{"id":692,"date":"2007-12-20T14:59:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-20T14:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog2\/2007\/12\/is-this-the-united-states\/"},"modified":"2007-12-20T14:59:00","modified_gmt":"2007-12-20T14:59:00","slug":"is-this-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/is-this-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Is this the United States?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m tired of the excuses everybody uses<\/span>
He’s your kid, do as you see fit.<\/span>
But get this through that I don’t approve of what you did —<\/span>
–Natalie Merchant<\/span><\/p>\n

The Judge Rotenberg Center must be closed. It should never have remained open after the Department of Mental Retardation stopped referring clients there because of its unorthodox treatments. But the Behavioral Research Institute, (now renamed the JRC) took the DMR to court and won. <\/p>\n

So now the is JRC is under more critical scrutiny for a horrible sequence of events that left two teenagers with burns on their skin.<\/p>\n

“It was a perfect storm of things that went wrong that night,” Ernest Corrigan, a spokesman for the Center told the Boston Gl0be<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n

I would say that you always take the weather with you. Two teenage boys were tortured by the staff at their JRC group home, because of a prank call that ordered this punishment. The Globe<\/span> keeps talking about how “no IEPs were checked” before this heinous, barbaric torment began (77 shocks administered to one of the boys, 29 to the other). Implying that if it had been on the IEP, it would have beeon okay?<\/p>\n

I’d say that JRC students’ IEPs are checked alright — checked at the door. Along with their civil rights. Is there a justification on earth, a behavior problem so thorny and mystifying, that torture would ever <\/span>be the solution? Whatever happened to our Constitutional right to be protected against “cruel and unusual punishment?” Does that not extend to the severely autistic or attention deficient? <\/p>\n

What I believe is that the people who refer to the JRC and the people who believe in the JRC methods are actually not acting in their clients’ best interests. Not at all. In fact, I would go as far to say that they have all given up on their kids. To say that nothing else “works.” What are the goals? To simply get rid of an undesirable behavior, or to help and teach someone? To understand what is causing the undesirable behavior, or to merely stamp it out? <\/p>\n

Doctors, therapists, educators, and parents are supposed to investigate and thoroughly try to analyze difficult behaviors. Bring in more thinkers, really troubleshoot the problem. <\/p>\n

How in the world can hurting another human being be the way to teach?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m tired of the excuses everybody usesHe’s your kid, do as you see fit.But get this through that I don’t approve of what you did —–Natalie Merchant The Judge Rotenberg Center must be closed. It should never have remained open after the Department of Mental Retardation stopped referring clients there because of its unorthodox treatments. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-ba","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}