{"id":12425,"date":"2022-03-06T22:03:42","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T06:03:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unsilenced.org\/?p=12425"},"modified":"2022-07-14T21:58:09","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T04:58:09","slug":"untangling-the-digital-ties-of-family-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unsilenced.org\/untangling-the-digital-ties-of-family-care\/","title":{"rendered":"Untangling the digital ties of Family Care"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Troubled<\/span><\/div>
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Untangling the digital ties of Family Care<\/h1><\/span>
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In early October 2021, Paris Hilton wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post<\/a> <\/strong>calling for greater oversight and regulation for congregate care facilities in the United States. A couple of weeks after her post, Katharine Weymouth, a former publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, wrote her own op-ed<\/a><\/strong> offering her own mostly positive perspective of her experience with sending her child away to four different facilities. Ms. Weymouth never names the \u201cgood programs\u201d in her article so it leaves this reader curious as to what Ms. Weymouth might define as a \u201cgood program.\u201d<\/p>\n

One thing of note in her article is in her bio where it states: Katharine Weymouth, a former publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, is chief operating officer of Family Care, a start-up digital platform for parents of struggling teens<\/em> and gives the following URL for Family Care: https:\/\/www.familycareus.com\/<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

When one goes to Family Care, it is a basic landing page asking for names and email addresses so you could learn more about what they offer.<\/p>\n<\/div>

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Not very descriptive of what Family Services does. I hoped it would provide more information on what services or support they seek to provide to families. I signed up for their mailing list but, unfortunately, at the time of writing this article, I still had not received any email or update from Family Care.<\/p>\n

Instead of giving up, I decided to dig deeper to see if Family Care had ever published any pages prior to publishing their splash page.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where I hit paydirt. I found several cached pages on various search engines and archiving sites for familycareus.com. Below are several imagines from the various pages that Family Care initially published and then later removed.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

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One page seemed to endorse certain programs and the use of teen escorts \u2013 or \u201cgooning\u201d \u2013 to forcibly transport the child from home to the program. In many cases, teen escorts have been known to surprise the child in the middle of the night while they sleep in their bed at home and use handcuffs or zip ties to restrain them for transport. In the last few years, thousands of survivors have come forward and shared their stories of being left traumatized and left with PTSD after being ripped from the safety of their own beds. However, the author of this page states that the child will \u201cbond\u201d and \u201claugh\u201d about it later with their parent.<\/p>\n

While it would be impossible to discern which program Ms. Weymouth\u2019s child went to from this, it does appear that Family Care \u2013 Ms. Weymouth\u2019s organization \u2013 seems to endorse several programs on these cached pages from 2021. It also appears based on the program demographic that she provides that there is a strong preference towards NATSAP programs. The Troubled Teen subreddit made an amazing wiki article about NATSAP<\/a><\/strong> I encourage others to read to learn more. One interesting historic fact about NATSAP is that five out of six of its founding members had their programs closed under allegations of abuse.<\/p>\n

The Unsilenced program archive is the largest program archive currently available in one place. To link just a few so you could learn a little more about these programs what Family Care appeared to endorse:<\/p>\n