TEXT SIZE
SEND TO A FRIEND
PRINT
MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONThe Myth Of Tough Love
Maia Szalavitz On The Epidemic Abuses Of The Teen-Help Industry
The complete text of this selection is available in our print edition.
“Adolescence strikes fear in the hearts of even the best parents,” writes journalist Maia Szalavitz in her new book Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids (Riverhead Books). That fear, she says, drives well-meaning mothers and fathers to send their misbehaving teens to “tough-love” programs, where they’re subjected to abusive treatment in the name of helping them.
Based on her own research, Szalavitz estimates that between ten and twenty thousand American teens are forced into “boot camps,” “emotional-growth centers,” and “behavior-modification programs” each year. The industry is unregulated, and some programs operated by U.S. companies place children in facilities outside the U.S. What tough-love programs all have in common, Szalavitz says, is the belief that teens should be made to conform to the expectations of parents and society, by whatever means necessary. Critics have accused the programs of using beatings, extended isolation and restraint, public humiliation, food deprivation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, forced exercise to the point of exhaustion, and lengthy maintenance of “stress positions.” Research shows that tough treatment is not effective, Szalavitz says, and can even be harmful.
Szalavitz traces the roots of the tough-love industry back to the Alcoholics Anonymous offshoot Synanon, a 1960s treatment program for heroin addicts that evolved into a cult and was eventually shut down and discredited. She points out that incessant verbal attacks were a core component of Synanon and are now common to tough-love programs. But unlike Synanon, the latter are not for adult drug addicts. They’re for troubled teens, some of whom have never used a single illicit drug.
Szalavitz began her reporting career at the age of fourteen, writing and anchoring her own cable-access news show in Monroe, New York, an hour north of New York City. Seventeen magazine ran a story about her in 1980, projecting a successful television career for this precocious high-school student. But Szalavitz developed addictions to cocaine and heroin while at Columbia University and dropped out of college for several years before seeking help. She went on to graduate from Brooklyn College with a degree in psychology and soon began writing for the Village Voice. Szalavitz returned to television as a producer for The Charlie Rose Show on PBS, then worked with Bill Moyers on his five-part series Moyers on Addiction: Close to Home. Next she teamed up with University of Pennsylvania researcher Joseph Volpicelli to write Recovery Options: The Complete Guide (Wiley), which outlines the benefits and drawbacks of various drug-treatment options in the United States.
Szalavitz had long wanted to write about the abuse in tough-love treatment programs, but publishers showed little interest. In the end it took her more than three years to write Help at Any Cost. She conducted hundreds of interviews, spent many days poring over legal and congressional documents, made repeated Freedom of Information Act requests, and traveled to Utah, Jamaica, and Texas’s death row. The book focuses on four programs: Straight Incorporated, KIDS, North Star Expeditions, and the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP). All but the last are now defunct, but many former staffers still work in the industry.
I have a personal interest in the subject, having been through a program that was a predecessor of Straight Incorporated in the early 1970s. [See “The Seed” in this issue.]
Polonsky: What is a “tough-love” treatment program?
Szalavitz: It’s any program that operates on the premise that teens in trouble need to be broken down and rebuilt. The idea is that suffering is good for the soul; therefore, we will inflict suffering on them to “help” them. Sometimes people ask me, “Well, there are teen boot camps, emotional-growth centers, wilderness schools, behavior-modification programs — aren’t they each a little different?” On the surface they are, but what they all boil down to is “Let’s be mean to teens in the woods,” or “Let’s be mean to them military style,” or “Let’s be mean hippie style.”
There are some wilderness programs that claim to take a loving approach, but with so little regulation, it’s impossible for parents to know what they’re going to get. The people selling the program tell consumers what they want to hear. The parents of Aaron Bacon, a teen who died in one of these programs, had been told that North Star Expeditions used kind, gentle methods. Then their son came home in a coffin after being starved and denied medical care.
Polonsky: What exactly happened to Aaron Bacon, and why was he put into the program?
Szalavitz: By all accounts Aaron was a compassionate, highly intelligent kid, but at some point he started smoking dope and taking psychedelics, and then his grades started to sink, and he banged up the family car a couple of times. His parents also suspected that he was involved with gangs, and they were worried. North Star sold itself to them as a wilderness-adventure experience with trained therapists. Aaron’s mom thought her son might enjoy it.
So one morning at six, two men — one a 280-pound former military policeman — came storming into Aaron’s bedroom. His parents were there too, assuring Aaron that they loved him, but that he had to go with these men. They brought him to North Star in Utah and put him and a group of other boys under the care of untrained survival guides who wouldn’t let them cook their food to make it edible if they couldn’t start their own fire. They gave Aaron boots that were too small, a sleeping bag, and a backpack, and they basically starved and froze him to death over the course of a few weeks. Near the end, Aaron was so weak he was falling down and incontinent, and the guides laughed at him and called him a “faker.” It’s a well-documented case, because Aaron kept a journal, and the other boys were witnesses.
Polonsky: What about the therapists?
Szalavitz: There were no therapists. The guides were nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one years old. Among the three of them, they didn’t have a year’s experience leading wilderness expeditions. They served at most a few days in jail after Aaron’s death, and some of them even violated probation by immediately going back to work in the industry.
Polonsky: There was a boy who died in a facility in Florida earlier this year. Are there any similarities between his case and Aaron Bacon’s?
Szalavitz: Not in the particulars, but in the root cause. Fourteen-year-old Martin Lee Anderson was in a boot-camp-style program. He complained of trouble breathing and couldn’t complete his drill exercises, but the instructors thought he was faking, so they punched, kicked, and “restrained” him. When he lost consciousness, they tried to revive him using ammonia capsules, and he asphyxiated, either on the fumes or because the capsules were pressed against his mouth and nose and he couldn’t breathe.
The boot-camp instructors still maintain that they did nothing wrong because they were legally permitted to use “pain compliance.” Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that agencies acting “under color of state law” may not use painful disciplinary tactics, that decision does not apply to private corporations. In addition, Florida made a special legal exception for its youth correctional boot camps, exempting them from a ban on pain compliance, which includes punches, kicks, and pressure to the head. Ironically, if parents treated their own children this way, they’d be charged with child abuse, but it’s all right for them to pay “professionals” to do it.
