The state oversight board for Montana's private programs for troubled teens and adolescents was established after a 16-year-old girl killed herself at Spring Creek Lodge, the now-shuttered program pictured above. The board's majority comes from the industry it regulates.
'Fox guards henhouse' in Montana programs for troubled teens
It’s been nearly 15 years since 16-year-old Karlye Newman killed herself at Spring Creek Lodge Academy near Thompson Falls.
Fourteen years since the Montana Legislature — spurred in part by Karlye's death and a national focus on “tough love” residential treatment programs like Spring Creek — vowed oversight of the programs and their methods.
Twelve since the watered-down measures approved by the Legislature went into effect.
Ten since Spring Creek, beset by lawsuits and plummeting enrollment after Karlye’s suicide, closed its doors.
Nearly two since Ben Jackson — a toddler when the Legislature heard the urgent pleas on behalf of vulnerable children in such programs — killed himself at the Montana Academy in Marion. He was 16.
A yearlong review by the Missoulian showed that even as other states move to crack down on for-profit residential programs for troubled teens, many of the same issues that prompted the initial outcry here remain. Programs, clustered in western Montana, continue to operate with minimal oversight, sometimes charging parents desperate for help with struggling children more than $100,000 a year.
The programs' websites typically tout their state licensing. But while they handle children with sometimes severe emotional and behavioral problems, the programs are not overseen by mental health, child safety or education experts. Instead, they fall under the Department of Labor and Industry and a board whose majority comes from the industry it regulates, licenses and investigates.
Members of the state board, called the Private Alternative Adolescent Residential or Outdoor Program (PAARP), either declined to be interviewed on the record or did not return calls for comment. (PAARP Board Chairman John Santa, who runs Montana Academy in Marion, left a voicemail returning a phone call, but did not respond to multiple calls back.)
A review of the licensing and other PAARP documents, as well as court and law enforcement records, found that:
Not a single one of 58 complaints investigated in the 12 years of PAARP’s oversight has resulted in significant discipline against any program.
Unlicensed counselors care for children with sometimes serious emotional, physical and mental disorders, including depression, trauma, suicidal thoughts, fetal alcohol syndrome and eating disorders.
PAARP began granting licenses to the programs in 2007, but didn’t do any inspections until 2010. Inspections are announced a week in advance and, in two recent cases, were done by phone or at a fishing site 70 miles away.
Ownership and management of the programs is often a family affair, with nine of the 14 PAARP-licensed programs examined by the Missoulian showing at least two family members as owners and administrators, and one — Turning Winds, in Troy — with six, according to state licensing records. That raises conflict-of-interest issues in the event a complaint is filed against a program.
Students often have no way of reporting abuse to their parents because unsupervised communication may be forbidden for months at a time or is monitored by staff.
One program, Reflections Academy, has been sued three times in the last three months — most recently on Christmas Eve — for failing to protect teenage girls from alleged grooming and sexual assault by an employee who has worked in the industry for 15 years.
What are these programs?
The terms are myriad, and bewildering — Alternative adolescent program; residential school; therapeutic boarding school; wilderness program; treatment center — suggesting anything from a hard-core boot camp to a rehab facility.
At their most basic, therapeutic residential programs fall somewhere between rigorous military-style programs and the intensive therapy offered in rehab, although their methods often contain elements of both.
Two of the 16 programs licensed by the state have significant differences from the rest: Selkirk Outdoor Leadership and Education is based in Idaho but takes students on hiking trips in Montana; Sparrows Nest of Northwest Montana in Kalispell is a program for homeless children.
The other 14, which were the focus of the Missoulian investigation, tout counseling and behavior modification as a way of turning struggling teens into mature, disciplined citizens, offering a lifeline to parents at the end of their rope.
“Have you seen alarming changes in your child’s personality, behavior, or academic performance?” asks the website for Turning Winds, a program near Troy for up to 45 girls and boys ages 13 to 18. “Is your child engaging in self-destructive behaviors or have they just ‘given up?’ Are you finding it almost impossible to understand your child’s change in behavior? How do you know whether its [sic] normal teenage rebellion or something more?”
Websites and promotional videos for the programs tend to show lodge-like facilities ringed by trees, and smiling students hiking or petting horses, testament to the mental and physical health benefits of vigorous outdoor activities.
Those images belie a reality, at least for some students, of harsh physical punishment, controversial “confrontation therapy,” and isolation for emotionally fragile or even suicidal students, according to lawsuits against some of the programs, documents outlining the programs' procedures, and interviews with former students.
According to the Department of Labor and Industry, Ben Jackson is the only other teen to have taken his own life at a Montana residential program since Karlye Newman killed herself at Spring Creek Lodge Academy in 2004. Law enforcement records from Sanders and Lincoln counties show that others have tried:
In 2014, a teenage boy attempted to kill himself at Monarch School in Heron. He survived but, according to the report, with "fractured bones, in a lot of pain."
In 2012, a teenage girl at Clearview Horizon in Heron tried to kill herself. Another girl cut herself and was hospitalized in that same year. In March, a girl tried to kill herself at Clearview again.
Programs typically respond to these behaviors by removing privileges, restricting communication home, or punishing youth with exercise and physical labor — methods experts say only worsen a young person’s mental health.
Yet parents pay a hefty price to try to get their struggling teens back on track over the course of a summer, a year, or several years. Turning Winds' website, for instance, lists its cost at $283 per day, and demands a six-month minimum commitment, which works out to $51,506, plus unspecified enrollment fees. (It offers help in financing up to $35,000 of that cost through unregulated third-party companies.)
Six of Montana’s licensed residential programs for troubled teens are clustered in sparsely populated Sanders County — two in Thompson Falls, three in Trout Creek, one in Heron — with only four people per square mile. It has the state's third-highest unemployment rate, according to December 2018 Department of Labor and Industry statistics. Neighboring Lincoln County — home to five programs (two in Troy, two in Eureka, one in Rexford) — has the highest unemployment rate.
Before Spring Creek Lodge Academy closed in 2009, it was Sanders County’s largest employer, at one time housing 500 students.
Sen. Jennifer Fielder, R-Thompson Falls, said she has visited many of the programs located in her area and said they provide employment opportunities for local residents. Nearby communities also benefit from volunteers when the programs lend their teenage residents out for community projects, like the spring cleanup.
“These schools really do add value to our community,” she said.
Their “wilderness” or “outdoors” nature is no exaggeration: Most are located deep in the pine forests that once nurtured Montana’s timber industry, miles from the nearest towns, which themselves are just dots on a map. Thompson Falls, the county seat for Sanders County and the mailing address for four current programs, has only about 1,000 residents; Trout Creek, the address for the Mountain Meadow Youth Ranch, Explorations Phoenix Mountain Collaborative and, until last year, Galena Ridge — about 260.
In addition to outdoor activities, such remote locations offer a unique benefit — if students are tempted to run away, there’s nowhere for them to go.
The Montana Department of Labor and Industry said it doesn’t know the exact number of children in the 14 state-licensed programs the Missoulian examined. Self-reported numbers from PAARP inspections show that at least 300 children are currently enrolled in these programs in Montana, although the most recent inspections for some date to 2010.
The vast majority, including nearly every former student with whom the Missoulian spoke, are from out of state, and some come from other countries.
One program, the Ranch for Kids (“a bridge of hope and healing for hurting families”) in Rexford near the Canadian border in Lincoln County, specializes in adopted children, especially from Russia, according to its website. Its licensing application lists a Russian translator on staff. But while owner Joyce Sterkel Sutley and science teacher Harry Sutley have nursing licenses, state records show no licensed therapists on staff.
No oversight for religious programs
Programs affiliated with religious institutions are exempt from any state regulation or licensing. This means no state agency oversees their practices, tracks the children in their care, or inspects their facilities. In fact, even when Child and Family Services (CFS) is called about abuse or neglect, its hands are tied.
Law enforcement can handle individual complaints. But while Montana CFS has substantiated reports of abuse and neglect at the religious programs, it has no authority to penalize them or their employees. Sarah Corbally, former CFS administrator, testified before a legislative committee in 2015 about the state’s failure to protect children.
“I can tell you in just the last five years,” she said then, “we’ve had over 30 reports of abuse and neglect, and we go in and we conduct investigations, and in numerous cases we substantiate abuse and neglect, and then nothing happens, because they’re unlicensed and they're unregulated.”
In theory, she said, the state could remove all the children from a facility in an extreme case, “and I’ll be honest, we’ve had those discussions.”
While law enforcement can act on complaints against individuals, the state cannot shut down or otherwise sanction a religious program. Even when a staff member has been found multiple times to be abusing children, which Corbally said has happened, the results of the investigation remain private in Montana, and the state doesn’t have the authority to discipline unregulated programs or their employees.
The Legislature has been asked to change the law, bringing religious programs under the state regulatory umbrella, every legislative session since 2011. The efforts have always failed.
"The Montana Family Foundation kills it every time,'' Rep. Ellie Hill Smith, the former legislator from Missoula who carried the bill in 2017, said in an interview, of the influential conservative group. "They say people have a right to religious education. I say to them, 'I don't have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is religious education or group homes that don't have to comply with state laws like the rest of our schools.'''
DPHHS spokesman John Ebelt reiterated in an emailed statement that "per state law, DPHHS does not license these facilities. However, just as in every situation when we receive a call to the child abuse hotline regarding an allegation of child abuse and neglect, we respond appropriately by collecting the information and assigning it to the field for investigation, if warranted.”
State Inspection Reports
A photograph of Reflections Academy contained in state inspection reports. The program has been sued three times since Oct. 9 for alleged misrepresentation of its therapy practices and negligence in hiring a man accused of grooming girls there and sexually assaulting one of them.
'Fox guarding the henhouse'
Montana’s non-religious residential treatment programs largely self-regulate through PAARP, whose five members are appointed by the governor from a list submitted by the industry.
The law regarding PAARP mandates that three of the five members come from the residential treatment program industry. When complaints come to the board, they are discussed in closed meetings then sent to a screening committee composed of two industry and one public member. It decides, also in private, how to respond.
“The fox guarding the henhouse,” said Ben Jackson’s father, who asked not to be identified by name to protect his family's privacy.
Judy Bovington, chief legal counsel for Labor and Industry, said complaints remain secret until there is proof the allegations are accurate.
"If someone filed a complaint against someone, it just doesn't become a feeding ground for defamation or salacious allegations," she said. "The screening panel requires they find reasonable cause" before the complaint is made public.
In PAARP's case, the screening panel's majority is made up of people from the industry.
Desperate parents
The desperation parents feel in seeking solutions for their children's problems makes Montana's weak oversight particularly troubling.
Ann Moderie, an attorney in Polson who has represented parents who sent their children to programs in Montana, as well as former students who experienced abuse, said she understands why parents place their children in the programs.
Parents often feel they’ve tried every kind of specialist in their area, she said, and they are frantic for help by the time they send their kids to a program in Montana.
“Parents are scared and trying to do what's right for them,” Moderie said. “I’ve seen parents use retirement funds to send them to these schools, and then the children end up worse.”
It’s important to know that there are some good programs as well, Moderie said. Some students leave these programs feeling it helped them.
Sean Colin, who said he was sent to Montana Academy in 2015 after being expelled from a prep school on the East Coast for selling prescription drugs, said the 20 months he spent there taught him to be more mature and to stop putting on a facade.
But while it worked for him, he said some elements of the program, such as banning communication with anyone else for several days as punishment, could be a “nightmare” for his more troubled peers.
“I don’t entirely think it was a good program for drug addiction or for people with actual problems,” he said. “I think for a lot of kids with crippling depression and anything severe, you really need to go to something more specialized.”
Thom Bridge
Rep. Ellie Hill Smith, D-Missoula, shown in this file photo from the 2017 Montana Legislature, tried repeatedly to bring religious programs under state regulation.
Missoulian reporter Seaborn Larson contributed to this story.
Lucy Tompkins grew up around the American West and graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Montana in 2017. Upon graduation she worked at the Missoulian as an education reporter, during which she worked on the investigative series Troubled Kids, Troubled System. Tompkins now lives in Berlin, Germany, where she recently completed a Young Professional Journalist Fulbright Fellowship. Tompkins was recently granted a year-long reporting fellowship at the New York Times, beginning in June.
Seaborn Larson
Reporter
Seaborn Larson is the crime and courts reporter for the Missoulian. He covered business, local government and public safety for papers in Libby and Great Falls in his home state of Montana before joining the Missoulian. Larson, an avid hunter, graduated from the University of Montana School of Journalism in December 2014.
Cameron Evans
Reporter
Cameron Evans has covered K-12 schools for the Missoulian since August 2018. She graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 2017, where she minored in Women's and Gender Studies. In 2019, she was the co-recipient of a fellowship from the Education Writers Association to cover the role education plays in upward mobility. She previously worked as a health writing intern for Insider, editorial intern for Psychology Today, and university correspondent for Men's Health.
Gwen Florio
City Editor
Gwen Florio has covered stories ranging from the Oklahoma City bombing trials and the mass shooting at Columbine High School, to the glitz of the Miss America pageant and the more practical Miss Navajo contest, whose participants slaughter a sheep. She's reported from Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, as well as Lost Springs, Wyoming, population three. Florio has worked at daily newspapers in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Denver and now Montana, where she's the editor of the Missoulian and the Ravalli Republic. She's the author of six novels.
Tommy Martino
Photographer
Tommy Martino started taking pictures when he was a sophomore in high school. After spending a semester in the darkroom, he figured why not continue taking pictures and enrolled in every class he could that had photography involved. Martino graduated in 2014 from the University of Montana School of Journalism -- from there his love of telling stories with a camera grew. After interning at the Missoulian during the winter of 2014, he went on to intern and work as a photojournalist at papers in Michigan and Wyoming before rejoining the Missoulian as a staff photographer in the fall of 2015. After four years at the Missoulian Tommy took a new position as a staff photographer at the University of Montana, where he has been since November 2019.
Kathy Best
Executive Editor
Kathy Best was editor of the Missoulian in Missoula, Mont., and the Ravalli Republic in nearby Hamilton from June 2016 through April 2019. She previously worked as executive editor and managing editor of The Seattle Times and as a top editor for the Baltimore Sun, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She was also a reporter for the Post-Dispatch in its Washington, D.C., and Illinois statehouse bureaus. Best now leads the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Request Publications
Tragedies & Journalists
A 40-page guide to help journalists, photojournalists and editors report on violence while protecting both victims and themselves.
This documentary, available online and on DVD, features a wide range of Australian journalists their recounting experiences covering traumatic stories.
Whether clinicians like it or not, children and families affected by trauma are routinely covered by the media. When that happens, clinicians often face difficult choices.
In conjunction with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Dart Centre Asia Pacific created a teaching video on the treatment of news sources. The project was developed to supplement teaching materials for journalism educators.
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Integrating clinical and social perspective without sacrificing either the complexity of individual experience or the breadth of political context, "Trauma and Recovery" brings a new level of understanding to the psychological consequences of the full range of traumatic life events.
Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character
Jonathan Shay is a Boston based psychiatrist caring for Vietnam combat veterans diagnosed with severe, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. In this unique and revolutionary book, Dr. Shay examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer’s Iliad with many of his patients, Vietnam veterans struggling with PTSD . Although the Iliad was written twenty-seven centuries ago, so much can be learned about combat trauma, especially when it is threaded through the compelling voices and experiences of Vietnam vets.
Journalists under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War
War journalists, like all who have prolonged exposure to violence, come home emotionally maimed and often broken. And yet, a news culture in denial has pretended that war journalists are immune from trauma. This fit into the macho culture of war journalism. It also assuaged the consciences of those running news organizations, who often crumple up and discard, years later, those they send to war. Dr. Feinstein has provided us with research that is a chilling reminder that war journalists are human, as well as a searing indictment of major news conglomerates who have refused to acknowledge or address the suffering of their own.
PTSD and Veterans: A Conversation with Dr. Frank Ochberg
How do we help veterans who are returning from war with PTSD? Dr. Frank Ochberg, a leading authority on PTSD, shares his experiences, seasoned insights and suggestions in this intimate conversation with reporter Mike Walters. He shares his insights regarding common symptoms to look out for and the importance of building trust and other aspects of the patient-therapist relationship. He then explains techniques he has developed that help his clients work through the trauma and adapt to civilian life.
Mapping Trauma and Its Wake: Autobiographic Essays by Pioneer Trauma Scholars
Mapping Trauma and Its Wake is a compilation of autobiographic essays by seventeen of the field's pioneers, each of whom has been recognized for his or her contributions by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. Each author discusses how he or she first got interested in the field, what each feels are his or her greatest achievements, and where the discipline might - and should - go from here. This impressive collection of essays by internationally-renowned specialists is destined to become a classic of traumatology literature. It is a text that will provide future mental health professionals with a window into the early years of this rapidly expanding field.
Post-Traumatic Therapy And Victims Of Violence (Psychosocial Stress Series)
Frank M. Ochberg, MD is adjunct professor of psychiatry, criminal justice and journalism at Michigan State University. He served in the cabinet of Governor William Milliken as Mental Health Director. His book, Post Traumatic Therapy and Victims of Violence, is widely acclaimed as one of the leading resources in the field.
In this long-awaited memoir, Lifton charts the adventurous and surprising course of his fascinating life journey, one that took him from what he refers to as, "a Jewish Huck Finn childhood in Brooklyn, to deep and meaningful friendships with many of the most influential intellectuals, writers, and artists of our time—from Erik Erikson, David Riesman, and Margaret Mead, to Howard Zinn and Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Kunitz, Kenzaburo Oe, and Norman Mailer.
This work is more than a memoir, it is also a remarkable study of Hiroshima survivors. Lifton explored the human consequences of nuclear weapons, and then went on to uncover dangerous forms of attraction to their power in the spiritual disease he calls nuclearism. Lifton writing illuminates the reversal of healing and killing in ordinary physicians who had been socialized to Nazi evil. Written with the warmth of spirit—along with the humor and sense of absurdity—that have made Lifton a beloved friend and teacher to so many, Witness to an Extreme Century is a moving and deeply thought-provoking story of one man’s extraordinary commitment to looking into the abyss of evil in order to help others move past it.
Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming
In this original psychological literary work, Dr. Jonathan Shay continues what he started in his book, Achilles in Vietnam. Uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, Shay sheds light on the pitfalls that trap many veterans on the road to recovery, the return to civilian life. The combination of psychological insight and literary brilliance feels seamless. Shay makes an impassioned plea to renovate American military institutions and in doing so deepens the readers understanding of the veteran's experience.
Trauma Journalism personalizes this movement with in-depth profiles of reporters, researchers and trauma experts engaged in an international effort to transform how the media work under the most difficult of conditions.Through biographical sketches concerning several significant traumatic events (Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine school tragedy, 9/11, Iraq War, the South Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina), students and working reporters will gain insights into the critical components of contemporary journalism practices.
After the War Zone: A Practical Guide for Returning Troops and Their Families
Two experts from the VA National Center for PTSD come together in this work to provide an essential resource for service members, their spouses, families, and communities. They shed light on what troops really experience during deployment and once they return home. Pinpointing the most common after-effects of war and offering strategies for troop reintegration to daily life, Friedman and Slone cover the myths and realities of homecoming; reconnecting with spouse and family; anger and adrenaline; guilt and moral dilemmas; and PTSD and other mental-health concerns. With a wealth of community and government resources, tips, and suggestions, After the War Zone is a practical guide to helping troops and their families prevent war zone stresses from having a lasting negative impact.
Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges
Experiencing trauma at some point in life is almost inevitable, overcoming it is not. This inspiring book identifies ten key ways to weather and bounce back from stress and trauma. Steven M. Southwick incorporates the latest scientific research and interviews with trauma survivors. This book provides a practical guide to building emotional, mental and physical resilience after trauma.
Trauma Therapy in Context: The Science and Craft of Evidence-based Practice
This book examines several current clinical approaches to trauma-focused treatment. Rather than describe theoretical approaches in isolation, the editors have integrated these interventions into a broader clinical context. Chapter authors emphasize basic therapeutic skills such as empathic listening, instilling resilience, and creating meaning, in the service of empirically-supported, highly efficacious trauma interventions. Throughout, they focus on the real-life challenges that arise in typical therapy sessions to deepen our understanding and application of evidence based interventions.
While this book is intended for all clinical mental health professionals who work with trauma survivors it is also a phenomenal resource for those who seek to broaden their understanding of the way various approaches to understanding treatment of trauma.
The award-winning author and noted psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton offers a powerful critique of American militarism during the Vietnam War. Home from the War is recognized as the ultimate text for those working with Vietnam veterans, the book's insights have had enormous influence among psychologists and psychiatrists all over the world.
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
The Boston Globe called this book, "A powerful reminder not only of what happened, but of the monumental evil done by the particular human beings who were trained to heal and cure."
Based on arresting historical scholarship and personal interviews with Nazi and prisoner doctors, the book traces the inexorable logic leading from early Nazi sterilization and euthanasia of its own citizens to mass extermination of "racial undesirables."This extraordinary work combines research and analyzation to describe a seemingly contradictory phenomenon of doctors becoming agents of mass murder. With chilling literary power, Lifton describes the Nazi transmutation of values that allowed medical killing to be seen as a therapeutic healing of the body politic.
When Trauma and Recovery was first published in 1992, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work. In the intervening years, Herman’s volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large.
Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting About Victims & Trauma
More essential now than ever, Covering Violence connects journalistic practices to the rapidly expanding body of literature on trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, and secondary traumatic stress, and pays close attention to current medical and political debates concerning victims' rights.
Sharing the Front Line and the Back Hills is a story that points to a crisis facing international institutions and the media who seek to alleviate and report human suffering throughout the world. The goals of the editor are to tell the story of thousands of individuals dedicated to helping others; and to integrate issues of protection and care into all levels of planning, implementing and evaluating international intervention and action. The book identifies approaches that have proven useful and explores and suggests future directions.
The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence
Ervin Staub explores the psychological, cultural, and societal roots of group aggression. He sketches a conceptual framework for the many influences on one group's desire to harm another: cultural and social patterns predisposing to violence, historical circumstances resulting in persistent life problems, and needs and modes of adaptation arising from the interaction of these influences.
Drawing on more than 30 years of criminal justice experience, author Susan Herman explains why justice for all requires more than holding offenders accountable it means addressing victims three basic needs: to be safe, to recover from the trauma of the crime, and regain control of their lives.
Arnold Isaacs, who spent the final years of the war in Vietnam as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, describes his firsthand observations of the collapse of Cambodia and South Vietnam―from the 1973 Paris peace agreement to the American evacuation of Saigon and its aftermath―with heartbreaking detail, from the devastated battlefields and villages to the boats filled with terrified refugees.
Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles
This is the story of the Northern Ireland troubles told as never before. It is not concerned with the political bickering, but with the lives of those who have suffered and the deaths which have resulted from more than three decades of conflict
A Country Called Amreeka: U.S. History Retold through Arab-American Lives
The history of Arab settlement in the United States stretches back nearly as far as the history of America itself. For the first time, Alia Malek brings this history to life. In each of eleven spellbinding chapters, she inhabits the voice and life of one Arab American, at one time-stopping historical moment.
This book seeks to tell the life stories of the innocent men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the “war on terror.” As we approach the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, this collection of narratives gives voice to the people who have had their human rights violated here in the U.S. by post-9/11 policies and actions.
Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs/Los niños en un mundo de las pandillas
With profound empathy for a reality that is too easily defined and dismissed as repugnant, Unsettled/Desasosiego takes us on a visual journey into the lives of children deeply affected by civil war and gang violence.
Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future
Legal Lynching offers a succinct, accessible introduction to the debate over the death penalty's history and future, exposing a chilling frequency of legal error, systemic racial and economic discrimination, and pervasive government misconduct.
War Photographer is a documentary by Christian Frei about the photographer James Nachtwey. As well as telling the story of an iconic man in the field of war photography, the film addresses the broader scope of ideas common to all those involved in war journalism, as well as the issues that they cover.
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
For the first time in the United States comes the tragic and profoundly important story of the legendary Canadian general who "watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect.
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
In Blood and Soil, Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides.
Ophuls examines attitudes toward war in the Western media, and in the societies they inform. The 243-minute documentary interlaces stark realities of combat with mordantly hilarious references to Hollywood fantasy-versions of war, and includes over 50 interviews with some of the world’s leading journalists, commentators, historians, newscasters and many others.
An enthralling, deeply moving memoir from one of our foremost American war correspondents. Janine Di Giovanni has spent most of her career—more than twenty years—in war zones recording events on behalf of the voiceless. From Sarajevo to East Timor, from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, she has been under siege and under fire.
Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity)
Echoes of Violence is an award-winning collection of personal letters to friends from a foreign correspondent who is trying to understand what she witnessed during the iconic human disasters of our time--in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and New York City on September 11th, among many other places.
It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War
War photographer Lynsey Addario’s memoir It’s What I Do is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life.
With inspiring fearlessness, McClelland tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind and repairing her broken psyche. She begins to probe the depths of her illness, exploring our culture's history with PTSD, delving into the latest research by the country's top scientists and therapists, and spending time with veterans and their families.
Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide
This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.
Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values
In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld signed a memo that authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. From a behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates how this memo set the stage for divergence.
Shoah is Claude Lanzmann's landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust. Assembled from footage shot by the filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, it investigates the genocide at the level of experience: the geographical layout of the camps and the ghettos; the daily routines of imprisonment; the inexorable trauma of humiliation, punishment, extermination; and the fascinating insights of those who experienced these events first hand.
Humankind has struggled to make sense of human-upon-human violence. Edited by two of anthropology's most passionate voices on this subject, "Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology" is the only book of its kind available: a single volume exploration of social, literary, and philosophical theories of violence.
A gripping and insightful examination of the relationship between news-makers and news-watchers, looking at how images of war and tragedy are presented to us in the media and how we consume them
Guzmán focuses on the similarities between astronomers researching humanity’s past, in an astronomical sense, and the struggle of many Chilean women who still search, after decades, for the remnants of their relatives executed during the dictatorship. Patricio Guzmán narrates the documentary himself and the documentary includes interviews and commentary from those affected and from astronomers and archeologists.
In his extraordinarily gripping and thought-provoking new book, Jeremy Bowen charts his progress from keen young novice whose first reaction to the sound of gunfire was to run towards it to the more circumspect veteran he is today
The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict
The Observer's chief foreign correspondent Peter Beaumont, takes us into the guts of modern conflict. He visits the bombed and abandoned home of Mullah Omar; discovers a deserted Al Qaeda camp where he finds documents describing a plan to attack London; talks to young bomb-throwers in a Rafah refugee camp. Unflinching and utterly gripping
France's leading sociologist shows how, far from reflecting the tastes of the majority, television, particularly television journalism, imposes ever-lower levels of political and social discourse on us all.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom.
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World
MINDFULNESS reveals a set of simple yet powerful practices that you can incorporate into daily life to help break the cycle of anxiety, stress, unhappiness, and exhaustion. It promotes the kind of happiness and peace that gets into your bones. It seeps into everything you do and helps you meet the worst that life throws at you with new courage.
Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
Full Catastrophe Living is a book for the young and the old, the well, the ill, and anyone trying to live a healthier and saner life in today’s world. By using the practices described within, you can learn to manage chronic pain resulting from illness and/or stress related disorders.
Slee: A Very Short Introduction, addresses the biological and psychological aspects of sleep, providing a basic understanding of what sleep is and how it is measured, a look at sleep through the human lifespan, and the causes and consequences of major sleep disorders.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust.
This is a new edition of the world's leading textbook on journalism. Translated into more than a dozen languages, David Randall's handbook is an invaluable guide to the 'universals' of good journalistic practice for professional and trainee journalists worldwide.
Legends of People Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka
This provocative study of the political culture of nationalism in Sri Lanka and Australia - is one of the few genuinely comparative studies in anthropology and in taking up such an important question as nationalism it reminds us that truly relevant anthropology questions deep-seated cultural beliefs, including our own
Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain
Family Secrets offers a sweeping account of how shame--and the relationship between secrecy and openness--has changed over the last two centuries in Britain. Deborah Cohen uses detailed sketches of individual families as the basis for comparing different sorts of social stigma.
During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died—a figure twice that of all American war casualties. Seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. Given the astonishing scope of the devastation, W. G. Sebald asks: Why?
The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan
Christina Lamb's evocative reporting brings to life the stories that no one else had written about: the abandoned victims of almost a quarter century of war. Her unique perspective on Afghanistan and deep passion for the people she writes about make this the definitive account of the tragic plight of a proud nation.
House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe
Christina Lamb's powerful narrative traces the history of the brutal civil war, independence, and the Mugabe years, all through the lives of two people on opposing sides. Although born within a few miles of each other, their experience growing up could not have been more different.
Butcher & Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Failure in Afghanistan
Butcher & Bolt brilliantly brings to life the personalities involved in Afghanistan’s relationship with the world, chronicling the misunderstandings and missed opportunities that have so often led to war.
Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Jerusalem 1913 shows us a cosmopolitan city whose religious tolerance crumbled before the onset of Z ionism and its corresponding nationalism on both sides-a conflict that could have been resolved were it not for the onset of World War I. With extraordinary skill, Amy Dockser Marcus rewrites the story of one of the world's most indelible divides.
They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq
Based on "Blood Brothers," the award-nominated series that ran in Army Times, this is the remarkable story of a courageous military unit that sacrificed their lives to change Adhamiya, Iraq from a lawless town where insurgents roamed freely, to a safe and secure neighborhood. This is a timeless story of men at war and a heartbreaking account of American sacrifice in Iraq.
The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle against America's Veterans
Aaron Glantz reported extensively from Iraq during the first three years of this war and has been reporting on the plight of veterans ever since. The War Comes Home is the first book to systematically document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Madame Dread: A Tale of Love, Vodou, and Civil Strife in Haiti
Kathie Klarreich's compelling memoir interweaves shattering political events with an intensely personal narrative about the Haitian musician Klarreich, who turns out to be as enthralling and complicated as the political events she covered.
In the tradition of Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood, Columbine is destined to be a classic. A close-up portrait of hatred, a community rendered helpless, and the police blunders and cover-ups, it is a compelling and utterly human portrait of two killers-an unforgettable cautionary tale for our times
Juvenile, photographer Joseph Rodríguez spent several years following several youths, from arrest, counseling, trial adjudication, and incarceration, to release, probation, house arrest, group homes, and the search for employment and meaning in their lives.
By age twelve, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East Los Angeles gang warfare. This story is at times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-earned lesson for the next generation.
Still Here, documents the ongoing expressions of hope, perseverance, and suffering in the still-devastated communities of New Orleans and Texas post hurricane Katrina. Rodríguez spent two years photographing and interviewing families and individuals who shared their daily struggles to rebuild their lives.
Breaking News, Breaking Down, Two journalists' emotional journey after 9/11 & Katrina - This program tells the hidden story of how traumatic news impacts the men and women who cover it. Mike Walter loved chasing the big story, but on one September morning, the biggest story of his career chased him down: a jet rained from the sky, piercing the Pentagon and shattering his emotional well being.
One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers
The debate about women and torture has, until recently, focused on women as victims of violence. The essays in One of the Guys challenge and examine the expectations placed on women while attempting to understand female perpetrators of abuse and torture in a broader context.
Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War
Tara McKelvey — the first U.S.journalist to speak with female prisoners from Abu Ghraib — traveled to the Middle East and across the United States to seek out victims and perpetrators. McKelvey tells how soldiers, acting in an atmosphere that encouraged abuse and sadism, were unleashed on a prison population of which the vast majority, according to army documents, were innocent civilians.
Gogo Mama : A Journey Into the Lives of Twelve African Women
This book is a journey across Africa, in all its complexity; from the townships of Johannesburg, to the back alleys of Zanzibar; from the frontline of the war in the Sudan, to the nightclubs of Cairo. It is a vivid, illuminating and often haunting composite picture of an extraordinary continent, in the words of the women who know it best.
Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America
This is the first anthology of its kind, bringing together outstanding practitioners of the muckraking tradition, from the Revolutionary era to the present day. Ranging from mainstream figures like Woodward and Bernstein to legendary iconoclasts such as I. F. Stone and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the dispatches in this collection combine the thrill of the chase after facts with a burning sense of outrage
Trauma Therapy in Context: The Science and Craft of Evidence-based Practice
This book examines several current clinical approaches to trauma-focused treatment. Rather than describe theoretical approaches in isolation, the editors have integrated these interventions into a broader clinical context. Chapter authors emphasize basic therapeutic skills such as empathic listening, instilling resilience, and creating meaning, in the service of empirically-supported, highly efficacious trauma interventions.
Ari Goldman’s exploration of the emotional and spiritual aspects of spending a year in mourning for his father will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one, as he describes how this year affected him as a son, husband, father, and member of his community.
What began as a project to deepen his knowledge of the world’s sacred beliefs turned out to be an extraordinary journey of spiritual illumination, one in which Goldman reexamined his own faith as an Orthodox Jew and opened his mind to the great religions of the world. Written with warmth, humor, and penetrating clarity, The Search for God at Harvard is a book for anyone who has wrestled with the question of what it means to take religion seriously today.
Being Jewish: The Spiritual and Cultural Practice of Judaism Today
In Being Jewish, Ari L. Goldman offers eloquent thoughts about an absorbing exploration of modern Judaism. A bestselling author and widely respected chronicler of Jewish life, Goldman vividly contrasts the historical meaning of Judaism's heritage with the astonishing and multiform character of the religion today.
This book is a collection of reflective crime pieces, often approaching the events from different angles, yet written by on-the spot observers and reporters. There is an emphasis on the victims, and as a result these stories are written with sensitivity and compassion rather than sensationalism.
Over twenty-five tales of grisly murders and suspicious killings are laid out for inspection, including the story of the Police Killers and tales of the seedy Melbourne underworld.
This fully revised and updated new edition of Smart Health Choices will provide you with the tools for assessing health advice, whether it comes from a specialist, general practitioner, naturopath, the media, the Internet, or a friend. It shows you how to take an active role in your health care, and to make the best decisions for you and your loved ones based on personal preferences and the best available evidence.
The Spanish-language version of the Dart Center's 40-page guide to help journalists, photojournalists and editors report on violence while protecting both victims and themselves.
9/11: Mental Health in the Wake of Terrorist Attacks
This book comprehensively describes the psychological response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and, to a lesser degree, Washington DC. The impact of what happened on the local and US national population is considered through various epidemiological studies, as well as personal accounts from some of those more directly involved.
Filled with astonishing personal stories, conflict, and drama, Feet to the Fire gives readers the rare opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of this nation’s most powerful journalists and news executives and experience their highly stressful environments. With each new and revealing interview, Borjesson gathers devastating details from national security and intelligence reporters, White House journalists, Middle East experts, war correspondents, and others. Like pieces of a terrible puzzle, these conversations combine to provide a hair-raising view of the mechanisms by which the truth has been manufactured post 9/11.
Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss
Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work.
Daring to Feel: Violence, the News Media, and Their Emotions
Daring to Feel is a bold, brave book. Jody Santos challenges the entrenched doctrine that journalists are neutral, dispassionate observers of 'fact.' Santos demonstrates how journalists themselves and society as a whole benefit from emotionally nuanced and emotionally engaged reporting. This is a beautifully written tribute to the passion of journalists and the heart-wrenching stories they cover.
The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War
In The Things They Cannot Say, award-winning journalist and author Kevin Sites asks these difficult questions of eleven soldiers and marines, who—by sharing the truth about their wars—display a rare courage that transcends battlefield heroics. For each of these men, many of whom Sites first met while in Afghanistan and Iraq, the truth means something different. One struggles to recover from a head injury he believes has stolen his ability to love; another attempts to make amends for the killing of an innocent man; yet another finds respect for the enemy fighter who tried to kill him. Sites also shares the unsettling narrative of his own failures during war—including his complicity in a murder—and the redemptive powers of storytelling that saved him from a self-destructive downward spiral.
Kevin Sites, the award-winning journalist, covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels and government troops, child soldiers and child brides, and features the people on every side, including those caught in the cross fire. His honest reporting helps destroy the myths of war by putting a human face on war's inhumanity.
Swimming with Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey Across the Afghan War
Using his trademark immersive style, Kevin Sites uncovered surprising stories with unexpected truths. He swam in the Kunduz River with an infamous warlord named Nabi Gechi, who demonstrated both his fearsome killing skills as well as a genius for peaceful invention. Sites talked with ex-Taliban fighters, politicians, female cops, farmers, drug addicts, and diplomats, and patrolled with American and Afghan soldiers. In Swimming with Warlords he helps us to understand this kingdom of primitive beauty, dark mysteries, and savage violence, as well as the conflict that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives--and what we might expect tomorrow and in the years to come.
The Price They Paid is the stunning and dramatic true story of a legendary helicopter commander in Vietnam and the flight crews that followed him into the most intensive helicopter warfare ever—and how that brutal experience has changed their lives in the forty years since the war ended.
What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars
Most Americans are now familiar with PTSD and its prevalence among troops. In this groundbreaking book, David Wood examines the far more pervasive yet less understood experience of those we send to war: moral injury, the violation of our fundamental values of right and wrong that so often occurs in the impossible moral dilemmas of modern conflict.
Collective Conviction: The Story of Disaster Action
Collective Conviction tells the story of Disaster Action, a small charity founded in 1991 by survivors and bereaved people from the disasters of the late 1980s, including Zeebrugge, King's Cross, Clapham, Lockerbie, Hillsborough and the Marchioness. The aims were to create a health and safety culture in which disasters were less likely to occur and to support others affected by similar events.
When Lynne O’Donnell met Pauline and Margaret in Iraq she could never have guessed the wealth of stories she’d discover. Over tea the two women tell Lynne of their lives in the country: each having married Iraqi men had then relocated from England more than thirty years before.
Trauma Reporting A Journalist's Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories
Trauma Reporting provides vital information on developing a healthy, professional and respectful relationship with those who choose to tell their stories during times of trauma, distress or grief.
