“I am here to be the voice of children whose voices cannot be heard.” In front of a packed room of the American Congress, Paris Hilton, rich heiress to the hotels of the same name, pleaded, Wednesday June 26, in favor of better protection of children placed in the United States. In its crosshairs: the abuses perpetrated in residential therapeutic centers for young people, where 50,000 American adolescents are sent each year, specifies KFOX14. For his part, The New York Times speaks of 100,000 minors interned in these homes.
Paris Hilton, 43, was sent to four of these institutions by her parents between the ages of 16 and 18. An experience she described to lawmakers as“isolating and traumatic”, reports The Guardian. The former reality TV star gave Congress a chilling account of her two years in those institutions, saying she was “force-fed drugs and sexually assaulted by staff.”
“I was forcibly subdued, dragged through the corridors, stripped naked and placed in solitary confinement.”
A $50 billion industry
But Paris Hilton is not the only one to have experienced such an ordeal. According to the New York Times, “Hundreds of thousands of young Americans have suffered similar assaults or violence in rehabilitation centers, in nature therapy settings, and in Christian therapeutic homes, all of which purport to treat adolescents with psychological problems such as depression, drug abuse, and defiant behavior.” These establishments are mostly run by a handful of large for-profit companies and funded by taxpayers. An industry that today generates more than 50 billion dollars.
While some teenagers, like Paris Hilton, were sent to these establishments by their parents “caught in the deceptive marketing of the troubled teen industries,” “Others are referred directly by social services or criminal justice,” the star says. And that’s where the problem lies, because once they arrive at the center, the children are cut off from the rest of the world. As a result, according to a report from the U.S. Office of Health and Human Services released this month, “many states do not have the information needed to identify patterns of abuse in residential settings.”
Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act
In the spring of 2023, driven by the activism of Paris Hilton, around fifty senators and representatives from all political sides joined forces to present a bill entitled “Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act” (Sicaa) [“loi contre les violences institutionnelles faites aux mineurs”]. First objective: to know how many children are interned in these homes, then, in a second step, to think about their financing. Even if Paris Hilton defended the adoption of this law on Wednesday, the measures of the Sicaa are judged “far from sufficient” speak New York TimesIts adoption would nevertheless allow a first spotlight to be shed on a dysfunctional system.
