I was twelve years old when I was sent to a wilderness program. I'm not going to tell that whole story here. But I carry it into every room I walk into, and it's why this section exists: the "troubled teen industry" is not an abstraction to me. I've been the child on the other side of the brochure.
It's a multi-billion-dollar patchwork — wilderness programs, residential treatment centers, boot camps, "therapeutic" boarding schools — marketed to frightened parents at their most desperate, and operating on children at their most powerless. Oversight is thin and fragmented across state lines. Outcome data is scarce. Complaints vanish into systems built to contain them. And the person with the most at stake — the child — is the one nobody is required to ask.
If you've read this far, you already know why this belongs here. It's the same pattern I work on everywhere else: power exercised without accountability, consent presumed instead of sought, people processed by systems that never asked them. I learned that pattern years before I had the legal vocabulary for it. Survivors of this industry deserve what every consumer, every user, every citizen deserves — transparency, real oversight, and the right to be believed.