A Project of Spectrum Institute

Each year thousands of juveniles are forcibly removed from their homes by distraught parents and banished to months or years of confinement in unlicensed residential facilities in remote rural areas of the United States.

Some are sent to unregulated facilities in foreign nations.

Many minors are abducted by unlicensed "special transportation services" and are taken thousands of miles away to be mentally reprogrammed at so-called "boarding schools" or distorted "behavior modification" programs which charge the parents $50,000 or more per year.

About 400 businesses confine nearly 14,000 troubled teenagers and generate $1 billion in annual revenues.

Despite repeated complaints by juveniles of abuse, and complaints by parents of fraud, there is little regulation of this industry by federal, state, or local governments.

The Emancipation Project publishes this educational website to monitor and report on:

all aspects of the "teen help" industry, including problems associated with "abduction" services, unlicensed residential facilities, and "therapeutic" programs;

the responses of government agencies and elected officials to complaints of abuse, neglect, and fraud; and

the activities of established and newly emerging nonprofit advocacy groups working in this field.

The Emancipation Project operated from 2004 to 2006.
This website is now an archive for materials from that era.