Instead, states oversee the facilities variously as camps, boarding schools or residential treatment facilities, and state regulators often hesitate to step in because the programs exist in an ill-defined area of the law. For example, private boarding schools are not regularly inspected and are not required to be licensed or accredited, according to the federal Department of Education.

In a case that is not directly related to World Wide, children at a number of privately operated facilities in Florida recently said they had been abused in programs with little governmental control because the schools are regulated as religious institutions.

‘Manipulative’ Students

Mr. Lichfield said that accusations of mistreatment by troubled adolescents are common in the business. “All schools working with disturbed teens have a few students who are angry and manipulative, with long histories of lying and dishonesty, who will make allegations,” he wrote. “Find one school for me that does not. The schools we provided services for had such volume that even a very small percentage of students who make such allegations start to add up, but every school has about the same percentage of students who didn’t like being there and are willing to make such allegations.”

Mr. Lichfield’s lawyer, J. Ralph Atkin, said that parents of the nearly 20,000 children who have attended World Wide schools during the past 20 years had a satisfaction rate of 96 percent, and that the schools’ employees had been required by law to report signs of mistreatment. Mr. Atkin himself owned a World Wide program in the Czech Republic during the 1990s. It was investigated by Czech authorities after accusations of child abuse and was later closed; World Wide said no children had been mistreated there.

A lawsuit on behalf of more than 350 former students and their parents in a Utah state district court claims that World Wide’s programs provide little education or mental health help, and that staff members engage in outright assault. “In many instances,” the suit says, “the abuse could be accurately described as torture of children.”

In May, a lawsuit against a World Wide-related company was resolved for $3 million without the company admitting liability — nine years after a 16-year-old girl hanged herself in a bathroom stall at a facility in Montana called Spring Creek Lodge Academy, which has since closed. Before her suicide, the girl had been punished by being forced to carry a bucket of rocks, according to depositions by the school’s owners and staff.

Owners of the facilities that are currently open say their programs have no connection to World Wide, and turned down requests to visit. But in interviews, former students, parents and staff members — many of them, like Mr. Chomakhidze, not part of a lawsuit against World Wide — described them as spartan places.