The troubled teen industry (also known as TTI) is a broad range of youth residential programs aimed at struggling teenagers. The term encompasses various facilities and programs, including youth residential treatment centers, wilderness programs, boot camps, and therapeutic boarding schools.[1][2]
These programs claim to rehabilitate and teach troubled teenagers through various practices. Troubled teen facilities are privately run, and the troubled teen industry constitutes a multi-billion dollar industry.[3] They accept young people who are considered to have struggles with learning disabilities, emotional regulation, mental illness, and substance abuse. Young people may be labeled as "troubled teens", delinquents, or other language on their websites and other advertising materials. Sometimes, these therapies are used as a punishment for contravening family expectations.[4] For example, one person was placed in a troubled teen program because her mother found her choice in boyfriends unacceptable.[5]
The troubled teen industry has encountered many scandals due to child abuse, institutional corruption, and deaths, and is highly controversial.[6][7] Many critics of these facilities point to a lack of local, state, and federal laws in the United States and elsewhere governing them.[8] Some countries, such as Bermuda, have been known to send teenagers to programs located in the United States.[9] In addition to their controversial therapeutic practices, many former residents report being forcibly transported to troubled teen facilities by teen escort companies, a practice dubbed "gooning".[10]
Once there, RTFs advertise care, promise behavior modification, and seek to "fix" whatever parents may deem wrong with their teenage kids. But RTFs too often punish mental health and behavior, instead of treating it. Actual, evidence-based treatment, such as cognitive behavior therapy or trauma-informed care, is frequently supplanted by cruel, archaic methods of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
She had been sent by Bermuda's child welfare system more than 2,600 miles away to a Utah facility for troubled teens that was supposed to help her.
The slang term is gooning, as in taken by goons.
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