|
War of words online Teen Help, foes fight Web battle over best ways to aid kids in trouble Desperate parents logging on to their personal computers to seek help for their troubled teens need not search long before finding welcoming arms.
Teen Help, the Utah-based network of behavior modification camps, operates colorful, information-laden Web sites touting its facilities and featuring testimonials from parents and teens praising its programs and philosophy.
In-your-face style appalled one mom
This Internet battle for the hearts and minds of parents is fought with catchy phrases, lush color photos and related link after link after link.
A Teen Help site was the second of 932,162 the Excite search engine uncovered in a recent query for the words "treatment for troubled teens."
An Alta Vista search for the phrase "help for defiant teen" put a Teen Help site first among 7,920,280.
Teen Help popped up first in HotBot and Google searches for the words "teen help." The organization also held the first eight positions in a HotBot search for "treatment facility for defiant teen."
Teen Help's omnipresence on the Net is partly due to technical know-how. The goal is to prompt a search engine to flag words a Net surfer likely might use. These words -- invisible to an ordinary user -- are typed as key words atop Web pages.
Though invisible to people, they are clearly seen by search engines. Teen Help's hidden words include "delinquency," "rebellion," "emotional problem," "residential treatment center" and dozens of others.
A search for http://www.defiantteen.com lands the surfer on the handsome home page of Adolescent Services International, a parallel company run by the brother of Teen Help founder Robert Lichfield. ASI's logo: A clipper ship, set against a globe and sailing through rough seas. The slogan: "Helping to navigate the troubled waters of adolescence."
Users clicking on a Teen Help site can find links to more than two dozen related home pages. The main Teen Help site at http://vpp.com/teenhelp offers this pledge:
"Teen Help provides a national toll free hot line designed to assist parents, child care professionals and others in locating appropriate resources for the treatment of adolescents struggling with making the best choices in their lives." The site does not disclose that Teen Help is a for-profit group of Utah-based companies.
Other linked pages describe facilities in beautiful settings where defiant teens undergo "behavioral modification" and where "appropriate attitudes and behaviors are encouraged, rewarded and reinforced. Inappropriate attitudes and behaviors are confronted, consequented and redirected."
Teen Help's Internet sites do not describe in detail the rigorous group seminars it holds for parents and teens.
Right behind Teen Help's listings in Web searches comes http://www.intrepidnetreporter.com, the work of Maine social worker Donna Headrick and others. She said she has irritated Teen Help so much it has threatened to sue.
Begins one Headrick online broadside at Teen Help:
"For a mere $30,000-plus a year, you, too, can send your child to beautiful Western Samoa -- and keep him there, complete with handcuffs, pepper spray, Mace and electric disablers."
Headrick, who has a master's degree in social work and has lobbied on juvenile justice issues, began her interest in Teen Help after reading about it in the Web-based magazine Salon.
She soon was exchanging e-mail with Boulder businesswoman Alexia Parks. Parks, who owns an Internet firm called Vote-link, had just published an online account about her efforts to free a niece from a locked Christian detention compound in Missouri.
Headrick then heard from a Washington state woman trying to free a boy from Teen Help's compound in Western Samoa. Headrick decided to take Teen Help on -- via the Internet. By her account, tens of thousands of people have visited her Web site.
She said that what most alarmed her was the lack of trained therapists at many Teen Help compounds.
"I am not one of those people who thinks that only credentialed professionals can work effectively with kids," she said. "But I want to know that in any organization of any size that there are at least two or three people that are trained.
"God knows we need to do new and different things, but if people don't even know what's been tried before and what has been a horrible failure, how are we going to build?"
She said Teen Help turns teens "into little zombies."
"What we're trying to do with teen-agers is to get them not to give in to peer pressure, to make independent judgments based on values," Headrick said. "And everything Teen Help is doing is contrary to what we know is necessary for mature people."
Teen Help, in turn, rips Headrick and the Intrepidnetreporter site, which it calls "an incomplete and low-traffic Web site containing misleading online resources written by ordinary people, not experienced journalists or Web authors.
" ... We regret that fly-by-night 'reporters' such as Intrepid continue to slander programs which have changed the lives of many families and helped teens to grow and mature into accountable and responsible adults."
Headrick said she sympathizes with parents who grab for a Teen Help solution.
"I have a child who was the teen-ager from hell," she said. "She dropped out of high school the first part of her junior year, wearing pairs of black combat boots, the black leather with studs bracelets."
Her daughter finally found her way.
She graduated with highest honors from Smith College in 1996 and just passed her preliminary examinations for a doctorate at Brown University.
©
1999, Denver Rocky Mountain News
insidedenver.com |
||||
