When Wilderness Boot Camps Take Tough Love Too Farby Sulome Anderson, The Atlantic, August 12 2014Troubled teens are occasionally sent to corrective outdoor programs, where they hike for days or perform manual labor. But some parents are saying the physical exertion verges on abuse. It’s dusk in the high desert of Utah. The heat of the day is starting to abate, and the cooling air smells of sage. There’s nothing but rough terrain for miles—the closest town, a tiny hamlet called Enterprise, is about an hour and a half away by car.
A group of teenagers huddle together by a tarp shelter. They are members of the latest crop of students at Redcliff Ascent, a wilderness program for troubled youth. They talk animatedly, exuding a kind of brittle bravado—all except for one of them, a heavy-set, red-faced girl who cries under the tarp with her knees pressed to her chin.
“I just want to go home!” she wails. “Please, I just want to go home!”
The boys and the other girl in the group don’t seem to notice her distress. Instead, they exchange tales of how they came to be in this camp—leagues away from their familiar world of running water, soft beds and Playstation 4s. Two adults stand close by with watchful eyes.
“They woke me up at 4 a.m.,” one of the boys says. “My parents came in and told me, ‘We love you,’ and then left me alone with these goons … after that, I just tried to act nice, but I was really pissed. I didn’t cry or anything, but my bat wasn’t in my room, so I couldn’t do anything about it.”
“I tried to run, and they arrested me,” another girl says. “I was listening in on my mom’s conversation over the phone, and I heard that these people were coming to get me. I ran, so they put cuffs on me and put me in the car. I was crying my eyes out. I almost had a panic attack. This place is hell … I didn’t do that many bad things that I should get sent away to a place like this.”
Eventually, she’s led to a pickup truck, where she sits in the backseat. She’s being moved to another group, an all-female one, and she’s not happy about it.
“I hate women,” she mutters. “All my friends are guys.”
After a while, she heaves a sigh.
“I mean, I know I need help,” she says. “I’m fucked up in the head. Maybe I do need to be here, but I don’t want to be.”
There are dozens of institutions similar to Redcliff across America, and they promise therapeutic treatment for teenagers who are engaging in drug use or other behavior frowned upon by their families or schools. Parents often hire transport agencies, which are charged with delivering the teens to their programs, forcibly or otherwise. This industry, which has only reached mainstream popularity in the last couple of decades, is still controversial. Its proponents maintain that this type of isolation, away from the temptations and perils of society, can benefit youth who are straying down the path of addiction and dysfunction. They present a multitude of success stories and insist this type of therapy can be life-changing.
Programs differ in intensity and duration, although typically, they involve activities such as hiking and learning wilderness skills. At Redcliff, staff teaches students how to make fire using only materials gathered from the wild, a seemingly simple task that actually takes weeks to master. Most teens admitted to wilderness programs are there for a few months, although some stay as long as two years.
But critics of other wilderness programs point out the lack of regulation for these businesses, citing abuse allegations as well as deaths that have taken place at such programs. No one, not even the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which compiled a report in 2007 on the dangers of wilderness and other teen facilities, knows the exact number of fatalities at adolescent therapeutic programs, although the highest unconfirmed count is 86 deaths since 2000. Many states don’t require background checks for staff, and there have been multiple investigations into sexual abuse and arrests for sexual assault at teen residential and wilderness programs in recent years. As recently as six months ago, police began investigating allegations that a counselor at Second Nature Blue Ridge, a wilderness program in Georgia, forced a 14-year-old into a sexual encounter. That investigation is ongoing.
Redcliff itself has been embroiled in several legal battles over alleged abuse. One lawsuit began in April, when a girl and her mother filed complaints against Redcliff, including unlawful search and seizure and involuntary servitude. The case is still pending.
“Our attorney has filed to have this lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that it is frivolous,” says Steve Schultz, Redcliff’s media representative. “There is a lot of sensationalistic language and allegations … there is also a lot of information that is minimized or conveniently left out.”
Another court case took place in 2004, when a student, Jared Oscarson, complained of severe stomach pains. The lawsuit alleges that staff ignored him, and he was made to hike five miles in spite of his complaints, until he fell down and had to be taken to the hospital for appendicitis.
“The student complained about a stomach ache,” says Schulz. “This is not unusual behavior for students and can be everything from not properly cooking their food to malingering and manipulation. It did take some time to evaluate the seriousness of his pain. We … decided to take him to Cedar City to the doctor. The doctor diagnosed appendicitis and recommended he have surgery immediately. The family lived in Las Vegas and refused to have surgery in Cedar City. The boy was transported by ambulance to Vegas and on the way his appendix burst in the ambulance.”
The Oscarson case was eventually dismissed on the grounds that “the parties … have fully compromised and settled their difference,” according to court documents.
Some politicians have taken their concerns regarding unregulated adolescent therapeutic programs to Congress. In May 2013, Congressman George Miller, a Democrat from California, reintroduced legislation that aimed to better protect adolescents in such facilities from abuse and provide easily accessible information for parents on the safety records of the programs. The bill has repeatedly failed in the House.
“What we’re trying to do is set minimum standards that would then be instituted at the state level,” Miller says. “For example, they would not be able to deny children things like water, food, clothing, shelter and medical care. We would like to have professional staff who are trained in the care of these children and have experience, and that’s often not the case.”
Others have pointed out strong ties between politicians and the adolescent treatment industry. Just before the 2012 presidential election, Salon published an in-depth investigative piece detailing Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s connections to CRC Health Group, which owns Aspen Education, a large umbrella organization that encompasses several wilderness programs.
Still others complain that these ties go much deeper at the local and state level.
Nicki Bush, a child psychologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, works with the Alliance for the Safe, Therapeutic, and Appropriate Use of Residential Treatment (ASTART), an organization of medical professionals, family members and former residents of such programs. She says ASTART often encounters obstacles because of strong local ties.
“What we see is that these places are almost always in remote areas or near small towns, and they create a situation where everyone in the region is a big proponent of the facility,” Bush says. “They provide a lot of jobs and stimulate the local economy, and that creates a sense of pride that they’re helping the youth of America. So there’s social capital to having one of these in your area. Moreover, because the youth that are put there are predominantly at risk for something—either they have some peer problems or behavior problems or social problems, etcetera—when something happens to them, people tend to dismiss it as, ‘Well, they’re bad teens.’”
Bush is concerned that the lack of regulation is creating an environment where untrained staff is often given free rein with an extremely vulnerable population.
“[These programs] call themselves wilderness therapy or come up with their own categories so that they can avoid the criteria that would apply to, for example, a mental health treatment facility,” she says. “Then because they’re not regulated, no one is really ensuring that their staff has adequate training, and in many cases we’ve seen, the staff are by no means qualified to provide the type of care that is being advertised and certainly not the type of care that these facilities require.”
According to Redcliff’s clinical director, Eric Fawson, their staff is more than adequately trained in wilderness therapy and isn’t allowed into the field before undergoing an extensive orientation program, although there aren’t any educational requirements for them to work at Redcliff.
“Wilderness staff are very passionate about what they do,” he says. “You have to be … a lot of our staff is educated. They have Bachelor’s degrees in all kinds of different fields … but as far as education, there isn’t an expectation.”
In Utah, which has many such programs, there is a regulatory body within the Division of Administrative Rules that oversees wilderness programs, with an extensive code of rules. And some of these businesses, including Redcliff, have formed an organization, the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs (NATSAP), which has its own guidelines and requirements for membership, although they aren’t as specific as the Utah regulations.
Despite the fact that some medical professionals view wilderness therapy as a kind of unreliable fringe treatment, Fawson says that’s because they associate these programs with the widely discredited “boot camp” mentality that was so pervasive at the therapy’s inception. He maintains that wilderness therapeutic methods have evolved greatly since they were first conceived.
“We’re actually in the process of trying to be one of the first programs to set standards for wilderness therapy as well,” Fawson says. “The research we have indicates that wilderness therapy is extremely impactful. I think that the larger psychological community doesn’t understand it because it’s so far outside the box.”
Fawson says Redcliff’s approach ranges from disrupting unhealthy family dynamics to teaching teenagers responsibility and independence.
“Wilderness therapy is all experiential and metaphoric as well,” he explains. “The hard part to conceptualize … is the actual sand and the dirt and the sagebrush and the tarps, and digging a pit, and what all that means in the process. That’s not therapist-driven. That’s driven by the wilderness … the other thing that Redcliff is built on is that mundane part. I mean, we embrace that, to let them go ahead and fight and sit in the dirt for a while and see what that’s like … but we’re also a very clinically sophisticated program, with therapists that regularly see the kids.”
And many former students of Utah programs do report successful treatment with wilderness therapy. At a Redcliff Ascent outpost, a destination coveted by students for its outhouse (they usually dig latrines while camping), Richard, a lanky, tanned 15-year-old from the U.K. who prefers his real name not be used, sits with his parents and two counselors around an unused fire pit. There’s no fire because the weather in the region has become too hot and dry, and a ban has been instituted to prevent forest fires. This means that making fire manually, one of the linchpins of Redcliff’s therapy, is not allowed, so instead, students use their equipment to make coals, which are quickly blown out. Richard is done with making coals for the moment, though. He just graduated from Redcliff after an 85-day stay, and his parents seem overjoyed to see him.
“I think we got to the point where things were going to end badly unless we did something,” his mother says when asked why they placed Richard in the program.
“Things got so tough, we were running out of options,” his father says.
“We were on two or three 999 calls a week—that’s the equivalent of 911 in England.”
“I was acting out, being disrespectful,” Richard adds. “I’ve always had a short temper, then I started smoking weed and doing drugs all the time, and it got worse.”
Richard says the first few weeks at Redcliff were extremely difficult for him.
“It was harder than I thought it would be,” he says. “I was in the red suit for a while, and I tried to run. I was being argumentative towards staff; I refused to eat and drink. I wanted to leave.”
Students are made to wear red suits if they are deemed a danger to themselves or others, and according to Redcliff standards, Richard definitely fit the bill when he first arrived.
“We got an amazing letter from Richard in the beginning,” his mother adds. “It was three pages long and beautifully written. Longest thing I’ve ever seen him write, and it basically said ‘Get me the hell out of here.’ I was just like, ‘Oh my God. What have we done?’ But we knew that if we brought him back, nothing was going to change.”
“In the last six hours, we’ve noticed a huge change,” his father says with pride.
“You have?” Richard asks.
“Christ, yes.”
“Just the way he looks!” his mother says. “His eyes are just completely different. Before he came here, they had changed color and sunk in. He was gone. Now his eyes have gone back to what they used to be like. When he came walking out of the woods, I couldn’t believe it. His eyes were this bright, amazing, shining blue that just smacks you—like they used to be, before all the trouble.”
Richard’s father pulls out a tablet, displaying a photo of Richard the day he was admitted to Redcliff. In the picture, he’s squinting, his face bloated and spotted with acne.
“Compare that person to the boy you see now,” his father says.
Asked if they’re worried about bringing Richard back home, to a place of familiar stresses and temptations, his father sobers for a moment.
“Richard has changed enormously in the three months he’s been here, but the world and our environment has stayed the way it always was,” he says.
“I wouldn’t go back to that,” Richard interjects. “I’ve caused so many people, and myself, pain. It would be dumb to do that again. I figured out that I would get more out of the program if I worked with the staff rather than against them. Something just clicked. I was taught different values I needed to learn. They were slowly being brought into my life.”
* * *
