Woman reveals shocking reason her parents hired kidnappers to snatch her in the middle of the night

A New York woman has revealed why her parents hired kidnappers to pluck her from her bedroom in the middle of the night when she was just 16 years old.

Natasha Pelowski wrote in an essay for Newsweek that she was a depressed teenager, and well-meaning parents listened to the advice of her high school principal and decided to send her to a residential treatment facility.

Her parents decided the best way to get her into one of these “problem teen centers” was to forcibly remove her from the bedroom of her family home in Northern California on the night of November 23, 2014.

That night, Pelowski wrote, a strange man and woman burst through her door and demanded that she “come with us.”

When she refused, the man grabbed her arm and told her, “I didn’t ask.”

Pelowski described how she tried to break free and begged for help before being handcuffed face down against the carpet and carried downstairs to where her mother stood at the front door.

She said her mother said the word “Sorry” before Pelowski was pushed into the back of a car and drove her away from her Silicon Valley neighborhood.

The teenager was then dropped off at an unknown wilderness camp, where she said she spent 54 days without electricity from shoes and was repeatedly searched, unable to talk to her friends for weeks and forced to work in the fields.

One morning, Pelowski said staff at the troubled teen center woke her up before dawn, blindfolded her and told her to “follow the sound of their drums.”

When staff members later removed the blindfold, Pelowski said she came face to face with an open grave.

She was then placed in the six-foot deep plot while staff members read a eulogy to “represent the end of my old life,” she said.

From there, Pelowski said she was transferred to another residential facility in Utah, where she was isolated in solitary confinement for 24 hours, subjected to so-called “seizure therapy” and witnessed multiple suicide attempts — with staff members later scolding those who tried. kill themselves.

Pelowski was eventually released from the “troubled teen industry” before her 18th birthday, but she said, “a piece of me has been in that grave ever since.”

She said her time in these facilities caused her to develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

“For ten years I struggled to understand how my family could have abandoned me,” she wrote. ‘It has always haunted me that children are still subjected to cruel treatment programs like mine.

“Today I know that my kidnapping was not unique,” ​​Pelowski continued, describing how most of them are brought in through “abuse” or the forcible transportation of minors to these treatment facilities.

She alleged that the network of juvenile mental health facilities targets affluent families, who can afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to keep their child.

Parents who choose to send their children to these institutions – which receive more than $23 billion in public funds each year – according to the American Bar Association – tend to have genuine concerns that their child will hurt themselves or others if not kept in a controlled environment, reports the New York Times.

They also tend to assume that because residential treatment is more expensive, it must provide a better quality of care.

However, teen mental health settings are largely unregulated, with no federal licensing requirements for staff, no federal mandates to use evidence-based therapies, and no requirements to report the use of seclusion or restraints.

Many parents also don’t know what treatment their child will receive, with some facilities offering minors only a few hours of therapy a week, while others offer no therapy at all, the Times said.

‘I no longer blame my parents. Instead, I wonder why lawmakers who have the power to save vulnerable youth don’t do so,” Pelowski wrote.

In 2007, the Federal Government Accountability Office released a report identifying “thousands of allegations of abuse, some resulting in death, at residential programs across the country and in U.S. facilities abroad,” according to the American Bar. Association.

It pushed for reforms, and the following year, Representative George Miller of California sponsored legislation to regulate congregate care facilities, but the bill never passed.

In more recent years, however, the problems with the ‘murky teen industry’ have received more attention after Paris Hilton – herself a survivor of the system – detailed the abuse she suffered in a 2020 documentary, a memoir and in a Opinion piece from 2021 in which she wrote that she was “choked, punched in the face, spied on while showering, and denied sleep” at all four facilities she was sent to as a teenager.

Last year, she voiced support for the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, which sought federal oversight of these facilities, but which also failed in Congress.

And in April, Paris Hilton testified in support of a California bill that would require greater transparency about disciplinary methods in short-term residential facilities.

Still, some in Congress are fighting for industry reform.

On June 12, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon held a hearing and released a report on a two-year investigation into existing residential programs that receive government funding from Medicaid or through the child welfare system.

The report documents widespread, taxpayer-funded “sexual, physical and emotional abuse, unsafe and unsanitary conditions and inadequate provision of behavioral health care,” the Times reports.

It also describes systemic “routine” harms that are “the direct, accidental result of a business model that has the incentive to treat children as paydays and that does not provide sufficient safety and behavioral health care to maximize business and profit margins.”

At least two of the chains investigated have also been ordered to pay more than $1 billion in damages related to the rape of minors over the past year.

Later in June, Hilton also testified before the House Ways and Means Committee — which has jurisdiction over several child welfare programs — about what she endured.

“These programs promised healing, growth and support, but instead left me unable to speak, move freely or even look out a window for two years,” she said. according to the New York Times.

‘I was force-fed and sexually abused by staff.’

She then ended her testimony by promising “not to stop until America’s youth are safe.”

“If you are a child in the system, heed my words: I see you. I believe you. I know what you’re going through and I won’t give up on you,” Hilton promised.