http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story ... 77,00.htmlTrain them like rats
Boot camps for badly behaved teenagers are mistaking conformity for emotional growth
Cherry Potter
Wednesday February 22, 2006
Guardian
'Forget sending naughty kids to bed without supper; take them to a remote Utah boot camp for weeks on end instead - it's far more entertaining!" enthuses Channel 4's website about Brat Camp. The first series made the top 10 in the 100 Greatest TV Treats in 2004. Now we can watch a new bunch of recalcitrant teens, girls this time, exiled in the Utah wilderness. They are given a plastic sheet to withstand the freezing nights, meagre rations of muesli, and a hole in the ground as a toilet. And there they will stay, guarded by their Aspen Achievement Academy minders, until they knuckle under and do what they're told.
The girls have variously been in trouble with the law, addicted to drugs, or so out of control they have made their parents' lives a living hell. So they deserve whatever treatment is meted out to them, don't they?
Isn't there something chilling about what Brat Camp is telling us about society's increasingly punitive attitude to disaffected adolescents? Dickens wrote numerous novels showing how the Victorians delighted in strict discipline and sadistic punishment regimes for the young. But why are we seeing a revival in coercive treatment methods now?
In recent years we have become impatient with namby-pamby liberal therapies. Behavioural psychology is back in fashion. Never mind working with the causes of distress; just fix the problem by changing behaviour.
In the 1950s the American psychologist BF Skinner, the grandaddy of behaviourism, performed his infamous experiments on rats. He found that behaviour that is positively reinforced will reoccur, particularly if the reinforcement is intermittent - that is, if you confuse the poor rats so they never quite know if they are going to be rewarded or not. Of course, whether it's rats or children you want to control, you have to impose a strict regime of deprivation of food and freedom for the method to be successful.
President Bush has been an enthusiastic advocate of "behavioural modification", faith-based treatment programmes for juvenile delinquency and addiction. Now America has a $1bn industry, with up to 14,000 teens a year sent to largely unregulated "tough-love" boarding schools and wilderness programmes. Their speciality is strict discipline, confrontation and exhaust-'em-till-they-break regimes. Incredibly, it is described as "emotional growth".
More than two dozen teens have died while in such programmes. In Mexico three member schools of the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools were closed for abuse and human-rights violations. An official who raided a boot camp in Costa Rica said: "We don't even allow that kind of punishment for prison inmates."
Maia Szalavitz, the author of Help At Any Cost, has researched the kids who get sent to these places. Many have mental illnesses and a history of trauma and abuse. The last thing they need is more experience of powerlessness, humiliation and pain. But no specialist psychiatric diagnosis is required for admission.
Most destructive and self-destructive adolescent behaviour is a manifestation of rage usually rooted in unbearable distress. The reason is often a combination of deep-seated family conflicts and environmental pressures. In many dysfunctional families a child is made a scapegoat for the family's ills. It's easy to see why such families would send that child into the wilderness. But this is precisely why it's important that adolescent therapy should involve the family at home.
As for the claim that boot camps produce results, we have always known that fear and coercion instil conformity and obedience. It's the adolescents who might get dumped in these places without the safety of being filmed we should be most concerned about.
· The author is a writer and psychotherapist
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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