Why are "therapeutic schools" a booming --if questionable--business? Elliot Currie has an answer -- the changes in middle class culture since the 1960s.
He says the answer has four parts:
Specifically, Currie identifies four elements that contribute to middle-class white kids drifting into trouble with drugs, sex, and deep anomie:
- "the inversion of responsibility" -- by this, Currie means parents who believe it is right to abrogate their parental responsibilities for guidance, nurturing, and care. It's the child, not the parent, who has the problem.
- "the problem of contingent worth"--parents and schools who value the child based on what the child produces (grades, sports) not the child's essence.
- "intolerance of transgression"--zero tolerance policies in schools, "tough love" type parenting, the mistake-free demands.
- "rejection of nurturance"--families who are quick to find things wrong, and discipline by excluding the child from the family circle and by labeling the child as bad.
Currie has a chapter, "There's No Help Out There": The World of Therapeutic Darwinism that reviews the troubled-teen-help industry and finds it wanting.
In theory, these encounters might have been able to buffer the effects of punitive or neglectful families. In practice, they often compounded them.
The elements here are:
- Treatment centers are quick to medicate, slow to do more detailed work
- Many of the children Currie interviewed had been "diagnosed" with learning disablities, usually ADHD, and medicated for that, but did not have access to other forms of self-management (such as cognitive behavioral therapy)
- "The pejorative assumption"----the unthinking and rigid assumption, on the part of treatment centers and parents, that a problem between a child and her parents, or a child and school, was a problem only and always inside the child, a problem of her character or personality, not ever a problem caused by the parents or the institution.
- The markedly punitive nature of the "help" kids get -- "intervention, when it came, often involved a predictable combination of harshness and exclusion, together with a stunning lack of concern for the consequences".
- A tendency on the part of the "helping institutions" of equating "recovery" with "better compliance". A child is "being treated" when she is presented with a long list of rules and strict, harsh punishment for breaking those rules.
Hallmarks of a bad program:
- Enforced silence on the part of the children, instead of open and honest dialog
- When the child breaks rules, excluding the child from the social circle (such as it is) instead of inclusion and curiousity about the child's reasons for breaking the rules;
- Responding to transgressions with isolation and shaming of the child, rather than understanding and firm guidance.
Currie comments on the culture of the "struggling teen" industry:
Indeed, the degree to which an emphasis on punishment dominated the inner culture of many "helping" programs bordered on the bizarre. Every institution that deals with troubled people, to be sure, requires some way of maintaining discipline, and achieving a blaance between discipline and support is never easy. But the discipline meeted out in many of the gaencies encountered by these teenagers was often explicitly designed to demean and humiliate them. (p. 161)
Justin Torres has a three-part review: Introduction, Acknowleding reality, and Where to go. Bill Wallo has an excellent review at Blogcritics. Corrie Pikul wrote about the book for Salon. Homiletics Online has a sermon based on the book's themes. MyShelf has a brief review. Buzzle.com has another brief review. Tracy Farnsworth has a brief review. Steven Martinovich has a rather dismissive review, and is not moved to action. However, David Chartrand thought Currie's analysis was correct.
(other online places about struggling teens: 63 Days (a diary from a girl who was sent to a "teen boot camp"--here's the story of a girl who died) What it Takes to Pull Me Through; The Epidemic; ;a site focused on monitoring the care and treatment of youth by the privatized behavior modification industry, TeenAdvocatesUSA)
Interview with Elliot Currie focusing on crime statistics and the reasons for change.
Article on Currie's philosophy of crime and social change by Sarah van Gelder.
Elliot Currie is a professor of Criminology, Law & Society and Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine.
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