The Daniel Frouman Memorial Scholarship Fund at Safe Passage Foundation has received an annual donation pledge that will provide scholarships of at least $500 per year for at least two students per year for five years (from 2012 until 2017).  If you can,  please donate to the scholarship fund.  If you are interested in applying for a Safe Passage Foundation Scholarship funded by the Daniel Frouman Memorial Scholarship Fund, please visit their Scholarships page at http://safepassagefoundation.org/scholarships.

Safe Passage Foundation (EIN: 30-0188676) is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization that provides resources, support and advocacy for youth raised in restrictive, isolated or high-demand communities, often referred to as “cults” by society at large.

In November 2011, Safe Passage Foundation will begin accepting scholarship applications and plans to make the first awards in January 2012.

Daniel Frouman was born in the Children of God (now known as The Family International) in April 1976 and remained there until April 1993 when he was freed by a judge who later ruled that Daniel’s basic human rights had been violated:

That in the long investigation, which has not yet concluded, by this court, to locate the FROUMAN brothers (two of the children, Emanuel David and Daniel Pasquale,  have been returned to their father), it has become aware of the existence of conduct which undoubtedly cannot be tolerated in that it clearly infringes the articles of National Law 23.849^[8] (Convention On The Rights of The Child^[9]), Law 23054^[10](American Convention On Human Rights called Pact of San Jose of Costa Rica^[11]) and Law 10.067, among other legal bodies, and which undoubtedly deserves the pertinent procedural activity of the organs of competent jurisdiction to establish not only the existence and responsibility of typical conduct but also the consequent sanction, not only against Stuart Harris Baylin but also, as will be seen, against the identified organization as they have violated the fundamental rights of people.
This is what has happened to the FROUMANS in that their identities have not been preserved, and that they were prevented from being near their parents and relatives and that they were not able to visit their mother before she died. Article 9^[16] of law 23.849 was also infringed every time they were separated from their parents as has been perfectly accredited “ut supra” in the judgment of this court. Not to mention the infractions of the norms contained in articles 9^[16], paragraph 3^[17] and articles 11^[18], 12^[19], 13^[20], 14^[21] and 16^[22] of law 23.849 among others. In this respect, these violations against the FROUMAN minors are profusely documented in the court’s records (“sub-examine”).

 

During most of his childhood (primarily from 1980 until 1993) in the isolated, restrictive and high demand organization known as “The Family,”  Daniel routinely experienced and witnessed child abuse (both physical and sexual), neglect and exploitation.  Some of the sexual abuse he experienced at a very young age (6 and 8) was violent and horrific yet not a single one of the adults in the community who were aware of its occurrence ever did anything to protect him and other children from further harm.  In most communities outside The Family, there is a good possibility that an adult who witnesses a child’s abuse “outcry” will immediately report the matter to a law enforcement or child protection agency.   In the community Daniel lived in, most of the child abuse, neglect and exploitation he experienced was promoted and encouraged in the cult’s religious publications and practiced by its top leaders and most of its adult membership.  There was little respect or regard for the basic human rights of children and reporting a credible suspicion of child abuse to a law enforcement agency was strictly forbidden and grounds for expulsion from the community.  When confronted with factual information that their minor children had been sexually and physically abused by others, many parents in The Family did nothing except label their children delusional liars and do everything possible to protect child molesters from being held accountable. Naturally, this resulted in so few criminal convictions that The Family still maintains that the number is zero (the actual number is at least two).   In one of the two known cases that resulted in a criminal conviction, a father appeared in court at a sentencing hearing to beg the judge to show leniency and give a no jail time probation only sentence to the older man who spent 9 years repeatedly sexually assaulting his daughter (starting when she was 5 years old).  The judge may have astonished but he was not persuaded and sentenced the child molester to 11 years in prison (the sentence was low because the defendant only pled guilty to one count of aggravated sexual assault and most of the crimes occurred in other jurisdictions outside the United States).  In the other case, it was a father who was sentenced to 19 years in prison for sexually assaulting his children over a period of many years.   Until it began to disintegrate, The Family was always one of the safest places in the world for child molesters.

Despite the odds against them, survivors of childhood trauma in The Family were remarkably resilient and Daniel was no exception.  After an extraordinarily traumatic and painful childhood, he began a new life at age 16 without any formal education and little help from anyone except himself.   He overcame many obstacles and worked very hard to succeed in a number of fields including music, teaching and medicine.   In 1993, he obtained a GED certificate and later began attending Austin Community College.  In 1998, he enrolled at UT-Austin and in 2002 he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish with honors by the University of Texas at Austin and in 2006, he was awarded a Master of Arts in Spanish by Texas State University.  The offered financial aid (most small grants and large loans) was never enough so he worked many jobs (including as a bus boy, bus driver, flower delivery, office assistant, tutor, home health care aide,  musician and bartender) to pay for his education and even participated as a subject in Phase I clinical drug trials (at Pharmaco, the same place Robert Rodriguez went to get funding to produce El Mariachi) for the cash provided to compensate subjects for the inconvenience (but not the risks) of participation.  He learned how to live on inexpensive foods like Ramen noodles, rice and beans.  Even a tiny scholarship such as this one could have made a difference.

He taught a chemistry lab at Texas State for awhile and then in 2006 enrolled in his first year of medical at UT Southwestern Medical School.   In 2007, due to financial hardships, he took a break from medical school to teach undergraduate Spanish courses at Texas State University.  In April 2008, he joined the U.S. Navy as a medical student in the Navy Health Services Collegiate Program and soon attained the rank of an E-7 Chief Petty Officer.  The funding from the Navy program covered his tuition and living expenses and enabled him to return to UT Southwestern to begin his second year of medical school without the distraction of financial hardships.   He was starting his third year of medical school after taking Step 1 of the USMLE (on which he received an acceptable score) when he committed suicide on July 8, 2009.   He overcame many challenges to accomplish extraordinary things.  However, in the end he was not invulnerable to the constant pain caused by the trauma (most of which, but not all, occurred during his childhood in The Family).  In this he was not alone; over the years many children born and raised in The Family have committed suicide.  A partial and incomplete list of deaths (due to various causes including suicide, unintentional drug overdoses and medical neglect) of people born and raised in The Family can be found at the Lost Children Memorial site.

He and other children freed from The Family via a successful individual escape plan (often simply running away) or judicial intervention (such as the child abduction case involving Daniel and three of his siblings) were among the first children in The Family to begin what would later become a mass exodus of youth from the organization that eventually resulted in the failure and disintegration of most of its structural components.  The Family International is finally fading into oblivion and one can hope that eventually it will be nothing more than a bad memory.