Marked NSFW for a number of reasons - potentially triggering to anyone who’s been through this or something similar. Supplemental links contain some very dark, horrifying accounts.
Why you should know: Hundreds of thousands (possibly far more) of now adults carry that trauma with them. Many of these schools are still in operation, still abusing children.
You likely can’t fully appreciate what these kids went through and what many of them still carry around with them, but reading and watching accounts from past “students” can get you closer:
Webcomic about one man’s experience with Elan, another Troubled Teen program outside the WWASPS umbrella. I won’t spoil the many, many twists, but his story is something I couldn’t pull myself away from the entire time I read it. https://elan.school/
Watch “The Program” on Netflix. Shows multiple people that were sent to different schools in the WWASPS umbrella retelling their stories while exploring the now abandoned facility they were once prisoners in.
Last Podcast on the Left did a series on this and it’s horrifying. I will never understand the capacity for humans to be so intolerably cruel to others.
Behind the Bastards also did a podcast on this and it spans multiple bastards, Dr Phil being the one i remember