Alia Michelle Weiner at CEDU school (From: Youthrights.org)

This story was originally written on a webpage created to provide statements for a GAO hearing in 2007. The address is cafety.youthrights.org and it waits for your statement if you believe that your stay at a boarding school included unfair treatment or even abuse. All rights and credits goes to the author Alia Michelle Weiner, who posted the original story on cafety.youthrights.org

I was sent to CEDU school when I was 14 years old. The trauma that I experienced there sent me into a state of complete isolation from which I have only just begun to emerge from recently, being jarred out of my denial when my Dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor February of 2007.

I have spent the past 15 years believing that I was defective, that I was a sexual pervert, that my parents thought this and were too afraid of being judged to address it openly, and that no matter what I did I was never going to be able to have a healthy sexual relationship. I was celibate for 6 years and cloistered myself in the Christian church for 10 years to try to prove to my parents that I was not this horrific thing that they thought I was, but could not speak to me about.

Then, last year, when I was under so much stress that I allowed myself to speak with my parents about these thoughts, they were shocked. It turned out they had no idea about the 5 hour long screaming sessions we were put through at CEDU, or the all night 'propheets' we were subjected to. They had no idea that they were teaching me that self hatred, humiliation and shame were the way to 'salvation' and they never would have allowed me to be there if they had.

As soon as we got there, though, our communication with our parents, family and friends was completely shut off. They monitored our phone calls and read our outgoing mail, and because they benefited the community financially, all police and local business turned their heads and closed their ears to any stories they may have heard from the teens who were sent there, dismissed by the community as drug addicts and losers.

And so society had branded us, and so we branded ourselves, and punished ourselves for the crimes we had committed, in my case, being interested in sex at 14, in others' cases, having eating disorders, not playing along with our families usually dysfunctional habits. My father was a good man, but he had no talent for intimacy and not much more for understanding others, but he loved me. They preyed on him because he did not know himself well enough to see through their distorted and exaggerated ideas, and it cost me my entire life with my father.

My parents sent me there because they feared for my safety, and they told my parents that they were creating a stress free environment for us, pampering us, nurturing us in ways that they, with their stress filled city lives, could never provide. They told my parents that they had failed me, that they were bad parents, and that I needed real help now to repair the damage they had done.

My parents were not perfect, but they loved me, and they are to this day some of the best people I know. And so I learned the lessons CEDU taught me, learned that no one cared about me, learned that hatred of myself was the only way I would ever avoid being destructive, isolated myself and kept myself from people while inside trying to find a way to prove my worth. I got a BA in Business from Pepperdine, but still could not see myself as accomplished. Spent 6 years celibate and 4 years married but still could not see myself as virtuous. Worked as hard as I could to solve every one around me's problems, but still could not see myself as having worth, let alone consider that my own problems might need solving.

I see a therapist twice a week now to try and undue some of the damage they did to me. She makes me feel good because she reacts with shock and care when I tell her the things that happened to me there, like being read my own epitaph or labeling myself slut in front of all my peers, or pounding pillows that I was instructed to picture my parents' faces on, and my own. She doesn't react the way I react internally to my own memories, the way I react is how they trained me to react, pitiless, merciless, and ever placing blame on myself.

I don't know how to give adequate testimony in text form as to the kinds of destruction they enacted upon my young and vulnerable mind. I am a smart person, gifted, high IQ, and so I was smart enough to shut out as much of what they did to me as I was able to, but being smart doesn't protect you from this kind of brainwashing because they play on your emotions and they destroy your sense of self. No thought, no idea, no impulse was acceptable in this environment without somehow referencing the cultish, empty philosophies they pretended to espouse there. We were told to be honest while they lied to our parents. We were told to have integrity while they called us losers and junkies who would never succeed. We were told to have compassion while they provoked us into sobbing, hysterical messes 3 times a week. We were told to persevere while they drained our parents' bank accounts.

They said they were making us strong when really they were making us crazy, and no one has been held accountable, no one has even taken a counting of the damage that has been done. They told us all this was our parents' fault, they even scoffed at our parents at how flippantly they gave up their children, saying things like, 'If they really loved you, they never would have sent you to a place like this, would they?'

As far as real physical evidence of their abuse, I ran away once while I was there and was raped. My rape was neither addressed nor viewed as any different than any other sexual deviance that I had enacted. It went right up there on the list of evidence that I was a 'slut'. I pretty much just kept my head down in that place, as best as I could, but no matter how hard I tried, they still got in my head and convinced me of my worthlessness. This is why I feel more raped by this school than I do by the man who actually raped me when I ran away from there and hitchhiked all they way from San Bernadino to the Hollywood Hills at 15 just to avoid going into the next propheet, or being on my 'full-time' punishment where I was not allowed to sing, smile, laugh or be touched by another person. They revoked the 'priviledge' of touch. This alone causes psychological illness, and to do this to teens is truly cruel and unusual punishment.

As for being defined as a school? I fell behind in all my studies being there. There was no adequate education: staff member's spouses and whoever they could get to stick around in their crazy program was all we got to teach us, largely because they made the staff go through raps and propheets just like the teens, so we all got put through the self hatred machine and went along with the program or we got the boot (fired if you were staff, full time if you were a student)

And the deepest tragedy is that this self hatred kept me in fear of speaking my true mind to anyone, especially not my parents, and so I have gone all this time with little real guidance or sense of my own life. I feel robbed and raped by these people, and although they owe me the very life of my father, who died too soon for me to explain in full to him why I had been so distant for so long, all I want is that nothing like this ever be allowed to be done to any other family.

CEDU war a large organization and very much founded the term "Therapeutic Boarding School". The first CEDU school was opened around 1968 and all the school closed in 2005 due to some lawsuits.

References:
Datasheet about the boarding schools from the Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
The original statement on Youthrights