Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Christian facilities assured parents their troublesome teenagers would receive a much-needed, faith-based rehabilitation if they simply handed over custody and paid a hefty fee. Instead of making things better, though, the Christian ranches became a hotbed of physical and emotional abuse that left the kids far worse off than when they entered.

That was the case at the “Circle of Hope Girls’ Ranch and Boarding School” in Missouri. It also occurred at Agape Boarding School in the same state. Just last week, a former dean at Agape was charged with abducting a child and sending him to a different Christian school.

A lot of this happens because religious boarding schools are unregulated, relying on their religious label to win the trust of unsuspecting families.

And now the former residents of Trinity Teen Solutions and Triangle Cross Ranch in Wyoming, which housed girls and boys, respectively, are speaking out against the treatment they received at the hands of the Christian family behind both facilities after state officials declined to take their complaints seriously.

Tyler Kingkade of NBC News spoke with a number of the victims and summarized the legal issues facing these ranches: ...