At the Rotenberg Center, students as young as nine and ten receive shocks for misbehaving. Employeed wear remotes bearing a picture of each child around their waist so they don't shock the wrong kid.
The cover story of last month's Mother Jones magazine is a chilling account of a America's most controversial "behavior modification" school:
In 1999, when Rob was 13, his parents sent him to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, located in Canton, Massachusetts, 20 miles outside Boston. The facility, which calls itself a "special needs school," takes in all kinds of troubled kids—severely autistic, mentally retarded, schizophrenic, bipolar, emotionally disturbed—and attempts to change their behavior with a complex system of rewards and punishments, including painful electric shocks to the torso and limbs. Of the 234 current residents, about half are wired to receive shocks, including some as young as nine or ten. [...]
The Rotenberg Center is the only facility in the country that disciplines students by shocking them, a form of punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. Over its 36-year history, six children have died in its care, prompting numerous lawsuits and government investigations. Last year, New York state investigators filed a blistering report that made the place sound like a high school version of Abu Ghraib. Yet the program continues to thrive—in large part because no one except desperate parents, and a few state legislators, seems to care about what happens to the hundreds of kids who pass through its gates.
Aversion therapy is nothing knew. Psychiatrists have been tormenting their patients with this kind of thing for about a hundred years now.
The guy who runs the place sounds criminally insane.
I can't believe this is where they are at now.
Where is this world going to???
I don't know if I can bring myself to read the full article.
Weapons of Mass Defibrillation.
Desperate parents and families indeed. A sad post.
;-)
the Saddest thing is that each year Massachusetts tries to stop it but is blocked by the parents of the kids who want to keep them there.
This place seems to be using shock as a psychological punishment instead of a physiological one by having those picture belts...
On the other hand, I'm not going to raise a special needs child for someone else, so if the parents are willing to let their offspring be subjected to mild torture I say let them.
Then if they still want to put their child in this hell, they should have their child put in a decent facility, their parental rights terminated and they should be sterilized.