Woman reveals why her parents hired kidnappers to take her out of her room in the middle of the night

A New York woman has revealed why her parents hired kidnappers to take her out of her bedroom in the middle of the night when she was just 16.

Natasia Pelowski wrote in an essay for Newsweek that she was a depressed teenager, and well-meaning parents listened to her high school principal’s advice and decided to send her to a residential treatment center.

Her parents decided the best way to get her to attend one of those “troubled teen” facilities was to force her out of the bedroom of the family home in Northern California on the night of November 23, 2014.

That night, Pelowski wrote, a strange man and woman walked in his door and asked him to “Come with us.”

When she refused, the man grabbed her arm and said, “I wasn’t asking.”

Natasia Pelowski has revealed why her parents hired kidnappers to take her out of her bedroom in the middle of the night when she was just 16.

Pelowski described how she tried to free herself and called for help before handcuffing her face down against the carpet and taking her downstairs, where her mother was standing by the front door.

She said her mother uttered the word “I’m sorry” before Pelowski was pushed into the back of a car and driven away from her Silicon Valley neighborhood.

The teenager was dropped off at an unidentified wilderness camp, where she said she spent 54 days without electricity or shoes and was repeatedly searched, unable to speak to her friends for weeks and forced to work in the fields.

One morning, Pelowski said, staff at the troubled youth facility woke her up before dawn, blindfolded her and told her to “follow the sound of their drums.”

When staff members later removed the bandage, Pelowski said he came face to face with an open grave.

She was then placed in the six-foot-deep plot as staff members read a eulogy for “representing the end of my old life,” she explained.

From there, Pelowski said she was transferred to another residential facility in Utah, where she was held in solitary confinement for 24 hours, subjected to so-called “assault therapy” and witnessed multiple attempts of suicide; commit suicide

She explained that she was a depressed teenager and her well-meaning parents sent her to a residential treatment program.

Pelowski was finally released from the “troubled teen industry” before her 18th birthday, but said, “Part of me has been in that grave ever since.”

He said he developed post-traumatic stress disorder from his time at those facilities.

“For 10 years, I struggled to understand how my family could have abandoned me,” she wrote. “It has always haunted me that children are still subjected to brutal treatment programs like mine.

“Today, I know my abduction was not unique,” Pelowski continued, describing how most minors are taken to these treatment facilities.

He claimed that the network of youth mental health facilities is aimed at wealthy families, who can afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to support their child.

Parents who choose to send their children to these facilities, which receive more than $23 billion in public funds each year, according to the American Bar Association, often have genuine concerns that their child will be harmed himself or others if they are not limited to controlled control. environment, reports the New York Times.

They also tend to assume that because residential treatment is more expensive, it must provide a better quality of care.

However, residential mental health treatment facilities for adolescents are largely unregulated, with no federal licensing requirements for staff, no federal mandates to use evidence-based therapies, and no reporting requirements use of seclusion or restraints.

Many parents also don’t know what treatment their child will receive, with some facilities offering children only a few hours of therapy a week, while others offer none, according to the Times.

‘I don’t blame my parents anymore. Instead, I wonder why lawmakers who have the power to save vulnerable youth don’t,” Pelowski wrote.

Pelowski said he developed post-traumatic stress disorder from his time at those facilities

In 2007, the federal Government Accountability Office released a report that “identified thousands of allegations of abuse, some of which resulted in death, in residential programs across the country and in facilities American ownership and operation abroad,” according to the American Bar. association

He urged reform, and the following year, Representative George Miller of California sponsored legislation to regulate congregate care facilities, but the bill never passed.

In more recent years, however, issues with the “problem teen industry” have gained wider attention after Paris Hilton, herself a survivor of the system, detailed the abuse she suffered in a 2020 documentary, memoir and article 2021 opinion piece in which she wrote that she was “choked, slapped in the face, spied on while showering and sleep deprived” at the four facilities she was sent to as a teenager.

Last year, he spoke in support of the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, which sought federal oversight of such facilities, but that also stalled in Congress.

And in April, Paris Hilton testified in support of a California bill that would require greater transparency about disciplinary methods in short-term residential facilities.

Issues surrounding the ‘problem teen industry’ have gained attention after Paris Hilton opened up about what she suffered

Still, some in Congress are fighting for industry reform.

On June 12, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon held a hearing and released a report of a two-year investigation into existing residential programs that receive government funds from Medicaid or through the child welfare system.

The report documents “sexual, physical and emotional abuse, unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and inadequate provision of behavioral health treatment,” reports the taxpayer-funded Times.

It also describes “routine” systemic harms that “are the direct and casual result of a business model that has incentives to treat children as payment and provide less-than-adequate behavioral health and safety treatment in order to maximize operating margin and profit”.

At least two of the chains investigated were also ordered to pay more than $1 million in damages related to child rape in the past year alone.

Later in June, Hilton also testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over various child welfare programs, about what she suffered.

“These programs promised healing, growth and support, but instead they did not allow me to speak, move freely or even look out a window for two years,” he said, according to the New York Times.

“I was force-fed medication and sexually abused by staff.”

He then ended his testimony by vowing not to “stop until America’s youth are safe.”

‘If you are a child in the system, hear my words: I see you. i believe you I know what you’re going through and I won’t give up on you,” Hilton promised.