Episode 7: Nobody Believes the Fat Kid

Though Camp Shane is falling apart, kids still love spending their summers there, largely because of the limited parental supervision and endless romantic opportunities. Some counselors do their best to stop the hookups. Others manipulate naive teens for their personal gain. Camp Shane is quickly losing its status as a refuge for overweight kids and becoming a place full of secrets that will haunt campers for decades to come. And one camper is ready to come forward.

If you or someone you know needs support, please visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline at https://rainn.org/.

References: 

• Helping Children and Adolescents Cope With Traumatic Events
• The Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment
• Why many sexual assault survivors may not come forward for years
• The abuser’s playbook: the weaponization of mental health
• What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Fat
• Why Don’t We Hear Fat Women’s #MeToo Stories?
• Weight-Based Discrimination of Rape Victims

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Camp Shane—one of America’s longest running weight loss camps for kids—promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution.

But there were some dark truths behind  Camp Shane’s facade of happy, transformed children. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. More than 50 years after its founding, host Kelsey Snelling is bringing the real story of Camp Shane to light.

In this eight-episode series, she unpacks and investigates stories of mistreatment and reexamines the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. Along the way, she reveals and weighs the heavy price of shame.

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