Colorado has become the first state to ban court-ordered camps that place children into relationships with parents who have been accused of abusing them.
The camps, known as reunification camps, are ordered by family court judges in private custody disputes or divorces involving minors. As part of the order, workers with private transport companies for the camps are sometimes given temporary custody of the children so they can legally take the children from their homes.
Children sent to reunification camps are forced into what some in the system’s care have described as a “brainwashing technique” that the system calls “reunification therapy.”
Tina Swithin, founder of One Mom’s Battle, said forcing children into a relationship with an abusive parent is nothing short of “court-ordered child trafficking.”
Evita Tolu, an attorney in Missouri who has represented children forced into reunification counseling with abusive parents, called the practice Kafkaesque.
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, handcuffed, and transported to an unknown place. Some children have reported undergoing degrading punishments if they don’t say they love the parent who allegedly abused them.
“I was so terrified, I couldn’t stop shaking,” Allyson Bender said in YouTube videos she made recounting her reunification camp experience in 2017 at the age of 16.
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.
It also followed the results of a state audit that turned up evidence that at least one custody evaluator admitted he dismissed 90 percent of child abuse claims without investigating them.
The main trigger for ordering a child to attend reunification camps is an allegation that the child has falsely reported child abuse as part of one parent’s plot to alienate the child from the accused parent.
As The Epoch Times and other media outlets have reported, family court judges have been found in a high number of cases to refuse to consider evidence of child abuse.
In some cases, the judges have ordered the suppression of criminal convictions of child abuse against a parent. Some parents who brought up past convictions have themselves been accused of parental alienation.
As part of the practice, the parent accused of “alienation” is often stripped of custody and children are ordered to undergo reunification therapy.
Court-ordered reunification has been denounced by several organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association. Insurance companies will not insure the camps or the therapy administered. The therapy costs an average of $5,000 a day, according to bills shared with The Epoch Times by parents.
The length of the stay in the camps averages 90 days. But as one parent told The Epoch Times in March, his two girls were kept “indefinitely” at the reunification camp. They were forcibly transported by “transporters” in California under a family judge’s court order.
“Family court judges are basically doing whatever they want with our kids,” Riley, who said he went broke paying for the camps, told The Epoch Times.
In addition to the Colorado legislation, Swithin is in touch with dozens of parents who have either already filed a lawsuit, or are currently working with attorneys to file a lawsuit against several of these reunification camps, including Turning Points for Families reunification camp and its owner Linda Gottlieb.
Gottlieb didn’t respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times.
On its website, the camp, which operates nationwide, bills itself as “a therapeutic vacation” and refers to parental alienation as child abuse.
On its website, the caption under a picture of a child’s hand reaching out to an adult’s hand reads, “It is anti-instinctual to reject a parent—even an abusive parent.”
Other states are considering legislation similar to Colorado’s recently passed ban on courts ordering children to attend reunification camps.
Republican lawmakers in New Hampshire have tried repeatedly to pass legislation banning reunification therapy.
The lawmakers recently had the child and family law committee form a special committee to study the state’s family court system.
The committee has so far held four hearings. Parents and advocates for court reform have been held to a strict five minutes to speak, while judges and other supporters of the court have been allowed to speak for up to an hour.
