WWASP or the World Wide Association of Special Programs was at the center of the troubled teen industry as covered in the Netflix documentary The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping.
Katherine Kubler is a filmmaker who was taken to the Academy at Ivy Ridge in handcuffs because her parents considered her a troubled teen.
At Ivy Ridge, Katherine was supposed to go through a program that would help her become a better person and strip her of her bad behavior.
However, Katherine reports accounts of abuse that she went through and corroborates it with several other survivors in the docu-series.
After getting out of Ivy Ridge and going to film school for college, Katherine decided to investigate the facility and get some kind of closure on her experiences there.
What she found was a much larger, darker network that profited off of the abuse of teenagers across the world.
A scam from the beginning
During her research, Katherine learned that many of the facilities fell under the umbrella of WWASP, the World Wide Association of Special Programs and Schools.
This organization was based out of Utah in the United States and was created by Robert Lichfield in 1998.
The organization stated that it operated multiple independent institutions responsible for the education and treatment of teenagers were considered problematic.
As shown in the documentary, many of these institutions operated at minimum cost by paying their employees a measly wage and enforcing child labor.
However, the costs of having a child enrolled in the institution were astronomically larger, pointing to potential corruption within the organization.
Several institutions faced allegations of abuse and some of them were shut down by authorities while others were forced to shut down due to bad press affecting enrollment.
The organization has since dissolved after multiple lawsuits against it, but other off-shoot organizations have cropped up using a similar model for their structure.
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