COUNTLESS techniques exist aimed at combatting "troubled teens," but the multi-billion buck industry's debatable techniques frequently hurt more youth than they lend a hand.
Established via Steve Cartisano in the past due 1980s, the Challenger Foundation was a wilderness therapy camp geared against youngsters categorised as rebellious, delinquent, or worse.
What was the Challenger Foundation?
In 1988, Steve Cartisano created the Challenger Foundation.
The organization targeted around a wilderness survival program for troubled teens and adolescents.
As part of the Challenger program, teenagers were taken out of their beds in the middle of the evening, and transported to the wilderness of Utah.
While it sounds like a kidnapping, the teen's folks were not most effective privy to the experience, but they also shelled out giant greenbacks to pay for it.
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The reasonable cost of the program was upwards of $15,900.
Parents would quickly signal away their parental rights to their "troubled" teen, allowing Challenger workforce participants to come back into their homes and whisk their child away for 63 days.
As described in the Netflix documentary, Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare, the Challenger Foundation was based to "transform bad kids through ordeal."
Teenagers would face "brutal conditions" during the camp, which claimed that "the kids are worn down until they're good again."
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While some called "the concept" behind the Challenger Foundation "remarkable," others wondered the legality and morality of taking children via any such nerve-racking revel in "far beyond the reach of US authorities."
The ultimate objective of the Challenger Foundation was to use harsh techniques, like strenuous, guide labor, and discipline teens into submission, obedience, and "goodness."
The boot camp-style approach blended bodily and mental coaching that many, if no longer all, of the teens had been ill-equipped to deal with.
The camp employed a myriad of ways to encourage children into compliance, together with strip searches and military haircuts.
Many of the teenagers have been allegedly starved, and food was steadily withheld as "punishment" for dangerous habits or non-compliance.
Teenagers were compelled to hike for dozens of miles in the rocky, outdoor terrain, often in freezing temperatures and wearing heavy tools.
What began as a valid, therapeutic tool quickly turned to controversy, as many former "students" alleged that they were physically and mentally abused all through the length of the camp.
The majority of those claims have been directed at the Challenger Foundation's unruly body of workers, and the organization's founder, Steve Cartisano.
Who was Steve Cartisano?
Steve Cartisano was born on August 15, 1955, in Modesto, California.
Before growing the Challenger Foundation, he labored as an Air Force trainer and a military special forces officer.
In 1978, he married Deborah Lee Carr.
The couple would go on to have four children together.
In 1988, Cartisano created the Challenger Foundation, intending to assist troubled teens and adolescents triumph over their struggles with substance abuse, mental health issues, and behavioral disorders.
According to High Country News, Cartisano's philosophy in the back of the Challenger Foundation was to "break the kids down and build them back up."
Using his military background, Cartisano would perform as the camp's "drill sergeant," forcing the camp's contributors into being attentive to him and abiding by way of his rules – or else.
While some heralded Cartisano as a genius, the youngsters he "helped" would say in a different way.
As the camp's recognition (and profits) grew, Cartisano needed to tackle increasingly body of workers.
These "camp counselors" have been not worthy or ill-equipped to handle the teens they have been looking to help, leading to negligence, misconduct, and downright abuse.
By the early 1990s, the Challenger Foundation was forced to close down and declare bankruptcy on account of consistent and constant legal battles between Cartisano and the camp's workforce, and the camp's former campers and their folks.
While Cartisano ended up being banned from working any form of "treatment" techniques in Utah, he did try and reflect the Challenger Foundation in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.
None of the programs had been ever authorized.
In the 2000s, Cartisano reportedly labored a dormitory manager on a reservation in Oklahoma.
When a Bureau of Indian Affairs officer discovered about Cartisano's previous, he fired him on the spot.
On May 4, 2019, Cartisano died at his house in Durant, Oklahoma, at the age of 63.
While he had reportedly been combating colon cancer for a couple of years before his dying, he ultimately passed on to the great beyond from an surprising heart attack.
Cartisano is survived via his spouse, Deborah, their 4 kids, and two grandchildren.
What happened to the victims of the camp?
In the 2023 documentary, Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare, former contributors of the Challenger Foundation recount their reviews with the program.
Some of the scholars described being tied to bushes for misbehaving, whilst others say they have been forcibly "dragged" through the woods when stopping for a spoil on a hike.
As reported by Dexerto, in one among the documentary's key moments, a witness remembers seeing the teens firsthand: “They have been emaciated, they were dirty. You couldn’t even inform that they have been children.”
Another witness recollects a physician who reportedly “counted over Eighty scars, marks, and contusions” on one of the camp's attendees after they completed the 63-day program.
Despite dozens of an identical accounts of manipulation, starvation, or even torture, the camp went on, garnering more and more participants.
Even the nation's wealthiest households had been sending their misbehaving teenagers to the camp, hoping it would change their ways.
The camp's consumers incorporated the Winthrop Rockefeller circle of relatives, who placed their daughter and son in the program.
In 1990, alternatively, one camp participant managed to change the whole thing – and close down the camp for excellent.
Sharon Fuqua had despatched her teenage daughter, Kristen Chase, to take part in the Challenger Foundation's desert camp.
Just a couple of days into her keep, Kristen went on a hike on Utah's Kaiparowits Plateau.
She reportedly began complaining that she had a headache, sooner than stumbling and collapsing to the floor.
The group of workers reportedly attempted to revive her, but Chase fell right into a hallucinatory state, and fell down once more.
According to authorities, it took over two hours for scientific assist to arrive.
By then, it was too past due: Chase, simply 16 years old, had died.
The post-mortem record ruled her loss of life as "exertional heat stroke."
At the time, Fuqua did not blame Cartisano or the Challenger Foundation for her daughter's loss of life.
In a July 3, 1990 interview with Deseret News, Fuqua stated: “We’re no longer condemning Challenger. I’ve never met any further devoted, loving other folks striving to assist children,” she said.
“What we did for our daughter was the perfect factor we could have ever achieved," she added.
"We felt this was the answer. I in point of fact feel it would were if she’d been able to finish it.”
Still, Cartisano and the Challenger Foundation were charged with negligent homicide and 9 misdemeanor counts of child abuse.
As reported by AP News, all over the trial, Cartisano mentioned: ″It was a horrible tragedy however nothing could have been completed," referring to Chase's death.
Prosecutor Jim Scarth alleged that Cartisano had previously told his camp counselors that if they encountered any problems with the teens, to "take them in the back of a rock and thump on them," adding that it was the counselors' words "in opposition to" the campers'.
In 1992, Cartisano was acquitted of all criminal charges in Chase's death.
However, the national publicity from the case resulted in dozens more civil suits filed against Cartisano and his company.
According to High Country News, former campers turned out in droves, alleging "negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, fraud, and breach of contract."
All cases were settled out of court.
In Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare, many of the former campers share a surprisingly similar sentiment about their time at the camp.
While they acknowledge that what Cartisano, the camp's counselors, and the camp did were wrong, traumatizing, and often times illegal, they also refuse to blame them entirely.
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As one former camper put it, "the toughest thing about being there, [was] realizing my parents did it to me."
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