A House committee received the findings of this General Accountability Office study on Thursday, hearing about one program where teens had bags placed over their heads and nooses tightened around their necks, similar to what U.S. soldiers did to prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In another case, a teen was forced to lay on a red ant hill and was not allowed to remove the ants from his face or body.

"It is hard to believe people would do this to somebody else's child," said Rep. George Miller, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.

Miller, D-Calif., and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., have introduced a bill that would set minimum national standards for care in these boot camp-style programs. The legislation would also require inspections, set monetary penalties and the disclosure of substantiated cases of abuse on a government-run Web site.

Thursday's hearing follows one held last October, where an earlier GAO study found thousands of cases of abuse and dozens of deaths have taken place in these wilderness programs since 1990. In that study the GAO focused on 10 deaths, five of which took place in Utah.

The latest study focused on eight other cases of abuse and deaths, one of which involved a Utah program, the Whitmore Academy, which is no longer in business. In 2004, a 15-year-old California boy was punched and kicked by other students at the direction of the program's owner. The same boy was later pushed down the stairs by that owner and forced to sleep in a bathroom or a closet as punishment. The owners of the Juab County home are now barred from operating another teen help program, but only in Juab County.

"Although the youth we are talking about today are troubled that shouldn't be an excuse for anyone to torture or abuse them," said Gregory Kutz, a GAO managing director.