These are kids that come from virtually anywhere — 60 percent of them
from white middle class homes. These are kids that now have virtually no
other place to go. Their spirits have been broken from a vicious cycle
of child abuse, of physical and emotional punishment that is fraught
with sexual abuse and physical torment.
In the evenings, after the children are asleep, said Ernest Campagnone,
you learn the most, from the screams that come with the nightmares.
Sleep for these youngsters is not easy, often impossible.
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When there is no place left to go, they are brought to the residential
treatment centers operated by Gateway Healthcare, Inc., often with scars
on their arms and wrists or rope burns on their necks from the suicide
attempts. Always there are the scars inside. They are referred by the
Department of Children Youth and Families, taken from what at best can
be described as dysfunctional homes.
“Ninety percent are sexually abused,” said Campagnone, the program
manager for Gateway’s children’s residential services. “Typically the
adolescent girls are suicidal, promiscuous. Without treatment they will
contract AIDS, be killed, or commit suicide. The boys would become
predators. Left untreated this is a very dangerous population.”
Gateway, which its president Richard H. LeClerk said operates the only
licensed residential treatment facilities in Rhode Island for this
population, gives them a chance.
With its partners — Community Counseling Center, Mental Health Services
of Cranston, Johnston and Northwestern Rhode Island, Rhode Island Youth
Guidance Center and Tri-Hab, Inc. — Gateway operates three homes,
covering a population from just older than toddler to late teens. The
program is part of Gateway’s overall mission of providing services to
adults and children with severe mental illness, emotional disorders and
substance abuse problems.
Gateway and its partners hope to open a fourth home for abused children,
and LeClerk dreams of a time when funding might be available to open a
supervised apartment to help transition graduates back into the
community.
Gateway’s child abuse and prevention program, which is financed through
its contract with DCYF, decided within the last year to reach out to the
business community, and the general population, seeking financial
support. Lynne K. Donahue, Gateway development director, said the
organization hasn’t had an increase in funds from DCYF in eight years.
The organization is in the midst of its “Light Up A Child’s Life —
illuminate the world” campaign, looking specifically for corporate and
individual gifts. The campaign began last year, Donahue said, with 45
individuals and companies contributing some $20,000. They hope to double
that this year. Donahue can be contacted at (401) 553-1015.
The funds are used to support programs, but also to provide holiday
gifts for the youngsters.
“Holiday times are a particularly difficult time,” she said.
At a ranch house on the corner of a residential street some eight
youngsters try to reconstruct their lives, with the help of a staff of
counselors, and the warmth provided by a wholesome home environment.
These are the teenagers. Younger children are in other homes.
The ranch house is bright and cheerful, meant to help the youngsters
learn the social and personal skills that have been obscured in what for
them has only been a world of abuse, the only world they would have
known before.
‘Adolescence is a time for kids to identify who they are,” Campagnone
said. “These kids have no foundation for identity. They have a very low
ego structure. They don’t have a foundation for personality.”
And the stories are chilling. A five and a half year old, whose parents
had been prostituting her since she was two-and-a-half; a six-year-old
boy, locked in a closet by his father, who then set fire to the house
and told the fire department no one was inside; another child, who by
the age of five had 25 to 30 incidents of head trauma, taken from the
home only after his mother, in retaliation for a bed wetting incident,
tied him to the bed and set it afire.
Since the first of the facilities was opened in 1990, Donahue said they
have had 1,000 referrals.
And they have had their successes, although sometimes it’s a matter of
how you measure success.
“Some days it’s that nobody tried to kill themselves,” said Campagnone.
But on most days, it’s looking to the young man who graduated from the
program, eventually headed to Florida, opened a successful business and
invited staff members to spend some time on his 32 foot yacht.
Or it’s the young woman, who as a child came to the program suicidal, the victim
of sexual abuse, who lives in New Jersey now with her husband and child.
Or it’s the young man who is in a police training program, or another
who graduated from a local college’s music program.
Or it’s that just about every one of the youngsters who go through the
program receives either his or her high school equivalency or high
school diploma.
