Today is seven years to the day that I left Provo Canyon School (PCS).  Human dignity, especially the dignity of youth, is an issue that I have only been able to speak about starting this year.  Previously I could only speak about issues that impacted my friends and community, I am beginning to confront the ideas that allow “gulag schools” such as PCS to exist. That is not to say PCS has nothing to do with comprehensive sexual education or reproductive autonomy, but sex-ed reform wasn’t a traumatic issue for me to speak about.

There are many voices sharing the indignity to which youth are subjected at these schools, and there are even more voices silent about abuses that happened in their youth at these facilities.  Our society does not attribute to our youth this inherent dignity.

The front page story in the Dallas Morning News yesterday mentioned this: a teenager named Byron with a comprehensive history of violence brought on by paranoid mental illness was shuffled around 10 times, between punitive corrections institutions, mental institutions, and community schools, in the year and a half before he stabbed and killed his special education teacher.  He was not stabilized on any medical regimen, and at one point after refusing the medication, psychiatrists at the corrections institute withheld the drugs that provided him an anchor in reality for weeks at a time. Doctors believed it was an appropriate punishment to stop medication for  a teenager with violent paranoid schizophrenia. This wasn’t “prohibiting him to attend classes with other inmates”, this was taking away his ability to be present, to have control over his own mind. Apparently, there is not a right, but only a privilege to one's own mind as a teenager. No one, of course, has been fired in the incident.

Often, incidents involving youth don’t focus on the impact to the actual youth, but the impact of those responsible for the youth.  The idea of removing a youth from her/his community, placing her/him in a locked-down environment under strict behavior-modification policies that forbid all outside communication when the relationship between parent and child becomes too difficult for the parents to handle alone does not serve the best interests of the youth or the community at large.  Instead of seeking help in the local community or attending family therapy, this removal is tantamount to saying the problem rests only in the "defective" youth who needs to be "reprogrammed." That youth is not a person to be taken seriously, but more like a bad pet needing obedience school, once properly ‘house-broken’, the parents "get their lives back".  After all, not all parents have the opportunity to simply send their children back to Russia. I'm not saying there shouldn't be options for the youth to experience independence in a safe environment while recovering from an eating disorder, drug addiction, post traumatic event, or any serious self-harm. But that's a far throw from the dehumanizing journey that happens at these gulag schools that deny the humanity of the teenagers.

In a slightly less extreme version of  this focus on the guardian rather than the youth, Sunset over at the Feministing Community wrote about Sexual Assault and Young Women: Healing as a Dependent Child. This post brings up many of the same points as stated above: dependent young women may be forced to allow others access to their body, or may not be allowed medical treatment at all. They may not be taken seriously over the word of an adult. It is hard for society to take the problems of a young woman seriously instead labelling her as merely as seeking attention or being selfish.

Comprehensive Sexual Education is often presented in the same way, not as a right for youth in order to be responsible with their bodies, but in terms of the impact on “parental control” over what information their child may access.  Very recently, the Louisiana House shot down a bill that would have allowed comprehensive sexual education in the state. Allowed, not required. Currently, there are no requirements to teach sexual education in public schools, but those who do must teach abstinence. This is a real disservice to youth. If we were serious about the dignity of our children, we would recognize they are not simply an extension of their guardians. And while parents absolutely have the right to bring children up with the morals they believe, these children will also one day be members of a larger society that requires them to have the tools to make healthy decisions about themselves.

(this has been crossposted from my personal blog at lklouise.com and the source article can be found here)