Colorado has become the first state in the nation to ban court-ordered camps where children are ‘reunified’ with a parent who has been accused of abusing them.
These reunification camps are used by family court judges to settle private custody disputes or divorces involving minors. As part of the order, camp workers are sometimes given temporary custody of the children so they can legally take them from their homes. While at the camp, children are forced into what some have described as a “brainwashing technique” that the camps call “reunification therapy.”
According to Tina Swithin, Founder of One Mom’s Battle, forcing children back into a relationship with an abusive parent is essentially “court-ordered child trafficking,” the Epoch Times reports.
Evita Tolu, an attorney in Missouri where she has represented children forced into reunification counseling with an abusive parent, called the practice “kafkaesque”—a term based on German novelist Franz Kafka who wrote stories about characters who were subject to severely bizarre bureaucratic powers.
The Epoch Times reached out for comment from the three major court-ordered reunification camps: Family Bridges, Turning Points for Families, and Lynn Steinberg’s reunification camp. None responded.
Some children sent to the camps have described being dragged out of their homes by transport workers, being handcuffed, and transported to an unknown place. Some children have alleged undergoing degrading punishments if they don’t say they love the parent who allegedly abused them. -Epoch Times
“I was so terrified, I couldn’t stop shaking,” said one former ‘inmate’ of such camps, Allyson Bender, who recounted her experience in 2017 when she was 16-years-old.
More via the Epoch Times;
The Colorado law, which now bans judges from ordering children to attend reunification camps against their will came on the heels of a string of tragic murders of children within a month by Colorado parents awarded custody despite having either convictions or pending allegations against them.
Read more: Colorado Bans Court-Ordered “Brainwashing” Camps For Abused Minors
