This young boy died because boot camps are considered "tough love"

The BBQ Pit
21

I think this thread has been hijacked, and the hijacking is in quite poor taste. What they call these things, be them boot camps-summer camps-basketball school really has no bearing on the OP, and the point she was trying to make (I think). This has been one of the worse hijackings I have ever seen, and really should stop. IMO you should take the miliatry discussion to another thread.

As to the video, some of you need to get your eyes checked or something. A sack of potatoes? You honestly don’t see the black male (hard to tell age) being surrounded by a lot of men in uniforms with guns? The black male is made to walk, but can hardly do so. He collapses numerous times. It is obvious that he is not faking it, that this isn’t a protest move (or at least what I consider one, just going slack to make the officers’ jobs harder), but someone in genuine distress.

The complete lack of medical attention is shocking. A person in a white coat stands around for a while, doing little, until the black male finally collapses over and over, then she gets a stethoscope out and listens to his heart. Excellent medical aid given. A cynic would point out it seemed she only acted when it became obvious that an ambulance was there.

Now this video isn’t shocking because of a beating, which is very difficult to see, ( I believe I can see it, however I wouldn’t blame others for not being so sure) but rather because of the actions of the bevy of pseudo-military men. The forced walk when teh legs weren’t working, the lack of urgency when it was apparent a human needed medical aid.

I for one, am apalled by these actions, and these so-called boot camps. It is beyond me that they are still allowed to operate.

Is the US the only western democracy where they have such things?

22

A couple of things to clarify.

  1. I was calling it a boot camp because that’s what it’s being reported as. I’m not sure if it is just a Florida thing. Or perhaps the better way to put it is “Juvenile Boot Camp”

  2. Panama City actually does have a military base. Tyndall Air Force Base, although this has little relevance to my OP.

  3. I apologize for not being able to get better quality video, however, I was able to clearly see what was happening. The video actually lasts 40 minutes, and here in Tallahassee we have it. And it is HORRBILE.

What upset a lot of people is the complete lack of humanity that these “people” showed. It was reported that the whole reason they were beating him up is because the boys were made to run 16 laps around some large area, and do sit ups and push ups. On his last lap, he stumbled and stopped. A sign of exhaustion. Instead of helping him in any way, they proceeded to beat up an already physically worn down child.

What is even more sad is that this incident happened 4 months ago, and still no one has been arrested. This family is going through so much pain, while the nurse and the officers involved sit at home and watch it on the news.

23

Same here. I couldn’t tell anything from the video. I confess, I was expecting to see a pretty gruesome beating, but I couldn’t make a damn thing out.

24

This is nothing new. Kids have been dieing and getting abused, both emotionally and physically, in foreign “tough love camps” or “schools for troubled teens” for years. Many of them are fly-by-night operations in no-tell countries that charge parents hundreds of thousands of dollars to hold their kids custody for years, for offenses like “sullen, wears lots of black” and “gay”. Here kids get no education and are often forced to do extreme punishments that they sometimes don’t survive. They are nearly always subject to brainwashing techniques. Communication is discouraged or forbidden, and parents are told it “harm the program” if they see their kids more than a couple supervised visits a year.

You can even hire escorts to grab the kid on her way home from school, handcuff her, and shove her on a plane.

And this is all totally legal. You can imprison your kid as long as you like, with no due process. A while ago a few kids stuck in one broke out and got free. But many still languish, vicitim to often thouroughly fucked up families that choose one kid as the martyr, who can be quietly disposed of for a fee.

It’s fucked up. We need legislation that makes it illegal to do to a kid what you can’t do to an adult, and that includes kidnapping them off the street and leaving them indefinitely in a private foreign prison.

25

I didn’t ask a question.

even sven is right, though; this isnt the first time it’s happened.

Look, I was a soldier, and I’ve been to boot camp. Real boot camp was fine. Nobody punched me or kneed me, because professional military instructors don’t have to do those things to teach you. The goons who murdered this kid are, for the most part, second-rate losers.

My comment, which even sven did a better job of commenting on than I did, is that this “troubled youth boot camp” shtick is part of the problem. It’s certainly indicative of an alarming growth in militarism, but clearly it’s not an indictment of the actual military, which does not staff its recruit schools with thugs and morons.

There seems to be this general consensus among many people that anything called “Boot camp” magically turns a person into a disciplined, decent human being. It is simply not true. Even REAL military boot camps do not make you a better person, at least not any more than you’d become by going off to college, or getting a civilian job. People who are irresponsible jerks, in my direct experience, were still irresponsible jerks after basic training. Look, I saw them, dozens of them. Basic made them trainable soldiers, but the set of soldiers still included assholes, sluts, gin monkeys, gambling addicts and schmoes in pretty much the same proportions you would expect out of the general populace. The purpose of boot camp is to make you a useful SOLDIER. You can be good at your job and still be a jerk.

Sending kids to one of these “boot camps” and thinking it will fix what’s wrong with them - and to be honest it didn’t sound like this was really a bad kid - is stupid. Stooooooopid. It would be stupid even if these boot camps were run by real professionals, as opposed to the usual staff of sociopaths. The sociopaths make it a lot more physically dangerous, but even without them, these things are a giant scam.

You can’t fix a 14-year-old kid by sending him off the Colonel Kurtz’s Fucked-In-The-Head School for Wayward Boys.

26

Dammit, I’d go to boot camp just to meet R. Lee Ermy. I love that guy.

27

These places are a disgrace. An absolute disgrace. They are an insult to actual boot camp, which may not be fun but isn’t run by people whose mission is to seemingly beat you into submission.

That poor kid.

28

Obviously, you’re the type of person who would fuck a man up the ass without the goddamn common courtesy to give said man a reach-around.

It’s OK. So am I, and there’s a support group available.

:wink:

29

We understand this happens all the time. Of course, it takes it happening in your backyard to make you really see it. So that is why we are hoping to raise people’s eyebrows a little. Get people to attempt to make some changes, and get these places shut down. The one in Panama City has been closed, but there are more here and Florida and I’m sure everywhere else.

30

The World is Round,
It is Not Fair,
It is Just Damn Round !!!

Well, this has the complaint down pat. Now what was the solution again? Shut down youth camps? The Methodist and Lutheran camps around here will be sorely missed. The kids love them and are not harmed in anyway except for that pesky ‘religion’ thing.

You all are volunteering to take the kids because these places are so evil… correct? ( I saw not one comment about any ‘youth camp’ being a good thing so… )

Oh, just the ‘bad’ camps… I see, you have a list I suppose?

Care to share?

31

So… you think people should be able to kill kids without any repercussions whatsoever?

Were you born stupid, or did you go into training?

32

Geez, GusNSpot, got stock in one or something? Kids die here for no good reason. Do you really want to support that?

There needs to be an accountability system. Schools are subject to all kinds of regulations, inspections, etc. If these camps are in the US and are going to have kids in their custody, they need some oversight. There needs to be a way for kids to communicate when they are in trouble or feel like they are inn real danger. For off-shore programs, there needs to be a public education campaign showing what really goes on in them. And the US needs to help kids that are in trouble at them- even gasp against their parent’s wishes. No human deserves to be in custody with no due process. No human deserves to get beaten or brainwashed at someone else’s will. Even children- perhaps especially children, deserve a safe home.

33

Derleth, GusNSpot has a point. Obviously camps like this one shouldn’t be allowed to exist, but not every kid that resents being sent to summer camp is being sent to a hell hole. Drawing the line won’t be easy.

What about sending kids to “Outward Bound” type programs that teach them nature survival skills and self-reliance to improve their self-esteem? There are good programs with good reputations even though the kids don’t want to go. They too are used with troubled teens.

What happened to this child is just unspeakable. I hope everyone responsible is brought to justice.

34

This is appalling. I’ve seen the tape on television and I can’t believe the meager coverage this tragedy has received.

A second autopsy was done and the findings differed greatly from the original cause of death listed. This is murder and the offenders as well as all involved in the cover up need to be punished.

I have a 14 year old son and my heart breaks for the family. It could have been my child - Dopers: it could have been your child.

OP - thank you for bringing this to the boards.

35

Uh, yeah it is. Camp counselors can’t commit child abuse, as defined by local statute. How hard a line is that to draw?

Now, if you’re saying that enforcement of this line won’t be easy, sure–neither is enforcement of child abuse provisions in the home. The first step toward enforcing the latter was acknowledging that a problem existed. That’s the first step here. Now we’ve got to set up protocols to deal with the abuse.

Daniel

36

This is a helluva good summary of the situation.

On the one hand, we have military basic training: 18-21-year-old volunteers undergoing a stringent training process designed to convert a late-teens boy into a soldier, with a mixture of stern discipline and training.

On the other, we have the juvenile-penal so-called “boot camps” – compulsory as a juvenile-court sentence, dealing with juvenile offenders in their early and middle teens, often without any purpose other than to “shock and awe” rebellious kids, run by people of questionable training and motivation.

If I tie a fake trunk and tusks on a pig, it doesn’t magically turn him into an elephant. These places are abusive and should be shut down. And saying that doesn’t mean that Parris Island is evil, it means that something that lifts one element from its formula for converting volunteer civilians into Marines and applying it to younger kids is not going to work, and not only that is obviously harmful in its results.

37

I don’t want to hijack an already abused thread. Really I don’t.

But I see stories like this, and I learn that some of the Abu Ghraib ringleaders were prison guards in civilian life, and brutal ones as well.

And then I see bold assertions on this board that those abuses at that prison couldn’t have been the actions of those soldiers, because “guards can’t dream up abuse like that on their own.”

Well, yes they can. And threads like this are proof of it. And I think we ought to dispense with that canard once and for all.

Someone put in charge of someone else can act brutally if not constrained by rules and a good command structure. It’s a simple thing to understand, but the most difficult problem in the world to solve, as it cuts to the heart of our very flawed human nature.

38

OK.

I have watched the video.
And if I were on a jury, I’m not sure I’d vote to convict anyone of anything based on the content of the video.

So, for someone who contends that the video shows a crime, please identify the precise moment (minutes and seconds into the video) and what crime you believe is shown there. I am having trouble seeing anything that would allow for a criminal conviction.

At timetick 1:28, three men bring a young man (presumably the victim) down the the ground. At 1:46, they release him. At 1:54, they appear to be holding him up; he seems to have trouble standing. It’s unclear to me if this is voluntary or genuine distress. At 2:26, they are restraining his arms, but he’s in a sitting position. At 2:37, they try again to get him to sit up or move away from the telephone pole he was leaning against, but he again apparently cannot walk on his own. At 2:53, they move him back into a sitting position against the pole. (I should note that the view jumps at several points, as though a section of the tape has been removed from what we’re viewing; obviously, I have no idea what happens on those missing sections, or even how long they are).

By 3:47, the group is no longer restraining the alleged victim; they are simply standing around him. At 4:02, they move him into a prone position on the ground. At 4:23, they assist him in walking away; there appears to be no force or manhadling now, just help in walking. At 4:37, having taken about 6 laborous steps, he sinks to the ground again. At 4:50, one of the guards strikes the victim three or four times on the lower arm, near his wrist. There’s another up-and-down assisted walking sequence at 5:34. There’s another “edit jump” at 6:04 and we then see the victim on the ground. A woman in white is apparently checking him out; at 6:10, she’s using a stethescope to monitor him. At 6:40, thirty seconds after using the stethescope, she gestures and at least two of the guards run quickly out of frame in apparent response to a direction she gives.

At 6:53, after another “edit jump,” two more figures in white shirts arrive carrying a bag; they look to me like EMTs. At 7:12, after another edit jump, there is a wheeled stretcher in place, the victim is loaded on to it, and at 7:56 the camera pans back and follows them wheeling the stretcher to a waiting ambulance.

So where’s the crime? Point it out to me, please.

39

Wow. A child dies a brutal death at the hands of authorities after being put in a “tough love” camp that was all the former, and we get Der Trihs attacking the military and [del]religion[/del] “mythology” and then Mr. Moto using it to justify not prosecuting higher up the chain of command in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

Fuck both of you.

40

No?