A question of 'tough love' vs.
torture
By Scott Allen,
Globe Staff | May 22, 2006
CANTON -- When New York regulators meet today to consider
limiting a Massachusetts school's use of electric shocks as
punishment, it will not be the first time that states have
tried to rein in the unorthodox methods at the Judge
Rotenberg Educational Center.
Massachusetts officials tried to
close the school in 1985 after a student with autism died
while being forced to listen to loud static through a
helmet. They tried again in the mid-1990s when the school
began giving mild shocks to students for misbehavior.
Each time, judges protected the
Rotenberg Center, siding with parents who said the school had
improved the lives of children with autism, mental retardation, and
emotional problems after gentler methods had failed. And doctors
concluded the death was caused by the student's neurological
disorder.
Now, the center -- the only school in
the country to rely so heavily on painful punishments -- faces a
challenge from the state that supplies almost two-thirds of its 251
students. Today, the New York Board of Regents is scheduled to
debate emergency regulations that would severely limit electric
shock and other corporal punishment on students from New York after
one New York teen complained that the shocks were a form of torture.
''Mommy, you don't love me anymore
'cause you let them hurt me so bad," sobbed the former Rotenberg
Center student, Antwone Nicholson, 17, to his mother, Evelyn,
according to her sworn statement. The family plans to sue the state
of New York for $10 million for sending the teen to the school where
he received 79 two-second shocks over a year and a half.
If New York adopts the rules,
Rotenberg officials would need permission from a panel of three
specialists for each child they want to shock, in addition to the
court and parental approval they already obtain. The limits on the
use of electric shock could require a fundamental change in the
school's methods -- currently half the students, including 77 from
New York, wear electrodes so that teachers can shock them.
But Matthew Israel, the psychologist
who founded the school in 1971, is counting on parents to mount an
eloquent defense against the limits. They have written 82 letters in
support of the school that are posted on its website,
www.judgerc.org.
''When you first hear about a school
that uses skin shock, it's shocking if you don't understand the
severity of the mutilation that the students would otherwise engage
in," Israel said.
The debate over the private
residential school -- which costs local school districts and states
more than $200,000 per student each year -- boils down to whether
there are children who pose such a danger to themselves that an
electroshock version of ''tough love" is justified.
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