At Some Youth ‘Treatment’ Facilities, ‘Tough Love’ Takes Brutal Forms
If this was therapy, it sure didn’t feel like it. From September to January, Claire Kent spent her days digging up tree stumps from a barren field, her mind and body battered by the elements. The work was part of her “treatment” for the drinking and sex that had landed her at a boarding school for “troubled teens.”
In the Montana woods, Kent and a couple dozen other adolescent girls had been committed by their families to a disciplinary program that included chopping wood, exercising to the point of physical breakdown, and being regularly bullied and insulted by “counselors” – all in the name of what the private treatment industry calls “emotional growth.”
zmag.org