According to a book I read on torture, few people in any country want to believe it goes on in their country, but it usually does. And it’s always done by the wonderful fine upstanding citizens to all the non-persons, whoever those two groups might be in any given country.

For anyone interested, Why Students Praise the Judge Rotenberg Center was my post about that little video they took off the web right after I posted it. Comments by ex-employees and such are down the page a bit.

I’ve seen the video you guys use to convince parents that any of their children’s legitimate complaints about the place are actually invalid, too. The one that invites parents to use behavior modification techniques to keep children from exhibiting what you essentially compartmentalize as “complaining behaviors,” and that subtly encourages them to view all this as them taking part in their children’s “treatment”, and to view any of the complaints as actually being about something else, because of course you guys don’t do anything unethical there, supposedly.

One of my current staff people used to work at that place, you know. In one of the areas for “higher functioning” people. And even there she didn’t like what she saw and left pretty quickly. I know people who’ve walked in there for job interviews, taken one look, been unable to stand what they saw, and walked right out again.

Funny thing is, I blogged about that little propaganda video you give parents to teach them to brainwash their children to only say good things about the JRC. I’d written to other people about it before, pointed it out to people, and so forth. The minute I blogged about it in public, though, that video disappeared from your website.

These “aversives” don’t only go on in your institution, of course. They go on in lots of them. Yours is just one of the slickest and best-organized.

For a long time I’d have been well within your guys’ estimation of who’s a candidate for that torture you call treatment. Banging my head once every second or two for hours on end. You know what got me to stop? Respect, being treated like a real person, and being taught things by people who’d been where I’d been. Which you do not show an iota of to your “students”. You just program them, and in your slick “We’re doing it for their own good” presentation you remind me a lot of the guy who used to hit me “for my own good” and call it treatment. Sorry, but torture isn’t treatment.

Sorry, for the pun, but it is shocking that a place like this can exist in a first world 21 Century country…

Their parents already sent them to JRC once, and they know it can happen again if they don’t give the “right” answers, so they say whatever their parents and the JRC staff want them to say.

Amanda Baggs has described such people as living in a “disability gulag,” and I agree with her.