One of the largest responsibilities an individual can be beholden to is maintaining the well-being of a child, and oftentimes being held to such a duty comes with unforeseen difficulties. There are times when parents aren’t sure of how to handle their offspring, and their job may become particularly stress-inducing when behavioral inadequacy exists as a consistent problem. When pushed to the edge, people become desperate, and there will always be someone willing to take advantage of a desperate person and use their misfortune to their advantage. When such an issue as previously described occurs, it is often not an individual who chooses to become exploitative, but rather a company, notably those in what has come to be known as the troubled teen industry.
As the name implies, the troubled teen industry is an industry based on reforming teenagers whose pasts reflect less than upstanding behavior and instilling discipline and proper behavior within them. While on paper this industry may seem, unfortunately, necessary and perhaps positive, the problem lying within it comes from the practices that it frequently engages in. Those within the industry often bring teens to camps or retreats, where countless survivors have alleged that while there, they endured abuses and cruelties. In spite of survivor accounts, this problem is still relatively unheard of in the wider public, so it might be unclear how teenagers are sent here in the first place. One way troubled teens find themselves in camps comes from the court system; typically, when minors are found guilty of crimes, they are sent to juvenile detention centers, but there are instances in which deals are made with the court to instead head to a private-run institution such as a troubled teen camp. The second way comes from the aforementioned exploitation; troubled teen organizations will present themselves more directly in a way sympathetic to parents’ plights, earning their trust to take their child. If a parent agrees to this, then the horror of the industry starts to rear its head, as the way teens are sent to these camps is nightmarish.
If a parent believes that their teenager is troubled, then they might understandably come to the conclusion that it won’t be easy to make them go to a camp peacefully. On account of this, one of the industry’s most shockingly common practices comes into play. It is not at all unusual for a troubled teen organization to acquire parents’ consent to legally kidnap their child by forcibly seizing them at night and bringing them to their location. This ordeal serves to instantly put the subject in a position in which they feel required to comply lest they face unknowable harm, and their issues only escalate from that point. At camps, teens live under the intense regimes of their captors and often live in total or near isolation from the outside world and their families. They have to follow rules which, while varying on the institution, all serve to correct any and all imperfections within the teen, show the control of those running camps, and, when broken, exact punishments of the harshest variety. Children at camps also tend to be forced into intense physical exercises and labor, and while to an extent this is a normal set of regimens for camps and other activities to practice, it is practiced to a degree that can be detrimental to the physical and mental health of attendees, some more than others.
What constitutes a reason to be sent to a troubled teen camp is determined by a teen’s legal guardian, and they can be sent for effectively any reason. A frequent motivator for sending children to camps is the expression of emotion that is disapproved of. Teens exhibiting feelings of melancholy or rage can be indicative of mental illnesses such as depression or bipolar disorder, and for treatment may need help as simple as therapy or medication. When they are sent to troubled teen centers instead, though, they are exposed to intense derision and mistreatment, which takes them in their already unstable state and breaks them down further, doing the exact opposite of what they advertise. Teens who are sent to troubled teen centers for substance use are also worsened as they are typically suffering from withdrawal on top of everything else, and are being provided inadequate treatment for both physical and mental health issues. Hospitalizations have occurred on several occasions due to the activities from these centers, and even when deaths are reported, very little is done.
The troubled teen industry has been around since the 1970s, and despite having a constant history of abuse, there has been almost nothing done about it. In 2024, President Joe Biden signed the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, which strove to address abuses in youth residential programs; however, the way the act worked required a report to be filed three years after its passing, meaning that the government had to wait to take action against the industry. While survivors have been speaking out more and more, in today’s chaotic world, abuses in the troubled teen industry are simply not the primary concern of most people, and as long as that stays the same, it’s hard to tell if anything will change.
Sources
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10612-019-09466-4
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2043610619900514
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1351
