If you have some time, this is a good read to perhaps figure out more about where I'm coming from with my whole crazy "youth rights" thing.
WANT YOUR KID TO DISAPPEAR?
By Nadya Labi
Legal Affairs, July 2004
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For $1,800, former Atlanta police officer Rick Strawn will make that problem child someone else's problem. He even makes house calls.
Louis Boussard has hired a professional to abduct his son.
Flicking on the lights to look for Boussard's number, Strawn dialed his cellphone. "Um, Louis. Hi. Does your house have a circle driveway with a Jag in it?" he said. "If you're ready, we'll come on in. Is he asleep?" The connection broke up. Moments later, Strawn's phone rang. "Much better, yes. No, don't wake him up. We're going to talk to you for about an hour," he said. "I'm going to help you through all that. Okay. Bye-bye."
We drove back to the house at a crawl and got out of the car, easing the doors shut. Both men wore khaki pants and dark blue shirts embossed with a globe logo and the website address of Strawn's company. Strawn walked up the stone pathway, peered in the window of the front door, and lightly rapped. No one answered. "Maybe he said go around the back," Strawn said. "Wait here for a second." He began to walk toward the back of the house when a light came on inside.
A Haitian-American man in his late 40s opened the front door and beckoned us inside. Boussard (his name and the names of his wife and son have been changed) guided us to a dining-room table covered by a white tablecloth. It held a white vase filled with artificial pink flowers and two fat red candles in wrought iron stands. The matching white cushions of the dining-room chairs were covered in plastic. Boussard sat at the head of the table, flanked by his wife, Sandra. In spite of the late hour, they were impeccably dressed—he wore a beige linen suit and she wore a scoop-necked sweater set off by a gold necklace and bracelets. The couple's formality, however, soon gave way to the urgency of the task at hand. Two rooms away on the other side of the kitchen, their 16-year-old son, Louis, Jr., lay asleep in his bedroom.
The Boussards had hired Strawn Support Services to transport Louis, Jr. to Casa by the Sea, a school near Ensenada, Mexico that seeks to "modify" the behavior of troublemaking teens. Casa takes kids who parents have decided are out of control, usually because the teens are talking back, getting poor grades, staying out late, drinking, having sex too soon, or taking drugs.
Louis, Jr.'s parents had not told him that he was going to Mexico—nor how he would be taken there. They thought he would run if he knew what was about to happen. Now they kept glancing in the direction of the kitchen. "Louis is very suspicious," Sandra whispered about her son as her husband began a hurried account of the teen's misbehavior.
The troubles had begun a year earlier when Louis, Jr. was in 10th grade. His grades fell from A's and B's to C's and below. He stopped playing basketball with his father. He started talking back when his mother wouldn't let him go out to clubs with his friends. He broke his curfew, which was 7:30 p.m. during the week and 9 p.m. on the weekends. Often he left the house by his bedroom window. The Boussards thought Louis, Jr. might be smoking pot. Then all of a sudden, his report cards improved dramatically. "I thought, something is not right," said Boussard, squinting at the memory. He discovered a bad report card in his son's backpack, and Louis admitted that he had faked the good ones.
The Boussards enrolled their son in counseling; the counselor said he was doing fine. They sent him to boot camp for a day, where he got anger-management and drug counseling. He behaved better for about a week. At around the same time, Louis was told that he had to repeat 10th grade. His parents transferred him to a vocational program in carpentry at his high school with the hope that he would find the schoolwork easier. Louis hated it.
Strawn listened to this litany of frustrations, nodding sympathetically. Then, he took a breath and started the spiel that he has honed over the course of six years and some 300 transports. "Behavior is as addictive as any drug or alcohol," he told the Boussards. Like all troubled kids, Louis, Jr. needed to recover from his bad behavior. "The way I look at it," Strawn continued, "any good recovery has three components: breaking down old habits, building a strong foundation, and building new habits." But Boussard père was not paying attention. He was still steamed about the fake report cards. "I said 'Something is not right,' " he repeated.
There was a slight noise, and he and his wife jumped.
"Do we need to have Josh go outside?" Strawn asked, referring to his assistant.
"He's very suspicious," Sandra whispered, glancing over her shoulder toward her son's room.
Strawn went outside to make sure that Louis had not climbed out of his bedroom window. The teen seemed to be asleep, but Strawn left Dalton outside to stand guard. On the air conditioner outside the window was a bottle of cologne, which Strawn guessed Louis used to freshen up before his nights out.
Strawn squeaked back into his chair and rushed through his usual script. Now was not the moment to dwell on his own recovery from alcoholism, or to lead the prayer circle that he often suggests before a trip. He ran through what his clients should expect when he entered Louis's room. Strawn advised them to introduce him to Louis, to give their son a hug if Louis let them, and then to walk away. "The hardest thing I ask a parent to do is to turn around and walk out," he said. "Don't come back, no matter what you see or hear."
The mother and father nodded, shifting in their seats. Boussard got a black overnight bag from a closet and handed it to Strawn, along with a check for $1,800. In return, Strawn asked him to sign a notarized power-of-attorney that authorized his company to take "any act or action" on the parents' behalf during the transport to Casa. The document also promised that the couple would not sue for any injuries caused by "reasonable restraint." Strawn warned them that he would take Louis away in handcuffs. The father signed the release, then seemed to have a moment of buyer's remorse. He said he'd been obsessively reading the catalogue for Casa. "All of a sudden, the intensity just takes off," Boussard said about sending his son away. "We feel like we failed."
"Let me help you out there," Strawn reassured him. "I go to families all the time with four or five siblings. Only one of them decided to take this path. If it had anything to do with your parenting skills . . . " His voice trailed off. "It isn't because of that."
"We don't want to see him go to prison or jail," said Boussard, rubbing his hands over his face again and again. "Will he understand what we're trying to do for him?"
Boussard got up from the table with a sigh. The rest of us followed close behind. He walked into the kitchen and took a dinner knife out of a drawer, explaining that he would use it to pry open his son's locked door. Sliding the knife into the crack between the door and the wall, he prepared to enter.
RICK STRAWN IS AN EX-COP WHO STARTED HIS COMPANY in 1988 to help police officers find off-duty work guarding construction sites. Ten years later, he was asked by a member of his United Methodist church to transport the churchgoer's son to Tranquility Bay in Jamaica. The school is run by the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, a company headquartered in Utah that owns eight schools in the United States and abroad, including Louis, Jr.'s destination.
Strawn said no to that first inquiry because he knew the boy involved. But he had stumbled upon what he now believes is his calling. In his first year of business, he escorted eight teens to behavior modification schools. Since then, his company has transported more than 700 kids between the ages of 8 and 17. Strawn has gone on about half of the trips himself; on the others he has sent agents. Either way, the company generally uses two escorts for the part of a trip that's on the road. Girls are escorted by coed teams; in the early years, Strawn relied on his wife, mother, or older daughter to help him on these trips. Now his wife, Susan, runs the company's office from the family home in the Atlanta suburb of Suwanee. After every trip, she sends the client a card with the message: "Just a note to say thank you for allowing us to assist your family."
Balding and slightly soft in the gut, Strawn is a reassuring 52-year-old. He speaks with a light drawl—he was born in Lubbock, Tex.—and he seems to mean it when he drops endearments like "hon." Strawn's easy manner has won over many parents and school administrators. "He's one of the few escorts who takes the time and effort to talk to the kids," said Karina Zurita, the admissions coordinator at Casa. "He lets kids know that they'll be in good hands."
But if Strawn is decent and likable, he will also go to almost any length to get his charges to do what their parents want. He has chased kids down. He has dragged teens to the car in their underwear. He has used a choke hold, learned as a cop, to render a few others unconscious. He has taken suicidal kids from hospital treatment to reform school.
Most of Strawn's clients are genuinely concerned about their children's welfare. They believe their children are at risk and want to save them. But these parents also revel in forcing their kids to sit up, pay attention, and do what they're told. Glenda Spaulding, who took out four loans to send her 14-year-old daughter to a WWASP school in South Carolina last November, had three words for Strawn before he took the girl away: "Go get her."
Strawn's willingness to use force differentiates him from other escorts. While no one tracks the teen transport industry, those in the business estimate that more than 20 companies nationwide take kids to behavior modification schools, residential treatment centers, and boot camps. Some of the bigger companies are more selective than Strawn about what they'll do. The Center for Safe Youth in Atlanta, for example, doesn't use restraints to force a child to go anywhere. And the center won't transport kids to WWASP schools because educational consultants with whom the company works don't recommend them. Its owner, John Villines, would like to create a professional association to oversee the transport industry. The standards he proposes are rudimentary: no agents with felony convictions or histories of irresponsible driving or drug and alcohol abuse. But they set the bar higher than almost any state does.
Instead of operating by rules, the escort industry runs on trust—the trust that parents won't put their kids in harm's way. But there is no trust between parents and kids in the households that Strawn enters. It has broken down so completely that parents think it's okay, and even courageous, to send a stranger into their child's bedroom. Strawn makes his living from that judgment and he is willing to mislead a child for what he sees as the greater goal of reform.
Once parents put their kids at Strawn's mercy, for a short time he is in loco parentis—in the place of the parent—in the fullest sense of the term. He has the authority to tell a kid what to do and to punish him for failing to obey. At the same time, he is the only person left to cling to when a kid is on the threshold of a scary, unknown world.
Three years ago, Strawn escorted Valerie Ann Heron, a 17-year-old from Montgomery, Ala., to Tranquility Bay. The school is the most hardcore in the WWASP system, the one to which students are sent when they repeatedly cause trouble at other schools. The trip went smoothly, according to Heron's mother, Nell Orange, and Strawn played his role well. "He made her feel comfortable with him. She trusted him. He talked to her about what to expect, where she was going," Orange said. "She gave him a hug when she left him."
The day after that hug, Valerie rushed out of a second-floor classroom and jumped to her death off a 35-foot-high balcony.
The suicide didn't faze Strawn. He didn't ask himself whether he should have taken Valerie to Tranquility Bay and left her there, or whether she needed more help and tenderness than the tough-love school provides. He doesn't even acknowledge that she might have been upset or unhinged enough to kill herself. "We had a really good trip. We were laughing and cutting it up," Strawn recalled. "Was she suicidal? Till the day I die, I won't believe that." Without any evidence, Strawn says that Valerie must have jumped in an effort to run away or in hopes of hurting herself so that she would be sent home. She landed on her head instead of her feet, he thinks, because one foot got caught in the balcony. "My feeling is that the majority of kids who talk about suicide, they're not suicidal," Strawn said. "What they are is manipulative."
LOUIS, JR. SAT STRAIGHT UP IN HIS BED. He was surrounded by three strangers and his parents. His chest was bare, and white acne medicine stood out against the dark skin of his forehead. He grabbed his wire-rimmed glasses from the bedside table and blinked a few times. The basketball posters of Tracy McGrady and Kobe Bryant were still there. His childhood teddy bear sat in a low-slung armchair by the door.
"Do you have some underwear on?" Louis's father said. "They're here to help us. They're here to take you to a school."
Louis shook his head to clear it.
"The only thing we want you to know is that we love you very much," Boussard continued. He and his wife stepped forward to hug Louis, but the gesture was forced and none of them seemed to want the contact.
"Where am I going? When am I coming home?"
Louis's parents walked out the door.
Strawn broke the silence that followed their exit. He launched into what he calls "the scenario," a three-minute script that he instructs his employees to memorize and deliver, right down to a required chuckle. "Personally, I feel like I do it better than anyone else because I designed it," Strawn had explained earlier. The scenario is the key to a smooth escort, he believes. It gives teens time to cool off, weigh their options, and realize that their best course of action is to follow orders.
"I want you to know that we are not here to be bad guys and bullies. We are not here to lecture you, or right-or-wrong you to death," Strawn told Louis. "We are here to get you safely to the school and we are going to do that. But we'll absolutely give you as much respect as you allow us to give you."
Louis stared at him and drummed his leg against the bed.
"Quite frankly, cuffs do not embarrass us," Strawn continued. "But if it goes there, it will be 100 percent your choice." He concluded with the question that the scenario is designed to set up. "I have an important question for you. If you walk out of here cuffed, do you understand that it's 100 percent your choice?"
"Uh-huh," Louis said. He looked around the room. His mind was working but coming up empty. He asked if he could grab his clothes. The answer was no. Instead he was allowed to direct Dalton to hand him a gray t-shirt, a black-and-gray Fubu jersey, and black mesh gym shorts.
"Am I coming home today?" Louis was trying not to cry. He blinked rapidly behind the smudged lenses of his glasses.
"I will not lie to you," Strawn hedged. "I might not answer your questions . . . "
"So when am I coming home?"
"I mean no disrespect, but I learned a long time ago that I don't want to chase you," Strawn plowed on, ignoring Louis's question. He explained that he would handcuff Louis to Dalton. "And son, if you can drag this ugly sucker far and fast enough to get away, well, God bless you, you weren't meant to go." Strawn gave the scripted chuckle.
Louis was still trying to buy time and find a way out. "Can I brush my teeth?" he asked.
Strawn shook his head, and cuffed Louis to Dalton. Strawn wrote his script to give his charges the illusion of control, but he often cuffs the kids, especially boys, no matter what they say. He hustled Louis to the car, guiding him into the back seat along with Dalton, to whom he was still cuffed. Taking the wheel, Strawn explained to his passenger that he would stop talking—"I consider it disrespectful to talk to you in the rearview mirror," he said—until he reached the airport. At the mention of an airport, Louis said, "Oh, God."
When we arrived at the Tampa airport half an hour later, Strawn took off Louis's handcuffs. As we walked to catch our connecting flight to Atlanta, Dalton grabbed the waistband of the boy's shorts, which rode low on his hips and might have fallen off if Dalton hadn't held fast. The teen rolled his eyes and cracked a piece of gum that Dalton had given him. He was auditioning for the part of bad boy, but the role didn't fit. He was too quick to say "Thank you" and too eager to talk. He had spent the past year bottling those impulses around his parents and chafing at the limits they had set for him. His abduction struck him as the latest outrage. "I don't listen to them, I don't like what they say," he said. "I don't listen to the curfew. I'm not doing that. It's too early."
When his parents bore down, Louis pushed back. He hung out with a crowd they didn't like and he drank and smoked pot. "I came home high once. My father said, 'I know you're high,' " Louis remembered. "Then I went to a one-day boot camp last August. You exercise and they talk to you. I came home high again and he sent me to this juvenile rehab thing that lasted two and a half days. It was pointless."
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