Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Brat Camp

What critics say

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Pete:
Orlando Sentinel:
ABC has perfected the feel-good reality show with "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." The network has gone another route with reality recently, with some disastrous results.

Brace yourself for feel-uneasy TV.

"Brat Camp," debuting Wednesday, tracks nine reckless teens whose desperate parents ship them off to a wilderness boot camp to shape up. The goal is laudable, but the program turns voyeuristic and intrusive.

There's no contest among the participants on "Brat Camp." The unruly teens have been sent off to SageWalk, The Wilderness School, in remote Oregon, to be broken of their destructive ways.

The situations are dramatic and shocking. The therapists react thoughtfully but firmly. The teens comport themselves before the camera with chilling ease. Socially awkward Frank and compulsive liar Jada are the dominant figures in the two-hour premiere.

Yet "Brat Camp" operates on the questionable notion that intense, personal therapy can be adapted into entertainment for the masses. This programming for a summer night depends on confused, young lives that might be better off protected from a camera's invasiveness.

The narration often sounds too optimistic for the dire situations. There's a lot more at stake with "Brat Camp" than whether it succeeds in the ratings. It will take years to understand whether the children turned themselves around.

ABC likes to trumpet that its reality programs provide wish fulfillment. Yet you might wish that "Brat Camp," like the recently yanked Austin-set series "Welcome to the Neigh-borhood," hadn't reached the air.

Pete:
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - In the annals of parent nightmares, this one is near the top: teens who won't behave and, worse, become threats (bodily as well as psychologically) to everyone around them.

What's a parent to do when all else fails? Send the kid to a brat camp, a place far out in the wilderness (so no one will know or see) and get him or her straightened out, at any cost. In this primetime telecast, "Brat Camp," kids get sent packing, as it were, to that very same wilderness and the viewer gets to watch the kids' psychological turnaround -- every painful, seemingly sadistic moment of it (although sometimes caring as well).

As television fodder, this is old stuff: Maury Povich and Montel Williams, for starters, have been doing it for years, albeit in more sensationalistic form. It has great audience appeal, the kind that reality television folk love: the plain old, gladiatorial thrill of watching someone get punished, the rush of that voyeuristic gaze into someone else's distorted life.

The group of kids in this telecast, whose problems range from drug and sex addiction to plain old (but severe) oppositional behavior, get their due. And we're there to see every thrilling moment of it. More signs of the times.

Anonymous:

--- Quote ---sex addiction
--- End quote ---

Would it be called that if they were adult?

Anonymous:
Healthy.

webcrawler:
It's amazing that Fair Housing was going to sue ABC for allowing a bunch of bigots to decide who's worthy enough to live their neighborhood, but there's not one national children's organization speaking out at the very least about this sick show.

If any of these kids make it out of there here are some suggestions:

1) Call CPS on your parents and tell them about how you were forced to go into that place and suffered mental and / or physical abuse. If it takes 10 years or so for the brainwashing to wear off like it did for many of us here, then speak out publicly about your experiences when you finally come to terms of how wrong these places are.

2) If you have ever disclosed substance abuse to this place, file a recipent rights complaint. It's against the law to disclose a client's substance abuse issues w/out their consent. Oh I'm sure they had all the kids sign a long agreement to sign their rights away, but plead that you were coherced. Think about how for the rest of your life potential employers, colleges, professional associations, and mates are going to have an extremely easy time finding out you used substances because your parents allowed all your buisness to be paraded on TV.

Just a little background info from my own exp, I once signed away my freedom in a treatment center as a minor. You see we were all coherced into doing this because we were told we would not be able to ever move up on our phases (treatment level) and we would not have the "priveledge" of speaking to our parents. So if we did not sign the consent for treatment form we would never be able to make it off the first level, talk to our parents, go to school on the outside, or have a chance to go back home before we turned 18.

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