Today I learned about the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center
Today I learned about the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center
This is a """school""" that makes "pray away the gay" camps look like lovely vacation experiences. They primarily cater to families with neurodivergent kids under the guise of helping them learn how to function in a neurotypical society. They use methods like GEDs to administer electric shocks when students "act up", long-term restraints (which the students have to carry with them in case they have to be "conditioned"), solitary confinement, sensory deprivation and food deprivation. I'd highly recommend reading the entire article, especially the parts about behavioral modification, controversies, litigation, and work culture. It's so much worse than you can imagine. I wanted to quote parts of the article to highlight how bad it is, but I would be copying and pasting half the article.
This place is still in operation.
Holy shit, they still exist? I thought they were shut down years ago.
... okay, turns out I was confusing these criminals in Massachusetts with the kids for cash criminals in Pennsylvania.
In a video that was made publicly available in 2011, JRC staff tied an autistic boy face-down to a four-point board and shocked him 31 times at the highest amperage setting. The first shock was given for failing to take off his coat when asked, and the remaining 30 shocks were given for screaming and tensing up while being shocked. The boy was later hospitalized with third degree burns and acute stress disorder, but no action was taken against any of the staff as neither the law nor JRC policy had been broken.
Really sums the whole center up. It's depressing how many years I've been following this through ASD advocates and survivor stories.
This place's existence is a crime against humanity.
Pro-youth activists have known about it all along but the more mainstream exposure it gets hopefully the sooner it gets shut down.
I feel like we need to pull a team together for a rescue mission