I SEE YOU, SURVIVOR

The author recounts the shocking abuses she suffered at a boarding academy and takes aim at the “Troubled Teen Industry.”

“What you will read here is upsetting,” writes Ianelli, “especially if you have suffered abuse….This is not a story of trauma but of triumph over trauma.” At age 15, the author was committed to the Family Foundation School, a boarding academy in rural New York that incorporated anger and violence into its troubled-teen program. “The Family is not unique. You need to understand that,” the author writes. “The Family is a pinhole is a multibillion-dollar industry that uses the same basic approaches, mindsets, and techniques on ‘troubled’ teens. Prolonged restraint, beatings, starvation, savage verbal attacks…this is standard stuff.” Punishments included moving huge rocks back and forth from one pile to another for consecutive days as well as digging graves. Despite its facade as a high school, writes the author, “there were no classes my first year.” Ianelli describes being sodomized by a violent cook in the school kitchen. After the school priest (“that former Catholic piece of shit”) failed to help her, she was locked in the boiler room, taped inside a blanket, eating from a dog bowl. As the author recounts, the horrific abuse continued. “The abuse becomes the reason not to believe the abuse, and the worse the abuse, the more the story is disbelieved,” she writes. Although efforts by the author and fellow survivors contributed to the Family being shuttered in 2014, she writes, “This abuse is happening today, right now, as you read this. The Troubled Teen Industry that created and enabled the Family is still here, as massive as ever.” Online, Ianelli uses the identity Survivor993, “for the number of days I’d been imprisoned at the Family,” and she now lives in an undisclosed location.

A devastating explication of widespread overlooked abuse and a call for change that must be heeded.