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Director to Raw Story: Exposé on brutal Christian school cost me my faith
By David Ferguson
Saturday, December 14, 2013 8:00 EST
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Kate Logan, the director of “Kidnapped for Christ,” a documentary exposé
about a brutal offshore Christian reform school, said that she lost her
Christian faith in the course of making the film.
In an interview with Raw Story, Logan opened up about how her initial intent
was to make a documentary praising the school, but that the façade the
Escuela Caribe presented to the world quickly crumbled when she began to
interact with the students.
She first became interested in the school and New Horizons Youth Ministries
at the age of 18 in 2004.
“I was a missionary working in the area,” she said. Escuela Caribe is
located in the Dominican Republic, one of the most impoverished areas of the
world. “And I found out about the school because you tend to notice other
Americans there.”
When she first heard of the program, it sounded great.
“They told me the school was a place for kids that would either end up in
jail, on the streets or dead, kids that were really in trouble,” Logan said
, “And I thought to myself, what a great program, where kids can learn
about another culture and get away from bad influences back home.”
A few years later, Logan was in film school and thought, “Hey, that would
be a good project, to go down and make a short, kind of heartwarming
documentary about these rough-and-tumble kids learning about Dominican
culture together and getting therapy.”
“I had no idea what the school was really like or what their history was,”
she said.
But as she began to do research, to film and meet with former graduates of
the program, she said, “Slowly the story kind of unravelled about what was
really going on at the school and all its dark past and what was still going
on at the time.”
Students at the small school are consigned to life in a rigidly codified set
of levels. As former student Deirdre Sugiuchi told Raw Story on Friday, “
When you start at zero level, you then had rules about who you could look at
. You couldn’t talk to members of the opposite sex until you were on second
level and you had to fulfill a wide variety of requirements to move up.”
“At zero level, you’d have to be three feet away from a staff member or a
supervisor at all times. You had to ask to go from room to room. It was
insane,” she said. “Prisoners actually have more freedom than we had.”
Former students told tales of being prey to every sadistic whim of their
superiors, of beatings and punishing exercise regimes, as well as endless
work projects that the students were never compensated for.
“All of their stories were so similar,” said Logan, “that it was clear
this wasn’t just one person exaggerating or one incident that happened one
time. The abuses were systematic.”
The school’s program, she said, hasn’t changed, in spite of the fact that
it shut down and reopened under a new name, Crosswinds. Crosswinds still
works from same charter it used to and maintains the strict level
segregation between students.
Believing that she was still making a pro-Escuela Caribe film, the school
staff gave her full access for student interviews. Very quickly, Logan said,
she began to see signs that all at the school was not as administrators
promised.
“There were just a lot of things that were very obviously wrong right away,
” she said.
Two students spoke particularly honestly to the documentary team: 17-year-
old David, sent to Escuela Caribe because his parents thought he was gay,
and 16-year-old Tai, who was African-American and outspoken, the latter
trait landing her in frequent trouble at the school.
“We got really lucky with David and Tai,” Logan said. “Because David had
only been there four or five weeks, so he wasn’t completely terrified yet
of the insanity there. He still had hope, I guess?”
“Right away it was apparent that this kid should never have been accepted
to any type of reform program in the first place,” she said. “He was a 4.0
student and he was upset that he couldn’t talk to his parents. He was
worried what his boss at the store in the mall he worked at was going to
think. His concerns were that of a good kid.”
“Another student was Tai,” Logan said. “She would just say what was on
her mind and get in trouble for it. She was, like, ‘You can have my body,
but you can’t have my soul.’”
The plight of the kids there was so horrifying that ultimately Logan lost
faith not just in New Horizons and Escuela Caribe, but in all of
Christianity. When Raw Story spoke with Escuela Caribe alumna Deirdre
Sugiuchi on Friday, she said, “You should talk to Kate [Logan]. We both
lost our faith there.”
“It was really tough to feel that I was betraying them” by making the film
that she did, Logan said, that “in spite of the evidence I had that what
they were doing was harming kids, I still felt like I was ‘undoing’ the
work of fellow Christians.”
It took a while, she said, to accept that she wasn’t betraying people who
had trusted her, but rather exposing a wrong that was being done. That
process, however, led her in time to lose faith in Christianity and in
religion altogether.
“The kids that they were hurting really needed someone to speak out for
them,” she said. That became her spiritual mission. “That was way more
important than potentially harming people who were harming others.”
“I no longer consider myself a Christian,” she said. “I think what I
found at Escuela Caribe was a fairly large factor in that.”
But, she added “We have a lot of Christians working on the film and
dedicating a lot of time and effort into it. The message of the film is not
that Christianity is bad and did this. It’s that these people did something
really wrong, things that never should have been done in the name of
anything.”
UPDATE: Singer Lance Bass, formerly of ‘N Sync, is the film’s executive
producer. He told Raw Story via email, “”People will be absolutely shocked
when they see this film. It’s a powerful story that sheds light on a
secretive industry that harms kids and exploits families. I hope it can
reach a wide audience so that these abusive reform schools will get shut
down.”
David FergusonDavid FergusonDavid Ferguson is an editor at Raw Story. He was
previously writer and radio producer in Athens, Georgia, hosting two shows
for Georgia Public Broadcasting and blogging at Firedoglake.com and
elsewhere. He is currently working on a book. |
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