This is how I feel when I read a lot of posts about the Judge Rotenberg Center.

Close the Judge Rotenberg Center.  For the love of everything holy, close the Judge Rotenberg Center.  Stomp it into the ground and dance on its f.ing ashes. But. You won’t be done. You’ll just have eliminated the most obvious of a huge number of places that torture and abuse their patients in the name of treatment. Skin shock is showy and scary and it makes a good story and it makes it easy to see what is hurting people. But people can be hurt just as bad or worse without it. People can be hurt just as bad or worse by places that don’t brag about the torture they inflict on their patients. People can be hurt just as bad or worse in the institutions everyone loves to love because they’re so beautiful, they have such wonderful grounds, they seem so loving. You can’t understand, maybe, why this is true. You think, maybe, that abuse, trauma, PTSD, CPTSD, can be measured in volts. It can’t. You think, maybe, that the destruction of lives is proportional to the visible destruction heaped on the body. It isn’t. It’s so much more complicated. I have a friend who gets really upset every time some over-the-top institutional horror story makes the news.  So do I, for that matter. One part of it is because, obviously, it’s horrible, and we’ve both lived through horrible things.  She’s been to both state and private institutions (and found private ones worse, by the way, so much for stereotypes).  I’ve been to p...
Source: Ballastexistenz - Category: Autism Authors: Tags: Abuse Aversives Behavior Mod Degradation Disability Disability gulag Disability Rights Discrimination Ethics Ethics, justice, etc. Inclusion Institutions JRC Long & detailed Power Power relations Safety Segregation Self Source Type: blogs