When Cameron was growing up in the 2010s, he was preoccupied with two things: that he was gay, and that there would be dire consequences if his parents and community found out. He lived in a small town in Utah, where over 90 percent of the residents are Mormon. "They are very strict about gender roles and sexuality," he says.
But Cameron didn't want to keep his secret to himself. In 2014, when he was 14, he came out to a close friend via text message. Soon after he sent the message, his parents went through his phone and discovered it. "They immediately confronted me about it," he says. "I was barely ready to tell one person. I was not ready to have that conversation with my parents."
That conversation was just the beginning. "There was probably about a year there where it was just absolutely brutal—where every day it was coming up around the dinner table," says Cameron, identified here by a pseudonym at his request. "I can remember my mom picking me up from school and being like, 'You realize that you're taking away everything that I thought I could ever have, right? You realize that because of this, I'm never going to have grandchildren from you.'"
His parents' disapproval was devastating enough, but Cameron says things got worse when the news spread throughout the community. Anonymous accounts started sending Cameron homophobic messages on Facebook. "All gays of the world should be strung up and drowned in the ocean," he recalls one of them saying. Even scarier were the random people who showed up at the family's doorstep to confront his mom.
"It was, honestly, really, really terrifying….Everybody around you hates you and essentially wants you purged from the earth," Cameron says. Around this time, he attempted suicide.
In spite of the harassment, he managed to go on a few dates with guys when he was 16. Nothing panned out, but his parents found out about it. Around the same time, they found some gay porn on his phone. They started locking him in his room at night, forcing him to pee in Gatorade bottles.
During this time his father told a co-worker who was in his late 20s about Cameron. Soon the man "started reaching out and being very schmoozy," Cameron said. "I was so alone. Everybody hated me….And here's this person." He was giving Cameron the attention he craved. They began having sexual encounters. Cameron says the relationship was consensual, yet "you're under the age of consent, and there's no way to justify pedophilia. But he was always just really, really nice."
Once again, his parents found out. They confiscated his phone, so he could no longer talk with the man or look at porn. They also pressed charges, and the man was sent to prison for a year. Cameron was sent to his own prison of sorts: STAR Guides Wilderness Therapy, which bills itself as "the country's premier wilderness treatment program for teens with technology, pornography and sexual addictions."
These camps say they can change teens' lives by helping them overcome severe mental and behavioral issues. STAR Guides claims the camp "provides a specialized 'unplugged' environment to reset and re-balance the physical, mental and spiritual health of youth…under the guidance of highly trained therapists and professionals, we provide a setting where youth can feel safe and supported when working through sensitive pornography or sexual issues along with trauma, free of fear, embarrassment or shame." And some parents and teens testify that STAR Guides was a positive experience. "You gave me my daughter back, and helped her how she needed," one parent said in an exit interview. A teen said the program was "extremely helpful and life-changing"; another said, "I found myself."
Others offer a much less rosy view of wilderness therapy. At STAR Guides and similar programs, according to Breaking Code Silence, a nonprofit that documents abuse in troubled teen programs, "the abuse we continuously uncover in this industry is beyond just a few programs. These abusive practices are reported across the board and are ingrained in the pervasive culture of the Troubled Teen Industry."
A lot of people look at porn. While statistics differ, most research shows that the majority of men (reported rates range from 69 percent to 98 percent) and at least a third of women (reported rates range from 33 percent to 85 percent) consume pornography. A 2020 study in The Journal of Sex Research found that 80 percent of 18- to 19-year-olds had watched porn. A 2013 study in the same journal found that 68 percent of teens had accidentally seen porn in the past year and 37 percent had looked at it on purpose.
Just as 18th century doctors blamed masturbation for everything from pimples to epilepsy, porn is now widely viewed as the culprit behind depression and social anxiety. At least 16 states have passed resolutions declaring porn a "public health crisis." The singer Billie Eilish claims that porn "destroyed her brain" when she was a kid.
But even if you accept the idea that porn is bad for developing brains, sending kids to the middle of nowhere—for weeks, months, or even years—with no running water, phones, internet access, or contact with the outside world (aside from an occasional handwritten letter) seems like a disproportionate reaction to watching videos of people having orgasms. Is wilderness camp really the best way to keep teens off Pornhub?
To answer this question, Reason spoke with six former attendees of STAR Guides, read years of Utah's inspection reports on the organization, scoured the r/troubledteens subreddit, and interviewed experts on such programs.
STAR Guides, which was founded in 2013, declares on its website that watching porn causes kids to contract sexually transmitted diseases, to molest other kids, and to devalue "monogamy, marriage and child rearing." It claims that "Internet pornography is rewiring the brains of teens." It warns that "When pornography addicts try to quit, they experience the same type of withdrawal symptoms as drug addicts." (STAR Guides did not reply to repeated requests for comment.)
Cameron's parents didn't tell him these details. They even left out the wilderness part of the camp. Cameron believes they were afraid if he heard the details he would attempt suicide.
"You better be grateful," he says his parents told him. "Because it cost a lot of money, and you're really damaging our family." They added: "We will not have a son that is sexually deviant." It's unclear what Cameron's parents expected, but offering conversion therapy is illegal in Utah: Therapists cannot use a treatment on a client under 18 "that seeks to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of a patient or client."
A few days later, his aunt drove him to an office building in St. George, Utah. "You have to say goodbye to your aunt now," he recalls a man telling him. The man had him change into a bright orange T-shirt and a pair of khakis, and then he was ushered into a parking lot and ordered into a truck with a few other teens. They drove about 20 miles deep into the Utah desert. "They opened the door and dumped us out," Cameron says. A group of teens from the program was waiting to meet them—some of whom, he later discovered, were prone to violence. STAR Guides hosts up to 40 kids at one time, in five different groups of no more than eight kids apiece.
"I saw more blood and fistfights and violence and threats and you know, all kinds of crazy shit while I was there, than my entire life combined," he later said. Reports from Utah's Department of Health and Human Services detail a teen at STAR Guides during this period pushing a staff member into a glass window, a teen attempting to grab a staff member's throat with both of his hands, and a teen throwing a metal can at another teen.
When Cameron went to bed that night, he was terrified. For the first five nights, he reports, "they do what's called tarping and alarming you." An alarm was placed on the zipper of the sleeping bag. If he tried to unzip it, the staff was notified. Then he would be rolled into a tarp, and a staff member would sleep on part of the tarp to ensure he didn't try to escape. "They're like, 'The reason that we do that is because we can't have you running away,'" he says. "That alone tells me they know that what they're doing is fucked up." All the STAR Guides teens Reason spoke with corroborate the "tarp and alarm" protocol, as do Utah Department of Human Services reports and posts on the subreddit r/troubledteens.
One former STAR Guides client alleges that a staff member wouldn't let her use the bathroom because they claimed she was being manipulative. She ended up urinating on herself and was then forbidden from changing clothes. "She told me I should 'sit in my mistakes for a while,' so I sat in my own urine for at minimum an hour," the girl wrote on Reddit.
According to reports from Utah's Department of Health and Human Services on troubled teen camps, kids have been held in miserable and abusive conditions. According to a department inspection report of STAR Guides from April 11, 2023, "multiple interviews disclosed that a staff member acted outside of the provider's policy and procedure and Utah Administrative Rule. The staff initiated a pain compliance technique on a client that was not an immediate danger to themselves or others; the client was being argumentative. The restraint resulted in undue physical discomfort and pain to the client. This was a repeat rule noncompliance."
An inspection from February 23, 2023, which was triggered by a complaint, found that "a staff member made comments that humiliated and degraded clients and another client was not treated with dignity" and "several critical incidents were not reported to the Office." Former attendees discussed in interviews being subjected to invasive questioning by counselors in thrall to highly dubious psychological ideas.
The juvenile justice system actively participates, sending sex offenders to complete the STAR Guides program alongside nonviolent teens (and sending taxpayer dollars to the programs' coffers as well), according to Cameron and others who attended the program. "We work closely with courts and probation departments for youth who are facing legal problems. We have worked with courts and probation departments from many parts of the country," reads STAR Guides' website.
The camp is operated on public lands owned by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and STAR Guides must pay a $105 annual fee or "3 percent of adjusted gross receipts" plus site and use fees, whichever number is greater. In 2021, STAR Guides paid BLM $107,599.81. STAR Guides applies annually to use the land. In the most recent application from 2022, they answered the question "What hazards are inherent to the activity?" with "Uncooperative, resistant youth; attempts to abscond or run." They answered "How will they be managed?" by saying, "We have specific protocols to manage youth."
In a document Reason obtained via a freedom of information request, a concerned citizen emailed BLM officials on April 22, 2022, with the subject line, "filing a complaint of child abuse on BLM land." The email reads: "Star Guides Wilderness Therapy Program and Therapy Associates uses your land as a field for their treatment program for minors. Child abuse is being committed on this land. I have proof and have filed complaints with the state. I want to file a complaint with you so that no child continues to be hurt on this property. Please let me know how I go about bringing awareness to this situation." The email chain ends with a plan to print the email and "place it in Star Guide's file."
The Joint Commission, which provides STAR Guides with accreditation, did not respond to requests about complaints. And the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs, of which STAR Guides is a member, doesn't have a record of complaints either. It's unclear if STAR Guides has been sued; the Utah Department of Health and Human Services, the state organization that licenses STAR Guides and other camps, tells Reason: "Agencies under our licensure are not required to report lawsuits to our office."
The STAR Guides website connects use of pornography in teens with "sexting, cyber-sexual activity, voyeurism, compulsive cross-dressing to sexually experimentation [sic] with younger siblings or even having sexual desires towards children (pedophilia), animals or objects" and claims "Extensive research has revealed that boys exposed to porn from a young age are more likely to…demonstrate decreased academic performance…have decreased empathy for rape victims…pressure their partners to engage in porn-style sex (harmful, painful, degrading, aggressive, etc.)…have increased levels of erectile dysfunction," and more.
"Porn addiction" and "sex addiction" are controversial diagnoses, but most professionals who accept them would not diagnose adolescents with the ailments, "recognizing that adolescence is a time of intense hormonal development," says David J. Ley, author of The Myth of Sex Addiction. Ley, a psychologist, used to direct a residential wilderness program for adolescent sex offenders; today he is a harsh critic of the industry.
There isn't strong evidence that wilderness therapies stop such offenders from committing further crimes. A 2015 review published in the Journal of Adolescent and Family Health found "little empirical support" for "the effectiveness of [wilderness therapy] programs in reducing adolescent recidivism." Experts typically believe that rehabilitation for such offenders should happen closer to home. Treatment "in their community and with their family is what is going to be most effective," says Vic Wiener of the Juvenile Law Center.
According to Breaking Code Silence, the industry gets about $23 billion annually in public funds. (Neither the Department of Health and Human Services in Utah nor the camp itself will share how much STAR Guides receives.) Add parents' private payments, and you have a significant industry. A 2016 report from the University of Utah found that the state's youth wilderness therapy and residential treatment centers had generated $269 million in profits the previous year. The beneficiaries, says Vanessa Hughes, founder of Breaking Code Silence, range "from the staff member who's being paid, to the community that the facility is nestled in…to the local politicians who are funded by the program, to the larger programs that fund state and even national leaders."
Many of these programs have religious roots or overtones. While STAR Guides claims it is not religious, it is an offshoot of Mending The Armor, a Mormon anti-porn group owned by STAR Guides' organizational parent, Therapy Associates. Mending The Armor's website says their goal is to "assist youth in eliminating the use of pornography, masturbation and other unwanted sexual behaviors," and to do so it says they must believe in God and Jesus Christ. Mending The Armor did not respond to requests for comment.
Records on STAR Guides from Utah's Department of Health and Human Services show teens taken to the E.R. suffering from nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. One teen was diagnosed with an E. coli infection, another with a viral infection, another with mild dehydration. Another teen was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with "sponge liver" and constipation, and told to stay hydrated. All were returned to the camp. The records do not indicate the causes of these issues.
Cameron claims the teens in his program would hike for up to 10 miles a day. Each one initially carried a backpack made of tarp and rope, which held up to 40 pounds at a time, including two gallons of water; rations of oats, rice, lentils, flour, powdered milk, and occasionally cheese and peanut butter; a sleeping bag; and other equipment.
At night there were sessions around the campfire, where the team members would make the teens share stories of their sexual experiences. Many of the staffers weren't much older than the campers, and often had degrees in fields unrelated to social work or therapy. Once a week, licensed therapists would visit and talk with each camper for an hour. But for the first month, says Cameron, none of them talked with him, something he says his counselor later told him was part of "an isolation mechanism."
Cameron and the others had to fill out a "sexual history" workbook daily, listing their sexual experiences and answering questions like "How many times are you masturbating a day?" According to Cameron, the staff would then share information from "studies" that claimed "porn degenerates your brain and desensitizes you to human connection." Such claims are also posted on STAR Guides' website, which says that teen porn use can lead to "a decrease in ability to maintain focus and concentration," causing kids to do poorly in school. It also claims that teen porn addiction leads to "multiple failed relationships" in adulthood, because addicts "prefer pornographic images and the fantasy of sexual acts more than the real act itself."
After campers submitted their questionnaires, some of them would be driven to an office building to take a polygraph test. There a stranger hooked Cameron up to the machine, placed a camera in front of his face, and asked him questions from his sex workbook to see if the answers lined up with what he'd written.
"They would be like, 'How old were you when you hooked up with this person for the first time? And what kind of sex did you have with this person?' It was just very, very gross. They're quizzing you on your sex life to make sure that you've disclosed everything to them," he says. "It was the most violating and horrible feeling." The sessions, he said, made him feel "intrinsically wrong and bad for being this way." (Reason has obtained copies of these workbooks and other documents, which corroborate Cameron's claims about the quizzes and polygraphs.)
Utah Department of Health and Human Services reports detail a teen at STAR Guides grabbing their genitals and pulling down their pants in front of the group. Cameron says he witnessed similar behavior. After the "tarping and alarming" ended, Cameron's nights were still scary. "I would be laying down at night to go to sleep, and then some really, really, really creepy guy that was in the program with me would start humping on my sleeping bag and jerking off in a sleeping bag next to me. There's nothing that I could do about it," he says. The staff and teens called this "Wiggy Whacking." When Cameron complained about the other camper's behavior, the staff members told him, "They're not actually touching you, right? It's fine." It was a strange response from people working for STAR Guides, an organization devoted to preventing teen masturbation and other sexual behavior. He responded, "No, it's not fine. I can hear them fucking breathing on my neck and jerking off." Cameron calls it "the most sexually nonconsenting experience I've ever had in my life." Multiple STAR Guides alumni related similar experiences with "Wicky Whacking" in a group chat obtained by Reason.
Cameron was miserable. "There was not a single day that went by that I was not thinking about ways to kill myself," he remembers. He was not alone. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services details the attempted suicide of a teen by hanging in the latrine in 2019. "Once the cord was removed [the student] immediately gasped and opened his eyes," the report said. A staff member "checked his vitals and everything checked out as normal."
Cameron felt that he had a choice: leave the world altogether, or just leave STAR Guides. Fortunately he chose the latter, but he knew that this meant he'd have to claim to be something he was not. After years of being shamed for his sexuality, he now would have to confess to another supposed sin: He would have to say he was addicted to pornography.
"I just wanted to get out. I would do whatever it took. I would say whatever I had to, checking the boxes saying 'I'm a porn addict' and being like, I'm not though, inside….If you say, 'No, I'm not a porn addict,' you don't progress. And you're 16. So it's going to be another two years that you're in the program before you turn 18."
Ricquelle sits amid sparse foliage as inspirational piano music plays. "I just lost any purpose and any will to live," she says matter-of-factly to the camera in a STAR Guides promotional video. Soon her parents come on screen, lounging on a couch, dad in a Brigham Young University polo. "I knew stuff was going on, but I was beyond the point of being able to help her," says mom. What "stuff" her daughter was doing is never clarified.
The video cuts to Ricquelle in the desert. As we watch a towheaded toddler splashing through a fountain, she tells us that STAR Guides gave her "the chance to get married to an amazing man and have two very beautiful children and be a good mom to them." In another video, the anti-porn message is more explicit. It shows STAR Guides co-founder Kena Frey, a psychotherapist, saying: "People think that pornography addiction and sexually compulsive behaviors are primarily an issue that boys or young men go through, where it is just as prevalent in younger women." Frey did not respond to requests for comment.
Kelly (another pseudonym) was sent to STAR Guides for mood swings, attempted suicide, being in an abusive relationship, and sexually acting out with a girl at a previous camp. She was taking three different psychiatric medications, but she says they weren't helping. She also watched porn occasionally, but it was not a huge part of her life. "I looked at [porn] maybe once or twice a week for five minutes, and I scored like 60 out of 100 on [the porn addiction test]. And they're like, 'Ah, you've got a pornography addiction.' I was like, 'No, no, I don't. I'm just 16,'" she says.
Kelly nonetheless had to create a plan for reducing her porn watching. She soon learned that "they will not approve your porn treatment plan unless you agree that you're not going to watch porn." According to Kelly, if any teens said they were sexually active or interested in sex, staff members would claim that this indicated a porn or sex addiction. Kelly says STAR Guides told her that watching about 10 minutes of porn a week is dangerous and a sign of addiction.
There is no evidence that watching pornography should be "viewed as an addiction," says neuroscientist Nicole Prause. The American Psychological Association agrees. In 2016, the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists released a statement saying that "porn addiction" and "sex addiction" should not be classified as mental health disorders at all. When Ley and Prause reviewed the porn addiction literature in 2014 and published their findings in Current Sexual Health Reports, they found no clear definition of porn addiction.
"If you base a treatment off of a model that's inaccurate, you risk doing harm," Prause says. "And we believe that's exactly what's happening in the case of these 'nofap' [anti-masturbation] approaches."
Studies are mixed, but the consensus seems to be that porn itself does not cause sexual violence. If anything, it's associated with the opposite: "The more pornography that circulates in a society, and the easier it is to access and consume, the lower is the reported incidence of most categories of sexual offending, with a particularly marked decline since the 1980s," the sociologist Brian McNair concluded in a 2014 study published in Porn Studies. "Societies where women are most likely to be sexually assaulted and disadvantaged across the range of indicators (human rights, political rights, workforce participation and economic independence, etc.) are those in which pornography and sexual culture in general are either banned or tightly restricted."
Porn may have some negative effects. When people who are morally opposed to it watch it anyway, that can cause immense distress, according to a 2018 article in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Teens who watch porn may have stronger beliefs in gender stereotypes and more permissive sexual attitudes, according to a 2016 paper published in The Journal of Sex Research (though this study showed only a correlation and did not claim causation). A 2021 study in Health Communication found that "watching porn more often leads to more exposure to depictions of choking in porn, which predicts a higher likelihood of choking partners through the beliefs that sexual choking is safe, pleasurable, and does not require consent." Such misconceptions could be corrected in a porn literacy program, which STAR Guides decidedly is not.
STAR Guides participants say they had to pass through three phases. In phase one, they had to learn how to make a fire three ways, create a backpack out of a tarp, and discuss their masturbation habits. Phases two and three involved plant and constellation identification, fire making (again), and specific exercises detailing sexual practices, according to the program's workbook and interviews with participants. During excursions, teens sometimes collected their own water from troughs filled with worms, spiders, and insects, say Cameron and other kids who attended the camp. Counselors would sanitize the water with eight drops of bleach per gallon, making it taste like pool water. While this is not unsafe—it is fairly standard behavior for people on voluntary hikes or camping trips—it is horrifying to kids who don't have any other choice.
The teens had to agree that they were porn or sex addicts to get through the phases. They also had to convince their counselors and peers they had made significant progress. "If you weren't being open enough, you would not get it signed off," Kelly says. "When I was trying to talk about my sexual fantasies, they kept asking for specifics on sexual acts."
"You would have to share with the group how often you masturbate and what you think about when you masturbate, and your plan to stop masturbating," Kelly says. When Kelly told her therapist she planned on masturbating only every few days, her therapist replied that masturbation will make her desire sex, so she should never do it at all. "That's highly unrealistic, but whatever," Kelly thought to herself—and then checked the box saying she'd never masturbate, so she could proceed to the next phase.
In keeping with the theme of sex being dangerous, STAR Guides did not allow any touching—even nonsexual touching. This is standard in these types of camps. "They're trying to thwart sexual exploration between kids," says Hughes of Breaking Code Silence.
Thanks to the no-touching policy, Kelly reports that she wasn't allowed to get a hug when she learned her grandfather had died. (She also says she wasn't allowed to call her parents or fly home.) "I got really upset. And I hit a rock on my head. And then they put me on a 'tarp island'" for a week, she says. "You have to sit on a square on the tarp. And if you step off the tarp, you get thrown in the dirt. They will immediately restrain you." She was also put on "tarp and alarm" for three weeks.
Despite the no-touching rule, sexual activity at STAR Guides did happen, and some of it appears to have been nonconsensual. While she was at STAR Guides, Kelly says, a 13-year-old camper was sexually assaulted by a 17-year-old. Documents from Utah's Department of Health and Human Services verify Kelly's claim. On March 14, 2020, a "client sexual misconduct" occurred, the report reads. "Both clients have been engaging in sexual touching and digital penetration on each other. A 17 year old girl has done these things to a thirteen year old girl and a 13 year old girl has done these things to a 17 year old girl," according to the STAR Guides incident report. "Discovery and information gathering occurred on 3-17-20." The same document shows "inappropriate sexual contact" between a 17- and an 18-year-old.
Last year—thanks partly to lobbying by celebrity and activist Paris Hilton, who was sent to a wilderness therapy camp by her parents—Utah passed a law saying that youth treatment centers "may not use a cruel, severe, unusual, or unnecessary practice on a child," including strip searches, restraints, and "discipline or punishment that is intended to frighten or humiliate." In the most recent report on STAR Guides, from February 10, 2022, Utah's state inspector wrote about a staff member who "restrained [a teen] and bent her wrist." The inspector also learned that STAR Guides was struggling to find staff because "some staff have left because they don't feel safe now that they are not allowed to use pain compliance."
Despite such stories, records requests reveal that STAR Guides has always passed its inspections from the Utah Department of Human Services Office of Licensing.
While STAR Guides was obsessed with sex, Kelly reports that it had much less concern with genital health. "I had so many UTIs….I had vaginal welts," she says. "I never showered the entire time I was there….You were constantly coated in dirt." She was given seven baby wipes a week to clean herself. Campers received only two clean pairs of underwear a week, plus a daily pantyliner. They also got just one weekly roll of toilet paper, according to multiple interviews, and "the diet you're on makes you poop multiple times a day. So if you run out of toilet paper, you have to wipe with rocks."
Kelly told a staff member during a group meeting: "I have a UTI. I need cranberry pills." According to Kelly, the staff member responded, "You must be masturbating." When Kelly insisted that she wasn't, the staffer reportedly replied: "You're lying. Everyone here masturbates." (Kelly tells me she never masturbated during the program, because her "hands were disgusting" and her depression wiped out her sex drive.)
Makenna Atkins, another teen who went to STAR Guides, is reading to me from the pornography addiction test she saved from her time at the program: "Do you become restless, moody or irritated when you attempt to cut down or stop viewing porn? Do you find yourself preoccupied with pornographic thoughts or images more than you would like?" Here Atkins interjects: "You're a teenager. That's literally your entire brain. You get turned on by, like, shoulders."
Atkins laughs as she reads me another question: "Do you erase your history to uncover tracks or take steps to hide your pornography use to avoid being caught?" She pauses and then exclaims: "They made safe search for a reason!"
Yet Atkins wasn't really sent to the desert for her porn use. Her road to STAR Guides began in tragedy. When she was 15, her mother died of breast cancer. Six months later, she "took a shit-ton of ibuprofen and drank a bottle of wine." She ended up in the ICU. The next morning she was transferred to a psych ward, where she saw her girlfriend. "We both stare at each other for a sec. And she just goes, 'What the fuck did you do?' And I was like, 'I tried to off myself.' And she's like, 'I was thinking about it, so my mom committed me.' And we're like, 'Sweet, we can hook up in the psych ward.'"
Five days after Atkins was admitted to the facility, a social worker told her that her father was going to send her to STAR Guides. "And I already know everything about this program," she says, because of older siblings who had been through the program. "So I'm seeing the psychological damage of this….I was like, 'Dude, this is for offenders,'" she says.
The social worker decided that STAR Guides wasn't the right place for Atkins because it wasn't intended for people with psychiatric issues. Her father told the social worker that he wasn't going to send her there, and she released Atkins from the ward. A few days later, she recalls, "I wake up at two in the morning to two very large women [not STAR Guides employees] standing over me going, 'You can do this the easy way or the hard way.'…I knew that if I attack them, it's charges on me."
The duo dragged Atkins out of the house as she screamed and cried. They drove her to the airport two hours away. But, she says, they ended up "not being assholes. They were like, 'Hey, we have to take you here. We don't really know what the situation is. And we don't want to….This is our job.'"
They flew with her from Michigan to Utah. She arrived November 23, 2018, and was strip-searched before being taken to the camp. "The first week and a half I was there, I was so insanely suicidal," she says.
Atkins showed me a picture of herself at the camp. She looked completely different than the pale, straight-haired young woman on Zoom. Her skin was much darker. ("I thought I was tan. It was all dirt," she says.) Her hair was dry and brittle and breaking off at the ends. She asked her therapist if she could shave it off. "No," her therapist replied. "Girls aren't supposed to have short hair."
Once during a group therapy session, she recalls, another teen shared a story about being raped by her brother when she was 9. A counselor then asked the girl if she thought any of what happened was her fault. "All of the girls in the group just sat there and stared at him in complete and utter shock," Atkins says.
Her therapist, STAR Guides co-founder Frey, "asked me if I thought I was gay because of shit that happened when I was younger because of sexual trauma," Atkins says. "She made me come out to my dad….She was like, 'You need to be fully honest with your parent to ever build a relationship with them,' and I was like, 'He's straight-up the most homophobic person ever.' But OK, I wrote a little letter to him."
He responded with a letter saying her girlfriend had manipulated her into being gay. Being a lesbian, he declared, was a way to "distract" herself from her mother's death with "superficial friendships instead of real loving familial relationships."Atkins "graduated" from STAR Guides after more than five months. "I was super-brainwashed. I was convinced sex was a super-bad thing. And it's taken me quite a long time to get out of that and deal with a lot of repressed shit," she says. "I thought I was asexual. I was not."
STAR Guides had a lasting impact on the attendees that Reason spoke with—just not the impact the program promises. Kelly got out after six and a half months. "I literally can't focus on my classes sometimes because of my PTSD," she says. She's now 19 and paying for her own therapy. She's in college, where she's studying to be a nurse and minoring in neuroscience.
While STAR Guides claims that pornography addiction makes kids interested in "more extreme pornography like sadomasochism or fetishized content," Atkins believes that STAR Guides itself led her to BDSM. "Kink has been the most helpful in dealing with all of this…because it's [about] building trust," she says. According to Hughes, this is common among survivors of wilderness therapy programs: Because the culture of kink involves very strict rules about consent, it lets practitioners feel like they're in control.
Cameron spent nearly three months at STAR Guides. He now lives in Salt Lake City and is an active member of the leather community, a tight-knit group of gay men who wear leather fetish gear. "There's a lot of sex positivity [in the leather community]," he says. "I think maybe that's what drew me to it, because that's something that I never had. Our community is kind of like this big family. We all just kind of look out for each other and support each other."
His parents won't be snooping through his phones together anytime soon either: They divorced after his mom discovered his dad was having an affair with her best friend, he said. "Who's the sexual deviant one now?" Cameron laughs.
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