UN official says JRC tortures its students
By Jay TurnerSchool defends practices amid damaging news reports
The convergence of recent local and international headlines had officials at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton doing another round of damage control last week after separate reports cast the controversial school in a negative light — first in a Boston Globe story that hinted at a climate of fear and violence at one of JRC’s group homes on Turnpike Street, followed a day later by an ABC Nightline segment in which the United Nations’ torture czar Manfred Nowak blasted the school’s use of electric skin shocks, declaring it a form of torture and calling for an immediate federal investigation.
In a telephone interview last Friday, JRC attorney Michael Flammia attempted to downplay both stories, describing the Globe article, written by Patricia Wen, as “completely inaccurate” while calling Nowak’s comments “disappointing” and his claims of torture “ridiculous.”
Founded nearly 40 years ago by Harvard-trained behavioral psychologist Matthew Israel, JRC is believed to be the only school in the country currently employing the two-second skin shocks as a form of “aversive therapy” to treat severe developmental and behavioral disorders. Because of this fact, Flammia said the school has been repeatedly targeted by agenda-driven activists who would like nothing more than to see the school shut down, even at the expense of its students.
Although he did not put the Canton Police or the Globe in that category, he did take issue with the reporter’s account of a recent altercation at the group home — an incident Flammia described as “very minor” — and he disputed some of the comments attributed to Police Lieutenant Patty Sherrill, who was one of five officers at the scene.
Sherrill, who has since stood by her comments, was quoted as saying, “In my 17 years here, I’ve never seen anything like this.” She also told the reporter that one of the teenage males had whispered to her, “Miss, you have to get me out of here. I fear for my safety.”
Flammia claimed that video surveillance tapes, which were later turned over to the district attorney’s office, discredit Sherrill’s account. He added that police were only called as a precaution and that three students who were taken to the hospital were subsequently released with “no serious injuries of any kind.” Both sides also confirmed that electric shocks were not involved in the incident.
The Globe story, however, described a far more chaotic scene — a “30-minute brawl” involving students and staff, including some who had donned helmets for protection — and Sherrill, while declining to discuss the specifics of the fight, said the reporter’s account was accurate and called what she witnessed an “eye-opening experience.”
Canton Police Lieutenant Helena Findlen said Friday that no charges had been filed in the incident but that the DA’s office was reviewing the tapes.
Meanwhile, a day after news of the altercation broke, a far more damaging story aired on ABC with Nowak, the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, declaring the JRC’s use of electric shocks and mechanical restraints to be a serious form of torture that would not be permitted even if the subjects were convicted terrorists.
With almost certainly no pun intended, Nowak, an Austrian human rights lawyer, told ABC’s Cynthia McFaddon that he was “shocked” to learn of the special needs school’s use of high level aversives as a behavior modification tool for children and young adults with severe disabilities.
“It is inflicted in a situation where the victim is powerless,” Nowak explained. “And a child in a restraint chair being then subjected to electric shocks — how more powerless can you be?”
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was opening a “routine investigation” into the JRC’s use of aversives after receiving a letter of complaint signed by 31 disability groups from across the country. Now the United Nations has gotten involved, with Nowak recently sending an “urgent appeal to the U.S. government asking them to investigate.”
For longtime opponents of the school’s practices, such governmental action is a welcome, if not long overdue step in the right direction.
“We think of the U.N. investigating human rights abuses in third world nations, and yet they have determined, and I believe correctly, that what’s taking place behind the walls of the JRC in Canton, Massachusetts, is indeed torture,” said state Senator Brian Joyce, who has fought for nearly two decades to end what he believes are “abusive” and “barbaric” practices going on at the school.
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