measures are necessary to
help troubled teens struggling with extreme problems.
"We are not here to
punish kids; that is not part of the program," said Utah native Joe
Atkin, director of Dundee Ranch.
But allegations of
psychological and physical abuse - including pinning students' arms
behind their backs or sentencing them to 12 hours of solitary
confinement on their knees (known as Observational Placement, or O.P.)
- have prompted authorities to raid or investigate affiliated
programs in Mexico, the Czech Republic and Utah - all three of which
are now closed.
Since the late 1990s, WWASP has been named in seven lawsuits in Utah
courts by parents alleging negligence and abuse in its programs, The
Salt Lake Tribune reported this week. However, WWASP has never paid
any plaintiff a cent in damages, and many of the cases have been
dismissed, association president Ken Kay told the newspaper.
At Dundee Ranch,
incoming "students" are stripped of all basic privileges - including
the right to talk - and are punished for minor infractions, such as
looking out the window, scratching themselves without permission, or
looking at a member of the opposite sex. Students who habitually
violate the academy's rules will soon be sentenced to serve time at
Dundee's "High Impact" walled compound, where they will remain
incarcerated until they walk 100 miles around a gravel track to win
their freedom. High Impact is in the final stage of construction and
scheduled to be open by early next month.
Those who manage to
comply with the strict rules can earn points, and higher-level
students are allowed to discipline lower-level or newly arrived
students.
Not all kids sent to WWASP programs by parents or court order go
willingly. In extreme cases, desperate parents pay burly "escorts"
to literally break into their houses at night and drag kids off to
one of WWASP's programs, in handcuffs if necessary. The same escorts
-- part of a growing child behavior modification industry -- were
hired by Ms. Bock to help bust her twins out of Dundee.
According to Dr. Clark,
the Bock twins were "traumatized" by their experience at the
academy, and, upon their return to the United States, acted "head
down and compliant."
"They were terrified of
the possibility of going back because of what they said goes on
there," the psychiatrist told The Tico Times this week during a
phone interview. "If what the boys say is true, they are both
suffering legitimate stress disorder."
Clark became even more
concerned when Geoffrey Bock recounted stories of being forced to
"watch torture videos, so we would know how good we have it here."
"We would watch videos
of people getting tortured in war camps; lots of stuff about Hitler
and the Jew camps," he told The Tico Times last October.
Dundee owner and Utah
native Narvin Lichfield said in October kids watch "education
videos," but didn't know if any of them were on World War II.
The twins were allowed
once a week to e-mail their father, living in Brazil. But Mr. Bock
later discovered the glowing messages he was receiving were being
monitored by the Dundee staff.
Atkin, son of J. Ralph
Atkin, who owned the Czech Republic program that was closed for
allegedly torturing and illegally imprisoning 57 children, denied
e-mails are monitored, but said they should be. "We are not doing as
much as we ought to be doing," he said this week.
However, a former Dundee
employee told The Tico Times this week that staff regularly screened
and commented on e-mails, as is specified in the enrollment
agreement. Teen residents are not allowed direct access to the
Internet, so all e-mails are sent and received by the staff.
Kristin Whitchurch, 15,
recently returned to her home in St. Paul, Minnesota, after spending
a year at Dundee for behavior problems. She said "manipulation is a
big issue" at the academy.
"We were afraid to write
home about the program because we didn't want [staff] to think we
were manipulating our parents," she said. "Some girls who wrote
their parents about what was going on were confronted by staff."
Some parents are not
allowed any communication with their children. Despite claiming to
have joint custody of her daughter, Su Flowers was denied
communication with 14-year-old Nicole, who was sent to the academy
by her father.
Flowers claims she
arranged to talk to her daughter for five minutes on Christmas, but
Dundee staff did not answer the phone all day and then later told
her via e-mail that future communication with Nicole was prohibited.
Another concerned
mother, Karen Burnett of Shepherdsville, Kentucky, is also speaking
out against the academy, following the return of her 17-year-old son
Nathan, who was in the Costa Rica program from April to August 2002.
She claims the
literature and promotional videotapes were misleading, and don't
mention anything about "diet deprivation or physical restraint."
When Burnett aired her concerns on private Internet message boards
set up for the parents of Dundee students, she became worried about
what she called the "cookie cutter" responses, telling her to "trust
the program" and "you are being manipulated by your son."
"The parents are just as
brainwashed as the kids," she charged.
Yet despite the growing
criticism, defenders of Dundee - advertised on its Web page as a
"Paradise for Change" - and the other WWASP institutions are adamant
about the merits of the program. Atkin said 30 students are
currently positioned to graduate from Dundee in the near future, and
Lichfield claims those who make it through the program have a
greater than 90% "non-relapse" rate.
Even Mr. Bock, despite
agreeing that his sons should not be sent back to Dundee, claims it
helped them.
"If they are here and
they are doing well, there's only one reason for that; and that's
the program," he said during last week's court case, as quoted by
The Times Picayune.
Lichfield, a former
used-car salesman with a background in marketing, claims he would
send his own kids to the program because it teaches students to live
with the consequences of their actions.
"I can choose to speed
in my car, but the consequences of getting caught is having my
rights removed," he said. "Most of the kids here have been speeding
a long time."
Staff members are also
expected to deal with the consequences of their actions. Two former
academy employees were reportedly fired when a male staffer
allegedly raped and assaulted a female staff member last August.
Medical records at San José's CIMA hospital show the victim was
treated for a brain hemorrhage resulting from her beating.
Atkin told The Tico
Times this week the alleged victim was not raped or assaulted
because no charges were filed. Asked what happened, he said: "I
don't know exactly," and dismissed the incident a "non-issue."
The U.S. Embassy
recently paid a visit to Dundee, but claims it found everything to
be "status quo," according to spokeswoman Marcia Bosshart.
Other than periodic
unannounced visits from the Embassy, Dundee, which is not legally
registered as an educational institution in Costa Rica, has little
contact with the outside world.
The academy claims on
its Web page that ("The students) are visited every day by the local
police department of Orotina," and the Child Welfare Agency (PANI)
"checks on the students as well."
However, regional police
commander Rafael Rodríguez told The Tico Times patrol cars pass
Dundee Ranch twice a week as part of their regularly scheduled
rounds, but police don't enter the compound unless called. Only once
in the last several months have police entered the campus, when they
were called to help look for a student who ran away, Rodríguez
added.
The PANI, meanwhile, has
not visited Dundee since 2001 because no formal complaints have been
filed, according to regional chief Marta Jiménez, who claims she
asked PANI Minister Gil to review information on the academy last
October, but never heard back from her.
Gil, however, said
Wednesday that based on The Tico Times' Oct. 25 report, the PANI is
going to open an investigation of Dundee.
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