Utah anti-pornography camp accused of 'abusing' teens

STAR Guides Wilderness Therapy bills itself as "the country's premier wilderness treatment program for teens with technology, pornography and sexual addictions." But some say the camp the program offers have been havens for abuse, Reason reported.

While some parents and teens say the camp changed their lives and helped them overcome serious struggles, the watchdog group Breaking Code Silence said "the abuse we continuously uncover in this industry is beyond just a few programs. These abusive practices are reported across the board and are ingrained in the pervasive culture of the Troubled Teen Industry."

As Reason's Hallie Lieberman points out, one of the main focuses of STAR is battling teen porn addiction. But even if one agrees that porn is bad for developing brains, "sending kids to the middle of nowhere—for weeks, months, or even years—with no running water, phones, internet access, or contact with the outside world (aside from an occasional handwritten letter) seems like a disproportionate reaction to watching videos of people having orgasms," she writes.

Reason spoke to a teen named Cameron, who grew up in Utah hiding from his parents and friends the fact that he was gay. When the word finally got out, it felt to him like the people in his strict Mormon community wanted him "purged from the earth." When his parents found out he was watching gay porn and having a relationship with a man, they locked him in his room, "forcing him to pee in Gatorade bottles."

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They enrolled him in the STAR program. Soon, Cameron was seeing violence. "I saw more blood and fistfights and violence and threats and you know, all kinds of crazy sh** while I was there, than my entire life combined," he said.

The Utah's Department of Health and Human Services reports that a teen at STAR during the period Cameron attended pushed a staff member into a glass window. Another teen tried to grab a staff member's throat with both of his hands, and a threw a metal can at another teen.

"When Cameron went to bed that night, he was terrified. For the first five nights, he reports, 'they do what's called tarping and alarming you.' An alarm was placed on the zipper of the sleeping bag. If he tried to unzip it, the staff was notified. Then he would be rolled into a tarp, and a staff member would sleep on part of the tarp to ensure he didn't try to escape. ... All the STAR Guides teens Reason spoke with corroborate the 'tarp and alarm' protocol, as do Utah Department of Human Services reports and posts on the subreddit r/troubledteens."

Read the full report over at Reason.