Paris Hilton met with Members of Congress on Wednesday to announce the creation of a bill to protect children in congregate care facilities. The move comes one day after she called on President Biden and Congress to take action against the “troubled teen industry” in an op-ed published by The Washington Post.
“For 20 years I couldn’t sleep at night as memories of physical violence, feeling of loneliness, the loss of peers rushed through my mind when I shut my eyes. This was not just insomnia, it was trauma,” Hilton said in a press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. She discussed how she was sent to four different care facilities within a two-year period in her teens, and “each one haunts me to this day.”
“I was strangled, slapped across the face, locked in the shower by male staff, called vulgar names, forced to take medication without a diagnosis, not given a proper education, thrown into solitary confinement in a room covered in scrap marks and smeared in blood, and so much more,” Hilton explained in the conference, noting that children at her facilities were regularly abused.
"I wish I could tell you that what I experienced and witnessed was unique and even rare, sadly it's not. Every day in America children in congregate care settings are being physically, emotionally and sexually abused. Children are even dying at the hands of those responsible for their care,” Hilton continued. "Federal law and funding are desperately needed to bring real reform and true accountability to congregate care in America,"
This year, Hilton became an advocate for minors who are placed in congregate care after coming forward with her own story of abuse she experienced at a facility for troubled youth in Utah in the 1990s. Since then, she has pushed lawmakers to pass legislation to protect teens from going through what she endured.
"The Accountability for Congregate Care Act will formally be introduced in both houses of Congress. This bill creates an urgently needed bill of rights to ensure that every child placed into congregate-care facilities is provided a safe and humane environment,” Hilton said in the conference. “This bill of rights provides protections that I wasn't afforded like access to education, to the outdoors, freedom from abusive treatment and even the basic right to speak and move freely. If I had these rights and could have exercised them I would have been saved from over 20 years of trauma and severe PTSD."
In a press conference, Hilton was joined by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and other institutional abuse survivors and child welfare advocates. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) attended as well.
In February, Hilton testified about her alleged abuse at Provo Canyon School before a state Senate Committee, where she said she was “cute off from the outside world and stripped of all my human rights” and “I cannot go to sleep at night knowing that there are children that are enduring the same abuse that I and so many others went through. Neither should you. I am proof that money doesn’t protect against abuse.”