Tough Love by Lillian Speerbrecker

Tough Love:  Truth Behind The Troubled Teen Industry, Lillian Speerbrecker.  Munich: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG, 2013.  e-book, 38 pps.
website:  http://safeteenschools.org/home.html 
twitter:    @SafeTeenSchools


Lillian Speerbrecker was a teen living in Michigan with her father and her step-mother.  She was taken by two hired "escorts" from her home to a WWASPS facility in Mexico known as Casa by the Sea at the end of May in 2004.  After that facility was shut down by the Mexican authorities, she was then taken to Midwest Academy [MWA] in Iowa.  The author was one of the "lucky" ones.  On February 11, 2005 she got expelled [!] and her dad took her back home to Michigan.  Unfortunately, her father to date of publication had never come to terms with the abuse that she suffered at the hands of the WWASPS program staff.

sapphoqreviews says:  Yet another book by a survivor of the culture of abuse at WWASPS.  Tough Love confirms-- once again-- that during "group therapy" sessions and/ or seminars-- teen girls who had been raped before arrival at a program were called sluts and shamed because of their rapes.  Another item that the book confirms is the overuse of isolation rooms for days on end with those punished being made to sit in certain positions all day except for meals.  It was also mentioned that a staffer at MWA had actually been a detainee at Tranquility Bay but had bought into the ideology so well that she was given a job in Iowa.

I was ecstatic to discover that Lillian Speerbrecker has created an organization called Safe Teen Schools which can be found at: http://safeteenschools.org/home.html  and on Twitter at: @SafeTeenSchools.

I have said this before and I will say it again:  I believe the survivors who have reported horrific conditions and abuse.  Period.