Principal Skinner
Jesse Walker | November 15, 2006, 11:36am
The Judge Rotenberg Center is a private special-ed boarding school in Massachusetts. For decades, it has hosted a bizarre experiment in behavior modification,
described here by Jarrett Murphy of
The Village Voice:
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 device is called the Graduated Electronic Decelerator, or GED. Its goal, as Murphy summarizes it, "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."
[T]he 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, [school founder Matthew] Israel asks, what if the kid nags all the time, every minute, every day?
The whole story is
here. A follow-up is
here. The school's website is
here. Bonus link: a brief history of the
punishment box.
Tommy | November 25, 2006, 9:00am | #
The skin shock is often the only way of getting the attention of a child caught in a compulsive, self-destructive behavior so that other therapies can work.
For example, one girl was brough to the Judge Rotenberg Center suffering from compulsive head-banging. She'd hit her head so hard and so often on the floor that she detached her retinas. The skin shock enabled her to break this self-destructive pattern.
Other means, such as drugs or restraints, carry harmful side-effects. Restraints can cause lethal embolism. The skin shock has no known side effects, and no one has ever been injured due to it. It also has a track record of clinincal success.
Skin shock is administered only after parental consent, peer review, review by a human rights committee, and the consent of the probate court. It is not given lightly. It is proposed only after other therapies have failed.
For those who receive it, it is often the only efficacious life-saving therapy. In other words, it is the treatment of last resort.
If we were dealing with cancer or AIDS and proven life-saving treatment were denied, the denial would be a crime against humanity. There is a double standard for the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled, however.
Many in society would rather wharehouse these people under inhuman condititions provided that they are out of sight and out of mind rather thank deal with the reality of their ilnesses.
That approach, to my thinking, is criminal.
