"Designed to be abusive" might not be the right terminology - the intent in most programs is not to abuse. However, my hypothesis is that the CEDU influenced programs are designed in such a way that it should be expected to cause harm.
Lifesteps, raps, etc. were designed to be stressful. If I take a group of a hundred random people and prepare them for a marathon exactly the same way, some people are going to be successful and be in the best shape of their life. Some people are going to finish the marathon, but have permanent knee damage. And probably at least one person will suffer a fatal heart attack, either before, during, or after the marathon.
The people for whom the CEDU process is successful become its advocates (starting or working in programs, becoming educational consultants, fundraising for the industry). The people for whom it was not successful are generally silenced (at least until this forum was developed). It doesn't take away the fact that anyone with a modicum of knowledge about psychology should have known that the CEDU process was likely to cause harm in some of the people who were served by it.
To Mike's point, whether forcing this stress upon a person in an effort to change their behavior, even if objectively it was in their own best interest is an ethical dilemma that I don't care to engage in.
What does matter to me, is exposing that these negative outcomes are real, that they exist, and if nothing else raising the bar in what the public considers to be a good outcome.
Kids were dying in programs, not because they were merely accidents, but because there was a pattern of staff not taking health complaints seriously because youth were viewed as being manipulative as a baseline. I hope that it finally got through to people that, deaths such as these were not acceptable, and that the culture of the industry has changed to at least assume that potential life-threatening conditions are real, before assuming the kid is lying. 3 1/2 years without a parent-choice industry program death. I sincerely hope that it's not a fluke, and it's result of programs looking at their practices and making the programs safer. The industry had for years tried to make it seem that deaths were rare compared to other physical activities, and minimize the danger. Pressure by advocates has changed the calculus to where a program death, particularly one caused by neglect, can put a program out of business.
Similarly, there have been programs that have recognized that the transition from program back to community is challenging, and that there are many youth that experience a J-curve, (I would argue that it's more like a backwards-J curve or at least a U-curve), so a number of programs have developed some kind of after-care program. The presence of these after-care programs has led to the occasional use of them as preventative-care programs, keeping youth from going into programs to begin with.
The industry takes a strictly capitalist, individualist, parents' rights model of treatment. If we assume a highly transparent system (of which the industry is still very opaque, but not nearly as opaque as it was many years ago), where the customer and the consumer are the same (this will never be the case), this model should be expected to lead to good outcomes on it's own - as individuals will cease purchasing a product that they know doesn't work. This is not an industry where we would expect the free-market to work. On the other hand, CAFETY for instance, bends socialist, collectivist, youth rights perspective. We can debate ideology, and never get anywhere. Or we can debate actual outcomes. What we might be saying here that complicates things, is that the outcomes that matter to the customer (compliant, law-abiding, college educated) are different than the resulting outcomes to the consumer (constantly anxious, loss of identity, loss of community).
First we have to make the point that the internal outcomes that the person who experiences a program, actually exists. Then the industry has to figure out if they can achieve the first set of outcomes without the second set of outcomes. Then they have to figure out if it's profitable to do so.