The House passed legislation Wednesday requiring more oversight of youth residential treatment facilities, a feat for hotel heiress Paris Hilton who has spent years lobbying lawmakers to regulate an industry marred by child abuse allegations.
The Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act gained overwhelming bipartisan support in the House after passing the Senate unanimously last week. It will now go to President Joe Biden's desk to be signed into law.
“This moment is proof that our voices matter, that speaking out can spark change, and that no child should ever endure the horrors of abuse in silence,” Hilton said in an social media post following the vote. “I did this for the younger version of myself and the youth who were senselessly taken from us by the Troubled Teen industry.”
Hilton has spent the last several years testifying about the abuse she says she suffered years ago at a boarding school in Utah. She was sent to Provo Canyon School for 11 months at age 17 where she says she was abused mentally and physically, recalling that staff members would beat her, force her to take unknown pills, watch her shower and send her to solitary confinement without clothes as punishment. The 43-year-old said the treatment was so “traumatizing” that she has suffered nightmares and insomnia for years.
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Details of the abuse were also chronicled in a documentary she released, titled “This is Paris” that was released in September 2020.
The legislation passed this week would establish an interagency work group under Department of Health & Human Services that would bring greater transparency around treatment of youth in these programs, particularly when staff use restraints and seclusion rooms as forms of punishment. Hilton's advocacy has helped changed laws to protect minors in at least eight states, including in Hilton's home state of California, where similar legislation will go into effect on Jan. 1.
