Exposing WWASPS camp abuse
"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.
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