The Judge Rotenberg Center is a special needs school in Massachusetts that uses electric shocks to discipline its students. The school claims that the electric shocks (which they tastefully call ‘GED treatment‘) are a valid form of medical ‘aversive’ treatment that helps young people with severe self-harm and behavioural problems, and cite a number of success stories (1, 2).
However, a recent report by NY education officials paints a far less rosy picture. Rather than being a carefully managed treatment administered by medical professionals, it appears that shocks are administered for range of minor, everyday offences, such as ‘nagging, swearing and failing to maintain a neat appearance’, and that even ‘newly-hired staff with little to no training’ are allowed to shock students.
I can’t comment on the potential benefits of a proper medical programme that includes electric shock aversion therapy. It may well be a good treatment. But it’s not what’s going on here, by a long shot. If the report is accurate, then what’s going on here isn’t medical treatment. It’s just plain fucking disgusting.
The center can trot out a handful of ’success stories’, but that doesn’t justify putting these young people through what amounts to a daily life of fear.
(As an aside, how would you respond if you started a new job supervising students, and without any training were told that you could and should administer electric shocks to the children when they misbehaved? I think I’d be horrified at the suggestion, and I think I’d be too worried about the wrongness of the situation and my inexperience and lack of understanding to actually do it. But then we all know about the Milgram experiment.)