Imagine waking up in the dead of night to strangers dragging you out of your home as your parents look on. Still unaware of what’s happening, you’re taken to a residential facility where your access to the outside world is cut off, and you may be asked to perform manual labor, deprived of food, and physically and psychologically abused until the facility deems you fit and ready for release. 

For decades, the troubled teen industry has been preying on parents desperate to get their children the help they think they need. From addiction to teens battling with mental health, these residential programs market themselves as solutions to these very real, very complex problems. 

However, as time goes on and more teenagers die in these programs, either in them or as a result of them, it becomes clear that they don’t provide the support necessary to combat serious problems. 

Beginning as early as 1912 with the Devereux Foundation, a school founded by a special education teacher in Philadelphia to rehabilitate individuals with “behavioral problems,” former survivors of the residential behavioral program have been sharing their stories of abuse as more information emerges about these programs.

However, despite its early origins, the troubled teen industry indeed took off in the 1960s with programs like Synanon, which targeted behavioral problems with their philosophy of “attack therapy,” where teens would be systematically broken down and abused so that the program could mold them into their vision of a well-adjusted person. 

Other programs, like the Brigham Young University Wilderness Expeditions and Hyde School, operated with similar tactics to rehabilitate teens and young adults with behavioral issues through their respective philosophies. In the years since they’ve been released, many people have come forward over the many abuses they’ve experienced in these camps. 

In a recent lawsuit against the Hyde School, former students were asked to give testimonies of their alleged maltreatment, and an anonymous former student said, “Nothing quite like being put out to work as a punishment in response to being a victim of sexual battery. Brother’s keeper was easily transformed into a muzzle for many victims who were too scared to ask for help.” 

A recent tracking program has documented the lives of former Hyde School students since their release. Between 1999 and 2021, an estimated 150 students have died, with the majority of deaths being attributed to substance abuse and suicide. 

While many of these programs claim to offer counseling and different therapies for the mental health problems and substance abuse disorders that they claim to cure, many of them don’t have licensed therapists or psychologists on-site at all. 

Many of these schools are unregulated, with little oversight from state or federal agencies. With an estimated 150,000-200,000 teenagers still in these residential facilities and a constant influx of teens going into them, many child welfare activists have taken to advocating for institutionalized reform in the treatment of children by these facilities. 

Recently, after many lawsuits against several of these programs have been made, Congress has finally decided to implement stricter laws to protect teenagers from having to experience the many abuses that have been sustained throughout the troubled teen industry. 

With the backing of hotel tycoon heiress and troubled teen industry survivor Paris Hilton, a new bipartisan bill, the Stop Institutionalized Child Abuse Act, has sailed through Congress. The bill mandates “a federal study, with a report issued every two years for a decade, on the prevalence and scope of child abuse and deaths in youth residential programs,” along with taking measures to improve the oversight of existing programs. 

In the past, bills like this have passed in the House and not the Senate over concerns raised by some conservatives who appear to have a harsher approach to handling behavioral issues.

In 2008, a similar bill, Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Act, was introduced to Congress; this bill failed to pass five times in the span of seven years. It took widespread campaigning on social media from activists like Paris Hilton, gathering the support of thousands of young Americans, and generations of trauma for laws protecting children from different forms of systematic abuse to emerge finally. 

How, in a first-world country, does it take a decade and a half for a bill to protect children and teens from institutionalized abuse to pass? 

Despite this, advocates like Paris Hilton have worked to bring light to the issue by drawing attention to the experiences of various survivors and victims of these residential programs, as well as detailing her own experiences. 

In an interview with Bustle, Hilton said, “I just want people to understand that these types of places exist and that there are hundreds of thousands of children being sent to these places every single year. Some children are dying in these places, and [people are] physically, emotionally, psychologically, and sexually abusing children [in them].” 

As the government works to correct the mistakes of the past, a generation of teens and young adults are protected from systematic abuse.