In just a few short weeks, parents will be labeling their children’s clothes and packing their duffle bags with sunscreen and bug spray.
But there’s one thing all too many forget each summer before sending their kids to camp: checking if it’s safe. And that can literally be a deadly oversight.
‘People will read the ingredients on the back of a mac and cheese box to know what their children are eating, yet they’ll send them into the woods with strangers for a month with no due diligence at all,’ says Elizabeth Phillips, whose brother killed himself six years ago, unable to live with the trauma of having been sexually abused at camp.
Her brother, Trey Carlock, was among dozens of campers known to have been molested – some over several summers – at Kanakuk Kamps in Branson, Missouri, one of many camps nationwide with records of abusing kids.
Kanakuk evolved from a single camp founded in 1926 into a string of eight campuses that make it one of the biggest Christian camp operators in the US, welcoming about 20,000 children from around the world each summer. Abuse allegations there date from 1958 to recent years, according to victims’ accounts.
Many survivors have said counselors and other camp leaders told them that engaging in sex acts with them would bring them closer to Jesus.
Kanakuk has been run for decades by Joe White, a charismatic evangelical who promotes himself as ‘America’s Expert on Raising Godly Teenagers.’
Neither White nor his representatives has responded to the Daily Mail’s several requests for comment.
Elizabeth Phillips says her brother Trey Carlock tried talk therapy, electroconvulsive therapy and lengthy stays in treatment centers and hospitals to come to terms with the abuse but nothing worked
Joe White, the CEO of Kanakuk Kamps. The company promoted and rehired some sexual predators even after having been made aware that they were preying on campers
Court documents and victims’ complaints show that White and his direct reports either hired or otherwise allowed campers to be in the proximity of at least 10 sexual predators.
Kanakuk also has a record of promoting and welcoming some predators back as volunteers even after learning that they abused kids, according to legal documents, firsthand accounts from survivors and Facts About Kanakuk, a watchdog website Phillips launched in memory of her brother.
Since the site launched in 2021, Phillips says she has received more than 190 allegations of abuse connected with Kanakuk, all of which involve 57 different perpetrators.
One Kanakuk camp director, Pete Newman, was promoted after White and other Kanakuk leaders were made aware that he streaked, played naked basketball and went nude four-wheeling and swimming with boys.
Now 49, Newman is serving two life sentences plus 30 years in a Missouri prison for child sexual abuse. He is known to have at least 57 victims, although a prosecutor in his case estimated there were probably hundreds.
Kanakuk remains open and is celebrating its 100th anniversary this summer despite what victims and advocates say is a failure by White and other camp leaders to meaningfully acknowledge or address abuse complaints and report them to law enforcement.
After decades of sexual abuse allegations and lawsuits, the organization devised a child protection plan promising that ‘Kanakuk and Joe White hold your child’s safety in the highest importance.’ Independent reviewers, however, found that plan inadequate.
White, meanwhile, has sent iPads, Harry & David fruit baskets and offered expensive hunting trips to abuse victims and their families to keep them quiet, survivors tell the Daily Mail. He has kept others mum with out-of-court settlements that include non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).
Pete Newman has grown a long, thick beard during his time in prison in Missouri, where he is serving two life sentences plus 30 years
Kanakuk Kamps, evolved from a camp founded in 1926, and now has several campuses around the Branson, Missouri, area
‘Trey was silenced to his grave,’ his sister Elizabeth Phillips says. She says parents should use more diligence when choosing a camp for their children
Carlock, a neuroscience researcher, was one of those silenced after accepting a settlement relating to being groomed and abused by Newman between the ages of 7 and 16.
He tried talk therapy, electroconvulsive therapy and lengthy stays in several treatment centers and hospitals to come to terms with what Newman did to him. But nothing worked, and he died by suicide in 2019 at 28.
‘Trey was silenced to his grave,’ said Phillips, who in addition to launching Facts About Kanakuk, also connects survivors of camp abuse with each other and helps organize lobbying and advocacy efforts to end statutes of limitations to sue camps and lift NDAs about the abuse cases.
The family of Logan Yandell, another one of Newman’s victims, signed an NDA with Kanakuk, trusting White when he assured them he had no awareness of Newman abusing kids before Logan.
They have since sued White and the camp for lying about having no prior knowledge about Newman’s pedophilia. The fraud case is still winding through the court system after several years.
With White at Kanakuk’s helm, ‘I don’t see how any responsible parent could send their kids there,’ said Logan Yandell
‘Joe knew at that time he had multiple cases of Pete playing naked with children,’ said Greg Yandell, who spent many years blaming himself for sending his son to Kanakuk in the first place.
‘You have this sense of ‘How did I miss that? How did I trust someone else to protect and watch over my children.’ This sense of overwhelming failure as a parent,’ he adds.
‘A two-week time frame in the summer, those two weeks could change a person’s life forever,’ Logan, now a 30-year-old hardware store owner near Nashville, tells the Daily Mail.
Joe Alarcon, whose son Ashton was also abused by Newman, sums up his own guilt: ‘I delivered my son to the devil himself.’
With White still at Kanakuk’s helm, he adds, ‘I don’t see how any responsible parent could send their kids there to this day.’
‘Kanakuk has been saying for decades that they’ve had just one bad egg, when in reality there have been lots and lots of abusers,’ Jody Jones, a 47-year-old commercial real estate broker in Salt Lake City, told the Mail. Jones says she was sexually assaulted by a counselor when she was 8 years old.
Jones says Kanakuk fired that counselor when he confessed, but neither its leaders nor her parents reported his abuse to police. Social media posts and other information online show that the counselor went on to work with kids in schools, on sports teams and ministries, including programs affiliated with Kanakuk.
The counselor could not be reached for comment.
Only 56% of summer camps in the US face any kind of state or local regulations. Those laws and local ordinances tend to focus on infrastructure – inspecting whether camp cabins are structurally sound and kitchens properly cleaned, for example – rather than requiring emergency response plans, background and reference checks on counselors or protocols for reporting child abuse.
The American Camp Association, the National Rifle Association and Boy Scouts of America have successfully lobbied against federally regulating the $26 billion camp industry, which serves an estimated 25 million kids each summer.
The result are programs in which improperly certified teens may oversee shooting ranges or work as lifeguards, and sexual predators may enjoy easy access to vulnerable young campers.
Legal experts say it’s common for camps to silence families about accidents and sexual abuse with out-of-court settlements and NDAs. Considering it often takes child sexual abuse survivors many years to come forward, it’s often too late for them to get justice and prevent other victims from being preyed upon by the same abusers.
‘There isn’t really good data on any of this, so parents need to ask a lot of questions to assess the safety of a camp before choosing the right one for their kids,’ said Rahal Bayar, a former child abuse prosecutor in New York City who now consults with camps on improving their safety policies and practices.
Will Addis was given a reverse Mohawk haircut while at Camp Tecumseh in New Hampshire
Addis stands directly in front of his alleged abuser Matt Scavitto, who he says groomed him during summers at Camp Tecumseh
The Daily Mail spoke with 11 survivors of sexual abuse at bible camps, sports camps, arts and music camps and elite camps to which some of the nation’s wealthiest families have been sending their kids for generations. Their abusers, who are mostly men, ranged from camp directors to counselors to peers in their own cabins.
Most told us that their camps presented ripe opportunities for child sexual abuse because they were remote and generally prohibited campers from having phone contact with their families, they allowed predators 24/7 access to kids for several days or weeks at a time, and they inspired the kind of loyalty that kept kids from speaking out or complaining.
As a young boy, Will Addis spent seven weeks each summer at Camp Tecumseh in New Hampshire, which his older brother and their father had also attended.
Camp Tecumseh boasts of having nearly two miles of shoreline on Lake Winnipesaukee as well as 300 acres of land near the foothills of the White Mountains
Will Addis said Tecumseh counselor Scavitto picked out a bed for him near his. ‘I just thought he was protecting me because he liked me,’ he said
The camp has strong ties to families along Philadelphia’s elite Main Line area. It touts itself as ‘Making Good Boys Better Since 1903.’
As an athletic blond 8-year-old, Addis was one of Tecumseh’s youngest campers when he caught the eye of a counselor around 1999 – 2000. Matt Scavitto would sneak in Italian sub sandwiches from the local country store for Addis and protect him from the hazing that senior campers carried out on younger ones as an accepted part of the camp’s culture.
Such hazing included so-called ‘titty twisters’ and boys pulling their pants down to get hit with brooms. ‘I just thought he was protecting me because he liked me, or that I was his favorite,’ Addis, now 34 and living in Maine, tells the Mail.
He would return to Tecumseh each summer to find that Scavitto had already picked a bed for him right next to his own.
Scavitto’s grooming led to spooning during rest hours or after dark, and his spooning turned into daily and nightly sexual assaults for three summers starting when Addis was 10.
‘He would do things to me to teach me how to do those things to him,’ Addis says. ‘It became so frequent that it would be odd for a day to go by without it happening.’
Addis remembers realizing that his contact with Scavitto was very wrong when another camper woke one night, asking, ‘What’s that noise?’ in the dark, and Scavitto covered Addis’s mouth, physically threatening him if he spoke out.
‘He made me feel that I was equally liable and guilty for what was happening, and if I were to share it with anyone, I’d be hurting myself as much as him and that people would think of me as weak.’
Addis internalized that message, refusing to go to camp for three years in his early teens because he was certain that people there were talking about and mocking him. His anxiety grew so intense – and the pressure in his community to go back to Tecumseh so strong – that he forced himself to return as a senior camper to see what people were saying.
‘You can’t be weak. You gotta go back,’ is what I told myself,’ he recalls, noting that his parents at that time considered it a source of pride that he summered at Tecumseh.
Doug Forbes’s 6-year-old daughter, Roxie, drowned at SummerKids, a day camp in Southern California with under-certified lifeguards
Scavitto, who was still a counselor at the camp, stayed away from Addis that year, and Addis convinced himself that what happened remained between them and behind him.
But it hadn’t.
Addis spent his late teens and most of his 20s living with intense shame and self-loathing, severe anxiety and depression, and the crushing weight of a secret. He came close to suicide in his late 20s, overcome by paranoia and flashbacks upon hearing that Scavitto had been convicted of abusing two students once he became a teacher at the Phelps boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Addis waited four years after that to come forward. He called around to former cabin mates to see if they were abused or witnessed Scavitto abusing him at camp.
‘Everybody said they saw him in bed with me. And almost everyone said they remembered thinking nothing of it at the time, but that it seems really weird now that we were adults,’ he said.
Scavitto is now serving up to five years in prison for abusing Addis.
Camp Tecumseh settled the civil lawsuit Addis filed against it after a former counselor came forward to say he reported Scavitto in bed with Addis to the head of the camp – both the former counselor and Addis say he did nothing about it.
Unlike plaintiffs in most civil suits against camps, Addis refused to sign an NDA, believing it’s only by speaking out that he can help make a difference.
Camp Tecumseh has not responded to the Daily Mail’s request for comment.
Campers will start arriving for the season on June 22. ‘That, of course, is maddening,’ Addis says.
Survivors of sexual assault at camps where many abuse victims have come forward are especially frustrated when those camps remain in business and continue to be run by owners and directors who knew about patterns of abuse, yet didn’t stop it.
Some states are starting to pass meaningful reforms and many camps are getting better at reporting childhood sexual abuse. Still, advocates say parents can’t rely on those changes to keep their kids safe.
‘No matter what the reforms have been, there are no fewer child molesters out there than in the past,’ said Eric MacLeish, the New Hampshire lawyer who handled Addis’s case against Camp Tecumseh and has represented hundreds of sexual abuse victims in cases against schools and religious organizations, including in the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal.
‘I think camps are coming around in terms of understanding the needs for more safety, but I don’t think all camps are there yet,’ Bayar, the former prosecutor, said.
‘Assuming that a camp has the right policies in place is foolish,’ says Alarcon who, after his son’s abuse at Kanakuk, quit his career to run a summer camp and retreat center in the Texas Panhandle.
In 2019, Doug Forbes’s 6-year-old daughter, Roxie, drowned at SummerKids, a day camp in Southern California that a state investigation later found was operating without a license. The camp was destroyed in the Eaton Fire earlier this year.
In Roxie’s memory, he started the Meow Meow Foundation working to ensure camp safety nationwide. He cautions parents not to rely on accreditation by the American Camp Association as an acceptable standard of care.
‘They represent the interests of camps, not kids,’ he says, noting that the group’s lobbyists continue to thwart meaningful camp safety legislation.
He urges parents to ask for and review camps’ operating licenses, emergency action plans, policies for conducting background and reference checks on potential staffers, and details about their mandatory reporter training.
He recommends ensuring that the camp has multiple staff with CPR and First Aid certifications, safety and training certifications in high-risk activities such as swimming, horseback and ATV riding, zip lines and climbing walls.
He also suggests asking about how intensively camps train their counselors.
‘My wife and I asked a lot of questions, but not nearly enough,’ he says. ‘Parents just don’t go granular enough. That’s what I regret most in my life.’
