N.Y./Region Opinions
Shocks From the System
January 7, 2007
By Maia Szalavitz
ALTHOUGH the New York State
Department of Education bans corporal punishment, each year it uses
taxpayer money to send dozens of children with emotional or learning
disabilities to schools that use physically and mentally abusive
forms of behavior modification. These include electric shocks,
seclusion and sleep and food deprivation. Because these punishments
are euphemized as “aversive therapy,” they have until recently
stayed under the department’s radar.
But this summer, the New York State
Board of Regents decided to regulate the use of such measures.
Thankfully, the proposed new rules, which the Regents are scheduled
to enact this week, ban aversive treatment after 2009.
Unfortunately, however, for this school year and the two that
follow, young New Yorkers who receive a “child specific exemption”
will still be subject to some of these therapies, and those who get
this treatment now could continue to receive it after 2009.
This is a mistake. Aversive therapy
for children should be banned immediately here in New York and
nationwide. Though corporal punishment can sometimes produce
compliance among unruly children, history shows that regulators
cannot prevent it from being applied dangerously and
inappropriately.
The new regulation was spurred by a
$10 million lawsuit filed by a Long Island mother last spring. Her
teenage son, who has learning disabilities, had been placed by the
state in the Judge Rotenberg Center, a private boarding school for
special-education students in Massachusetts that uses electric
shocks delivered directly to the skin to change behavior. After
leaving the center, the boy was hospitalized for post-traumatic
stress disorder, which the lawsuit alleges resulted from his
treatment at the school.
In May, New York investigators made
an unannounced visit to Rotenberg, where about 150 New Yorkers are
enrolled. There, they found that shocks were being administered for
such minor infractions as “nagging” or “failing to maintain a neat
appearance.” A state survey discovered that nine schools used by the
state for troubled children also use aversive therapy.
Proponents of these institutions
claim that they have no alternative. Testimonials describe Rotenberg
as “life-saving.” In one instance, family members said it ended the
daily self-destructive behavior of a child who once needed brain
surgery after deliberately slamming his skull into a sharp object;
in others, parents say it stopped head-banging so severe that it had
caused near-blindness.
If aversive therapies were limited
to extreme cases and backed by strong evidence, they might make
sense. But no controlled research supports aversive therapy over
positive alternatives like medical and reward-based treatments.
What’s more, it’s far from given that these schools are staffed by
highly trained professionals. For instance, Rotenberg was fined late
last year by the state of Massachusetts for falsely reporting some
staff qualifications.
At a cost of more than $200,000 a
year per student, it arguably makes more sense for the state to pay
for live-in aides to treat children with gentler and proven
alternatives at home.
More to the point, New York faces a
tremendous challenge in policing these schools, particularly those
that are out of state. Take the Elan School in Poland, Maine, which
New York uses as an emergency placement for emotionally and
learning-disabled students and which has applied to the state for
permission to use aversive therapy.
At Elan, which was founded by a
former heroin addict and a psychiatrist in 1970, counseling involves
attack therapy “encounter groups” led by students. Three former
students who attended Elan in the last five years told me that
participants physically discipline one another and are often made to
stay up all night.
Elan is probably best known for
allegedly having produced a murder confession from Kennedy cousin
Michael Skakel in the late 70s after he was subjected to a “therapy”
called the ring, in which the victim is given boxing gloves, hemmed
in by a circle of students and pounded by fresh opponents until he
or she submits.
Elan officials told Maine
regulators that it stopped using “the ring” in 2000, but Daniel
Grossman, who attended Elan from 1999 to 2002, said he witnessed it
after that time. Through its lawyer, Elan said that any charges of
abuse from former students are “not accurate.” A state investigation
by Maine in 2002 cleared the school. New York officials recently
conducted an unannounced inspection, but the results are not yet
public.
Nonetheless, the fact that any
school serving disturbed children would consider electric shocks,
beatings, isolation, restraints and food deprivation as appropriate
punishments illustrates the inherent danger in allowing aversive
tactics. Once permitted, they tend to expand from emergency measures
to everyday abuse.
According to the New York
Department of Education, the state will be able to educate troubled
children by 2009 with nonaversive measures. But since proven
alternatives exist, there’s no reason to risk another minute — let
alone two years — of abuse.
Maia Szalavitz, the author of “Help
at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts
Kids,” is a senior fellow at Stats, a media watchdog group.
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