Hidden Torture: Illinois Homeschool Laws Can Shield Abusers

Sixteen-year-old Natalie Finn died from starvation on Oct. 24, 2016, after her mother locked her, a 15-year-old brother and a 14-year-old sister in their bedroom for months, food and water all but cut off. One of the kids who survived, barely, later said their bedroom slowly filled with their own waste because their mother often would not let them out even to use the bathroom. When they did get permission, they were so desperately thirsty they sometimes scooped water into their mouths from the toilet bowl.

These damaged children in Iowa were not alone. There are scores of cases like this one involving starving kids to death. Other cases document children who have been beaten by parents most of their young lives or have otherwise been treated so severely for so long they can rightly be classified as torture victims.

In Illinois, 6-year-old Liam Roberts died in November 2017 weighing just 17 pounds. His father, Michael Roberts, and stepmother, Georgena Roberts, are facing felony charges in Liam's death, accused of starving him as punishment. They're also charged with endangerment, accused of starving another child, age 7.

In one sense, the savage abuse inflicted on the Finn kids, Liam Roberts and in hundreds of other cases, is easily explained by the one thing they had in common: They were homeschooled.

That may not explain how parents like Natalie Finn’s mother or Liam Roberts' parents could reach such depths of depravity to starve her own daughter to death. Lax oversight of homeschooling provides a simple answer for why nobody noticed or reported the girl as she became little more than skin and bones. Her homeschooling ensured no teacher or other responsible adult would see the girl and detect the abuse.

Natalie’s starving siblings and her mother were the only people who saw her during the last months of her life, when her body gradually thinned until she became so skeletal that any responsible person who got even a glance of her would have sounded the alarm. A kid her age and height should have weighed at least 125 pounds. When she died, she weighed 81.

“It’s really hard to starve a child to death when that kid’s in school,” said Rachel Coleman, co-founder and research director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which is pushing for regulations to protect homeschooled kids. The group does not oppose parents teaching their children at home but it wants to prevent abusive parents from so easily making their kids invisible.

From 2000 to last year, at least 320 homeschooled children were severely neglected and abused, often for years without detection, according to the Homeschooling’s Invisible Children database kept by Coleman’s organization. Of those kids, 116 died. A disproportionate number of the children were adopted from foster care and the database indicates homeschooled kids die from abuse at a great rate than other children.

Nobody sees these kids.

“Without any oversight, there is nothing to ensure a child is receiving an education or is seen by mandatory reporters,” Coleman said. “Homeschooling parents could lock a child up and no one would ever know.”

Think about it: Lax oversight provides a shield far more effective than anything some parents could ever devise on their own to to lock up their children and hide their torture and abuse. Along with starvation, physical torture and medical neglect, totally isolating kids from any contact with the outside world is a common form of parental abuse.

Oversight of homeschooling in some states is non-existent. In most states, oversight is weak, at best. Nowhere in the United States do homeschool laws require welfare checks on the children involved to ensure they aren’t being abused or tortured. The most they require are academic assessments, either by parents or a certified teacher. Only a few states require those assessments be done by someone outside the home.

All but two states allow convicted child abusers and other criminals to homeschool their kids.

Calls to strengthen homeschooling regulations have come and gone over the years, with the net result actually being a weakening of oversight. Advocates for reform, though, have become as optimistic as they have been for years in large part because of the emergence of a group that had long been muted: former homeschooled students themselves.

Coleman from the home education coalition was homeschooled. Ryan Stollar the co-founder of Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out, was a homeschooler, too. “When homeschooling is done responsibly, it can be amazing,” the group says on its website. “What we oppose is irresponsible homeschooling, where the educational method is used to create or hide abuse, isolation, and neglect.”

Coleman and Stollar have attracted other former students who want reform and have quickly surged in status not only as leaders of reform efforts but also as credible voices that can gain the support of all but the most hard-core oversight opponents. The most extreme anti-oversight groups oppose any form of government involvement in homeschooling and they always will.

Coleman and Stollar have changed the tone from previous reformers to appeal to less ideological homeschoolers, positioning themselves not as hostile outsiders but as pragmatic insiders pusing for reasonable child protections that would never face opposition in any context outside of homeschooling.

The Responsible Education coalition’s creation of a database details in graphic language hundreds of gruesome abuse cases involving homeschooled kids.

“Homeschooling can serve as a powerful tool in the hand of an abusive parent,” according to the sister group that maintains the database, Homeschools Invisible Children. “Numerous young adults who were homeschooled for part of their upbringing and attended public school for part of their upbringing have reported that their parents’ abuse was worse when they were homeschooled, as there was nothing to act as a check on their parents’ abuse.”

Among other measures the coalition has called for:

• Background checks: Bar parents from homeschooling if they have committed a crime that would prevent them from teaching in a public school.
• A flagging system: Bar parents from homeschooling if they or anyone in the household have previously had a founded abuse or neglect report.
• Risk assessments: Conduct risk assessments when parents begin to homeschool after a recent child abuse report or concerning history of reports.
• Mandatory reporter contact: Ensure that homeschooled children are seen by mandatory reporters via academic assessments, medical visits, or other means.
• Medical care: Require homeschooled children to have the same medical visits required of children who attend public school.

Only Pennsylvania and Arkansas currently forbid homeschooling of kids whose parents have been convicted of child abuse and certain other crimes. Some states require none of the coalition’s proposals. No state requires all of the measures.

In Liam Roberts' case, the Department of Children and Family Services reportedly investigated a complaint that his parents did not have food in their home months prior to his death. The report, which came in from the local public school district, was closed as unfounded after a a pediatric specialist determined Liam's low weight was due to a medical condition.

Soon after the call to child protective services, the Robertses decided to home school Liam and two of his siblings, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Though social media posts by Georgena Roberts featured photos of smiling kids, neighbors told The Telegraph newspaper that the couple's children were seldom seen. "They never spoke,"one Jerseyville resident said. "They never came outside."

The case against Michael and Georgena Roberts, who have pleaded not guilty, is still pending.

Another Illinois mother, then 47-year-old Pamela J. Christensen of Montgomery, also home-schooled her children. In 2014, the estranged wife of a local pastor was accused of trying to poison her three daughters and stabbing two of them, telling investigators she wanted to them to "meet Jesus Christ." The daughters were ages 12, 16 and 19 at the time. In 2016, after being found guilty but mentally ill, Christensen was sentenced to four years in jail but was released just weeks later due to the time she'd already served in the lead-up to her trial.

In 2014, another child who was homeschooled, 11-year-old Raashanai Coley, was found dead in her Waukegan home. The little girl, who according to some reports had been diagnosed with autism, weighed less than 70 pounds at the time of her death. Her mother, Nicholette Lawrence, admitted to punching her daughter in the stomach. In January 2017, Lawrence was sentenced to 43 years in prison. She apologized for punching the feeble little girl, saying she was "not in her right mind" when Raashanai was killed.

Under Illinois law, homeschools operate at private schools. Parents who pull their kids out of public or other private schools to homeschool them are recommended to notify the school, but it's not mandatory. The Illinois State Board of Education has a one-page form on their website that parents can print off, fill in and turn in to their regional superintendent or the State Board of Education, but this is voluntary. Illinois doesn't have any mandatory qualifications for parents who wish to homeschool their children, and the state doesn't have requirements as to days/hours of homeschooling required, along with no required bookkeeping or assessments.

According to the law, Illinois homeschool parents must simply provide instruction in "the branches of education taught to children of corresponding age and grade in the public schools." The authority to investigate homeschools that do not meet the state’s requirements falls to the elected regional superintendents of education, and investigation only takes place in response to a complaint. If the regional superintendent finds sufficient evidence to justify further investigation, he or she will contact the state’s attorney of the county where the homeschool is located. The state’s attorney may obtain a search warrant and visit the home to ascertain whether the homeschool meets all requirements, and bring charges should it not.

About 1.7 million children in the United States — or about 3.3 percent of kids — are homeschooled, including about 65,212 in Illinois, according to estimates from the National Center for Education Statistics.

‘DROP-KICKED’ DOWN BASEMENT STAIRS

While most homeschooling parents provide warm, nurturing environments for their children, University of Wisconsin pediatrician Barbara Knox found in a 2014 study on child torture that in 38 cases of severe child abuse, 47 percent of parents had either never enrolled or pulled their kids out of public schools when abuse was suspected.

Her findings were based on reviews of only a small number of cases and while not statistically relevant, she identified the same pattern of abused homeschooled kids as the responsible home education coalition. Knox’s review also found the abused homeschool children received no true educational efforts, and the “isolation was accompanied by an escalation of physically abusive events.”

Sabrina Ray’s brief, tortured life is another glaring example.

At 16 years old, Sabrina weighed only 56 pounds when paramedics were called to her home last May in Perry, Iowa. She had often been so hungry that she ate what she could find rummaging through garbage cans. Police said that sometime after April 15, Sabrina’s adult brother “drop-kicked” her down a basement staircase. She lay for days on the basement floor in excruciating pain, police said, unable to move until her emaciated body finally gave up.

Like Natalie Finn’s mother, Sabrina’s adoptive parents had previous involvement with child protection workers. Under reforms pushed by advocates for tighter homeschooling regulations, once the parents removed Sabrina from school, they would have faced close monitoring.

Instead, the law allowed Sabrina’s parents to make their daughter, and signs of her abuse, invisible.

Except in Pennsylvania, homeschool laws allow even parents who have been convicted of crimes like sexual assault or child abuse to hide their children from public view.

A lack of oversight in California is what helped make the 13 children of David Allen Turpin and Louise Anna Turpin invisible to their Riverside neighbors .

The children, ages 2 to 29, were rescued in January after a 17-year-old escaped their house and called authorities. When police arrived at the home, they found ropes, chains and padlocks used to restrain and shackle the Turpin siblings to their beds. They were dirty and a putrid odor permeated the house. Investigators said parents had imprisoned their children for years. The adult children were so malnourished they looked like children.

What happened to these poor souls has been a sadly familiar story to Coleman since the founding of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

“This was not new to us,” said Coleman, whose organization keeps a database called Homeschooling’s Invisible Children listing the names of hundreds of home-educated children who have been tortured and abused by their parents. “The isolation and food deprivation, none of that was surprising. It’s not even the first case of 13 children, but a photo with all the girls dressed the same created a moment of virality.”

The case drew increased scrutiny of homeschooling oversight, but Coleman believes the enormity of the problem has been understated. Her organization’s Invisible Children database surely does not include every severely abused homeschooled kid or every child who died at the hands of their parents because no one knows where — or if — many kids are supposedly being schooled.

HOMESCHOOLING ‘NEITHER GOOD NOR BAD’

Of course, kids who attend public schools are often abused, too. Homeschooling has both advocates and critics, and many good parents whose children don’t thrive in traditional classroom see it as a valuable option.

Coleman is one of them. Her mother required standardized testing every three years, provided outlines of the curriculum to school officials and maintained a portfolio of Coleman’s academic achievements — “part of keeping a good record,” she said.

At-home educations are “neither good nor bad,” said Coleman, whose doctoral candidacy in history at the University of Indiana represents a level of academic achievement not uncommon among homeschoolers.

But “in the hands of abusive parents,” she said, homeschooling can lead to “horrific abuse situations.”

Iowa opened the door for abuse five years ago when it sliced homeschooling regulations to almost nothing.

Before the changes, Iowa’s homeschooling laws were among the most thorough in the country.

State Sen. Matt said McCoy, who conducted an inquiry into Natalie’s and Sabrina’s deaths, said that in some cases in which children are adopted from foster care, as the two girls were, home education is a complete ruse. Sabrina, for example, was not educated at home but rather worked at her parents’ Rays of Sunshine Daycare in Perry. McCoy called it “slavery.”

HOMESCHOOL LAW REFORM EFFORTS

McCoy is working on legislation to prevent parents from using homeschooling simply to hide their abuse. He wants mandatory annual physicals and dental checkups for the kids and a requirement that they be checked on by public school monitors every three months.

“Once we lose them in the system, no one knows what happens to them,” he said.

In California, Assemblyman Jose Medina, a Democrat whose district includes the area where the 13 Turpin children lived, said he’s “extremely concerned” about the lack of oversight and is considering legislation to “prevent a situation like this from occurring in the future.”

Lawmakers in several other states are rethinking the lack of oversight in homeschooling situations, too, but even modest reporting proposals have been killed over the years by the powerful homeschooling lobby.

In fact, when homeschooling began to catch on in the 1980s, it faced significant government resistance. The practice was banned outright in some states and heavily regulated in others. Since then, homeschooling’s lobby, led by the Home School Legal Defense Association, has led the charge for full parental control over their childrens’ education, in the process managing to weaken oversight considerably.

The defense association, a creation of the religious right, has opposed states merely requiring that school districts be notified that kids being homeschooled aren’t attending public school not because their truant but because they are being taught at home.

Beyond that, the defense association has been increasingly involved in defending homeschool parents accused of abuse and has worked to make investigations by Child Protective Services more difficult. To its homeschooling members who are approached by social workers, the association has advised:

“Never let the social worker in your house without a warrant or court order. All the cases that you have heard about where children are snatched from the home usually involve families waiving their Fourth Amendment right to be free from such searches and seizures by agreeing to allow the social worker to come inside the home. A warrant requires ‘probable cause’ which does not include an anonymous tip or a mere suspicion.”

EPILOGUE

Criminal cases against the parents and other family members in the three cases cited in this story are wending through court systems.

• Nicole Finn, Natalie Finn’s adoptive mother, recently received three life sentences for first-degree murder and kidnapping in Natalie’s death, and two counts of kidnapping for confining two of the teen’s siblings. Joseph Finn, Natalie’s father, is scheduled to go to trial on kidnapping, child endangerment and other felony charges in April.
• Marc and Misty Ray, Sabrina’s adoptive parents, are yet to go to trial on first-degree murder charges. Three other family members are also charged in her death.
• Sabrina’s adoptive brother Justin Dale Ray pleaded guilty Friday, Feb. 16, to two counts of willful injury and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
• Sabrina’s grandmother, Carla Ray Bousman, has yet to stand trial on charges of kidnapping, obstruction prosecution and child endangerment.
• Sabrina’s cousin, Josie Bousman, is charged with kidnapping and child endangerment and has agreed to testify against her family members.
• David and Louise Turpin, the parents of the 13 California children imprisoned from 2010 to 2018, could spend the rest of their lives in jail. Together, they are charged with 37 counts of torture, child abuse and false imprisonment. David Turpin also is charged with a lewd act on a child under the age of 14.

Written by Beth Dalbey of Patch’s national staff.

Image of Liam Roberts via GoFundMe