Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: Netflix, Film and TV
Gerrard Kaonga
Social media users have shared their shock and disgust at seeing the treatment teenagers endured at a camp highlighted in a new Netflix documentary.
Many kids go to camp during their formative time and while it can be a daunting idea at first, for many, it ends up being a wonderful experience which they can look back on fondly.
But not for the children who went to this wilderness therapy camp.
Shockingly, these kids had to endure ridiculously long hikes in the Utah desert from ‘militant counselors who employed violent tactics’.
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Netflix released the new documentary Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare - directed by Liza Williams - in December 2023.
It takes a deep dive into The Challenger Foundation that was formed in the 1980s and run by former military special forces officer Steve Cartisano.
“The program would, with parents’ consent, surprise misbehaving teens at their homes in the dead of night and take them to a wilderness camp in Southern Utah,” according to Netflix’s Tudum summary.
“When teens arrived at Challenger camp, they would endure 63 days (or more, if they were noncompliant) in the desert on a 500-mile hike in order to improve their bad behavior were poorly behaved.”
Social media users were left stunned and questioned how parents could ever agree to their children being subjected to such abuse, even if they were badly behaved.
“Watching Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare and it’s actually making my stomach turn the way these people are so proud of abusing these kids,” one user wrote.
“I’m only 1/2 way and all I can see is a former child abuse victim whose psychopathy makes him abuse children to feel power and control. So s****y that a bunch of parents in the 80/90’s thought abusing their kids would 'fix' them,” commented another.
“Hell camp teen nightmare is the most f****d up documentary I have ever watched, it's on Netflix,” added someone else.
“So I’m watching Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare. I’m only 30 mins in and I can’t fathom sending a child to live in the desert and be abused by strangers essentially. Did anyone do any research on where the kids would be going and what would be happening? A child died,” wrote another viewer.
The death in question was of 16-year-old Kristen Chase from Florida, who was enrolled in the camp in 1990. She died just three days into the program after collapsing during their hike in the desert.
While Cartisano featured in the documentary, he died in 2019 from a heart attack after being diagnosed with colon cancer.