"By habit, I was already awake before the screaming began. As soon as the wake up call started, I reminded myself that I had become a machine and I wasn't really there."
Thus begins an account of a typical day at Tranquility Bay, Jamaica, one of a dozen camps run by the Utah-based World-Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools. WWASPS runs camps across remote parts of the United States, Central America and the Caribbean, whose purpose is to "reform" defiant teenagers. Although the account was published in Texas in a fictional short story competition, its author, Ryan Pink, has stated that what he describes in the story, including the screams of students who were being punished by camp staff, is true.
Parents in the United States who pull their children out of normal schools and send them to WWASPS camps do not have to provide any justification - accounts online include a 17-year-old girl who had been accepted to Harvard before her parents sent her to Tranquility Bay. Students remain in the camp until they turn 18 (they can be sent there as young as 11 or 12), or until they genuinely embrace the camp's belief system, which includes accepting parental authority, turning away from drugs and sexuality, and genuine gratitude for having been sent there to be reprogrammed.
While at the camp, students are monitored 24 hours a day, are not allowed to speak or move without permission and are subject to a rigid disciplinary system. Punishment at Tranquility Bay includes being forced to lie on the ground for months without moving or speaking, being sprayed in the face with pepper spray, or having your arms and limbs twisted into unnatural positions - the idea being to cause extreme pain without leaving marks. At other WWASPS camps, students have been beaten, put in dog cages and starved. Teenagers who cooperate with the program rise in a complex system of internal ranks, eventually becoming enforcers against new students. In so-called "group therapy" sessions, students are punished if they do not hurl abuse at one another, reveal personal information and proclaim their salvation by the program.
Child abuse has slowly grown out of the family sphere and turned into an industry.
Even normally "defiant" teenagers are often unable to resist the camp's methods of indoctrination, and the Web is overflowing with testimonies from parents whose son or daughter was transformed into a "perfect" child, instinctively obedient and brimming with filial devotion.
These camps are not an aberration in a culture that fetishizes law and order above individual liberty, is unreasonably terrified of rebellion, drug use and teenage sexuality and is absolutely unwilling to believe that giving unrestrained power to fanatical conservatives could result in genuine atrocities. Both Republicans and Democrats are aware of these camps, but with the exception of congressman George Miller of California, none of them have tried to do anything about it. It's taboo to question the absolute rights of parents in this society.
Several institutions run by the organization in Latin American countries and elsewhere have been shut down, but for the most part they continue to operate, and are expanding. Sending your son or daughter to one of these camps is very expensive, and WWASPS has become a multi-million-dollar organization, with thousands of staff and a network of Web pages online designed to spread misinformation about the programs and convince desperate parents to send their children into the system.
But very few people even know about the issue, to a large extent because the camps are run privately rather than by the government. Letters have been sent to congressmen, court cases have been fought and articles have been published, but there are at least as many people working to support these camps as there are working to shut them down.
I am working this summer with a former Tranquility Bay inmate named Charles King to build a network of Web sites to counter the disinformation being spread by WWASPS on the Internet. We hope to decrease the number of parents willing to send their sons and daughters into these camps. A true solution would require national legislation to outlaw the child abuse industry, and all forms of privatized torture.
In the meantime, for every Brown student slouching over finals in the coming weeks, there will be a young man or woman somewhere receiving a very different type of education - silent, terrified, and with no one to turn to.
Michal Zapendowski '07 has been saved.
