Ashley again tested positive for drugs and stayed in the hospital for three days. It was essentially a repeat of her last hospital visit in June: Mike visited every day, and I went once because I didn't think I deserved to be treated with disdain and anger, and I had better things to do than sit across from our barely-speaking-to-us daughter. It seemed to me that there was a subtle shift in Ashley's attitude. In the past, she had reacted to Mike and I pretty much the same. In her eyes, Mom was being a witch, and Dad was unfair. Now it seemed that she was mostly blaming me.

In family therapy, Ashley refused to participate unless she could spout abuse and drag up all sorts of supposed hurts from her past. I'm not saying she didn't have some legitimate gripes, such as feeling her education had suffered from being dragged from school to school. But the way she chose to vent and accuse was hurtful, and even moreso that she lumped me in with her father. It was like she'd totally forgotten who had stuck up for her all those months. So she fumed and screamed and nothing was resolved. After three days of this, the hospital discharged her to us because she was considered no longer a threat to herself or others.

If Ash felt being put back in Charleston was wrong, it was nothing compared to her homecoming. Mike had spent considerable time reading the book he bought at the Tough Adolescent semimar, and he decided it was time for us to be proactive, not reactive. Our daughter threw a major hissy fit when she returned to a fully-activated alarm on her bedroom door and special bolts on the window bars. She was really fried.

Heidi said Ashley needed a cause outside of herself to focus on, something to get involved in which would help her to think about someone besides herself. Her suggestion was a Pro-Life Survivor’s Camp, loosely sponsored by a church group that worked with Operation Rescue. Training teens to stand up for their Pro-Life ideals, the two-week camp would house kids in the nearby mountains and at the beach as they learned sidewalk counseling. They would also actually work the abortion clinics handing out tracts. It was supposedly operated under close scrutiny.

I consider myself Pro-Life and have taken part in prayer groups and outreach programs to pregnant women. Heidi Cook was another breed altogether, virulently against abortion for any reason. I didn't mind sending her to such a camp after we had a chance to speak to the leaders on the telephone and found out they were not the radicals I feared. I was a little hesitant about the camp because I feared Ashley was being used to further Heidi’s cause, but Mike was all for it. It was free, and Heidi said she’d handle all the details, so we sent Ashley. She left on July 16th. None too soon for Mike and me because we had a business meeting to attend in Arizona a week later, and we had been wondering how we could go and leave Ashley at home unsupervised. But we trotted off to our meeting figuring she was being taken care of and we had no worries.

A lot was happening that we didn’t know about. Trusting Mike's judgment about Heidi and for her to be thorough, I figured she had informed the staff about Ashley’s sexual and drug addictions as well as her depression, Bi-Polar and PTSD. Maybe I just didn't want to be bothered by the details, but it never occurred to me to be concerned. This was a Christian organization, for heaven sakes, and the leaders had said we had nothing to worry about. But the day after our return from Phoenix we received a late-night telephone call from the Orange County Sheriff’s Dept. They had Ashley in custody for substance abuse and breaking curfew, and they wanted us to come pick her up in San Clemente. Mike got dressed and trotted out in the middle of the night to, once again, fetch her from somewhere she wasn't supposed to be.

As he would tell me later, Ashley had a decidedly odd tale. It seems as if the camp counselors allowed the teens a lot of freedom without much supervision. Ashley had wandered off from the main group in the evening and ended up down the beach near a bathroom where she met up with David, a boy from the group. He was smoking, and she asked for a cigarette. David, she claimed, had forced himself upon her sexually, and Ashley was so "devastated" that she immediately sought out another girl from the camp named Becka. This girl was somewhat of a trouble-maker, and her remedy for Ashley’s problems was to wander down the beach together. So much for keeping an eye on our daughter.

Ash and Becka went AWOL, and I'm not even sure if the camp staff realized they were missing. Soon they met a couple of men in their 20’s who offered the girls beer. Joining them, Ashley and Becka had some beer and agreed to go with the men when they suggested they go back to their apartment for marijuana. They smoked some pot, and then the men took the girls joyriding. It was at this point that the sheriff had stopped the car for reckless driving and suspected DUI and took everyone into custody.

Becka was being held overnight (she was 19) to be released back to the camp counselors in the morning. In the course of a day, the staff would put her on a plane home to Illinois. But Ashley was another story. Because of the rape allegations, the authorities were unsure what to do. Here was this underage girl traveling around with three adults, yelling rape against someone not even in the car, and she was legally supposed to be in the custody of people who weren't her parents. While everyone sought to figure out if there had actually been a crime, what happened when and where, Ash went into her damsel in distress mode, and the deputies thought best to contact us. Mike, upon is arrival, told them all about her emotional problems, and they agreed to release her to him provided that he notified the camp counselors and if necessary file charges through their San Diego counterparts.

Mike said that Ashley, for someone who had supposedly been raped, seemed to exult in all the attention she was getting. He had mixed feelings about the situation. Part of him wanted to make David be responsible for taking advantage of his little girl, but on the other hand, he knew Ash and how she could play the sex card to her advantage. In the end he just drove her back to the camp with plans to bring Ashley home. They woke up everyone and an uproar ensued when Mike repeated Ashley’s charges and asked the staff to pursue. He had her gather her things, and they left camp then and there.

Mike phoned Heidi later in the morning, and she professed to be concerned. She knew some of the people running the camp, and Heidi said she was surprised that the counselors hadn’t kept a closer eye on Ashley and the kids surrounding her. She said Ash needed to get into a hospital immediately for a rape exam. So after only a few hours of sleep, off to the hospital she went.

As for me, I was more than surprised, I was livid. What kind of set-up was this that a 15-year-old was allowed to be around adult males without anyone checking on her? You can talk about trust all you want, and I know that some of these kids had made moral decisions to not engage in sex, but not all of them it seemed. I was also skeptical about the so-called rape. What sounded much more likely to me was that Ashley had agreed to go along with David’s sexual advances, and maybe at some point decided enough was enough after it was too late for him to stop. Or maybe she agreed all the way and yelling rape was a way to blame the kid for what transpired later- the running away, drinking and marijuana use. Why should Ashley be accountable for herself when there were other people to make responsible? Whatever had happened, I was furious with her. She never seemed to learn, and now it was possible that some young man was going to be saddled with an unearned rape charge.

I guess the exam was pretty gruesome, and it took all day. Ashley was exhausted when she returned and went right to sleep. She got up later in a foul mood- I found out later she expected me to open up the conversation about what had happened to her at camp and in the hospital, but how was I to know she wanted to discuss it? Ashley never wanted to talk to me about anything. I guess she expected me to read her mind. She thought I blamed her for the rape, but I knew there was nothing gained in discussing it with her and saying I doubted the rape happened. I made it clear that I felt she'd behaved foolishly and running off to party certainly made her version seem questionable. I did hint that if there was the slightest possibility that David had misinterpreted her intentions, it wasn't her fault, nor was it exactly his. I thought the best way to handle it was to let her calm down on her own, not create a fight-producing conversation in which we'd both end up slinging mud.

****TTFN,

Julie