Christian Corrective Teen Camps Come Under Scrutiny

[Marmion]

Quote

 

Teens were sent to Wyoming ranches for therapy. They say they found a nightmare of hard labor and humiliation.

Two Christian programs are accused of forcing troubled teens to do heavy farm work. One man says he was branded with a cross. Three women say they were tied to a goat as a punishment.After the women from Trinity Teen Solutions were released, they reported the abuses they said they experienced to Wyoming officials and local police, left comments on Yelp and made TikTok videos. Then they joined men from Triangle Cross Ranch in filing a lawsuit.

For girls who were depressed, drinking, skipping school or fighting with their families, Trinity Teen Solutions claimed to offer a cure. Desperate parents paid $6,000 a month to send their children to the Christian therapeutic program at a working ranch in a remote area of Wyoming, often without visiting first.

What girls encountered once they got there, according to 22 women who spent time at the ranch as teens from 2007 to 2020, was a nightmare of hard labor and humiliating punishments that left some injured and others with post-traumatic stress disorder. 

In recent interviews and court filings, the women described injuries to their hands, legs and feet, including cuts, frostbite and in one case torn ligaments requiring surgery, from hauling heavy metal pipes to irrigate fields and carrying bales of hay they said weighed over 50 pounds. The girls built barbed wire fences, dragged carcasses of dead animals into a pile and were driven around the county to clean churches and recreation centers, they said. ... Down the road from Trinity Teen Solutions, which serves girls, sits Triangle Cross Ranch, a program for boys run by the same family that has also long been accused of forcing children to perform manual labor. The state has confirmed numerous regulatory violations over several years, finding that the ranch made teens box each other as punishment and tried to interfere with government investigations. One former Triangle Cross Ranch resident said staff members branded his arm in the shape of a cross in 2012, leaving a lasting scar.  At both ranches, phone calls with parents were monitored and letters home censored. The teens had no way to contact law enforcement, they said. And the ranches are in a rural area bordering the Beartooth Mountains, about 30 miles from the closest gas station, leaving them with nowhere to run.  NBC News Article

 

Edited April 3, 2023 by Coconut Flan

[indianabones]

At the similar type of school I was sent to, we were told upon arrival that the neighborhood surrounding the campus had lots of convicted sex offenders living in it and that if we tried to run they'd love to kidnap and rape us (if the rattlesnakes didn't get to us first). And in reality, everyone who lived in that town knew to either call the cops or drive back any teenage girl seen hitchhiking straight to campus. Geographic isolation means nothing in certain circumstances.

Our communications were also monitored and parents received pamphlets about all the possible "lies" that their daughters would try to tell them in order to "manipulate" them into taking us home. Of course, everything listed was actually happening.

[noseybutt]

The whole "Troubled Teen Industry" is super disturbing.

Phil Ludwig of Teen Rescue often appears on Christian radio to advertise his services and it's 100% ick. See here for a brief rundown of his outfit. 

[JermajestyDuggar]

9 minutes ago, noseybutt said:

The whole "Troubled Teen Industry" is super disturbing.

Phil Ludwig of Teen Rescue often appears on Christian radio to advertise his services and it's 100% ick. See here for a brief rundown of his outfit. 

What’s sad is that I sort of think it took Paris Hilton talking about her own experience with this kind of abuse for people to actually pay attention. 

[indianabones]

7 hours ago, JermajestyDuggar said:

What’s sad is that I sort of think it took Paris Hilton talking about her own experience with this kind of abuse for people to actually pay attention. 

Some of the staff at my school had worked at the place she was sent to back in the day. They'd tell us stories about what a wimpy princess she was that she couldn't even "complete" her program. It was kind of a shock for me to hear her describe what had actually happened to her there, even after everything I had been through. 

Brainwashing is strong!

[Petronella]

This reminds me of someplace a friend is sending their child. They live very far away and we have no influence on the situation. And the reason they’re sending her is not for fundy reasons (like drinking or disobedience), but for a level of behavior that will be arrestable when she’s an adult (is arrestable now but she’s been protected). She was kicked out of schools where they live and then when they’ve tried various “therapeutic” boarding schools she’s been kicked out of them too. Last year they tried a more normal boarding school, and she thrived academically but committed repeated thefts/fraud and got kicked out of there too. So now she’s back into a “therapeutic” boarding school that I fear may be like the one in this thread (and I fear the previous ones may have been too). The parents don’t feel able to have her at home again long-term because of her actions against her sister. It’s a difficult, heartbreaking situation.

I looked up reviews for the place she’s currently at. It’s a mix of 5-star reviews saying they work wonders and 1-star reviews saying what they do is abusive and traumatizing.

I want to warn them, but if they take her out of there it would just be to go to another one. And they’ve probably already read those reviews anyway.

Are all such “therapeutic boarding schools” abusive, like is it inherent to the model? Or are there some good and some bad, and how to tell the difference?

As I said, I don’t have any power in this situation, except to offer advice/information from a distance. They are already getting lots of input from their school district and counselors.

I wish abusive schools would be shut down entirely rather than trying to influence individual families from using them. I also wish I had a better idea for how to help a disturbed young person without putting the other young people around them at risk from their behavior.

It’s all very sad.

[JermajestyDuggar]

7 hours ago, indianabones said:

Some of the staff at my school had worked at the place she was sent to back in the day. They'd tell us stories about what a wimpy princess she was that she couldn't even "complete" her program. It was kind of a shock for me to hear her describe what had actually happened to her there, even after everything I had been through. 

Brainwashing is strong!

The thing is, she probably was a princess. But what did they expect? She’s a Hilton. They aren’t known for being raised in the back woods chopping wood and hunting for dinner. It’s just sad to think a person who is raised completely differently is forced into a place like that and everyone makes fun of her for being raised a Hilton. It’s not her fault. She was a kid. 

[FluffySnowball]

8 hours ago, indianabones said:

Some of the staff at my school had worked at the place she was sent to back in the day. They'd tell us stories about what a wimpy princess she was that she couldn't even "complete" her program. It was kind of a shock for me to hear her describe what had actually happened to her there, even after everything I had been through. 

Brainwashing is strong!

That's downright insidious and sinister. I'm very sorry you went through such horrors! 

[indianabones]

7 hours ago, Petronella said:

Are all such “therapeutic boarding schools” abusive, like is it inherent to the model? Or are there some good and some bad, and how to tell the difference?

In my opinion, most of them were opened with the best of intentions but are also inherently abusive for a few reasons:

1. 99% of them monitor student communications and also tell parents that anything "negative" they hear about the school is just their child trying to manipulate them into being taken out of the school and being sent home. We didn't have access to unsupervised phone calls (the only phones were behind locked doors) or the internet. There was no way we could have called 911 or reported illegal activity.

2. Predators are drawn towards facilities like therapeutic boarding schools. I know of three different men who worked at mine (a dorm staff member, the sports coach, and a therapist) who behaved inappropriately with teenage girls. I wasn't aware of this while I was attending, but since I left I've heard a lot of stories from people I know and trust. The sports coach in question tried to groom me and I didn't realize it until last year (when I was 30) because I was 15 at the time and flattered by the attention and special privileges I was getting. I'm fortunate that he never touched me, but I know a lot of other girls who weren't as lucky.

Combine these two things together and voila! You have a vulnerable population ripe for abuse. I have a LOT more to say than just that, but I think that those two factors apply to every "therapeutic boarding school".

[Marmion]

An update on this story 

Quote

A rural Wyoming ranch accused of subjecting troubled girls to forced labor and humiliating punishments has notified state regulators it halted operations.

The closure of Trinity Teen Solutions comes amid an ongoing criminal investigation and a lawsuit against the ranch, and follows an NBC News investigation last month that revealed a long history of allegations of hard labor and abusive treatment at the for-profit facility offering Christian-based therapy in northwest Wyoming. The facility has denied many of the former residents’ allegations in court filings, and no charges have been filed.

Trinity Teen Solutions informed the Wyoming Department of Family Services, which licenses the ranch, that it stopped providing services and enrolling new teens on Sept. 28, officials said. 

The company maintains its state license and was not ordered to stop operating, a Department of Family Services spokesman said. The ranch also remains in good standing with the Joint Commission, a nonprofit organization that accredits hospitals and behavioral health centers, a spokeswoman said. 

It’s unclear why the ranch, which opened in 2002, abruptly suspended its business. Ranch founder and owner Angie Woodward did not respond to emails and phone calls. Trinity Teen Solutions’ website remains active, but its Facebook and Twitter accounts were deleted in the past several weeks.  

In the September investigation, NBC News interviewed 22 women who had been placed at Trinity Teen Solutions by their parents from 2007 to 2020. Women described injuries to their hands, legs and feet from hauling heavy metal pipes to irrigate fields and carrying bales of hay they said weighed over 50 pounds. The girls built barbed wire fences, performed veterinary work and were driven around the county to clean various properties, they said in court filings and interviews. If they disobeyed, they faced punishments including being tied to a goat for days at a time, three women said. 

Women reported concerns about their treatment at the ranch to state authorities and law enforcement several times over the past decade. The prosecutor and sheriff’s department for Park County, Wyoming, said a criminal investigation into the women’s complaints remains open....  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trinity-teen-solutions-wyoming-ranch-closes-abuse-allegations-rcna50762

 

[noseybutt]

It will be interesting to see if they really shut down or pause, rebrand, and open in another state. 

[OyToTheVey]

On 9/8/2022 at 3:37 PM, indianabones said:

At the similar type of school I was sent to, we were told upon arrival that the neighborhood surrounding the campus had lots of convicted sex offenders living in it and that if we tried to run they'd love to kidnap and rape us (if the rattlesnakes didn't get to us first). And in reality, everyone who lived in that town knew to either call the cops or drive back any teenage girl seen hitchhiking straight to campus. Geographic isolation means nothing in certain circumstances.

Our communications were also monitored and parents received pamphlets about all the possible "lies" that their daughters would try to tell them in order to "manipulate" them into taking us home. Of course, everything listed was actually happening.

I'm sorry you had to go through all of this. It's unbelievable these places still exist.

 

There was a Dateline episode on a school a few years back. A daughter of the owners spoke. She's still so traumatized that half of what she said was still in support of her parents. They were also in the middle of no where and local cops knew what was happening. The owners had them in their pockets. 

On 9/9/2022 at 7:17 AM, JermajestyDuggar said:

The thing is, she probably was a princess. But what did they expect? She’s a Hilton. They aren’t known for being raised in the back woods chopping wood and hunting for dinner. It’s just sad to think a person who is raised completely differently is forced into a place like that and everyone makes fun of her for being raised a Hilton. It’s not her fault. She was a kid. 

I'm glad Paris finally spoke out. She's got a platform not many have. It's bringing more awareness to these places like the conversion camps years back. Has people talking. Paris still seems traumatized over it. And I'm sure she's had years of expensive therapy.

[K'Z'K]

Joe Vs. Elan School

This is the detailed, brutal, and totally fictional for legal purposes (but coincidentally accurate) tale of one victim of the "troubled teen" industry. It's a graphic novel, up to chapter 90 and still growing.

The author, who calls himself Joe Nobody, was sent to the Elan School in Maine in the 1990s. He went through hell during his time there and in years of PTSD afterward.

I stumbled on this when browsing Reddit one day. A search on the topic here at FJ revealed just a handful of mentions of the "troubled teen" industry, mostly in this archived thread from a few months ago, and none of Elan specifically. I thought it deserved more attention. Elan itself was shut down in 2011--after abusing kids for more than 40 years--but similar places still exist.

 

Warning: the word "brutal" above was not chosen lightly.  This is story is very difficult to read.

[Howl]

This is a nightmare.  

[SisterCupcake]

As someone who's been sober awhile and also has diagnosed PTSD, I want him to get to "this is what it's like now"part of his story sooner. What he went through was horrific, and I'm glad he's telling his story, but I'm on panel 77 of 90 and we're still in the middle of "here are all the unhealthy coping mechanisms I tried to deal with this experience." At some point, one has to choose to deal with the shitty cards they've been dealt, not keep telling exaggerated stories about "the good old days" of getting high. Also, way to totally not examine all the white, male, middle class privilege you've been born with there, buddy.

Anyway, I may just need to quit reading now and remember to take what I need and leave the rest...and be grateful my own sobriety (both physically and emotionally).