Amanda Simmons Moderates the ABA Judicial Division Webinar “Judicial Solutions to End Institutional Child Abuse”

On November 12, 2024, Amanda Simmons, founder of Ambika Law, PC, moderated “Judicial Solutions to End Institutional Child Abuse,” a national webinar hosted by the American Bar Association’s Judicial Division. The program brought members of the judiciary and law enforcement together to examine how courts can protect children from abuse in residential treatment facilities — and to equip judges with concrete tools for doing so. Simmons was joined by the Honorable Ernestine Gray, the Honorable Lee Chitwood, and San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan.

The presentation moved through four parts: a history and overview of the “troubled teen industry,” a survey of the legal landscape at the federal, state, and local levels, the recurring legal issues in residential treatment centers, and a judicial panel discussion.

Simmons opened with her own story as a survivor of institutional child abuse — a therapeutic boarding school later described in the media as a “torture chamber,” where she was sexually assaulted by a headmaster who had already pled guilty to similar crimes, and a sentencing decision so lenient that local media called it “an inexplicably mild sentence.” That experience grounds the webinar’s central message: an informed, proactive judiciary is the final safety net for a child facing placement far from home.

Amanda’s presentation delved deeply into the legal regimes governing these facilities, underscoring the complexity of federal, state, and local authority. Through her slides, she explained how oversight is fragmented across agencies ranging from the Administration for Children and Families, Medicaid, and the Department of Education to juvenile justice and disability rights enforcement bodies. She illustrated how gaps in nomenclature, licensing categories, and statutory definitions allow facilities to circumvent regulation by rebranding themselves as boarding schools, academies, or faith-based programs exempt from state oversight.

From there, the program traced how the industry developed. Its roots run through the nation’s long history of institutionalization and the mid-century deinstitutionalization and disability-rights movements — from Brown v. Board of Education and President Kennedy’s 1963 call for community-based solutions, through the exposure of conditions at institutions like Willowbrook, to the pivotal court decisions of the 1970s (PARC v. Pennsylvania, Wyatt v. Stickney, and Goss v. Lopez) that established children’s rights to community-based education, humane conditions, and due process. As private equity and public funding flowed into the behavioral-health sector, residential treatment grew into a lucrative enterprise, and the problems became well documented — in GAO reports (2007, 2008, and 2022), in a Senate investigation dating to 1974, and in the Senate Finance Committee’s Warehouses of Neglect, which specifically urged that family-court judges be dissuaded from placing children in facilities with records of abuse, neglect, or the overuse of restraint. More than $23 billion is spent on these placements annually, with an estimated 120,000–200,000 youth placed each year.

Simmons then walked the audience through the layered legal framework, debunking the myth that these facilities operate without federal oversight. She identified the federal authorities that already apply — Title IV-E and the Family First Prevention Services Act, Medicaid/CMS standards, Protection & Advocacy organizations’ access rights, Section 504, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, the ADA, and the IDEA’s guarantee of a free appropriate public education — alongside the wide state-to-state variation in licensing, religious exemptions, restraint-and-seclusion rules, and statutes of limitations, and the meaningful progress possible through local tools like youth ombudspersons and wraparound services that keep children safely at home.

The webinar also confronted the hardest legal issues in this space: the loopholes created by inconsistent definitions of “residential facility”; the treatment of publicly funded programs as “private entities” beyond constitutional reach (Howell v. Father Maloney’s Boys Haven); the choice-of-law confusion that can defeat even clear claims (S.G. v. Care Academy); and the documented patterns of abuse — strip searches, restraint injuries, sexual assault, sex and labor trafficking, educational neglect, ADA violations, medical neglect, and deceptive marketing.

At the heart of the practical discussion was Judge Chitwood’s bench card — a 16-question checklist judges can use before authorizing a congregate-care placement. Its questions probe whether a facility strip-searches children on admission; how far it is from the child’s home and whether ICPC procedures are followed; what forms of punishment (solitary confinement, seclusion, restraint, or isolation) are used and whether written policies govern them; the average length of stay and discharge planning; the credentials of counselors and therapists; how a child can report abuse; whether guardians ad litem may make unannounced visits; how and how often a child may contact family and counsel; what visitation is provided; whether loss of contact or forced silence is used as punishment; whether children are penalized for criticizing the facility; the facility’s state-reporting requirements; whether the education provided complies with the child’s IEP; what recreation is available; the cost per day; and the facility’s capacity and staffing.

The closing panel drew on the NCJFCJ’s Voices from the Bench research to explore judicial perspectives on placement — including the finding that judges unanimously report a lack of safe housing alternatives for exploited youth, and the call for judges to use their authority both on and off the bench to advocate for safer, community-based options. Together, the program reflects Ambika Law’s trauma-informed mission and Amanda Simmons’s conviction that a well-informed judiciary can change the course of a child’s life.