A state inspection report offers new details on the hours leading up to a 12-year-old’s death at Trails Carolina, a camp for troubled adolescents.
Staff at a North Carolina wilderness therapy camp failed to check that a 12-year-old boy was breathing during his first night at the facility, a state report released Tuesday found.
The boy, who has been identified in law enforcement records only by his initials, CJH, was found unresponsive around 7:45 a.m. on Feb. 3 at Trails Carolina, a camp for troubled adolescents in the western part of the state.
What the actual fuck? There is so much to unpack from this article. I googled a bivy; it’s basically an enclosed sleeping bag. Before bivys, they would put a tarp over the zipped-up sleeping bag. Why? What’s the point in enclosing a child on their first night? Maybe to break their spirit? Show them you mean business? I can’t think of anything positive that could come from doing that to them.
And the “counselors”… they should be equally held liable. They heard things they were unsure of, but never thought to go check them out? That’s negligence.
I’m pissed. Beyond pissed. Everyone in that organization needs to go to jail. I pray that NC does the right thing and closes this torture factory down.
Every “camp for troubled youth” I’ve ever heard of turned out to be a fucking concentration camp for kids full of physical, mental, and sexual torture and religious indoctrination. I wonder if this one also kidnaps kids in the middle of the night.
The entire idea should be made illegal.
Caroline Svarre, whose parents paid to have her transported by two strangers in the middle of the night to Trails Carolina when she was 14, said she was “in shock” her first day.
Yup, also one that does the middle of the night kidnaps for maximum trauma infliction.
Shockingly, the treatment guidelines for panic disorder also don’t inlude zipping people into small bags all night:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478076/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6354045/
They should be shut down permanently, and those responsible for these policies held criminally liable.
Hey! Mine didn’t sexually torture me.
He wasn’t just in the bivy.
He had been required to sleep in a tubelike tent, known as a bivy, enclosed by a solid plastic sheet.
Asphyxia anyone???
And since the zipper was broken, they secured him in it with zip-ties.
And when they noticed his shallow breathing, they didn’t check on him because they couldn’t see through the bivy and were too fucking lazy to untie him to see if he was okay.
That’s not manslaughter. That’s depraved-indifference murder.
“If they survive, they’re a witch.”
This sounds like a bivy style tent… a bivy sack is just a waterproof layer your can put your sleeping bag inside of to stay warm and dry.
A bivy tent is kind of just a smaller one person tent that is not usually big enough to sit up in like a regular two man style tent.
That said, it sounds like on the past they used the tarps as a waterproof layer but switched to the bivy tents.
One weird thing is they put alarms on the zippers of the tent to go off if anyone tried to get out of their tent which seems odd to me.
Obviously he suffocated so it’s some kind of equipment failure, but in general bivy tents and bivy sacks are really good lightweight gear that can shelter you from the elements. If you don’t have one you generally need a tarp or a regular tent to protect from rain or other water leaking in from the ground.
I just mean to say their doesn’t sound like anything nefarious in just letting kids sleep in a bivy sack or bivy tent. Locking them in though seems kind of weird. If adults are sleeping nearby you would hear any zippers in the middle of the night etc.
just a regular bivy set up wrong, or gotten into wrong like if you really misunderstood the instructions and went head first could create those conditions.
More likely guess would be hypothermia from it being set up wrong.
It’s also not entirely clear to me this was a proper bivy. plenty of camps like this just throw the poor tortured child a tarp and tell them to figure it out. That’s why my guess goes to hypothermia.
Thank you for the explanation and differentiation. That makes me feel slightly better.
I want a bivy sack or a bivy style tent myself but they are a little out of my budget at the moment.
Locking the kids in the sack or the tent is the questionable action in my opinion.
That part of the state is known for deep religion. Think venomous snakes and arsenic Sundays.
So I’ve worked at out door facilities (none that did this kind of work) and have had colleagues that worked these kinds of camps.
Basically, you get thrown a minimum of supplies and told figure it out. Not usually a tent but a tarp you are expected to construct into a tent. I knew of one outfit in Utah where kids would get sent in the middle of the winter. I consider it abuse, but if their parents sign the waivers… keep in mind that children are a form of property (for most intents and purposes).
I refused to ever work those kinds of camps and threw shade at my friends who did.
Yes, people like this consider their children to be chattel. It’s why you should ignore anything that someone who uses the words “parental rights” says.
Shade - now that’s praxis!
Founded in 2008, Trails Carolina is a for-profit wilderness camp that treats children with diagnoses such as autism, ADHD, bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders, as well as those struggling with depression or unruly behavior.
Excuse me? You are sending your children with MEDICAL CONDITIONS to be scared straight by a FOR PROFIT company? How is giving them over to abusers going to help them?
Preying on ignorance is one of the largest activities in american society
Because they see the medical condition as a problem, and depending on the parents may not even acknowledge that it is a medical condition. So many of these types of parents see their kid as a burden that will lower their social standing by being weird.
it’s cheaper than real treatment i guess.
You guys should get socialized healthcare
ya think???
For some parents the cure to bad parenting is sending your kids off to a death camp.
They need to make these retreats for parents imo.
I will make two points here:
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Rarely, but some children just come out wrong. There are plenty of people who lived a regular, normal life and spawned a serial killer.
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Sending a child to these sorts of camps is sort of like someone being surprised that they are being fired. If someone is surprised they are being fired, then management failed along the way and missed all the opportunities to address whatever the issue was. Same here–these are going to be terrible parents who could have worked on the problem over the past 15 years who then give up and want someone else to fix the problem for them.
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Man, I want to run one of these “troubled teen facilities” the Christians send their kids to to scare them straight or whatever, and then give “how to pretend to fit in until you’re 18 and can escape” lessons along with “where to go, who to contact, how to support yourself once you have escaped” lessons. From the outside it looks like a good old fashioned Christian brainwashing center, we can even show you video of kids studying the bible, because they do, to learn how to fake being devout. But we’re actually about deprogramming and escaping.
Or, I wonder if passing this idea around and making it into an urban legend that some of them are like that would be enough to take the wind out of at least some of their sails.
Zip tied (probably against his will) in one of these… If he was even slightly claustrophobic it would be panic inducing.
The owners of this place need to be put against the wall.
What in the actual fuck?
I was sent to one of these with a hyper religious flavor
2.5 years.
Me as well. Still got the physical scars from it. But hey the rest of my life whenever someone talks about how great Christianity is or Jesus I get to smirk at their innocence. So not s total lost.
Please tell me you have never spoken with your parents since.
Kind of. I broke contact in 2020. Now I’m about 6 months into transition and got a bit of hair work done, so I actually sent them one message today for the first time. No text.
Wow, that was a very brave thing. I don’t know you but am proud of you for that. I am glad that you are getting to be your real self. Best of luck, and don’t put up with bullshit.
Your hair looks awesome btw!! I hope you are living your best life <3
You look amazing!
Ya know you look good, but your hair reminds me of one of my cousins circa 2004 and all I got to say is dont play with lighter fluid near a bonfire if ya want to keep said hair.
I do want to keep it XD ty for the advice.
Elan School illuminated a lot for me about the troubled teen industry.
Elan.school is the web series of someone’s life account of the industry.
Netflix just greenlit a Mae Martin series that sounds like it’s about the same thing.
I’m going to leave this here (it’s worth reading):
