A 55-year-old school in Utah was recently ordered to close down and some, including Paris Hilton are celebrating online. On Monday, local news announced that the Utah Department of Health and Human Services had revoked the license of Provo Canyon School’s Springville campus.The school was cited for several violations including failing to maintain health and safety and to report critical incidents and to use aggressive physical contact. Its license was already on a conditional basis due to a previous citation and now, it will have to cease all operations by August 6. At a media briefing on Tuesday, Shannon Thoman-Black of the Utah Department of Health and Human Services said that the school’s owners “may not reapply for a new license for five years,” and that in the meantime, the department will monitor the facility as “these kids get discharged into safe places.“Provo Canyon School CEO Tim Marshall said in a statement: “We disagree with the state’s decision to revoke Provo Canyon School’s Springville Campus license and are evaluating all available legal and administrative options, including an appeal,” adding that “our priority remains providing safe, high-quality care and support for adolescents and their families.”Amidst the back and forth, one thing has been established. Paris Hilton, the American heiress and media personality is celebrating the decision, one she has rallied for, for years. On Tuesday, she took to X to share a post celebrating the news. She wrote that she had been “waiting years” to announce this news. “The place that hurt me, and countless children before and after me, will no longer be allowed to operate,” she said. “The dream I’ve had to protect future generations from the abuse I endured is finally happening.”
A trauma from the past
Hilton’s association with the school goes back a long way. She forcibly attended the school for 11 months in 1997, at the age of 17. While she remained quiet for years, in 2020, she began speaking about the ordeals she faced at the institution in interviews and her documentary ‘This is Paris’. In her Washington op-ed, she wrote that she landed at the school after a parent-approved kidnapping where “two men with handcuffs” woke her up and “asked if (she) wanted to go ‘the easy way or the hard way'” allegedly carrying her screaming from her home. Her parents, she said, did so to help curb her “rebellious” behaviour.“I had no idea why or where I was being taken against my will. I soon learned I was being sent to hell,” she wrote, adding that staff “monitored and censored” her communications with the outside world, precluding the possibility of calling for help. Hilton maintained she was subjected to solitary confinement “in a room where the walls were covered in scratch marks and blood stains,” per her op-ed, and regularly berated by staff who would allegedly hit and throttle the minors in their care.In another instance, she said she was sexually assaulted as a teenager by staff members at the school. In a New York Times interview, she alleged that male staff members took her and other female students into a room “very late at night” and digitally penetrated them under the guise of performing cervical exams. “This wasn’t even a doctor,” Hilton told the Times. “It was with a couple different staff members where they would lay us on the table and put their fingers inside of us. I don’t even know what they were doing, but it was definitely not a doctor and it was really scary.”In an X post, she wrote that she was “sleep deprived and heavily medicated” during the exams and “didn’t understand what was happening” at the time. “I was forced to lie down on a padded table, spread my legs & submit… I cried while they held me down,” she wrote.She also said that she endured similar violations at three other facilities in her youth, writing that she was medicated without diagnosis and “choked, slapped across the face, spied on while showering and deprived of sleep.” Hilton’s allegations inspired other former residents to come forward with similar complaints.
The troubled-teen industry
At least one institution from the industry will no longer be allowed to operate to traumatise and abuse kids
In October 2021, the National Disability Rights Network released a damning report on the for-profit residential-treatment industry, spurred by the 2020 death of a 16-year-old Michigan youth academy who suffocated to death after staffers piled on top of him to restrain him. The report catalogued rampant abuse at for-profit facilities nationwide, “from broken bones, fight clubs and sexual abuse by trusted staff, to forced isolation, shaming and the complete failure by some facilities to provide the mental health treatment that prompted placement in the first place,” just to name a few examples.According to a 2022 Times report, the troubled-teen industry receives billions in annual funding and offers inadequate medical care to patients, subjecting them to assault, sedation, physical restraint, and confinement. Facilities are traditionally run with little to no federal oversight. An estimated 86 children have reportedly died at these places from 2000 to 2015.Hilton previously described it as a $50billion industry that includes therapeutic boarding schools, military-style boot camps, juvenile justice facilities and behaviour modification programs.Thus, Hilton lobbied Congress to push for tighter regulations and increase funding for government oversight in the spaces. At the time, she called on then-President Joe Biden and federal lawmakers “to enact a basic federal ‘bill of rights’ for youths in congregate care.” Finally, in 2024, Biden signed the bipartisan Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act.With the license of Provo Canyon being revoked, at least one institution from the industry will no longer be allowed to operate to traumatise and abuse kids and for Hilton and other former attendees, it is good news.
