The city of New York pays the Judge Rotenberg Center, which gives electric shock therapy to children with autism or mental disorders, $30 million a year. The facility, 30 km from Boston, has often been at the centre of attention in the past 30 years due to the punishments meted out to its young patients (some as young as three years), which include fasting, isolation and electric shocks. Even so, there has never been a lack of funding from New York and this year it has increased. This is all thanks to Mayor Bill De Blasio, who increased funding for schools and private centres that treat children with special needs.The JRC proudly says it accepts difficult cases and manages patients without psychotropic medications. But the centre’s actual methods of treatment have been revealed by Jennifer Msumba, a self-harming patient who used to banged her head against the wall. She stayed at the centre for seven years, until 2009, when she left and decided to sue. “It’s so scary that you don’t feel like it’s real life anymore. I begged God to stop my heart when that was happening to me. I just did not want to live. They told me that if I did certain things I would get five electric shocks in 10 minutes.” With an electric belt around her waist 24 hours a day, Jennifer even received ‘corrective’ shocks remotely.
“The brutal truth is that we are doing this to innocent children in Massachusetts. If we did this to terrorist prisoners in Guantanamo, there would be a global outcry,” said senator Brian Joyce. Another former student at the centre, Andre McCollins, was 18 when, in 2002, he was tied face-down by his hands and feet and given 30 shocks over a period of seven hours, during which time he screamed and begged staff to stop.
But psychologist Matthew L. Israel defends the methods used: “It’s a short, harmless shock lasting two seconds on the surface of the skin. It’s like a sharp pinch. The centre has saved the life of a child who vomited so frequently that he was in danger of starving to death, as well as restored the eyesight of two children whose head-banging was so severe that each detached both retinas and risked permanent blindness. It’s a very effective treatment that is approved in advance by a parent, a doctor and a judge.” Israel founded the centre in 1971 and the institution was later named after Judge Rotenberg, who ruled that the punitive methods could be used as long as they had court approval on a case by case basis.
