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by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News

The Associated Press has just published an explosive new investigative report about adopted teenage children being confined in for-profit residential treatment centers where they routinely suffer from sexual abuse and psychological manipulation, often ending in suicide.

Takeaways from AP investigation: Adopted kids confined in for-profit institutions

Excerpts (emphasis mine):

An Associated Press investigation finds that a business known for tough-love boarding schools for rebellious, rich teenagers set its sights on a different demographic: adopted kids.

Adoptees are vastly overrepresented in what some call the “troubled teen industry,” a sprawling network of loosely regulated, for-profit residential treatment centers, wilderness programs and boarding schools. Experts say that adoptees, only 2% of American children, account for an estimated 25-40% of those in residential treatment.

Adoptees told the AP they believe they’ve been enmeshed in a shadow orphanage system where children end up with the very fate that adoption was supposed to spare them — promised forever homes but institutionalized instead, some for years, in oppressive and sometimes abusive facilities.

Many said the programs felt like prison, except they had not been convicted of any crime, they had no sentence and no judge monitored their confinement.

The AP interviewed dozens of program attendees and their families, former employees, public officials, attorneys and experts, and obtained hundreds of government and business records to examine why and how adopted kids land in such facilities despite the companies’ disturbing track records.

Little oversight, big profits

There’s a lot of money to be made from adopted children in distress. The AP found at least 80 private facilities advertise they treat adoption-related issues.

Many of these businesses started as small operations, with behavioral modification approaches historically rooted in Christian teachings, experts said. Today, public and private equity companies drawn to the promise of significant profits and an endless supply of struggling kids have been acquiring centers and commercializing treatment.

That reliable money flow allows investors to go “into these markets risk free,” said Raj Kumar, an analyst at the financial services firm Stephens who tracks healthcare.

Promising a healthy 20% in profit margins, residential treatment centers make money based on minimizing staffing costs and maximizing how long kids are in care, Kumar said.

That’s easier to do, experts said, because there are so few regulations compared to other inpatient healthcare settings like nursing homes.

Full article.

In another article from this investigative report that was published yesterday, the AP interviews actual victims from some of these facilities, and what can only be described as “torture” in the kind of “therapies” they received in these facilities that continue to operate.

Adopted and Locked Away: Kids promised ‘forever homes’ instead confined in for-profit institutions

Excerpts:

The AP interviewed dozens of program attendees and their families, former employees, public officials, attorneys and experts, and obtained hundreds of government and business records to examine why and how adopted kids land in such facilities despite the companies’ disturbing track records.

Police reports reveal children as young as 9 experience or witness violence, chaos, self-harm and sexual abuse inside facilities.

Adoptees and adoptive parents said children left more traumatized than when they arrived — if, that is, they ever left. Some have died inside the facilities that promised they would keep them safe.

Children are strip-searched, regularly restrained and punished with manual labor, the AP found. Communication with the outside world, including their parents, is limited and tightly monitored.

The AP is using only Kate’s first name because it does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault. When she was 12, she says, she was assaulted by another girl in the middle of the night at her first residential center.

She finally checked herself out of treatment four years ago, when she was 18, but she cries even now as she recounts the night in 2017 when she says she was held to the ground, screaming

“I can’t breathe” as snot poured from her nose.

Eventually, she went silent, exhausted, she said, and she was released. She went to bed, without a night light.

She lived in that place for another two years.

“We were afraid all of the time,” she said.

Full article.

The AP report also discovered what we have reported for many years now on the topic of child trafficking through adoption and foster care, and that is the fact that corrupt psychiatrists are used throughout the process to place labels on these children through a “diagnosis” to justify their incarceration.

A corrupted diagnosis

Adopted by a Kentucky couple, Kate longed to know her birth family, and resented their absence. She lashed out, sometimes violently. She was never in trouble with the law, she didn’t do drugs, but she knows she was a difficult child to parent.

She struggled with depression, anxiety and trichotillomania, a psychiatric condition that led her to pull out her hair.

Kate’s parents went looking for answers. Like many adoptive parents, they thought they found them when they learned about RAD.

The diagnosis is meant for young children who were so neglected in early life that they struggle to bond with caregivers, said Brian Allen, a psychologist who runs the mental health program at Penn State’s Center for the Protection of Children.

It originally described the effects of confinement in orphanages abroad that were so understaffed that babies were rarely held and received no affection, Allen said.

Today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — the catalog of mental illnesses known as the DSM — says it applies to children who’ve become so withdrawn, they seek no comfort when they are distressed or scared.

The DSM specifies the diagnosis is extremely rare and applies to children under 5 — not older children who suffer neglect when small and misbehave years later.

Kate experienced no physical deprivation as a baby. Her adoptive mother was in the room when she was born and took her home right away, she said. But once she arrived in residential treatment, program therapists introduced her parents to reactive attachment disorder.

That’s a common misinterpretation, Allen said, to apply RAD to virtually any adopted preteen or teenager with behavioral challenges. Allen’s clinic studied 100 adopted and foster children brought in for treatment. Around 40% of them had been diagnosed with RAD, but not a single one fit the criteria, their study found.

Allen argues the DSM should delete RAD from its listings. The diagnosis has been too “corrupted,” he said, and it is demonizing adopted children who could be better served by researched diagnoses like post-traumatic stress disorder or oppositional defiant disorder, for which there are studied treatments.

“We should absolutely not be doing those types of heavy-handed, obedience-focused, boot camp kinds of things,” Allen said.

“There’s no empirical or theoretical basis for that.”

Full article.

The AP report also exposes how many of these treatment facilities are facing major lawsuits, where sexual predators are allowed to sexually abuse the teenagers, leading some of them to commit suicide.

Life and death in one company’s facilities

Excerpts:

Uinta Academy in Utah practices equine therapy, telling parents that if their daughters can learn to connect with animals, they can learn to connect with people. By the time Kate left there, she said, she felt like the horses they’d trained: broken.

“I had no feelings,” she said.

“I was a robot.”

The girls there were required to do what they were told without question, with a neutral expression on their faces — no sighing, no frowning, no crying, she said.

Break the rules and they had to scrub the floor on their knees with a toothbrush for hours or go outside in 100-degree heat, rake moldy hay or pull weeds all day, she said. The smell of freshly pulled weeds still makes her sick.

Uinta is one of more than a dozen facilities across the country operated by Family Help & Wellness, a company which faces multiple lawsuits alleging abuse.

The stakes are extraordinarily high: In the last two years, two of the company’s properties shuttered after children died there.

Trails Carolina closed in 2024 after a 12-year-old boy suffocated and the state revoked its license. Asheville Academy, which Kate also attended, closed last year. North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services suspended admissions after two girls died by suicide, the agency said, and the facility surrendered its license days later.

FHW’s Uinta Academy remains open. A lawsuit filed against it last year by a 16-year-old girl’s parents alleged “dehumanizing” punishments: A girl was made to strap a hula hoop around her waist to create a barrier between her and other students. Staff threatened to shave girls’ heads.

The suit alleged Uinta’s punitive culture allowed a 24-year-old employee to groom and rape their daughter.

She says in the lawsuit that she didn’t tell anyone because she’d seen other girls punished after expressing discomfort with what happened to them there. Years later, that staffer pleaded guilty to trying to meet a 12-year-old girl — in reality, a police officer who posed as a child online — for sex. The facility has not yet responded in court to the allegations.

Of the four programs Kate attended, Uinta was the one that scarred her the most, she said. It was where she learned not to think.

“They’d strip away any sort of individuality,” she said.

“They convince you that part of you is bad, that part is toxic, it’s unhealthy, it’s non-working and you have to get rid of it.”

Full article.

Another culprit in trafficking these children through these private residential treatment centers is the use of AI and “predictive analysis” software.

While there has been a lot more press in recent years since with the rise in popularity of Large Language Models (LLM) AI such as ChatGPT about the failures and biases of “predictive analysis”, this kind of software has been tested on parents who lose their children to the government programs of foster care and adoptions for years now, as we have previously reported.

Here is an article we published in 2017 almost ten years ago now:

CPS Using “Predictive Analytics” Software to Label Parents as Unfit, Even Before Baby is Born

Here is another one we published in 2019:

Pittsburgh Wants to “Predict” If You Deserve to be a Parent at the Birth of Every Child

In this investigative report by the AP, they reference “predictive analysis” in a report they published in November of 2023 in another way that the AI software is being used today:

Inspired by online dating, AI tool for adoption matchmaking falls short for vulnerable foster kids

Excerpts:

Some are orphans, others seized from their parents. Many are older and have overwhelming needs or disabilities. Most bear the scars of trauma from being hauled between foster homes, torn from siblings or sexually and physically abused.

Child protective services agencies have wrestled for decades with how to find lasting homes for such vulnerable children and teens –- a challenge so enormous that social workers can never guarantee a perfect fit.

Into this morass stepped Thea Ramirez with what she touted as a technological solution – an artificial intelligence-powered tool that ultimately can predict which adoptive families will stay together.

Ramirez claimed this algorithm, designed by former researchers at an online dating service, could boost successful adoptions across the U.S. and promote efficiency at cash-strapped child welfare agencies.

An Associated Press investigation, however, found that the AI tool – among the few adoption algorithms on the market – has produced limited results in the states where it has been used, according to Family-Match’s self-reported data that AP obtained through public records requests from state and local agencies.

Ramirez also has overstated the capabilities of the proprietary algorithm to government officials as she has sought to expand its reach, even as social workers told AP that the tool wasn’t useful and often led them to unwilling families.

Tennessee scrapped the program before rolling it out, saying it didn’t work with their internal system even after state officials spent more than two years trying to set it up, and social workers reported mixed experiences with Family-Match in Florida, where its use has been expanding.

State officials told AP that the organization that Ramirez runs as CEO owns some of the sensitive data Family-Match collects. They also noted that the nonprofit provided little transparency about how the algorithm works.

Those experiences, the AP found, provide lessons for social service agencies seeking to deploy predictive analytics without a full grasp of the technologies’ limitations, especially when trying to address such enduring human challenges as finding homes for children described by judges as the “least adoptable.”

“There’s never going to be a foolproof way for us to be able to predict human behavior,” said Bonni Goodwin, a University of Oklahoma child welfare data expert.

“There’s nothing more unpredictable than adolescence.”

Ramirez, of Brunswick, Georgia, where her nonprofit is also based, refused to provide details about the algorithm’s inner workings and declined interview requests.

Ramirez, a former social worker and wife of a Georgia pastor, has long sought to promote adoption as a way to reduce abortions, according to her public statements, newsletters and a blog post.

Ramirez has said she called Gian Gonzaga, a research scientist who had managed the algorithms at eharmony, a dating site with Christian roots that promises users “real love” for those seeking marriage. She asked Gonzaga if he would team up with her to create an adoption matchmaking tool.

Later, Ramirez began crisscrossing the country promoting Family-Match to state officials. Her work and her religious convictions drew support primarily from conservatives, including first lady Melania Trump, who spotlighted Ramirez’s efforts at a foster care event in the White House Situation Room.

In Virginia’s two-year test of Family-Match, the algorithm produced only one known adoption, officials said.

“The local staff reported that they did not find the tool particularly useful,” the Virginia Department of Social Services said in a statement, noting that Family-Match “had not proven effective” in the state.

Virginia social workers were also perplexed that the algorithm seemed to match all the children with the same group of parents, said Traci Jones, an assistant director at the state’s social services agency.

“We did not have access to the algorithm even after it was requested,” Jones said.

Full article.

Christians Run the Legal Child Trafficking System of Foster Care and Adoption that Destroys the Lives of Children

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As I have reported for over a decade now, Christians run the foster care and adoption programs in the U.S., partnering with the U.S. government to traffick children.

In 2019 I published a report on the “Orphan Care” movement within Evangelical Christianity that is responsible for trafficking so many children in the U.S. See:

Christian Churches Redefine the Meaning of “Orphan” to Justify Participating in Child Trafficking

In 2022 we published a report on how the European Adoption Consultants (EAC), a business that was set up in 1991 by then President George H.W. Bush and Bill Barr, his Attorney General, was also trafficking children through overseas adoptions.

How the Christian Church and U.S. Government Work Together to Traffick Children Worldwide Through the Lucrative Adoption Business

The investigative report just published by the Associated Press also frequently mentioned a treatment center in Utah as one of the worst ones, Uinta Academy.

This is not surprising, as Utah and the Mormon church are also complicit with child trafficking. It is the home of Angel Studios, which produced the 2023 blockbuster movie, “Sound of Freedom”, which tried to convince the U.S. public that child trafficking only happened outside the U.S.

But the film itself was funded by billionaires linked to child trafficking. See:

Sound of Freedom: A Movie About Child Trafficking Produced by Child Traffickers?

Angel Studios is run by Mormon business leaders who produce “family friendly” Christian films and TV series.

But few understand how these Mormon business leaders, with their close ties to Silicon Valley, are redefining “conservatism, family values,” etc., and establishing the “New Right”.

Peter Thiel is one of the main leaders in this movement, as I wrote back in 2023:

Why did Big Tech Billionaires Fund the Distribution of Sound of Freedom? The “New Right” Technocrats are Redefining Conservative Politics and Religious Values

See also:

Big Tech “Far-Right” Billionaires want to Eliminate Politicians and “Democracy” as They Believe They can Run the World Better by Themselves

As I have been writing for over a decade now, if the Christian churches would stop taking government money to traffick children through the lucrative foster care and adoption government programs, we could almost eliminate child trafficking completely in the United States.

This entire Christian movement of child trafficking through foster and adopted children is based on false premises and nefarious intentions throughout its history. See:

The U.S. Foster Care System: Modern Day Slavery and Child Trafficking

From Child Protection to State-sponsored Child Kidnapping: How Did we Get Here?

The origin of this evil system appears to have begun in Geneva, Switzerland, home of the International Social Services (ISS) organization which was originally founded just after WWI in Geneva, Switzerland, 1924, to deal with “orphans” caused by the war. The U.S. branch was established two years later in 1926.

There are strong Christian Mormon ties to this organization as well, as we learned while reporting on the Neal Sutz medical kidnapping story starting back in 2019, and is one of the most horrible stories we have ever published on the topic of Medical Kidnapping.

Neal still does not have his two sons back today, as they are allegedly still confined in Geneva.

See:

Is Geneva, Switzerland the Global Center for CPS and Child Trafficking?

So much has happened in recent times since we began in earnest back in 2014 investigating medical kidnapping and child sex trafficking, and put up our MedicalKidnap.com website.

Almost everything we have published for the past 12 years is now proving to be true, as it is all in the Epstein files now, and yet the pedophiles continue to run the U.S. and most of the western world.

As this AP investigative report reveals, the trafficking and sexual abuse is also still continuing in the Christian foster care and adoptive industries, and even increasing today.

How much longer before we reap what we have sown as a nation and as a culture, especially in “Christian culture,” where God finally intervenes to save the victims?

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked,

“Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said:

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me.

But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

(Matthew 18:1-6)

Comment on this article at HealthImpactNews.com.

This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)

See Also:

Understand the Times We are Currently Living Through

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KABBALAH: The Anti-Christ Religion of Satan that Controls the World Today

Christian Teaching on Sex and Marriage vs. The Actual Biblical Teaching

Exposing the Christian Zionism Cult

The Bewitching of America with the Evil Eye and the Mark of the Beast

Jesus Christ’s Opposition to the Jewish State: Lessons for Today

Identifying the Luciferian Globalists Implementing the New World Order – Who are the “Jews”?

The Brain Myth: Your Intellect and Thoughts Originate in Your Heart, Not Your Brain

What is the Condition of Your Heart? The Superiority of the Human Heart over the Human Brain