Shockwork Orange: Hope as justification for cruelty

As a young principal - I confess - I joked more than once that I'd like to have a device that would combine the effects of a television remote control and a small spark igniter.

In my imagination, every student would have a number. Then, if a child did not listen to their conscience, say, and did something evil anyway - I could punch up their specific number and press a button which would cause them a little shock.

This aversive therapy is what behaviorists call negative reinforcement, with an attitude.

The theory is that the recipient of this little reminder would come to associate bad feelings with bad acts; and, in time, would cease the bad acts.

As the person in charge of discipline for 500+ students, I couldn't help but think of this piece of Clockwork Orangeian administrative efficiency with an evil smile - one, no doubt, deserving of a little shock itself.

Today's New York Times did a follow up to the recent Judge Rotenberg Educational Center story that gives readers a little better peek at what is at work here.

Parents Defend School’s Use of Shock Therapy

Nearly a year ago, New York made plans to ban the use of electric shocks as a punishment for bad behavior, a therapy used at a Massachusetts school where New York State had long sent some of its most challenging special education students.

But state officials trying to limit New York’s association with the school, the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, southwest of Boston, and its “aversive therapy” practices have found a large obstacle in their paths: parents of students who are given shocks.

“I understand people who don’t know about it think it is cruel,” said Susan Handon of Jamaica, Queens, whose 20-year-old daughter, Crystal, has been at Rotenberg for four years. “But she is not permanently scarred and she has really learned that certain behaviors, like running up and hitting people in the face, are not acceptable.”

Indeed, Rotenberg is full of children who will run up and hit strangers in the face, or worse. Many have severe types of dysfunction, including self-mutilation, head banging, eye gouging and biting, that can result from autism or mental retardation. Parents tend to be referred there by desperate education officials, after other institutions have decided they cannot keep the child.

While at Rotenberg, students must wear backpacks containing a device that allows a staff member to deliver a moderate shock to electrodes attached to the limbs, or in some cases palms, feet or torso, when the students engage in a prohibited behavior.

Both the children’s parents and a court must consent to the shocks.

Michael P. Flammia, the lawyer for Rotenberg, defended the practice in an interview.

“People want to believe positive interventions work even in the most extreme cases,” he said. “If they did, that is all we would use. Many of these kids come in on massive dosages of antipsychotic drugs, so doped up that they are almost comatose. We get them off drugs and give their parents something very important: hope.”

But for state officials, many behavior experts and even some former Rotenberg parents, the shock therapy at the school represents a dangerous, outdated approach to severe behavioral problems, reminiscent of the electric shock helmets used on some autistic patients into the 1980s and now discredited...