Kate Gosselin, Kody Brown, Joshua Duggar… Reality TV gives the impression that most if not all children are being abused. (Can you name a single family-based reality TV show from 2000-2010 that hasn’t beenimplicated in child abuse? I can’t). This month, Collin Gosselin, one of the eight children featured on TLC’s Jon and Kate Plus Eight and later Kate Plus Eight, published his memoir documenting the abuse he experienced at the hands of his mother, which included being tied up and locked in the basement, isolated from his siblings, slapped, dragged, beaten with a wooden spoon, forced to perform for the camera, and finally, locked away in a psychiatric institution at the age of 11. Kate wrote in her diary, which was unearthed by an unlicensed biographer, that she “prayed to God to stop hitting [Collin].” Apparently, the prayer didn’t work. To shut Collin up, she sent him to a mental hospital.
Collin only managed to escape from the asylum by scribbling a note “in crayon while hiding in a bathroom stall,” which he smuggled to a friend who was about to be released. (The facility offered no real education and Collin was denied access to basic stationery). The note read,
Dear Dad. I’m not trying to trick you, but I still love you. I told mom [that] I want to live with you. She said, ‘No.’ But she can’t choose for me, I’m old enough now. I’m YOUR son, not hers. She was abusive to me after I left your house. I’m sorry. Take this to court.
Thankfully, Jon was awarded full custody of Collin after Kate failed to appear in court.
This is not a rare occurrence. When reality shows stop airing, their former child stars disclose child abuse and family dysfunction, almost always. TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting was canceled when Josh Duggar was accused of molesting five girls – four of his sisters and a babysitter – and investigated for possessing child pornography. (Josh is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence). TLC’s Sister Wives is still on the air, but Kody Brown has been disowned by almost all of his biological children due to parental neglect and emotional abuse, and one of his adult daughters recently disclosed that she was punished for telling her parents that she had been sexually abused. One has to wonder how many more allegations will come out once the show ends, the paycheques dry up, and the producers stop manipulating the narrative.
I learned these details through YouTube commentary and news coverage. I have never watched any of these shows because they should be illegal. More specifically, casting children on reality TV and family vlogs should be banned, and TLC should be sued for ignoring and hiding evidence of child abuse, if not actively enabling it. Online platforms like YouTube are hardly better than television networks: Ruby Franke, a popular YouTube mom-fluencer, prefigured Kate Gosselin’s abuse by tying up her children in the basement and torturing them. (She is currently serving between 4 and 60 years in prison, along with her accomplice, Jodi Hildebrandt, who had worked as a “parenting and relationship counselor”).
In fact, publishing any images of children online, no matter how mundane or innocent, puts children at risk, since pedophiles steal, trade, and view images of children from people’s social media accounts and circulate them on the dark web. If you are a parent posting images of your children online, those same images could be circulating on child pornography forums right now. This is the result of a culture of rape and pedophilia that goes all the way to the President’s office – one that promotes the sexual exploitation and abuse of minors.
Journalist David Roth observes that the Republican Party is the abusive parent party: “It is an undeniable fact that, from Trump himself all the way down, the contemporary Republican Party is not just exceptionally welcoming of violent abusers as candidates and cabinet-level appointees, but affirmatively aligned with that abuse and those abusers. People like that, abusers and their abettors, are the party’s constituency and its leaders.” Trump, who was named in the Epstein files, has assembled a death squad of ICE agents to raid schools, arrest children, and throw them in cages, where they are vulnerable to sexual abuse and sex trafficking. Elon Musk, the deadbeat dad extraordinaire who has harassed the mothers of his children and bashed his own daughter on X for being trans, spent a year and a half cutting government programs that investigate child abuse, track missing children, feed low-income children, and fund life-saving assistance for children overseas. John F. Kennedy Jr. has single-handedly dismantled childhood vaccine initiatives, purged vaccine advisory panels, and defunded pediatric research. These are just token examples of the Trump regime’s assault against children. The ultimate goal is to transform America into a version of Epstein’s Island.
As a survivor of child abuse, I know well that when children call out abuse, they are silenced and punished. When Collin Gosselin refused to perform like a circus monkey, he was tied up in the basement. When he tried to escape, his mother sent him to Fairmont Behavioral Health System, an asylum for children that, according to Collin’s interviews and recent psychological evaluations, invented diagnoses to justify holding him against his will. Why would they do this? For a payout from his custodial parent and (most likely) her insurance provider. If you thought that State Schools for “feebleminded children” were shuttered in the 1980s, think again: youths are still being incarcerated in so-called “behavioural health centers” and “therapeutic boarding schools” as punishment for holding adults accountable.
Netflix’s documentary The Program: Cons, Cults, and Programming, created by a survivor of the Troubled Teen Industry, documents the abuse inflicted on young people by these for-profit institutions. Youths are trafficked across state lines, confined against their will, segregated from society, barred from speaking to each other, deprived of food, subjected to humiliation rituals, placed in solitary confinement, and emotionally, physically, and sexually abused. Because some of these institutions operate outside of the child’s country of origin, and even the domestic ones are extremely unregulated (similar to Willowbrook), it is not an exaggeration to say that they are worse than prisons for adults. And they are for children.
Using qualitative analysis, Sarah Golightly finds that youths are often shipped to these residential facilities because they are disobeying their parents – whether this means breaking curfew or listening to goth music or being gay – or because they are disclosing parental abuse. Pathologizing and locking up the child protects the family from reputational damage. Even if an institutionalized teen manages to smuggle a note to the outside world, they have already been labeled “crazy.” Golightly writes that “therapeutic boarding schools for teens” combine “sanism, adultism and epistemic injustice” to silence teens and keep money flowing to the industry’s stakeholders. Despite this, “the schools’ strict structure and surveillance culture could not override students will and their ability to find means to resist.”
Paris Hilton was sent to four of these institutions as a teenager because her rebellious behaviour was seen as a threat to the family’s reputation. In 2024, she testified before Congress that she had been force-fed medications, stripped naked, placed in solitary confinement, and subjected to other forms of abuse and humiliation. In 2016, Danielle Bregoli, now known professionally as Bhad Bhaby, was sent to a Troubled Teen facility by Dr. Phil, where she was subjected to forced labor, isolation, sleep deprivation, inadequate hygiene, and other forms of torture. Due to her work with Breaking Code Silence, an advocacy network for survivors, Dr. Phil stopped shipping teenagers to “Turn-About Ranch.”
Some may object that Hilton and Bregoli did in fact exhibit troubling behavior. But note that the Troubled Teen Industry was not designed to address behavioral issues, and does not have the resources to diagnose, treat, reform, or educate minors. (Their “psychological evaluations” are as fake as their degrees, which are not accepted by accredited colleges and universities). There is no meaningful therapeutic or educational component to Troubled Teen facilities: despite their misleading title, their purpose is not to “reform” troubled teens but to protect abusive parents while generating a profit for their owners. To this end, they borrow techniques from the prison-industrial complex, the asylum system, and the residential school system: confining children in filthy, crowded, isolated quarters, monitoring and disciplining them, and, if they do not willingly comply, beating them into submission.
Celebrity children tend to end up in these asylums because their allegations of abuse have the potential to reach a wide audience, tarnishing their family’s reputation and threatening their earning potential. This is also why they are at the vanguard of the youth liberation movement, advocating for young people’s civil liberties such as the right to participate in society, to receive an education, and to be free from beatings, rape, and publicly humiliation.
Collin’s memoir is not just about him but about the mission to liberate all children from abuse, exploitation, and oppression. I say “liberate” rather than “protect” because paternalism is not a solution to the apparatus of adult supremacy that treats children as fungible resources, commodities, and property. Adults have failed miserably to protect children and must shift their focus from paternalistic control to political liberation. In both the disability rights movement and the youth rights movement, paternalism has not worked. Disabled people and young people do not need more “protection,” they need political solidarity. They do not need to be “saved,” they need to be recognized as effective political agents, capable of advocating for their own political interests and pursuing their own goals.
Youth liberation is a matter of disability justice because our fates hang together. Young people are oppressed as a social class because they are disabled relative to the ideal neoliberal subject, i.e., a nondisabled, neurotypical adult. Youths witness and experience more violence than adults (it is legal to hit children but not adults in the United States); they have fewer civil rights (minors cannot vote or run for office); and they command less trust (youths’ resistance is routinely dismissed as “acting out,” “tantrums,” or “mental illness”).
Similarly, disabled adults are more susceptible to violence than nondisabled adults; we have fewer civil rights (we can be denied the right to vote, make medical decisions, or control our own money on grounds of “mental incapacity”); and we are often dismissed as “crazy” due to cognitive, epistemic, or cultural differences. In addition, children and disabled adults are both especially susceptible to confinement in segregated institutions, whether a mental hospital, a residential group home, or a “correctional facility” (a prison or juvenile detention center). These facilities may target different populations, but they are part of the same extended carceral continuum – or, to use Foucault’s term, “carceral archipelago,” a global, for-profit system of human trafficking, confinement, and resource extraction. Segregated facilities for “impaired” individuals go by different names but they all serve the same purpose: to enrich prison profiteers through the exploitation of recalcitrant populations.
Of course, these industries are also inextricably linked to the history of colonization, the animal-agriculture industry, and other capitalist industries. Yet few disability theorists, and even fewer feminist and intersectionality theorists, connect adult supremacy to able-bodied supremacy. (In fact, many do not even use the language of adult supremacy, instead conceptualizing child abuse as an interpersonal problem rather than a structural injustice). Human supremacy is also a matter of disability justice, as nonhumans species are also confined, commodified, and raped en masse because they are seen as dis-abled or less “able” than the ideal neoliberal subject. Ableism is woven through both speciesism and adultism.
As I write this, youth activists are revolting against neoliberal educational cuts and austerity measures in France, torching buildings, looting stores, and confronting cops. This should come as no surprise: children have actively participated in every major protest throughout history, from the peasant revolts to the civil rights movement to the modern climate change movement. Yet much like disabled people, young people’s political agency has been erased from the (hegemonic) history books, which portray them as passive victims or helpless dependents, waiting to be rescued by adults. But where are these adult saviors? When I was a child, no adult swooped in to rescue me when I was being beaten to within an inch of my life. The Catholic Church and Catholic school system protected my abuser and left me to fend for myself. I learned a hard lesson: do not trust adults to protect children.
Young people revolt because they have been abandoned by adult-supremacist culture: they have learned that they must fight for their own liberation because adults will never voluntarily surrender their power. Whether it is domestic violence or school shootings or education cuts or housing insecurity or climate change: adults are not coming to the rescue.
The youth revolution will be televised because survivors of child abuse are sharing their stories and advocating for youth liberation. They are holding television networks and social media platforms accountable. At the same time, the media is covering youth riots, providing undeniable evidence that young people can advocate for themselves and are political agents (despite what philosophers may think), and they can torch a cop car just as well as an adult.
We can either support youth liberationists or side with their oppressors. I know what side I’m on.
