Media personality and fashion icon Paris Hilton is taking her advocacy against institutional child abuse to the California Capitol.
Hilton — who alleged that she was a victim of sexual abuse as a teenager in the ‘90s at a boarding school in Utah — is sponsoring California Republican lawmaker Shannon Grove’s bill, the Accountability in Children’s Treatment (ACT), which seeks to provide more transparency for parents about the whereabouts of their children during their stay in troubled youth programs. Any serious injuries or incidents of death will be required to be disclosed on the state’s social services website.
Under the bill, facilities licensed by the California Department of Social Services are required to release information pertaining to the use of restraints and solitary confinement-style rooms.
“These facilities systematically silence youth, and I am dedicated to ensuring there are greater transparency mechanisms in place to ensure those who are evaluating these facilities, and the families who are placing youth in them, have access to updated and accurate information on the often abusive and traumatizing practices that occur,” Hilton told Fox News Digital on Friday. “Transparency not only holds facilities accountable for their actions but also helps survivors like myself feel validated and heard.”
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Hilton added, “I also hope to inspire a more compassionate understanding of how to treat youth with mental health or behavioral needs, as I know from lived experience that sending them far away from everyone they know and love is not a sustainable answer.”
The state already took steps to protect children — many of whom are in foster care — from abuse in out-of-state facilities several years ago after passing legislation that de-certified non-California facilities and ordered all youth to return by Jan. 2023. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, allocated $8 million for the immediate return of children in out of state facilities and to bolster behavioral treatment programs.
Grove said she’s “grateful” to have Hilton’s support for her bill, SB 1043, and said the extra layer of transparency will help eliminate a decades-long problem of child abuse if signed into law.
“The out-of-state programs would keep them sometimes 20 hours in isolation in an empty room,” Grove told Fox News Digital on Friday. “We want to make sure that these kids don’t cause harm to themselves or others, and that’s what those specific places are supposed to be used for, but we want to make sure these kids aren’t being traumatized or harmed as well.”
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Grove said many of the youth facilities are meant to be a camp-like environment where kids are on a regiment to wake up early, eat breakfast, complete chores and have classes. But in reality, she said, many children — who are now adults — have come forward in recent years detailing alleged abuse that would take place in some of these facilities.
Many of those cases of abuse were shown in a recent Netflix docuseries “The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping,” which chronicled abuse of troubled teens at the hands of New York’s Academy at Ivy Ridge.
The former students claim they underwent abuse ranging from abduction from their homes, strip searches, starvation, sleep deprivation, corporal punishment and solitary confinement. Meanwhile, they said, they received no formal education.
Hilton alleged she experienced something similar in her youth.
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In a New York Times video op-ed series in 2022, Hilton said she was the victim of a “parent-approved kidnapping” when she was a misbehaving 16-year-old, with two men dragging her out of her home and into a congregate-care facility.
“Very late at night, this would be around like three or four in the morning, they would take myself and other girls into this room and they would perform medical exams,” Hilton said in the interview. “It wasn’t even with a doctor, it was a couple of different staff members, where they would have us lay on the table and put their fingers inside of us.”
Last year, Hilton stood alongside U.S. lawmakers co-sponsoring the bipartisan Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act. The bicameral bill, authored by Cornyn, Tuberville, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Rep. Earl Carter, R-Ga., was introduced last April and aims to provide stronger oversight for residential youth treatment programs to identify and prevent child abuse.
Hilton and Grove will present their bill during a press conference in Sacramento on Monday.
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