“For nearly a decade I tried to tell people I was kidnapped…”

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Issue #123: escaping the “Troubled Teen” industry, the digital remains we leave behind, and tips on building trust
By Scott Lamb

The “troubled teen industry” has been in the spotlight a lot recently. Last week, the new documentary Teen Torture, Inc. debuted on Max, following two others on Netflix from this year, Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare in January, and The Program in March (Paris Hilton, who has talked extensively about the abuse she suffered in a “troubled teen” camp, testified to Congress about her experience in June).

If you’re not familiar, the troubled teen industry is an umbrella term for a wide range of for- and non-profit residential programs (from boot camps to wilderness programs) designed to rehabilitate struggling teens — camps where kids are sent by their parents or the state, nominally to rehabilitate them after issues with behavior, substance abuse, or mental health.

But as writer and attorney Jack Strawman shares in his Medium story, “I left the troubled teen industry 18 years ago today,” the experience of many teens at these facilities is about anything but getting better. Strawman shares his own story and collects testimony from others who’ve been through the industry, full of allegations of neglect, physical and psychological abuse, violence, and torture. Strawman shares how at Spring Creek, the camp he was sent to, one of the worst punishments was being “sent to ‘the Hobbit.’ It was a small isolation hut with no temperature control and no one around. If any single staff member got mad at a child, they could haul them off to the Hobbit alone and with no accountability. Kids would come back from the Hobbit clearly psychologically altered.”

Over the last twenty years, a series of lawsuits and bills have tried to tackle the issue, but as Strawman’s story illustrates, there is still much to be done. While the camp that he went to was eventually shut down, there are still an estimated 120,000 kids currently in troubled teen programs in the U.S. For now, advocates like Strawman just want to get the word out: “Documentaries like The Program and testimony from high profile celebrities like Hilton help us to convey this truth. But for anything to actually get done about this widespread abuse, survivors have to be believed and heard. Please, for the sake of children still in these programs, listen.”

What else we’re reading

• Not something you’d expect from a poet: “I believe that AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for poets (and by extension, writers) without sacrificing human creativity and emotion.” That’s from 8th grade poet Sierra Elman, who’s been using Google’s Gemini chatbot not to create poems, but to provide analysis and advice on how to make them better by using AI to look at in-progress drafts.
• At some point in the next 50 years, it’s possible the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook, according to researchers (assuming, of course, that Facebook still exists). In “Mausoleums of The Web,” writer Mike Grindle explores the role our digital lives play in the world after we’ve left it. Imagine having access to an archived version of your great-great-grandmother’s social media profile — how will these digital remains change the way future generations relate to the present?
• One measure of how quickly climate change is starting to disrupt life: Even “climate havens” like Vermont are facing devastating weather issues. After back-to-back years of summer floods in 2023 and 2024, Vermonters are wondering if seasonal catastrophic flooding is becoming the new norm.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on establishing trust

Building trust with people is a core skill of life; no matter who you are or what you do, getting better at it will serve you well. There are a few simple techniques that will help you quickly build trust: focus on active listening, being open and vulnerable, admitting when you don’t know something, and taking the time to pause and slow down.

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Edited and produced by Carly Rose Gillis & Zulie @ Medium

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