Estée KlarThe Joy of Autism

Matthew Israel, Founder of the Judge Rotenberg Educational Centre where autistic students were taught to comply with electrical shock “treatment,” has finally been charged. Here from Boston.com:

The founder of the controversial Judge Rotenberg Educational Center is scheduled to face criminal charges in Dedham today arising from a night in 2007 when two special needs teenagers at the center were wrongfully administered dozens of electrical shocks, according to the father of one of the victims and another person with knowledge about the case.

In a deal reached with the state attorney general’s office, Matthew Israel, 77, is expected to be spared prison time in return for stepping down from the Canton-based center that he founded 40 years ago and accepting a five-year probationary term, said Charles Dumas, the father of one of the two victims in the 2007 case who said he spoke yesterday with prosecutors. As part of the agreement, the school’s day-to-day activities will also be overseen by a court-approved monitor.

As a mother of an autistic son, I am sick that it has taken this long after many of us signed petitions to stop him. I read through reams of his statements suggesting why this form of Behavioural Conditioning was an “effective treatment” for autism.

The Judge Rotenberg Center treatment goals include a near-zero rejection/expulsion policy, active treatment with a behavioral approach directed exclusively towards normalization, frequent use of behavioral rewards and punishment, video monitoring of staff and the option to use aversives, the most controversial of which is the use of electric shocks. The final item has provoked considerable controversy and has led to calls from several disability rights groups to call for human protection from behavior modification, behavior therapy, and applied behavior analysis approaches.(From Wikipedia)

“Its most effective backers have been the parents of some of these troubled students who say Israel’s center accepted their child when no other school would. Israel has said his methods work and have virtually eliminated the use of psychotropic drugs at his center,” says the Boston Globe.

Is this the type of quality education we receive for autistic students when “no other school” will provide it? And don’t kid yourself that similar aversive tactics are not used here in Ontario. You will hear of the autistic person being “ignored” by therapists as a behavioural tactic in order to stop the person from crying. Instead of attempting to figure out what might be the root and cause of upset, a child or person will receive this cruel form of “teaching.” It is my experience that this makes a person either more aggressive or shuts them down completely.

[Israel's] tactics have been condemned as barbaric and savage by many top medical and mental health professionals. But despite some injuries and even deaths at the facility, the center has continued to get state approval to operate as a special-needs school serving some 200 students with serious emotional and behavioral problems, including autism and intellectual disabilities.

It has taken years for Israel to be charged and such tactics to be viewed as criminal. There have been many parents who have believed that this shock treatment has been helpful and have stuck up for the Centre, typically arguing that their children are aggressive or self-injure, and the arguments can sound compelling. This is one of the reasons why it took so long to charge Israel. This is the side of parent advocacy that is risky to autistic folk. There is a side to people we don’t want to see. There are difficult sides and as our history has shown, we’d rather lock it away in institutions, and treat it harshly and ignore it all together. I was never convinced that treating human beings with shock treatment against their will was ever a viable option. I don’t imagine I ever will be.

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This lecture on TED.com by Michael Sandel (Harvard) constructs an argument using this case of Casey Martin and his need for accommodation on the golf course. He suggests that without engaging our moral convictions in a constructive argument, we are doing ourselves a disservice. In the autism sphere, it is very much time for these discussions where “engagement” has become very much like that “ideological food fight.” Some voices are stronger, indeed and others are downright nasty and others still use false facts to present a case. Yet, this is no time to back away. It’s time to think about how to engage ethically in the autism debate.

What is justice, Sandel asks his audience? Like Aristotle, Sandel agrees that justice cannot be determined without an understanding of the following:

1) What abilities we recognize as worthy of honour and recognition and,
2) the purpose of our social institutions.

It seems to me that these are, in fact, the essential questions that we can ask ourselves as we discuss and debate the bigger questions like “what is autism?” and “what kinds of help do autistics need to contribute to society?” The question pertinent here, of course, is how and if we regard autistic individuals as worthy and how we prove that we believe it.

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What do Michel Foucault, who taught at the Collège de France and Edward Scissorhands have in common? What do they both teach us in relation to how people with cognitive differences are treated by the legal system?

Foucault’s lectures from 1974-1975, compiled in the book Abnormal (Edited by Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni), suggest that our legal system is a mechanism of exclusion. Foucault argues that the emergence of abnormal in the nineteenth century constitutes the basis of human as: “the monster, the individual to be corrected, and the onanist.” It was the nineteenth century that saw the system of “normal” birth in the way we understand it today. Adolphe Quetelet established a measure of the stars that was also used as a model to create a “statistical norm” of humans for political purposes during this period. It should not be surprising then, that this system of “regularities” was used in medico-legal practice, and “produced a psychologico-moral double of the legal offense [thus] creating [a model] of the ‘dangerous individual.’”

Just how do we determine who is dangerous? The question is important since people with cognitive differences have been marginalized, feared and unjustly incarcerated. I do not think it needs rementioning that this fear underlies, even, the many media reports about autism and the fierce quest for a cure. Foucault, further, cites legal examples of how we exclude, judge, fear and incarcerate individuals who MAY BE a danger to society.

“The examination is that form of knowledge and power that gives rise to the ‘human sciences,’ and thus that contributes to the constitution of the domain of the abnormal. The examination of the ‘dangerous individual,’ for example, implied a control not primarily of what individuals did, but of what they might do. [italics mine], what they are capable of doing. ‘Dangerousness’ meant that the individual ‘must be considered by society at the level of his potentialities and not at the level of his acts,’ not as someone who had actually violated a law, but as someone whose potential behavior had to be subject to control and correction.”

Foucault has also said, “Expert opinion shows how the individual already resembles his crime before he has committed it.”

He also said in his lectures, “The first property is the power to determine, directly or indirectly, a decision of justice that ultimately concerns a person’s freedom or detention, or, if it comes to it, life and death. So, these are the discourses that ultimately have the power of life and death. Second property: From what does this power of life and death derive? From the judicial system, perhaps, but these discourses also have this power by virtue of the fact that they function as discourses of truth within the judicial system. They function as discourses of truth because they are discourses within a scientific status or discourses expressed exclusively by qualified people within a scientific institution. Discourses that can kill, discourses of truth, and, the third property, discourses — you yourselves are the proof and witnesses of this — that make you laugh. And discourses of truth that provoke laughter and have the institutional power to kill, are, after all, in a society like ours, discourses that deserve some attention…These everyday discourses of truth that kill and provoke laughter are at the very heart of our judicial system.”

As Foucault cites specific legal cases, it becomes clear that the least element of proof has been enough to entail a certain element of penalty.  I do not think I need to cite specific cases in autism where autistic people are marginalized, assumed to be dangerous, and who often are mistreated by those in law enforcement. These stories are in the news every month. Stories of how autistic people are feared manifest in our treatment of them and the burden of proof lies heavy upon the autistic person.

As I watched Edward Scissorhands again last night, which should be a cult film of the disability genre, I want you to pay specific attention to the court scene and the “expert” opinion and then the group of women perpetuating fear. As autism is diagnosed by observation only, I hope to illustrate the bias that underlies our thinking and permeates our society and how it effects the treatment of autistic individuals not only by our formal institutions, but as Foucault takes further, in the law:

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References:

Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures At The Collège De France, 1974-1975, New York: Picador, 1999.

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