News, Electric Shocks Can Continue at Mass. School After Hoax. (college, private school)

[JD59]

A special education school where two emotionally disturbed students were wrongly given dozens of shocks after a prank call, will be allowed to use electric shock treatments on students for another year, the Associated Press reports.

But the state's Office of Health and Human Services said the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center must prove it uses shock treatments only for the most dangerous and self-destructive behaviors, and also show that the treatments reduce those behaviors, according to the AP.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4022502&page=1

[KevK]

Is it a private school? If so it can do what it wants.

[charolastra00]

A private school cannot abuse children if it so wants. That's what we like to call illegal in America.

The problem with this school is that people are not trained in "shock therapy" (which most modern psychologists consider about as relevant as a labotomy). At the Judge Rotenburg Center, it's not just severely mentally disabled people. There have reports of kids who have aged out who then came out as having been abused who suffered from depression, bipolar, and simply bad behavior that parents can't deal with. They might have changed policies since Mother Jones Magazine wrote an expose on them a few months ago and now almost every local college has an organizational group against the school, but previously they would have kids set up with backpack type things from which they would shock them from. If that's not abuse, I don't know what is.