News

Some kids have died at camps like this. The link is the story of a 16 year old who died in Arizona in 1994.

He had to hike for miles a day and sleep with no blanket or sleeping bag in temperatures below freezing. He had no food for 11 days out of 20, partly as a punishment for being sick.

He complained about being sick for weeks - stomach pain, falling down, hallucinations. On the day he died, it took him an hour to crawl 20 feet to the fire. He died from an infection from a perforated ulcer. The staff were standing around making fun of him when he collapsed for the last time.

The owners of the camp pleaded guilty to negligent homicide. One of the counselors was convicted of felony neglect.

Earlier this year, a 12 year old suffocated to death at a wilderness camp in North Carolina. His death was found to be a homicide.

I don't often upvote you, but I have to upvote this.

I have a cousin who was shipped off to one of these camps in the early 90s. The trauma completely wrecked him. It was about a decade before he got his life back on track.

That story is horrifying on so many levels. If even half the claims in there are true, all the "adults" involved deserve the slowest, most painful death imaginable.

The fact that places like can exist terrific me. The people that prop up those systems are absolute scum.

Fucking hell.

A lot of thought and logistics go into those hell holes.

Thanks, I love graphic novels and never read that one. Enlightening true horror

I've been reading this on and off all day and god damn is it an absolute fucking roller coaster of a story! Thank you for sharing this.

Holy shit. I read about it in the news when it was shut down, but didn’t have these horrifying details. The school was two towns away from mine. How could that be going on and we “neighbors” be oblivious?

No, step brother.

The religion of self professed "conservatives" never fails to be pure, distilled cruelty falsely labeled as kindness.

"Wait wait wait, I get to point at, scream at, and shame an already distressed woman, it costs me nothing to do so, and I get to call it kindness towards the unborn? You sonovabitch, I'm in!"

A lot of it is run by Mormons not just because of their religion, but because a lot of these places are in the Southwest for two major reasons - they can be EXTREMELY remote and isolated that way (try walking 2 hrs in Arizona or Utah in the middle of the summer, without water, after probably living on starvation-level rations for several weeks), and the laws down there are pretty lax on what constitutes child abuse IIRC (especially Utah). The worst ones are out-of-country - one of my former boyfriends was sent to a gay camp SOMEWHERE in the Caribbean, and a lot of them operate in places that are normally tax shelters for similar reasons (although I know some of the islands have managed to push these places out of business).