|
School of
Shock
Inside a
School Where Mentally Disturbed Students Are Jolted Into Good
Behavior
"Matthew Israel, a disciple of pioneering behaviorist B.F. Skinner,
started two communes
before he
launched the Rotenberg Center"
by Jarrett Murphy
October 10th,
2006 12:00 PM
A resident at the Rotenberg
Center for 18
years, Matthew Slaff, 35, has autism.
For their last
field day of summer, the students of the Judge Rotenberg Center, a
private boarding school for special-education students in Canton,
Massachusetts, have gotten lucky; it is an exquisite afternoon. As
cars whiz by the two-building complex, the late-September sun gleams
off the basketball backboard and young bodies jostle for position on
the asphalt court below. The playground in the middle of the parking
lot is empty, but won't be for long: Students who earned their way
out of the classroom for good behavior or class performance will
get, as reward, a smooth ride on the school's newly assembled swing
set.
The only thing
that sets these students apart from kids at any other school in
America—aside from their special-ed designation—is the electric
wires running from their backpacks to their wrists. Each wire
connects to a silver-dollar-sized metal disk strapped with a cloth
band to the student's wrist, forearm, abdomen, thigh, or foot.
Inside each student's backpack is a battery and a generator, both
about the size of a VHS cassette. Each generator is uniquely coded
to a single keychain transmitter kept in a clear plastic box labeled
with the student's name. Staff members dressed neatly in ties and
green aprons keep the boxes hooked to their belts, and their eyes
trained on the students' behavior. They stand ready, if they witness
a behavior they've been told to target, to flip open the box, press
the button, and deliver a painful two-second electrical shock into
the student at the end of the wire.
Surveying the
seemingly cheery outdoor scene is the school's founder and executive
director, Matthew Israel. A trim 73-year-old with a head of curling
white hair, Israel wears a gray sports coat over a black shirt and
black-and-white-striped tie. The Harvard-educated psychologist
speaks in soft tones, but he offers a full-throated defense of the
skin shock treatments provided by his school, which Israel says
derive from the teachings of his mentor, the famous and
controversial behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner.
Israel has about
230 "clients"—full-time students at the Rotenberg Center—who are
mentally retarded, developmentally disabled with diseases like
autism, or have been diagnosed with ailments such as depression,
schizophrenia, or conduct disorder. Most come to this complex south
of Boston from New York, but some travel from as far away as
California. Many of them come not in spite of the skin shocks, but
because of them. The Judge Rotenberg Center or JRC is the only
school in the country that uses that type of behavioral therapy, and
has come under fire from those who find its techniques cruel and
unusual.
"They don't
really understand," Israel says of critics who oppose his use of
painful physical punishments—called "aversive stimuli"—to control
behavior. "The students with whom we use the skin shock are students
who can't be served anywhere else."
Over the past 35
years, Israel has repelled several attempts by regulators and
legislators to shut his school down, and has grown to become not
only a practitioner of aversive methods but also their champion.
Now, yet again, he has a fight on his hands—this time with New York
state government. New rules that the New York State Board of Regents
adopted this summer on an emergency basis (and could make permanent
later this month) ban the use of aversive stimuli—a range of tactics
that includes not just skin shocks, but also slapping, ice
applications, pinching, strangling, noxious smells and tastes,
withholding food, and sleep deprivation—on New York students, even
those who travel to Massachusetts to attend the Rotenberg Center.
But the Regents
rules won't put Israel out of business, because the regulations
allow exceptions for kids who pose a real danger to themselves or
others, and for whom all other therapies fail. Opponents of aversive
stimuli continue to fight for a total ban. "We are talking about the
torture of school children," wrote State Senator Richard Gottfried
in a letter to the Regents in August. "If we discovered that these
regulations were in place at Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib, no one would
have to demand Donald Rumsfeld's resignation."
Meanwhile, Israel
wants the loophole opened even wider, to give the Rotenberg Center
the freedom to impose its methods on children it deems in need. He
recalls some of the children he has treated at JRC—kids who slapped
themselves into blindness, or were so violent that a scrum of staff
members struggled to hold them down. He remembers patients who
rammed their heads onto tables or reached into their rectums to make
themselves bleed. Israel claims that the sting of skin shocks made
those kids better. In fact, he contends, the pain saved their lives.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Every inch of the
Rotenberg Center's two buildings, the play area outside, and the
student residences scattered around the area is monitored at all
times by surveillance cameras. A team of employees watches the
broadcasts from these cameras, and the people watching the cameras
are observed by other cameras. The monitors look out for staff abuse
and evaluate employees following every shift, to make sure students'
treatment plans are followed. Some use the cameras to follow
specific students who've been deemed particularly dangerous. Signs
of the skin shock treatment are everywhere; the students have their
backpacks near at all times, and a staff member might have as many
as seven triggers hanging from his or her belt at any given moment.
Despite these
hints of danger, it's hard for an outsider to detect the risks.
Hillary, with long blond hair framing a soft face behind thick
glasses, looks like a typical shy teenage girl—clad in baggy
clothes, shrugging when introduced to a stranger, concentrating on a
game of computer solitaire. It's only when she's out of earshot that
you learn what happened at Hillary's last school, in Florida, where
she hid in a bush, then tried to slice a staff member's neck with
the jagged edge of a broken CD. When she arrived at the school,
Hillary stabbed a staffer in the gut with a pencil. "She's very
dangerous," says Sue Parker, the school's head of programming. "She
could kill someone."
Parker has been
at the Rotenberg Center for two decades, and bears scars from
students who scratched her; she has had her ribs cracked three
times. "We witness the tremendous progress that they've made," she
says, explaining her longevity. "And I really think it's the GED,"
referring to the Graduated Electronic Decelerator, the shocking
device's technical name.
Some of the
scariest students never need the shocks; according to staff members,
the mere threat of an electric jolt alone snaps them into shape.
Other students actually ask to be wired up, say staff members,
because they witness the improvement their peers make and the
privileges they earn. But other kids don't have to ask. As Israel
and Parker lead their tour of the facility, a staff member walks to
the bathroom leading a kid wearing protective mitts. Every few steps
the kid stops, shouts something inarticulate, then moves on.
Finally, he makes it to the toilet.
"Hmmm," Parker
frowns.
"Yes," Israel
says, "it might be time for the GED."
One thing you
won't see at the center is traditional psychological counseling.
While students do meet with clinicians, there are no regular
appointments or group therapy. School literature states that
counseling is done "as needed," but not when it could be seen as a
reward for bad behavior, and adds: "The purpose of the counseling is
to enhance the student's cooperation with, and progress within the
program." You also won't see most students on psychiatric drugs,
even though many arrive at the school having tried several of them
(one patient had been on 29 different meds) and suffering from side
effects like tremors. Israel sees those meds as tools for
warehousing students, not treating them.
What you do see
here is a lot of color—an avalanche of it. The reception area is
full of oversize lime-green chairs, and the walls are hung with bold
glass renderings of blooming flowers. All over the school are
couches and chairs in pink and yellow, overstuffed and inviting. The
walls in the main building are covered top to bottom with bright
prints of flowers, while in the newly refinished classroom building
the hallways are painted a pleasing dark green. The splashes of
color give JRC a lively feel. But there are no traditional
classrooms. Each student works on an individualized program that is
computer-based; there are no teachers writing math on blackboards or
lecturing on American history.
Each classroom,
however, is slightly different because JRC students exhibit a range
of abilities and behaviors. In a classroom of lower-functioning
students, one of the girls can't stop bouncing up and down, and her
peers wear mitts to prevent scratching or grunt instead of talk. But
down the hall, a higher-functioning class has kids studying
chemistry and a girl named Fatima who's starting a job at Bertucci's
that afternoon. Other rooms are "alternative learning centers,"
where extra staff is on hand to monitor kids who are too unruly for
regular classes; there are mats on the floor and restraints at the
ready because the students are so often wrestled down or bound to a
chair.
But in every
class the logic of the Skinner Box comes into play. There are
rewards for acting the right way. Kids wear cards on their belts,
where they collect tokens for good behavior, hard work, or adhering
to a "contract" to sit still for a few minutes or get through the
morning without acting out. Most classrooms have a "reward box" full
of goodies like puzzles and games that the kids can take home, and a
"reward corner" where deserving students can watch cartoons for a
few minutes at a time. There's also a dazzling "reward room,"
equipped with a pool table and arcade games, to which the well
behaved earn entrance, as well as a "contract store" where students
can buy DVDs or handbags with points they've earned for staying on
track. Pizza parties, weekly field days, and less restrictive
housing placements are also part of its positive programming.
There's even a "whimsy room," a magical-looking chamber with
color-crowded walls, a cartoonishly enormous chandelier out of a Dr.
Seuss book, and a grand table with high-backed chairs made of clear
plastic laced with color. The room, which exists for parties, looks
like a designer's attempt to paint a picture of fun.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Samantha Shear,an
autistic 13-year-old, used to hit herself so hard she detached her
retinas.
 In
the early days of his work with aversive stimuli, Israel and his
staff used spanking, pinches, muscle squeezes, water sprays,
aromatic ammonia, and unpleasant tastes to punish problematic
behavior. They still withhold food from some students as an
aversive, but shocks are their main treatment. The school began
using electric shock in 1989, but the device they first used, called
SIBIS, was so weak that many students grew accustomed to it, eroding
its effectiveness. So Israel developed the GED, which he registered
with the Food and Drug Administration in 1995. (The GED was
classified in such a way that it only required FDA registration, not
approval.) When students grew innured to that, Israel brought forth
the GED-4, three times as powerful as the original GED. That version
is not registered with the FDA, which now says the Rotenberg Center
is exempt because it's only using the machines in-house. The skin
shocks at Rotenberg aren't a form of "electroshock therapy," which
involves far more powerful shocks traveling through the brain. The
GED-4 sends 45 milliamperes into the surface of the skin, the kind
of current that a fairly weak recharger can send to your laptop
battery. It's enough to hurt, delivering a rapid, vibrating pain.
Some compare the sensation to a strong pinch, a bee sting, or a
tattoo needle's bite. "Painful shock, muscular control is lost" is
one federal- government shorthand for the experience.
Samantha Shear, an autistic
13-year-old,
used to hit herself so hard she detached
her retinas.
Aside from a
momentary tingling, the faint whiff of singed hair, and a couple
small pinpoint marks on the skin, a single shock administered to a
visitor at Rotenberg didn't produce any lasting physical effects.
Five of the kids under Israel's care have died in the 35 years he's
run the school, but none of those deaths were linked to aversive
therapy. Israel insists the GED is better than the alternatives for
his students—debilitating drugs or physical restraints.
Students usually
start by wearing three GED devices so they won't know where the next
shock will hit, and won't be able to pull off all the devices at
once. A person might wear up to five, but only one operates at a
time. Every hour in each classroom, a computerized voice tells the
teachers to rotate the GEDs so students don't get zapped repeatedly
in the same area. Most students wear GEDs in which the electrodes
are right next to each other. But some wear a different version that
arrays the electrodes several inches apart, so that the current runs
from the palm to the tip of a finger or from the ankle to the ball
of the foot, and hurts more—or as the staff puts it, is "more
aversive." Students wear the GEDs 24 hours a day. If a student's
behavior improves, the GEDs are removed one at a time. Then the
student goes GED-free for an hour, then two, and so on, until he or
she is completely off the machine. They can always be hooked up
again, however, if they lapse.
The goal of the
GED, explains Israel, is to deliver punishment immediately so that
even a student with a low IQ or a severe psychiatric disorder might
be made to understand that whatever he just did was unacceptable.
Even kids who hurt themselves, he says, react differently to pain
outside their control. Each student has a sheet listing the types of
behaviors that prompt a staff member to administer a shock. When one
of the target behaviors occurs, the staffer is supposed to confirm
with a colleague that a shock is warranted.
While
psychologists write the aversive treatment plans for JRC students,
it's the school's "mental-health aides"—required only to have a high
school diploma, complete a two-week course, and attend regular
in-service training—who monitor the classes and do the shocking.
With confirmation in hand, the staff member zaps the student and
then explains to him why he's being punished.
Sometimes the
explanation to the student—and to outside observers—is simple and
obvious: no tearing out your hair, no hitting yourself, stop
scratching. But sometimes, the reasons are more obscure. Don't raise
your hands, no swearing, stay in your seat. In the school's point of
view, dangerous behaviors are sometimes preceded by seemingly benign
ones. When the school detects a pattern, it might punish the prelude
in order to prevent the harmful act. If a student typically slaps
the arms of his chair, swears, and stands up before he attacks a
teacher, a staffer might shock him when he stands up, when he
swears, or perhaps when he slaps the arms of his chair. This
approach is valid, say psychologists who defend Israel's approach—as
long as whoever is administering the shock is sure that the minor
behavior he's punishing is actually a predictor of something
serious.
That caution also
applies to the automatic shocking devices that the facility
sometimes uses. A child who tears his hair out might be told never
to put his hands to his head. He might be instructed not to even
raise his hands from his sides. To enforce this rule, the center in
some cases will rig plastic holsters to the student's hips. He has
to keep his hands in the holsters. If he lifts his hands out of
them, a device automatically shocks him, and keeps shocking him at
one-second intervals until he puts his hands back. The rationale
behind the device is that punishment must be immediate to be
effective.
But after some
serious incidents the student is not punished right away. For
example, when a student attacks a staff member in a life-threatening
manner, "we don't go to the cops," says Israel. "We don't do that."
Instead, Rotenberg Center officials keep both crime and punishment
in-house: The student has his hands and feet restrained and is then
shocked five times, at random intervals, over a period that can last
up to 30 minutes.
Sometimes, the
student gets shocked for doing precisely what he's told. In a few
cases where a student is suspected of being capable of an extremely
dangerous but infrequent behavior, the staff at Rotenberg won't wait
for him to try it. They will exhort him to do it, and then punish
him. In these behavior rehearsal lessons, staff members will force a
student to start a dangerous activity—for a person who likes to cut
himself, they might get him to pick up a plastic knife on the
table—and then shock him when he does.
Automatic
devices, lengthy shocking sessions, and behavior rehearsal lessons
are not what typical students receive. Israel says that among the
students who get skin shocks, the average is one zap a week. Rarely
does someone get shocked as often as 15 times a day, but Israel
wouldn't be embarrassed if they did. He's sure it works, recalling
one of his toughest cases—a kid who made himself vomit constantly
and was at risk of starving to death. "I mean, his life was saved,"
Israel says. "If we hadn't had the GED, I don't know how we would
have kept him alive."
But the GED isn't
only used when a life is at stake, or when a student hurts himself
or another, but also for "noncompliance" or "simple refusal." "We
don't allow individuals just to stay in bed all day," says Dr.
Robert von Heyn, a Rotenberg clinician, in a video for parents. "We
want to teach people. So we may use the GED to treat noncompliance."
Other behavior that doesn't appear dangerous also could earn a zap.
While it might seem excessive to shock a student for nagging his
teacher, Israel asks, what if the kid nags all the time, every
minute, every day? The nagging interferes with his learning, so he
can't learn self-control and develop normally. JRC's choice is to
shock him, stop the nagging, and let him learn.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Every
inch of the Rotenberg facilities is under constant surveillance.
Even the people watching the screens are themselves on camera.
Amid the black
leather couches and abundant glass sculptures in Israel's office, a
curious collection of boutique kaleidoscopes is displayed on the
coffee table. Peering into each tube, watching the crystals shift
together and apart, you see the picture constantly changing. Whether
it looks like chaos or beauty depends on the beholder. The decor is
fitting: Israel knows that outsiders and laypeople get upset when
they see kids getting shocked at JRC, but he says that's because
they don't understand the true impact of what they witness. A
half-century ago Israel was the one laboring to clear the picture, a
college student shifting the shards of 1950s Cold War ideological
struggle for an explanation of human behavior, with its stark choice
between Communist materialism and democratic capitalism. He
discovered another option. "Skinner said a man isn't good or evil,"
Israel recalled of the philosophy that inspired him. "He's what he's
made by his environment and his genetics. . . . Human behavior is
lawful."
Before B.F.
Skinner, a lot of psychology concerned itself with understanding how
the inner workings of the mind affect the way people act. Skinner
thought this approach was nonsense; he believed that it was neither
possible nor necessary to know what was going on in someone's head;
all that mattered was behavior. He wasn't the first psychologist to
adopt a behavioral approach, but he took it further than his
predecessors. He argued that people's behaviors were purely the
product of their environment, specifically of a process called
"operant conditioning," in which the consequences of our action
determine whether we repeat it: If it's rewarded, we do it again; if
not, we stop.
The experiment
that most clearly illustrated this was the so-called Skinner Box, a
cage in which a rat had a bar to press. If Skinner awarded a food
pellet when the rat pushed the bar, the rat would push it again. As
Skinner changed the pattern of awards, the rat's behavior changed.
Skinner extrapolated the logic of the Skinner Box to society as a
whole, believing that all human suffering could be eased through the
application of proper conditioning, and even penned a utopian novel
in 1948, Walden II, that depicted such a world.
The seeming
elegance of Skinner's approach moved Israel to dedicate his life to
applying it. After leaving Harvard with a Ph.D. in 1960, Israel
started a company to manufacture so-called "teaching machines," one
of the technologies Skinner advocated to properly condition young
learners. By the late '60s, Israel had started two communes that
applied behavioral techniques. But the teaching-machine business was
never successful enough to support the communes. So Israel instead
launched a school that applied "Skinnerian" techniques to students
with severe behavioral problems. The Behavioral Research Institute
began in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1971. In the mid 1970s it
opened branches in Massachusetts. Israel later changed the school's
name to honor a Massachusetts judge, Ernest Rotenberg, who had sided
with Israel in a battle against Bay State regulators in the mid
1980s over his use of painful aversive stimuli.
Aversive therapy
first emerged in experiments with animals. Then in the 1960s, around
the time Skinner's behavioral analysis was dominating psychology,
some scientists used aversion to try to "cure" homosexuals. But
Skinner was never a major advocate for aversive stimuli. His work
concentrated mainly on the use of rewards to encourage good
behavior, not punishments to discourage bad conduct. In the world he
envisioned in Walden II, Skinner foresaw little punishment. But
Israel says Skinner acknowledged that places like JRC were not
utopias. JRC does employ a comprehensive program of positive
reinforcement, consisting of those prizes and privileges that
students can earn for the simplest tasks. But for Israel,
punishments are just the flip side of rewards.
That view is not
universal. The American Association for Mental Retardation calls
aversive therapies "inhumane" and wants them eliminated. The New
York Civil Liberties Union seeks a total ban in New York, dubbing
aversive therapies "outmoded and ineffective." But while there's not
an abundance of research on the effectiveness of skin shocks because
of the ethical issues involved with shocking human subjects, many
psychologists believe that in a very few, very serious instances of
dangerous behavioral problems, skin shocks might be a legitimate
therapy option. "Only in your most extreme cases where there's a
threat of harm would you use it," says Kathryn Potoczak, a professed
Skinnerian psychologist at Shippensburg University, a public college
in Pennsylvania. She, like many psychologists, believes the choice
in those cases is between shocking patients and allowing them to
hurt themselves so severely they might die.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthew Israel, a
disciple of pioneering behaviorist B.F. Skinner, started two
communes before he launched the Rotenberg Center. He believes the
painful punishments that his staff administers have saved students’
lives.
 Students
who end up at the Rotenberg Center usually begin their educations in
a local school district's special-education programs. When regular
schools cannot handle a child, local officials and parents look for
private school options, including those out of state. No matter
where the child goes, the state assumes the cost, under its
obligation to provide a sound education for everyone until the age
of 21. (Most students return to New York once they reach 21, but
there are 24 New York adults who've remained at Rotenberg.)
The Rotenberg
Center—with an annual tuition of $214,000—has been positioned as the
program of last resort: It doesn't automatically reject anyone
except for sex offenders and those with very serious medical
conditions. Many of its students were thrown out or refused by other
schools.
Matthew Israel, a disciple of pioneering
behaviorist B.F. Skinner, started two
ommunes before he launched the
Rotenberg Center
That's what
happened to Samantha, a 13-year-old with autism from Roslyn Heights
who has been at the school since March 2005. "We had her in four
different schools and they tried all kinds of therapy, all kinds of
positive behavioral therapy, and we had various therapists coming
all over the house and it basically didn't work," says her father,
Dr. Mitchell Shear, an internist who practices in the Bronx. "She
became more aggressive. She would bite and scratch people. She was
basically constantly crying." She also smacked herself in the head
so hard she detached both retinas. The Anderson School in Purchase,
where she'd been staying, said they couldn't handle Samantha
anymore. A person at Anderson recommended Rotenberg to the Shear
family.
The Shears'
desperation resembles that of Bronx resident Lorraine Slaff 18 years
ago. Slaff's autistic son Matthew had troubles early; she recalls
having to pad his crib because he kept ramming his head into the
sides. As he grew up, he began banging his head on sharp points like
the corner of a table, bashing deep holes into his scalp. When he
was home, Slaff didn't sleep for fear that she'd miss the sound of
her son trying to do himself harm. When other facilities told Slaff
that they couldn't handle her then 17-year-old boy, Rotenberg
offered itself as a willing alternative. The catch: Slaff would have
to consent to her child being subjected to physical pain. Shear
faced the same choice. Neither parent blinked. "It didn't bother me
because I thought he was going to die," recalls Slaff. "There was
nothing else." Matthew's twin, Stewart, is also autistic, but
exhibited symptoms later than his brother, and now Slaff believes
Stewart would benefit from aversive therapy. But she cannot obtain
that treatment for him in New York—because adult facilities here
don't use aversives—or get him into the Rotenberg Center. While some
children remain at the center after they reach adulthood, the state
does not place adults there.
While many
psychologists agree with Israel that aversive therapy can work as a
last resort in a very few cases to control dangerous behaviors—the
school contends that the skin shocks are almost 100 percent
effective in reducing those—there's less consensus on whether a
method like skin shocks can really cure someone.
Israel's theory
is that by shocking to discourage dangerous behavior, the therapist
buys time to use positive approaches that teach patients how to
control themselves. But evaluating whether the school has succeeded
with students is difficult because they arrive with such different
talents and troubles. Higher-functioning students—those with normal
IQs but severe emotional problems, who constitute about half the
school—can have normal lives: The center's website features
testimonials from kids who have joined the Marines, or have been the
first in their family to complete high school, or have even gone on
to college.
Other students
are severely mentally retarded or developmentally disabled, and have
no such prospects. "They're never going to be normal, fruitful
taxpayers, but they can have some dignity and happiness," says
Israel. A student named Caroline, who is in her thirties and has
lived at the facility for more than 20 years, still wears a
protective helmet and requires one-on-one staff monitoring, but JRC
staff consider the fact that she's still alive a measure of success.
Slaff's son Matthew also remains at JRC. He has stopped banging his
head and can take vacations with his mom, but he still hurts himself
sometimes, and still wears the GED.
Shear says he and
his wife only visit their daughter once every six weeks or so; he
doesn't know how long Samantha will be there. He does know the
limits of optimism. "She'll never be cured of what she has. Her
mental capacity will never approach that of a normal person," he
says. "I believe that the GED will eventually come off her and
she'll be able to maintain control of her behavior and be happy
because she's not hurting herself or crying all the time."
Shear believes
Samantha has already come a long way in her time at the Rotenberg
Center. "I mean, when we went up last time," he says, "she was
actually happy."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But after
visiting the Rotenberg Center this spring, New York state inspectors
concluded that "the background and preparation of staff is not
sufficient," that JRC shocks students "without a clear history of
self-injurious behavior," and that it uses the GED "for behaviors
that are not aggressive, health dangerous, or destructive, such as
nagging, swearing, and failing to keep a neat appearance." What's
more, the inspectors said, the program for withholding food raised
health concerns, and the classroom instruction was substandard.
Israel says the
inspection was conducted by psychologists biased against his
methods. But the New York report is just the start of JRC's current
troubles. The Massachusetts agency (all JRC's operations have been
located in the Bay State since 1996) that licenses JRC will inspect
the school in coming months to see if requirements it imposed after
a 2003 visit have been met. A separate Massachusetts agency has
referred an allegation of abuse at JRC to local police; the claim is
that the GED burned a student. Meanwhile, a Long Island mother whose
son Antwone was treated at the JRC has sued her local school board
and the center for using aversive therapy that allegedly caused the
boy "serious physical injuries and mental anguish." At the same
time, the New York legislature is considering a new bill that would
ban skin shock outright on New York students.
Then there are
the Regents regulations, which were prompted by the spring
inspection. They prohibit all aversive stimuli but permit certain
limited exceptions. Israel says the New York rules would tie his
hands by restricting the skin shocks to kids who are endangering
their lives or others— preventing shocks in cases of "health
dangerous" behavior. The rules also bar automatic shocks. A group of
JRC parents who agree with Israel went to federal court this summer
to stop the imposition of the new rules on their children. The case
is still pending, but the judge did block some of the rules
temporarily for the students whose parents sued. Israel says that
other New York kids who are no longer getting skin shocks are
regressing.
But if that's
true, it only fuels Israel's critics who say that all he's doing is
hurting kids, not curing them. "This isn't a bell ringing. This is
somebody getting an electric shock. It hurts them, so they stop,"
says Beth Haroules, a staff attorney at the NYCLU. "But if you take
away the pain device, they haven't learned to stop what they're
doing."
Even the center's
aggressive methods— like automatic shocks and behavioral rehearsal
lessons—have some scientific support. But the endorsements are
cautious, and limited only to cases where painful techniques are the
only hope—and where they work. Experts note that there is a
"slippery slope" risk with aversives: If they work for a very
serious behavior, why not use them for a slightly less serious one?
And then there's the question posed by partial success: If skin
shocks reduce a behavior but don't eliminate it, do you keep
shocking for months, years, or even decades? The scientific process
of peer review could address some of these questions. But many
practitioners admit that when it comes to aversives, pure science
isn't the only issue. The ethical limits on how to use science are
also in play.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The GED, or
Graduated Electronic Decelerator, sends a two-second jolt into a
student’s skin. It’s painful but does no lasting damage, the
Rotenberg Center contends.
 Albany's
recent regulatory attention to his practices puzzles Israel. "It
isn't as if we just started to do something unusual," Israel says.
"We've been doing the service since the 1970s for New York." So why
is the state only acting now?
People on all
sides of the debate over aversives ask the same question. New York
showed some concerns about the school's approach in the '70s and
'80s; the state balked at paying for the school until parents sued.
But it wasn't until this summer—with a lawsuit in the mix—that the
New York State Education Department moved to regulate the use of
aversive techniques on its students. (While the Rotenberg Center is
the only place where New York students get skin shocks, two private
preschools that New Yorkers attend—one near Albany and the other in
Maine—use noxious tastes like lemon juice to punish kids.) The New
York State Office of Mental Health bars any aversive techniques.
Eleven other states already ban or restrict aversive therapies. And
while psychologists largely support the validity of aversive
methods, practitioners generally believe that such techniques must
be used sparingly and very carefully. But only now is New York
attempting to control their use.
Rebecca Cort, who
oversees special-education placements for the state education
department, says the need for rules only became apparent in 2005
when New York did a routine inspection of the institution. "A much
higher number and percentage of students who were coming from New
York State were being placed on aversive intervention," she says.
That's partly because in the past couple years, the number of New
Yorkers going to the school has swelled—but not necessarily because
their behaviors led other schools to pass on them. "It was that the
in-state beds were full," Cort says. "They were getting a larger
number of students because of a lack of capacity in New York State."
Cort says the
state is trying to build beds here, prodded by the legislature to do
so. The alleged abuse of a retarded New York man named Vito "Billy"
Albanese in a New Jersey facility a few years ago prompted state
lawmakers in 2005 to pass the so-called "Billy's Law," which tries
to tilt special- education placements toward in-state facilities.
That's how the new regulations have to be seen—not just regulating
Rotenberg, but erecting a framework for someday treating some of the
worst behavioral disorders within New York's borders.
Given that
context, some say the Regents have built a flawed framework. The New
York State Psychological Association says the rules "effectually
legalize corporal punishment." More than one New York school
district is being sued for the use of "time-out rooms," but the new
rules permit them. And there's not much confidence that the state
education department—which only last year was found to have put
residents at its School for the Blind in "immediate jeopardy to
individual's health or safety"—is up to the task of handling people
who, had they gone to the Rotenberg Center, would have received the
treatment of last resort.
Schools using
skin shock could open here. Or the Rotenberg Center could move to
New York State, an option Israel says he has considered. But even
though Cort says there's no move to take the Rotenberg Center off
the approved list of out-of-state facilities, Israel claims the
state's education department now discourages parents from placing
their children with him. Even if he had a branch of JRC inside New
York, Israel acknowledged by e-mail, the hostility toward the
Rotenberg Center would not change. And so, unless lawmakers or
regulators stop his practices, Israel and his school will remain
where they are, and the shocks will continue.
------------------------------------------------------
Shocking Kids So
Shocking?
By Power Plays |
October 09, 2006
In this week's
Voice cover story, staffer Jarrett Murphy writes about the Rotenberg
Center, a Massachusetts educational facility that uses electric
shocks on students who misbehave. As Murphy reports:
 The
only thing that sets these students apart from kids at any other
school in America ”aside from their special-ed designation” is the
electric wires running from their backpacks to their wrists. Each
wire connects to a silver-dollar-sized metal disk strapped with a
cloth band to the student's wrist, forearm, abdomen, thigh, or foot.
Inside each student's backpack is a battery and a generator, both
about the size of a VHS cassette. Each generator is uniquely coded
to a single keychain transmitter kept in a clear plastic box labeled
with the student's name. Staff members dressed neatly in ties and
green aprons keep the boxes hooked to their belts, and their eyes
trained on the students' behavior. They stand ready, if they witness
a behavior they've been told to target, to flip open the box, press
the button, and deliver a painful two-second electrical shock into
the student at the end of the wire.
The school's
founder, Matthew Israel, says that the shocks don't hurt much and
that sometimes so-called aversive therapy is the only method that
works. New York state inspectors, Murphy writes, say the school goes
too far, administering shocks "for behaviors that are not
aggressive, health dangerous, or destructive, such as nagging,
swearing, and failing to keep a neat appearance."
Just asking: Does
shocking kids seem okay to you, under any circumstance?
http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/powerplays/archives/002882.php
|
