Last month, I told you about “Kidnapped for Christ,” a powerful documentary detailing the goings-on at Escuela Caribe, a horribly abusive “Christian” boarding school deep in the mountains of the Dominican Republic. for tuition that exceeded that of Harvard, the school’s operators, New Horizons Youth Ministries, promised to put wayward kids back on the right path by way of “culture shock”–a radical change in the environment in order to make it easier to accept a new outlook on life. The reason I put “Christian” in quotes is that in practice, it amounted to behavior that any fair-minded person would consider abuse. While that school has since been shut down, there are dozens of other schools like it, and this film brought some badly-needed sunshine to other outfits that operate in this manner.
The film’s director, Kate Logan, initially started this as a senior film project at the evangelical Biola University, but that changed within a week when it was apparent that there was a rank odor about the place. One of the students Logan focused on was “David,” a teenager from northern Colorado who was sent there after coming out to his parents as gay. I recently had a chance to talk with David about his experience there–an ordeal that remains imprinted on him almost eight years later.
In the spring of 2006, David was acting like most seniors in high school. He was an honors student who was scouting out colleges when he realized he was gay. David’s parents didn’t fit the stereotype of the kind of family that would send their kids to a school like Escuela Caribe. They were nominally Catholic, but David told me that he rarely heard God mentioned until he came out. Indeed, when he told them he had become born-again, they didn’t really know how to react. In the months after David came out, his parents sent him to several counselors, and even had him talk to his priest. It was all to no avail.
Although David sensed that his parents were getting desperate, nothing prepared him for what happened on May 30, 2006. He woke up at around 5:30 that morning to find two “bodybuilder type” guys standing in his bedroom, while his parents stood behind them crying. One of the men restrained him with a belt, telling him that if he tried to get loose he’d be handcuffed. They bundled him into a car and drove him to Denver. From there they flew to Miami before going to the Dominican Republic.
Once there, David experienced the full force of Escuela Caribe’s draconian approach to discipline. As he put it, “we were all treated like criminals, and actually had less rights than an actual criminal in prison.” Students? lives were governed by a point system based on obedience; the more points you got, the less abuse you had to endure. Like most new arrivals, David initially had to ask his house parents for permission for just about everything–even something as mundane as going to the bathroom. That didn’t last long, however. He soon rose to second level–faster than all but a few other kids in the school’s four-decade history. One of the few people known to have advanced that far that fast was Julia Scheeres, whose book “Jesus Land,” which was published a few months before David was sent to the Dominican Republic, first turned the hot lights on New Horizons.
However, he was told that he wouldn’t advance any further until he made more progress in getting over his “trust issues” with his parents, though he wasn’t “officially” there to be “cured” of his homosexuality. If that sounds familiar to any of you, it’s long been an article of faith in the ex-gay movement that same-sex attractions arise out of trust problems. Indeed, David told me that New Horizons’ approach to conversion therapy assumed that homosexuality didn’t even exist. One of Escuela Caribe’s staff members, Cindy Hundley, said there was a “deeper issue” somewhere that triggered same-sex attractions. To give you an idea of just how backwards this school was, some of David’s counselors tried to convince him that his “deeper issue” had been that he’d been sexually abused when he was younger, even though he was adamant that he had no experience of that “whatsoever.” As we all know, recovered-memory therapy has long since been discredited by all legitimate mental health professionals.
Although much was made of students getting painful spankings, or “swats,” for stepping out of line, David told me that this was actually the lesser of two evils. Whenever a student accrued a certain number of demerits, he was given a choice–take the “swats” or be assigned extra work. As it turned out, that work proved to be so degrading that most kids opted to take the “swats.”
A number of students tried to escape–roughly once a month during David’s stay. However, they were returned in short order, mainly because New Horizons offered rewards of up to 20,000 pesos–a tidy amount considering the exchange rate–for their return. However, David stuck with it the best he could. While many of the kids he’d met had been there for as long as three years, he believed that he’d be there until November at the latest. He was due to turn 18 that month, and believed that at that time he could legally ask to go home. However, he got an unpleasant surprise–he was told that he didn’t have those rights in the Dominican Republic. David knew this was bogus, especially since Dominican kids are allowed to drink legally at 16. That lends a lot of credence to claims that Escuela Caribe is one of a number of schools that set up shop offshore so they can engage in practices that would never be acceptable or legal in this country.
By this time, Logan had been kicked out of the camp after school officials realized that she had turned her senior project into an expos? of the school–but not before David slipped her a note to give to a friend of his back in Colorado. That friend got in touch with the American consulate, who helped put together a team to free David. However, when an official from the consulate called David, he never told him that they were there to get him out. When the team finally arrived, they were told–falsely–that David wasn’t there.
Soon afterward, David’s father flew down. After a somewhat terse conversation–ostensibly to patch up their relationship–he returned to the States. David’s friends, with the consulate’s help, petitioned a federal judge for a writ of habeas corpus to get David’s release. While the legal process was playing out over the next month, David says that school officials began treating him far better than they had since his arrival; by this time they realized he had the chance to “completely ruin” New Horizons. However, he has since realized it was all a game to convince him that Logan was bent on “making a bad image of good people,” in the words of Annie Seabrooke, the wife of Escuela Caribe director Jeff Seabrooke. He was finally freed in December.
Once he got out, David was initially afraid to talk, mainly because his parents believed Logan had misled him into taking part in her documentary and were threatening to sue her. However, in 2007, he reached out to Logan saying he wanted to talk about his ordeal. It took another four years for Biola to give Logan back her footage; she was being threatened with legal action from every possible direction, and it took that long for school officials to realize that Logan was telling the truth. Their task was made considerably easier when New Horizons disbanded and sold the Escuela Caribe property.
According to David, his parents have yet to see the movie, even though it has been airing for much of the summer on Showtime. While they have accepted that he is gay, they still believe he was manipulated somehow into taking part in the film. To his mind, they don’t want to believe that they made a huge mistake in sending him to that school. It’s too bad–if more parents saw what was happening at these schools, it’s more likely that legislation to limit these practices would have long since passed. Something has to be done–and soon–so that no one else has to endure what David had to endure.
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