Why the fight against the "Troubled Teen" Industry (TTI) must continue

The “troubled teen” industry (or TTI) in the United States refers to a network of private residential programs, including therapeutic boarding schools, wilderness programs, and residential treatment centers, that claim to provide treatment and rehabilitation for adolescents with behavioral, emotional, or substance abuse issues. These programs frequently promise to offer focused education, therapy, and counseling to correct the teens' misguided ways often at significant cost to parents or guardians.

Interestingly, the “troubled teen” industry moniker was coined by the survivors of these facilities and programs who were subjected to forced and unpaid labor, inhumane conditions, severe neglect, false imprisonment, kidnapping, and emotional, psychological, and sexual assault and abuse. And, despite the broad array of therapeutic services marketed, many of these facilities are unregulated or at best, loosely monitored by state agencies. The lack of oversight and regulation has resulted in the employment of both inadequate and unqualified staff, medical and mental health neglect, physical restraint, isolation, and a bevy of abusive practices. Families who engage these organizations are served a polished and well-marketed program which can be intoxicating for desperate guardians and parents seeking help for their child.

“Troubled teen industry is a network of under-regulated, powerful, and punitive residential facilities that claim to ‘fix’ youth using tough love and other non-evidence based practices.” ~Meg Applegate, CEO of Unsilenced

Additional facts about “troubled teen” programs that create the potential for these programs to become a cesspool of abuse include:

• Beyond private placement by a parent or guardian, a percentage of youth are sent to “troubled teen” programs by state or local governments who pay programs to transfer them from foster care, juvenile justice systems, or even mental health facilities. Others are placed by school districts through Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).
• Until December 2024, there was no Federal regulation or oversight of these programs and limited, if any, regulation across the states. On Christmas Eve 2024, President Joseph R. Biden signed into law the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act which establishes an interagency Federal Work Group on Youth Residential Programs to support and implement best practices regarding the health and safety, care, treatment, and appropriate placement of youth in youth residential programs.
• Some programs are designed as religious boarding schools - freeing them from state licensing requirements or any oversight from education or child welfare authorities.

We Seek Justice For Those Who Have Been Wronged

Young adults and children have perished in these programs. Those who have survived frequently contend with a lifetime of trauma, leading them to self-medicate to cope, while others have taken their lives by suicide. Reasons that Justice Law Collaborative is aggressively engaged in protecting the rights and lives of those enrolled or those who have attended these programs include:

Misleading Marketing Leads Guardians to Trust

Guardians or parents who seek help for at-risk children find themselves swimming in the polished marketing of “troubled teen” programs. They fill their websites and brochures with emotion-stimulating verbiage such as “life-changing” and “transformational,” while promising treatment that will return them a well-adjusted young adult. These promises merely mask the deceptive practices and alarming reality.

Broken Humans Exit These Facilities

In the last year, Netflix and other streaming networks have aired a handful of documentaries and survivor stories including The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping, Hell Camp, and Teen Torture, Inc., all of which pull back the curtain on these programs that promise education, behavioral therapy, and mental health counseling. In truth, they rarely provide those services. They instead meter out physical and emotional abuse and place residents in forced isolation and unsanitary conditions. They use hard, manual labor to force submission and sexually abuse the residents. The voices that have emerged to sound the alarm come from broken humans who were forced or placed in these facilities, completely cut off from their support networks. The tragic results speak for themselves. In 2024, within days of Teen Torture Inc.’s airing on HBO/MAX, one of the primary survivors interviewed (Evan Wright, who also authored The Seed: A Memoir about his time in a TTI facility), died by suicide.

Frighteningly, former enrollees of these institutions and facilities depart them with lasting trauma including symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), loss of self identity, strained family relationships, and an inability to reacclimate successfully. Studies have shown that the majority of TTI survivors do not benefit from these programs and in many cases, their underlying conditions (mental health, ADHD) worsen.

Justice Law Collaborative has been involved in both legal and legislative battles to shift the trajectory for survivors by holding these programs to account and impacting state legislation allowing them to continue to operate without oversight. Our team has experience in changing legislation, including eliminating the statute of limitations for childhood physical abuse (along with sexual abuse).

Other support organizations including Breaking Code Silence (#BreakingCodeSilence) and Stop Institutional Child Abuse too are working tirelessly to support survivors and to broaden awareness about the flaws, faults, and missteps of “troubled teen” programs, to eliminate future trauma or loss of life to those children being enrolled in them.

Although the troubled teen industry has operated for years without oversight, growing awareness through survivor documentaries and reports and active litigation have helped sound the alarm. If you or your child have been subjected to abuse or neglect in one of these programs, we encourage you to contact our team to gain legal support to investigate and exact justice.