Shocking
When a news organisation reports on a “new” treatment for autism, you should hear the alarm bells go off in your head — and that’s certainly the case with the Australian Nine Network’s report this week on the work of Matthew Israel, who runs the Judge Rotenberg Centre in Massachusetts.
Israel is a behaviourist who fits electrodes to the arms, legs and torsos of resistant autistic children — misbehaviour earns a painful electric shock. Typically, the Nine reporter was too witless to do enough research (and we’re talking Googling the guy’s name, for goodness sake) to discover that Israel’s practice isn’t “new” at all.
As Mother Jones reported this week in a story headed Why Can’t Massachusetts Shut Matthew Israel Down? , he has been shocking autistic, and more recently Asperger, children for at least 17 years.
In the same issue of the magazine he gave an occasionally disturbing interview to Jennifer Gonnerman.
Autism Diva had an extensive post on Israel earlier this year, and an Australian blogger with a child on the autistic spectrum responds to the Nine report.
Last year the Boston Globe covered a report by New York City education officials who visited Israel’s “school”:
The report, based in part on an inspection last month of the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, portrayed a school in which most staff lack training to handle the students and seem more focused on punishing bad behavior than encouraging good acts.
The investigators said some forms of discipline, such as a device that delivers shocks at timed intervals, appear to violate federal safety regulations, and students live in an atmosphere of “pervasive fears and anxieties.” ….
There have been increasing allegations of abuse at the Rotenberg Center in recent months.
They include several assertions that students have been badly burned by the shock devices, known as graduated electronic decelerators. The Massachusetts Disabled Persons Protection Commission has received 22 allegations of abuse at the school since January, including 12 that involve injuries. Rotenberg officials have steadfastly denied the charges, but commission officials say that at least two have been substantiated.
The full report is here. Remarkably, the centre is taxpayer-funded.
The use of electric shocks as an “aversive” factor dates back to the 1960s, when one of the “fathers” of ABA therapy Ole Ivar Lovass (like Israel, a disciple of B.F. Skinner) used electrodes in therapy for autistic children. The practice was reported in a 1965 Life magazine article, Screams, Slaps & Love: A surprising, shocking treatment helps far-gone mental cripples.
It plays no part in the modern ABA therapy practiced in New Zealand.
And in case you wondering how strong these shocks are, here’s a video:
Dave wrote on August 23rd, 2007 at 6:08 pm:
It sounds awful. Thank you for speaking out. More of us need to.
Dave
andrea wrote on August 27th, 2007 at 5:29 am:
Unfortunately there’s nothing “new” about the JRC, or the terrifying idea that one can “cure” any number of issues by brute-force punishment. Indeed, I can’t help but think that when people leave there, they would be suffering from PTSD on top of whatever caused them to be incarcerated. (The idea that someone who already had PTSD be sent there is too horrifying to stand.) And not all do get to leave — some have been there for years beyond their age of legal adulthood; it’s good money for Mr Israel after all, and the inmates/residents have had no training for how to cope with the real world.
I too have blogged about them, with analyses on how punishment is a poor teaching tool The Crime of Punishment, and Being Unruly, and how the site’s testimonial letters are hardly good “proof” as to the benefit of the program: The Plural of Testimonials is Not ____”.
Comments by blog visitors (including a former resident and a job applicant) have also been very illuminating.
The whole scene is disturbing on a number of levels. I’m at a loss as to what can effectively be done about it.
Matthew L. Israel wrote on October 2nd, 2007 at 3:41 am:
Ms. Gonnerman’s article “School of Shock,” which appears in the September/October issue of the Mother Jones magazine, is an entirely one-sided and biased account of the court- and parent-approved behavior modification therapy used at the Judge Rotenberg Center to successfully treat, without drugs, severe (sometimes life-threatening) behavior problems of children and young adults with special needs that have not responded to any other form of treatment. For readers who would like to hear the other side of this story, please see http://www.judgerc.org/ResponsetoGonnermanArticle.pdf
Matthew L. Israel
Executive Director
Judge Rotenberg Educational Center
www.judgerc.org