Fornits
Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform => Aspen Education Group => Brat Camp => Topic started by: Anonymous on August 26, 2005, 05:34:00 AM
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http://slate.msn.com/id/2125096/ (http://slate.msn.com/id/2125096/)
Teenage Wasteland
Farewell to the sadistic pleasures of Brat Camp.
By Sam Anderson
Posted Thursday, Aug. 25, 2005, at 2:52 PM PT
Totally teen torture television
Network programming over the last five years has been a systematic rebuttal of T.S. Eliot's classic dictum that "human kind cannot bear very much reality." It turns out, upon further review, that humankind can bear reality seven nights a week, on about 35 different channels. We like it in every possible flavor, from the dramatic (Survivor) to the moronic (Joe Millionaire) to the horribly offensive (The Swan). Reality TV is not even a guilty pleasure anymore. It's as if our entire culture has reached the halfway point in a gigantic bag of Cheetos and just collectively decided to go ahead and finish it off.
A couple of years ago, in an act of countercultural rebellion, I renounced reality television forever. I think it was in silent protest of The Anna Nicole Smith Show, which struck me as a tipping point: The genre had become a Gordian knot of social postures?camp, irony, sincerity, acting, self-parody, and self-promotion. I couldn't even begin to untangle it, so I gave up, and I've managed to abstain from any regular viewing ever since (after, of course, having watched every single episode of Anna Nicole).
This summer, though, reality lured me back?not by reaching some new level of ironic self-regard, but through an appeal to my most primal emotion: my hatred of teenagers. Brat Camp documented the hormone-saturated plight of nine worse-than-average teens (their crimes ran from drugs to ADHD to the attempted murder of a twin brother) as they griped their way through a wilderness self-improvement program called SageWalk.
Last night, the series ended its surprisingly popular summer-long run with one final tantrum. Now that it's over, we can say definitively that it was awful to the very end: slow, repetitive, full of paint-by-numbers pop-psychology and manufactured epiphanies. Brat Camp was also (as all the critics have pointed out) ethically dubious, since it depended entirely on the exploitation of clueless and seriously troubled minors?a sort of When Animals Attack of human development. And yet I couldn't stop watching; its opening episode was the most riveting television I've seen in years. (It strikes me as a little parable of contemporary American culture that I was actually disappointed when Brat Camp was canceled one week to make way for a retrospective on the career of Peter Jennings.) Brat Camp was like porn for people who hate teenagers?which is probably the largest target audience possible, since it includes everyone in the world, even (and especially) teenagers.
Though I'm normally a pretty empathetic person, I hate teenagers with incredible fervor. It's nothing personal: I hate them categorically, like I hate injustice. I hate the way they roam around in packs, wearing floppy, Technicolor clothes, sculpting their marginal facial hair, slapping and tripping each other, shouting strings of banal obscenities as if they were delivering the "Gettysburg Address." I hate the way they express personal inadequacy through car accessories and vandalism. I even hate the word "teens," which sounds like some kind of infectious skin fungus. When a child I love becomes a teenager, my love for him goes into escrow for seven years. I know that there are biological excuses for their behavior?their amygdalae (the brain's anger and fear center) are ballooning, their exploding sexualities have only secret and shameful outlets?but that doesn't change my instinctive revulsion any more than knowing that sharks eat people because they need the protein. The cast of Brat Camp?a tribe of self-absorbed, violent, coke-dabbling, pimply rage-aholics?isn't an anomaly: It is the fullest logical expression of the genus teen, the platonic ideal of the species.
On Brat Camp, the teenage animal is frustrated at every turn. SageWalk is the most effective engine of teen torture ever devised, as carefully calibrated as any instrument of the Spanish Inquisition. Even its name?a cutesy portmanteau of wisdom, herbs, and slow movement?seems engineered to offend the teenage sensibility. It's a perfect blend of physical hardship?hiking for hours through blizzards, eating only boiled oats?and psychological torment. The camp is relentlessly uncool. The kids all have to wear matching hats, and instead of drill sergeants barking merciless orders (an authoritative yin that screams out for a rebellious yang), the camp is run by a squadron of unflappably gentle guidance counselors who call each other by "earth names": Glacier, Mother Raven, Little Bear. They answer every outburst of teen rage with respectful, hushed dialogue about feelings. I love it all exactly as much as the teenagers hate it, which is very much.
Critics have unanimously panned Brat Camp, usually based on superego-driven misreadings; its fundamental appeal is pure id. No matter how much the show tried to cover its tracks with feel-good narration and solemn music, we watched it for the breakdowns, not the breakthroughs. The campers' tantrums were jarring and authentic, exquisitely hateable, while their moments of clarity tended to sound like a word salad cribbed from self-help books: They proactively opened doors, cleared lines of communication, broke down walls, surmounted obstacles, and maximized potentials ad nauseam. My favorite line from the finale came when the fatherless and intermittently likable hothead Frank was reunited with his mom, who immediately broke into rite-of-passage talk: "You've turned into a man." To which he responded, "No, it's just from not shaving."
Most of the show's awkwardness came from the unbridgeable chasm between the noble ambitions of SageWalk?to administer emergency CPR to flat-lining young lives?and the network's pursuit of a very healthy (judging from the length and frequency of the commercial breaks) bottom line. In fact, the soul of the show was always and only the delicious spectacle of teens denied any outlet for their instinctive awfulness. This is why the real star of Brat Camp was the worst brat of them all: Jada, a pathologically manipulative drama queen who never even came close to buying into the program. While the others made actual progress, became less teenlike, and occasionally even crossed over into likableness, Jada kept lying about the most obvious things and then shrieking and flinging herself around in incredibly entertaining despair. Her impending hissy fits were often promised before commercial breaks. The show's ultimate tragedy was that she graduated in the end; I had fantasies of her being left to wander in the wilderness forever.
The show's real finale aired off-camera earlier this month, when two Brat Camp graduates were arrested for impeccably teenage crimes. Isaiah, an angry punk with two-tone hair, allegedly painted racist slurs and a swastika on a local preschool teacher's lawn. Not to be outdone, Jada almost killed a family of seven with a speedboat. Once again, reality has become almost unwatchably complex: The crimes came just in time to serve as unofficial advertisements for the season's final episode.
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It's difficult to know what to say about this article. He is quite open about it being sadistic but he just doesn't seem to care. I guess it is no surprise from a self-confessed teen-hater. I fear there are many other people just like him.
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I really dont get people like him. He was a teenager, just like eveyrone else who lived into adulthood.
Instead of fix the problems (which is why he hates them) hed rather see them screwed over to make them suffer... which could do nothing to ameliorate the problem, if not create it in the first place... which makes them hated.
Why not break the cycle of fucking up teenagers so they grow up into resentful adults and try to love them and support them and help them as they grow and develop? He knows that at its core its just a spectacle for people like him and bullshit, but really just doesnt give a damn.
I think that is the real problem with the USA. Nobody really cares anymore, except about themselves. People seem to just get drug into the polarizing pop-(non)issues such as gay marraige, violent video games, abortion, prayer in schools and other religious/moral bullshit. Education faulty? Bah, why not MAKE a problem about prayer in it, and then 'fix' that. Healthcare sucks? BAH! Get everyone worked up into a foaming frenzy about Terri Schiavo! Freedoms going away? BAH! Go ban gay marriage! Dont even let me get started about the economy, Social Security, and our internation policies :grin:) because they cant and dont want to fix shit, they just want to cash in on it just like EVERYONE else!
*Grunt* being a teenager sucks... and it always has, and because of people like him it will just create more problems that an industry will want to cash in on. Whatta civilization we live in!You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.
--Aldous Huxley, author
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This writers target market is Slate readers not the Atlantic, New REpublic or The New Yorker where you might find a writer addressing the things you mention Nihil. Its a satiric editorial. And a pretty funny one when you seperate yourself from the subject.
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Well, I dont read slate... so I dunno. Im also in insomniac mode so I didnt pick up on what I should've :silly:
My points still stand, however. If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
-- Dave Barry
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On 2005-08-26 06:59:00, Nihilanthic wrote:
"Well, I dont read slate... so I dunno. Im also in insomniac mode so I didnt pick up on what I should've :silly:
My points still stand, however. If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
-- Dave Barry
"
I am a Slate reader and so I get the satire. It is like a comedian I saw on TV recently. He ranted on and on about how annoying his toddler daughter is repeatedly, incessantly, asking the question, "Why?" Any parent who went through the 'why?' phase can relate. The punch line was, "Shut up and eat your fucking french fries!" It was funny. Even my kids laughed. We would never actually speak to a toddler this way and I am sure the comedian never really said this to his daughter.
I think the defining moment of Brat Camp's final episode was Jada's departure. When she realized she was the last one there; when they told her ALL the other kids had graduated, except her. She had her final hysterical breakdown of the show.
You can judge this girl all you want, but I dare anyone to attempt to show that this act of pure cruelty was therapeutic or in some way beneficial to this child. This is the very thing the author was aiming his satire at. The earth-named counselors taking their final shots at this girl as they release her.
In the epilogue of the show, Jada's parents say the program failed her completely. They mention her boating accident in text on the screen. The final message to me was they dragged this girl through a wilderness program, kicking and screaming the entire way, clueless, unable to come to come to terms with her issues and then stuck it to her one last time as they let her go, completely unchanged; and yet she insists she had 'changed completely.' This was the best counter-advertising they could have done for wilderness therapy. That is if the viewers actually saw it for what it was. The program had so vilified the girl that the audience was entertained by her torture. It came across that they were blaming her for failing to 'work the program.'
It was also telling that they showed clips of the parents talking about Jada, "We don't know what will become of her." Then, they show Jada in her room talking. They do not show the family together talking about their family problems. The disconnect between parents and child was glaring.
I noted that they let all the kids go at 56 days whether they were ready-or-not. I guess they used their budget up or they wanted the Hollywood happy ending. It was not lost on me that if this was not a reality TV show, the program likely would have kept some of these kids and moved them to other groups. They hadn't been 'fixed' yet.
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The whole show looked more like pledging a fraternity than any kind of therapy I've ever seen.
Mental cruelty combined with mindless, repetitive tasks, yeah, that's therapy alright...
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"Brat Camp was like porn for people who hate teenagers?which is probably the largest target audience possible, since it includes everyone in the world, even (and especially) teenagers"
I guess I'm a sadist, because I loved Brat Camp, and laughed hysterically at every episode. (Especially the solo one, with the face paint and the horribly contrived native american names, that no self respecting native american would be caught dead calling himself.) Despite the fact that I have been through a residential program that was a tad worse, and lasted much longer, and I also have strong feelings about the exploitative industry about private behavior modification schools and wilderness programs.
Still, I laughed myself silly every time Jada had a meltdown, or Frank was acting like a macho ass and one of the ridiculous wimpy hippie counselors would try to talk to him in their calm hippie voices (oh my GOD were they wimpy! The fact that Jada graduated proved how wimpy they were. But I did enjoy that little sadistic trick they pulled on her at the end.)
It was like crack.
I guess I'm just a pile of contradictions. Or maybe I just hate teenagers, too. (I know I was sure a raging asshole when I was a teen.) Or maybe I just bought into the whole package abc was selling.
I have to admit, it sure was enjoyable watching all the kids freak out, and watching the staff get more and more ridiculous and say more and more absurd things each time. Oh the drama!
I wonder if these kids even signed releases? I'm sure they did. It'd be illegal to film the show if they didn't. It just seems strange that, you know, they didn't even know they were going to be going out into the wilderness, but before all of that shit happened... oh, by the way, will you sign this release so we can film you being told you will be spending several weeks in the high desert?
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Every reality show's participants sign releases before being filmed. These kids knew where they were going and what was going to happen. Reality shows are staged and it only appears that they go through the jungle wilderness and almost get killed (for example: survivor series). How do you know there wasn't a Mickey D's down the mountain and a Motel 6 to stay in every night? Some people are SOOOOO gullible :silly:
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I don't know if it's true for all 9 'contestants', but atleast a few did not know where they were going until they got there.
While their parents may have signed releases before airing, it's my understanding that the kids signed off after they arrived, and under duress.
Contestants on reality show get paid for their performances.
These kids apparently got tuition paid in lieu of payment.
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These kids apparently got tuition paid in lieu of payment.
Correction, the kids' parents got "tuition".
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On 2005-08-30 08:47:00, Anonymous wrote:
"Every reality show's participants sign releases before being filmed. These kids knew where they were going and what was going to happen. Reality shows are staged and it only appears that they go through the jungle wilderness and almost get killed (for example: survivor series). How do you know there wasn't a Mickey D's down the mountain and a Motel 6 to stay in every night? Some people are SOOOOO gullible :silly: "
Have you been a participant or crewed on a program? I didnt think so. Paricipants sign releases - but those releases dont tell the partcipant whats going to happen to them. The release is about allowing the producer to use the image of the participant for advertising and to use footage of the participant in the body of the program. Is there fast food and a bed near by? Might be a helicopter ride away for the crew. Or not. Depending on how much the shoot, the crew might be camped just over the hill or they might drive twenty miles into town to shower, sleep and eat.
You dont see a lot of staged stuff in this genre of programming because staging and multiple shoots cuts too deep into the budget.
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On 2005-09-01 11:18:00, Shortbus wrote:
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On 2005-08-30 08:47:00, Anonymous wrote:
"Every reality show's participants sign releases before being filmed. These kids knew where they were going and what was going to happen. Reality shows are staged and it only appears that they go through the jungle wilderness and almost get killed (for example: survivor series). How do you know there wasn't a Mickey D's down the mountain and a Motel 6 to stay in every night? Some people are SOOOOO gullible :silly: "
Have you been a participant or crewed on a program? I didnt think so. Paricipants sign releases - but those releases dont tell the partcipant whats going to happen to them. The release is about allowing the producer to use the image of the participant for advertising and to use footage of the participant in the body of the program. Is there fast food and a bed near by? Might be a helicopter ride away for the crew. Or not. Depending on how much the shoot, the crew might be camped just over the hill or they might drive twenty miles into town to shower, sleep and eat.
You dont see a lot of staged stuff in this genre of programming because staging and multiple shoots cuts too deep into the budget.
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I cannot recall the sources, but one article in a California newspaper interviewed Lauren from Brat Camp. She clearly stated that when she signed the release and they staged the opening bad behavior videos (yes, these were staged), she thought the show was supposed to be similar to MTV's Real World. She had no idea she was going to a wilderness program.
I read another article in local PA newspaper about a member of the production crew. It was her first post-school production. She said the stipulation was that the crew was never to interact with the teenagers in any way. She mentioned the crew lived in trailers which were far enough away to be unseen and inaccessible to the teenagers. She said after spending all day filming in the freezing cold, the trailers seemed like luxury. The crew spent the entire time on location.
I have tried to Google both articles, but can no longer find them.
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She said after spending all day filming in the freezing cold, the trailers seemed like luxury.
I wonder if any of them felt any pity for the kids.
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I wonder went on when no one was watching...when no one was filming and when the crews were safely stashed away in their trailers.....I could tell from the few episodes I watched that they were definitely not showing everything....kinda like....something important was never filmed.
I dont know for sure...these were more along the lines of disturbing gut feelings (and my own experience).
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I wonder if any of these kids knew or have since learned about the teens who lost their lives while participating in a wilderness therapy camp? Kids like Ian August, Michelle Sutton, Kristen Chase who died while on a forced hike? Sadly, it appears nobody wants to talk about these dead kids. How they died and why. Not the industry nor the parents who support it. Why? These deaths were all preventable. None of these kids had to come home in a body bag.
Worse still, if wilderness therapy is any safer today because of mandatory laws governing things as basic as WATER, it is these teens who died from dehydration who made that possible. They paid with their lives. A price no child/parent should have to pay.
:smokin:
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There are a number of excellent, safe wilderness programs. I know it is hard for you to admit that, but there are. I know several teens who grew up and went back to work at their wilderness program during and after college.
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On 2005-09-10 13:58:00, Anonymous wrote:
"There are a number of excellent, safe wilderness programs. I know it is hard for you to admit that, but there are. I know several teens who grew up and went back to work at their wilderness program during and after college."
Right, like these camp counselors on Brat Camp? They were pathetic power trippers. They should go get a real job instead of playing games with kid's minds. Teen Helper 101 ... what a crock of shit.
:flame:
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So how many kids are forced to do wilderness therapy BEFORE being sent off to some locked emotional growth (cough-cough) school? And you don't think something stinks to high heaven here? Wake up and smell the M.O.N.E.Y. asshole.
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On 2005-09-10 13:58:00, Anonymous wrote:
"There are a number of excellent, safe wilderness programs. I know it is hard for you to admit that, but there are. I know several teens who grew up and went back to work at their wilderness program during and after college."
Tell me how enforced hardship, repetition of trivial and mundane tasks, boredom, isolation and deprivation are therapeutic?
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On 2006-05-18 12:13:00, MightyAardvark wrote:
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On 2005-09-10 13:58:00, Anonymous wrote:
"There are a number of excellent, safe wilderness programs. I know it is hard for you to admit that, but there are. I know several teens who grew up and went back to work at their wilderness program during and after college."
Tell me how enforced hardship, repetition of trivial and mundane tasks, boredom, isolation and deprivation are therapeutic?
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gee ... eating is mundane, so lets skip that in our daily lives. but since i sorta enjoy that, just you skip such mundane activity. dont tie your shoes either -- same reason.
boredom is a problem, especially if you don't look at your surroundings, the life around you and the stars at night. is it far better to have a constant stream of "entertainment" fed to you.
deprivation is another one. many of the programs don't let you bring drugs along, or chemical-additive-laced foods. your body gets cleansed of stuff some think toxic, but in your evident view that could not be therapeutic as it happens at a "program".
don't talk about the workbooks on biology, or on personal development. don't talk about group discussions. don't acknowledge any sessions with a psychologist or other qualified mental health professional in the wilderness, cause that could be therapeutic too.
some even accomplish things in the wilderness they never dreamed they could do, and gain a big sense of personal ability they'd otherwise never have. but don't acknowledge that, or that it has value.
only the enforced hardship of having no BMW ready, trivial and mundane activities like caring for personal hygene absent a butler/valet on any day, the boredom of the natural world [forget a "walkabout"], the isolation from do-nothing pals and deprivation of pie alamode are the only things that happen in wilderness.
u a self-pitying moron
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wahey, and absent the ability to actually refute my argument the anonytroll goes straight for the name calling.
Well done for living up to out expectations.
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On 2006-05-18 12:45:00, MightyAardvark wrote:
"wahey, and absent the ability to actually refute my argument the anonytroll goes straight for the name calling.
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u got no 'argument'.
u list nuttin of the heart of good wilderness programs, so u can hardly judge em.
but maybe u not a self-pitying moron, and instead be a do/say-nothing-positive, blame-others-for-your-own-failures whiney moron.
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Wow, did you learn those exceptional writing skills from your own brat camp?
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Your arguments were hashed to death a year ago when the show was on TV. Let's cut to the chase. Two of the Brat Campers were arrested before the series even finished airing. In the concluding follow-up episode, the parents of a third camper stated it did their daughter no good at all and they regretted sending her. Two other girls were hauled off to follow-up prisons (Oh wait, they call them TBSs) that were owned by the same company that owned and operated the Brat Camp. If you watched the series, you could see that the decision to send these two the to TBSs was made prior to them even attending Brat Camp. So that makes five of nine failures. Some good program.
Oh and how about the kid who really did not push himself past his limits. He did not rappel, do the ropes, or even a trust fall. He was terrified and confused through the entire series. He needed his ADHD meds, not some misguided, unprofessional, unqualified, hippie freaks dragging him through the wilderness. Any moron watching the show could see this.
Meantime, yes they saw therapists. They did not have to live in the god forsaken desert to do that, though, did they? Yes there were unprofessional group discussions during which they completely and inappropriately forced a teenager into revealing her history of sexual abuse on national television. They confronted another about positive drug tests on national television. Clearly, the best interests of these kids was not a consideration.
The show was so offensive, it is the reason I am here on Fornits'. I never heard of the troubled teen industry until it shocked me that people were actually forcing kids through such stupidity.
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I am amused by the fact that as soon as a good solid argument is presented the trolls go eerily silent.
If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson
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"I am amused by the fact that as soon as a good solid argument is presented the trolls go eerily silent."
What "good solid argument"? In fact, what argument at all, other than posturing. Take bits and pieces of this and that, put them together, and that doesn't mean you have a coherent, or even accurate picture. No, you don't have to go to the desert to see a therapist. No, "wilderness programs" don't accomplish what they advertise for everybody. Medical doctors aren't successful in curing every disease or sick person.
You've got to look at the whole picture, and nobody has done that here - or rather, nobody here seems to have put it all together and posted it. You can show successes and failures of a lot of places. But you can't defensibly claim miracles from a program when a handful of people say it helped them. And you can't defensibly claim "bad" when something went wrong once in four years and with one of hundreds of participants.
There are some places I wouldn't send my worst enemy. And there are some great places that aren't right for some people. But you can't take one or a few examples out of chance knowledge and determine absolute truth for one and all - either way.
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Shut up, Karen. You're so annoying.
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On 2006-05-22 06:06:00, Anonymous wrote:
""I am amused by the fact that as soon as a good solid argument is presented the trolls go eerily silent."
What "good solid argument"? In fact, what argument at all, other than posturing. Take bits and pieces of this and that, put them together, and that doesn't mean you have a coherent, or even accurate picture. No, you don't have to go to the desert to see a therapist. No, "wilderness programs" don't accomplish what they advertise for everybody. Medical doctors aren't successful in curing every disease or sick person.
You've got to look at the whole picture, and nobody has done that here - or rather, nobody here seems to have put it all together and posted it. You can show successes and failures of a lot of places. But you can't defensibly claim miracles from a program when a handful of people say it helped them. And you can't defensibly claim "bad" when something went wrong once in four years and with one of hundreds of participants.
There are some places I wouldn't send my worst enemy. And there are some great places that aren't right for some people. But you can't take one or a few examples out of chance knowledge and determine absolute truth for one and all - either way."
On the contrary. There are those of us who have no vested interest in the subject. We have no teenage children. We have no program experience. We have searched the Internet both on the survivors' sites and programs' own sites. We have read the testimonials of those who praise programs. We have read the accounts of abuse. We have sought out the news stories, the studies, and the opinions of experts. We have done our best to remain objective and open minded. We realize that there are no easy answers and the world is not black and white. When weighing in all of the evidence, we have come to the only rational conclusion.
Programs are scams based on new age junk science, overpriced and sold to those who do not do their homework. They are the equivelant of psychological snake-oil.
Program operators are, at best, amoral, at worst sadistic, and likely to be religious-like in their self-righteous opinion that they alone can solve the problem. They are either liars or arrogantly ignorant when they claim to even understand the problem.
These operators prey on parents who have either abused or ignored their own children for so long that the kids are now 'out of control' and cannot be reeled in. Not knowing what else to do, as a last resort, these hapless folk send their kids away to be forced into compliance by cruel strangers in a cult-like environment of oppression and abuse.
The kids themselves have no choice in their own treatment or fate. Many are too young even to understand what is abusive and unacceptable and what is normal and will often accept the programs teachings in the same blind way religious fundamentalists and cult members accept the teachings of their deluded leaders. They become the next generation of narrow minded thinkers.
Those kids that see through the programs' lies and distortions are forced to fake it or be treated with ever increasing brutality until they break and succumb to the will of the masters. They are damaged, but they survive and when they reach safety, either through age or the awakening of their parents, they speak out. They appear here on Fornits', they post in myspace groups, they testify in court. They sometimes stuggle for years in attempt to heal from the misguided abuse they have suffered.
And the program supporters, unable to face the real, hard evidence can only dismiss them as whiners and liars; even when the abuse is caught on tape, or photograhed, or proved in a court of law.
There is nothing so sad for me than to read the words of a young person who was kidnapped, robbed of his possessions, robbed of his identity, denied communication, denied even the basic right to speak out, treated like a prisoner, or dragged through the wilderness, admit that all this happened to him and in the same paragraph claim to never have witnessed or experienced abuse; and believe it. That truly, is an effective conversion; or brainwashing, take your pick.
Absolutely no one has the right to force their own set of values onto another person. Each human being has the right to define their own values and to think for themselves and act for themselves. Anything less is oppression and unAmerican.
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::cheers::
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It's not right to institutionalize people and then try to "adjust" their minds against their will.
I support outpatient commitment for people who are immenently suicidal or imminently likely do violence to others.
I also support those same people's right to sit in a mental hospital without having their minds "adjusted" against their will, to refuse any and all treatments and accept confinement (instead of treatment) for the sake of preventing that violence, and to still be treated completely humanely.
People who, as a result of mental illness, are dangers to themselves or others still have the right not to have their minds "adjusted" against their will, and still have the right to be treated as gently and humanely as is consistent with protecting the physical safety of their caregivers.
Convicted criminals have the right not to have their minds "adjusted" against their will and still have the right to be treated humanely while incarcerated.
Teenagers and children are human beings. They have the fundamental right not to have their minds "adjusted" against their willl. Loving parenting, in the family home of a parent or legal guardian equivalent, is entirely qualitatively different from having their minds institutionally, coercively "adjusted."
If they have to be institutionalized for the protection of themselves or others from their own imminent violent acts, teenagers and children have the same right as any other human beings to independence of the mind, sanctity of personal freedom of thought---a freedom *not* held in trust by their parents but inhering in themselves. They have the same right as any other human being to humane treatment while incarcerated or institutionalized, regardless of the reasons they're there.
That's enough argument against the "Brat Camps" of this world all by itself.
Even the most rotten human beings on the face of the Earth have the unalienable right to the freedom and privacy of their own thoughts. Even the most rotten human beings on the face of the Earth have the unalienable right to be humanely treated by the rest of us.
Even convicted multiple murderers who are under sentence of death have the unalienable right to be humanely treated while waiting for that sentence to be carried out, and have the right to have that death be humane, as dignified as possible under the circumstances, and as painless and quick as humanly possible.
The death penalty is, sadly, necessary as the only certain method to ensure the most vicious of the vicious will never hurt another human being again.
But even when we have to put a Ted Bundy down like a mad dog, just as a fellow human being he has the right to have us not screw with his mind coercively and to be dispatched humanely and with as much dignity as we can manage.
Dogs and cats deserve that much. Rats deserve that much. And any human being, no matter how monstrous, deserves that much.
And any human being, no matter how young, no matter how disapproved of or worrying to his parents, church, pshrink, or society, has the right to be treated with as much dignity as possible, to be treated humanely, and to not have his mind coercively changed.
There is a world of qualitative difference between spanking and beating. There is a world of qualitative difference between scolding/lecturing and verbally abusing. There is a world of qualitative difference between being grounded or levied with extra chores at home versus being shipped off to an institution or camp. There is a world of qualitative difference between being incarcerated after a fair criminal trial to merely "do time" versus being "changed" coercively while being held against your will. There is a world of qualitative difference between being constrained by rules that have a rational purpose, and rules whose only purpose is to break the subject to unquestioning, abject obedience for the purpose of chaining of the mind and will.
The line may look blurry to the morally bankrupt, but those things are worlds apart and anyone with a basic sense of morals knows the difference.
There are many people who would think that one leads to the other and would allege a certain method of socializing free human beings is wrong or ill-advised, but they know the difference between attempting to socialize someone versus abusively breaking them.
For one thing, attempts at socialization accept the right of the subject to choose to resist and refuse to be socialized--completely or partially--without having the ante upped and to the point that their mind and will are broken.
To fail to know the difference is moral bankruptcy. To know and fail to accept the difference is evil.
Julie
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On 2006-05-18 12:45:00, MightyAardvark wrote:
"wahey, and absent the ability to actually refute my argument the anonytroll goes straight for the name calling.
"
u got no 'argument'.
u list nuttin of the heart of good wilderness programs, so u can hardly judge em.
but maybe u not a self-pitying moron, and instead be a do/say-nothing-positive, blame-others-for-your-own-failures whiney moron.
I think you're confusing 'Brat Camp' with Outward Bound.