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'I call it teen torment' After her two sons were sent to Jamaica camp without her OK, Donna Burke got angry
It was a routinely busy day for Houston real estate agent Donna Burke until she went home for lunch.
Then came the phone call she will never forget:
"A child called me and says, 'Mrs. Burke, Mrs. Burke, get up to the school! Two strangers just carried Scott out of the building in handcuffs."'
"I want my mother!" Scott Burke had implored his friend as he was taken away. "Call my mom!"
Scott, 14, was being forcibly escorted to Teen Help's evaluation center in St. George, Utah, and then to its Tranquility Bay camp in Jamaica.
He had gone to the first day of school that morning in August 1997, promising his mother he was through with smoking pot and other defiant behavior. He'd even traded his baggy pants and untucked shirt for crisp khaki pants, a checkered shirt and Ralph Lauren Polo boots.
But stockbroker Stoney Burke, Scott's father and Donna's former husband, had arranged without her knowledge, she says, to have the boy removed from school and turned over to Teen Help.
Scott's older brother, David, an honor student, soon was sent by his father to Jamaica as well.
Donna Burke has sued Teen Help, alleging that the Tranquility Bay staff heaped upon her sons "the most sadistic and unwarranted physical and psychological abuse."
"... Both are changed from the wonderful, spontaneous young men they were before Tranquility Bay into robotic victims, afraid of any authority figure," the suit says. "They have lost their individuality, their spirits are broken, and their characters ruined. Instead of independent men, they are afraid, haunted by nightmares, subject to panic attacks and refuse to go anywhere near a beach."
Teen Help calls the litigation "a nuisance suit with no credibility. This suit is really about the mother trying to involve the program in an ongoing custody battle she has had with the father.
"We are prepared to present testimony from judges, psychologists, physicians, nurses, teachers and others who have visited the program sites, contradicting the accusations and allegations made by the plaintiff. We are confident they will present the truth."
Stoney Burke said he sent Scott to Teen Help because "he was the extreme picture of what you didn't want your kid to be at 13 years old." He said he sent David "because he wouldn't stay with me. The court granted me custody, and he kept running back to his mother. He was not functioning properly in life."
The Burke case is one of many involving Teen Help students whose parents have undergone nasty divorces and then quarreled bitterly on the best way to help their teen-aged children.
In-your-face style appalled one mom
But then David also was removed from school by his father and sent to Jamaica.
"The day that David was taken, the parents from my community came to my house almost like there had been a death," she said. "I had probably 100 people in my house saying, 'I can't believe they'd send David to this place.' I showed them the video. They didn't see Club Med. They saw a bunch of robotized kids."
Donna Burke said the real eye-opener for her was attending a Teen Help seminar for parents.
"They've got this big support group of everyone patting you on the back, telling you that you did the right thing," she said. "It's very cultlike."
"I could see what my kids were going through," she said. "And my opinion was, this was nothing for children."
The Teen Help seminars for parents, she said, "use fear and intimidation, and they brag that we had the watered-down version. When they reduced grown men to tears, I can imagine what they do to children who are thousands of miles from home."
Later, after she was reunited with her sons, she heard their account of life at Tranquility Bay, Jamaica.
"My kids told me that people throw up in the seminars. And I said, 'What makes them throw up?' And they said, first of all, it's gut-wrenching stuff that you're talking about. You're homesick, you're scared, you're hot. It's like, no air conditioning.
"You've got all these kids packed into a room. And they don't let you eat. So you're hungry, you're weak. People are passing out. They won't let you go to the bathroom. And a lot of kids wet their pants. And if you wet your pants, they throw you out. And then you don't advance."
"... Scott was hogtied with duct tape, put on his stomach for 48 hours. You can't let your chin touch the ground. You have to keep your head up. No sleeping. ... He got abused by a lot of these 17- and 18-year-old kids, to the point where he was going to commit suicide."
Yet Scott and David went along with the program -- they progressed in Jamaica from outcasts on Level 1 to staff aides on Level 5.
After Scott reached an upper level and began bossing other kids around, she said, "he became a jerk of all time. He was mean to the kids. Abused people turn into abusers themselves. Scott was the supreme jerk. Power hungry."
Burke said her first visit with her sons after their immersion in Teen Help was chilling:
"The kids start treating you like you are one of the students, giving you feedback. Saying 'my experience of you is such-and-such.'
"And it kind of scares you because all of a sudden you feel like they're looking into your mind. And all they can talk is that program talk. So you show up to visit your kid and you can't even talk with them.
"I thought I was talking to little Stepford children. I just wanted to smack them and tell them to snap out of it."
David was released from Teen Help on Nov. 30, Scott on Dec. 23.
According to Donna Burke's lawsuit, the company "subjected them to a steaming squalid jungle camp infested with flies, mosquitoes, scorpions and vermin."
Stoney Burke said his sons' Teen Help experience "is the best thing that ever happened to my family."
"They are significantly better people than they were when they started the program," he said. "Scott told me on my first visit that if I hadn't done this, he would either be dead or in jail."
Teen Help also sharply disputed Donna Burke's assertions.
"Undermining the mother's whole case is that at the time of placement, the father had custody of the students," the organization said. "During the course of the program, the court appointed an expert witness to evaluate the students and their current placement."
Teen Help said a forensic psychologist visited Tranquility Bay and evaluated the Burke boys.
"The court, upon hearing this testimony, ordered that the two boys remain at Tranquility Bay," Teen Help said. "In addition, the court did not award any visitation or custody to the plaintiff."
Teen Help also disputed Donna Burke's allegations about the Jamaican staff members:
"We are appalled at the allegations and accusations of the Jamaican people being sadistic, living in squalid jungle conditions, infestations of scorpions and vermin, primitive, meager and filthy food as they are unfounded and we feel have been done with malicious intent. We are insulted!"
Donna Burke said that parents who send their children to Teen Help compounds "call it tough love.
"I call it teen torment."
©
1999, Denver Rocky Mountain News
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