Brutal offshore Christian reform school exposed in new documentary

“Kidnapped for Christ” is a new documentary that tells the story of teenagers sent to an evangelical Christian boarding school outside the U.S. where school personnel attempt to rid them of feelings of same sex attraction or other “ungodly” influences.

“They mess your mind up,” said former student Deirdre Sugiuchi to Raw Story. “Prisoners have more freedom than we had.”

The “school” is Escuela Caribe, an evangelical Christian reform school that is run like a prison camp by an organization called New Horizons Youth Ministries.

Many of the students are the children of Christian parents who believe their sons and daughters’ nascent feelings of same sex attraction can be eliminated by the school’s program of Bible study, brutally hard work, exercise and physical punishment to break the students down.

Other students, like Sugiuchi, were the children of well-to-do evangelicals who were just being normal teens.

“My parents were fundamentalist Christians,” she said, “and they didn’t like the way I was turning out.”

So, at 15, Sugiuchi was sent to school in the Dominican Republic at Escuela Caribe. There were only about 40 students at the school at any given time, she said, and from the moment students arrive they are placed on a stringent system of punishments and rewards.