this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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Like Paris Hilton, I was sent to Brat Camp — it was horrifying (www.thetimes.com)
submitted 3 months ago by QuantumSpecter@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world
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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 207 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

I had a friend "sent" to something like this.

His dad paid a private company to cosplay as cops, "catch" his son with weed paraphanalia, and then shipped him off in the middle of nowhere to be surrounded by... people with way worse drug problems than him that taught him a bunch of bad shit and how to get a hold of far worse drugs.

Anyway, these facilities are absolutely fucked up, and it doesn't matter who you are if you get sent to one, you're going to be living with trauma.

Sorry to all the fucking assholes who decided this story didn't matter because of three fucking words at the beginning of the article. Grow the fuck up. Plenty of poor ass people end up in these facilities, too. A conservative parent who wants to abuse their child will spend money they don't even fucking have to do it. My friends' dad went into debt for this chicanery. Also, just because they're a shitty rich kid doesn't mean they deserve it.

Be fucking better, Lemmy.

[–] marron12@lemmy.world 66 points 3 months ago

Some kids have died at camps like this. The link is the story of a 16 year old who died in Arizona in 1994.

He had to hike for miles a day and sleep with no blanket or sleeping bag in temperatures below freezing. He had no food for 11 days out of 20, partly as a punishment for being sick.

He complained about being sick for weeks - stomach pain, falling down, hallucinations. On the day he died, it took him an hour to crawl 20 feet to the fire. He died from an infection from a perforated ulcer. The staff were standing around making fun of him when he collapsed for the last time.

The owners of the camp pleaded guilty to negligent homicide. One of the counselors was convicted of felony neglect.

Earlier this year, a 12 year old suffocated to death at a wilderness camp in North Carolina. His death was found to be a homicide.

[–] SaltySalamander@fedia.io 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don't often upvote you, but I have to upvote this.

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I love that even without following etc., we can still recognize other users. Very neat tbh

[–] Siegfried@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

We are all the same person with a lot of different accounts, of course recognize each other

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 13 points 3 months ago

Error: Dark Forest Protocol has been violated. Please report yourself to the admin of your host server node for neural weight retraining. This message will self-delete in 5 minutes.

[–] IamSparticles@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 months ago

I have a cousin who was shipped off to one of these camps in the early 90s. The trauma completely wrecked him. It was about a decade before he got his life back on track.

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 85 points 3 months ago (7 children)

Oh, it's my turn.

https://elan.school/

[–] ImADifferentBird@lemmy.blahaj.zone 28 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That story is horrifying on so many levels. If even half the claims in there are true, all the "adults" involved deserve the slowest, most painful death imaginable.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 14 points 3 months ago

Pretty much all of the claims have been corroborated. Even if it didn't happen to him, it happened.

[–] Crewman@sopuli.xyz 22 points 3 months ago

The fact that places like can exist terrific me. The people that prop up those systems are absolute scum.

[–] MNByChoice@midwest.social 21 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Fucking hell.

A lot of thought and logistics go into those hell holes.

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's kind of amazing how it all seems to have started with some cult in the 50s.

[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I'm not trying to sound "actually", abusive cults were around before the 1950s.

None of them are standalone or limited edition.

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

Synanon in particular seems to come up quite a lot in and around the troubled teen industry.

Though I'm admittedly not an expert in any of this.

[–] SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh god I forgot about this

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 3 months ago

I only found out about it less than a month ago, also from a lemmy comment.

I sometimes think my teen years were traumatic, which they were, but compared to everyone sent to Élan I definitely had it good.

The fact that it was eventually closed down because of online activism makes me an even stronger supporter of a free and open Internet.

[–] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Thanks, I love graphic novels and never read that one. Enlightening true horror

[–] Jessica@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 months ago

I've been reading this on and off all day and god damn is it an absolute fucking roller coaster of a story! Thank you for sharing this.

[–] just_ducky_in_NH@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Holy shit. I read about it in the news when it was shut down, but didn’t have these horrifying details. The school was two towns away from mine. How could that be going on and we “neighbors” be oblivious?

[–] extremeboredom@lemmy.world 24 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is not the brat summer I've been hearing about, I assume?

[–] another@discuss.online 4 points 3 months ago

No, step brother.

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 24 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I'm absolutely not surprised that so much of this shit is run by (and directed towards) Mormons. "Tough love" is the norm in Mormon families.

[–] Allonzee@lemmy.world 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The religion of self professed "conservatives" never fails to be pure, distilled cruelty falsely labeled as kindness.

"Wait wait wait, I get to point at, scream at, and shame an already distressed woman, it costs me nothing to do so, and I get to call it kindness towards the unborn? You sonovabitch, I'm in!"

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 5 points 3 months ago

I'm bitterly disillusioned that so many so-called Christians entirely ignore all the things that their Christ said. That is exactly what led me to begin questioning my faith in the first place.

[–] Mirshe@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

A lot of it is run by Mormons not just because of their religion, but because a lot of these places are in the Southwest for two major reasons - they can be EXTREMELY remote and isolated that way (try walking 2 hrs in Arizona or Utah in the middle of the summer, without water, after probably living on starvation-level rations for several weeks), and the laws down there are pretty lax on what constitutes child abuse IIRC (especially Utah). The worst ones are out-of-country - one of my former boyfriends was sent to a gay camp SOMEWHERE in the Caribbean, and a lot of them operate in places that are normally tax shelters for similar reasons (although I know some of the islands have managed to push these places out of business).

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 3 months ago

It sounds horrible, top to bottom.

I don’t know if the writer knew they were saying this, or even if ‘Sarah’ knows this, but the second to last paragraph just made me shudder.

In cases of extreme childhood trauma, it’s pretty common to just forget most things before the trauma.
Not that the stories and clear evidence of trauma didn’t make it clear how serious this was to her. Having personal experience with the memory loss, that piece of information really drove it home how that experience wasn’t merely a collection of traumatizing moments, but was a non-stop traumatic experience for a long enough period of time that it re-wired her brain.

The misguided notion that punishment is rehabilitation needs to go in every society that still embraces it.

[–] Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

I had a buddy get sent to a religious camp where he was abused and assaulted, because his parents found a joint in his bedroom.