Blogging Against Aversives

OK, so i missed this on the day it was supposed to happen (as i always seem to end up doing with these kinds of blogswarms) because i had been busy with unrelated stuff and not checking blogs as often as usual in the previous week. But it's fucking important, so i'm collating the posts on it from other disability blogs, plus a bit of ranting of my own...

Blogging Against Aversives, hosted at Uppity Disability (a blog i hadn't known about before now), is in response to the, hopefully now fairly well-known, horrific treatment of autistic and otherwise disabled pupils/prisoners at the Judge Rotenberg Center. "Aversives" is a harmless-sounding euphemism for the torture of disabled children and young adults with such methods as electric shock devices, being tied up or handcuffed for periods of hours to days, and being forced to throw food away instead of eating it when hungry (although, as Amanda Baggs points out, the flagrant and "exotic" horror of the tortures at the JRC do not necessarily make it any worse than the hundreds if not thousands of other "total institutions" out there which torture disabled people in subtler ways).

Disability bloggers who have posted for BAA include (in no particular order):

Andrea's Buzzing About
Stirring The Pot
The Strangest Alchemy
The Gimp Parade
Last Crazy Horn
Big Noise
Growing Up With A Disability
Not Dead Yet

When i first heard about the JRC, the only parallels that sprung instantly to my mind were from fiction; i was reminded of Bolvangar from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, Larkhill from Alan Moore's graphic novel V For Vendetta, and of course the archetypal fictional depiction of a psychiatric total institution, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest; the closest comparison, however, was probably the near-future slave plantation run by a fundamentalist Christian militia in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents. However, the JRC is all too real; we live in a world where reality is horrific enough that the response of many people when confronted with it is to refuse to accept it and to insist that it is lies or fiction.

(There is a huge thread on the JRC from 2006 here, and it was in the news recently for an incident in which 2 teenagers were punished with electric shock devices as a result of a prank call.)

The JRC is not unaware of the exposes of its atrocities all over the internet; either Matthew Israel himself, or some pro-JRC individual using his name, has been going round posting comments to anti-JRC posts on blogs directing people to a PDF on the JRC's website supposedly in response to bloggers writing about what goes on there - for example, on Last Crazy Horn's blog as linked above. He was doing this before the BAA blogswarm, as he posted the same comment (which i deleted, as i do all spam) to my post here.

Veralidaine at Stirring The Pot posted a response to his comment here. (I don't believe her post is going to get any kind of specific response, as Israel (or whoever he pays to trawl the web for criticism of his institution) seems to be essentially spamming, by posting the same "comment", or rather link to his PDF, to every blog that mentions the JRC.) My response, if i felt it was worth anything to post a response, would be nowhere near as polite.

If the things that are done to people in the JRC were done to prisoners of war, there would be an enormous international outcry about it, with headlines in every major newspaper in the world. If they were done to political dissidents by a "Third World" regime, there would be UN sanctions, calls for boycotts of that country's exports everywhere, high-profile campaigns by charities such as Amnesty International, and if that country contained natural resources that were potentially valuable to rich Western states or multinational corporations, and was withholding those resources from them, then it would be used as a pretext for a war against that country.

If I had an army, then i would invade the JRC with it, kill every member of staff without mercy ("Only Following Orders" is no excuse), and burn the entire place to the ground. Sadly, i don't have an army, and in any case "having an army" would probably corrupt me into something as bad as the JRC, so in reality, i probably wouldn't do any such thing, and so such fantasies are unltimately futile. And, of course, i'm opposed to the entire concept of "armies". Fictional solutions only work in fiction. Hell is another fiction as far as i'm concerned, but if it was real, then Matthew Israel would deserve to burn there right next to Josef Mengele.

There are online petitions and letter-writing campaigns to shut the JRC down. I don't generally believe in the effectiveness of such methods; I don't know, however, what actually will get the JRC shut down. Even the legal challenges happening now in the US courts, while they have a slim chance of actually achieving that aim, seem to have been prompted by bad publicity rather than by any actual principled opposition to the methods of, even less the fundamental ideology behind, the JRC. However, i think exposing the fucked-up shit that really happens in such places genuinely does have at least some effect, at least in terms of making people aware that this kind of thing doesn't just happen in dystopian fiction coming from dark or wild imaginations, but in reality, and that it being ostensibly "for their own good" in intention doesn't make it any less wrong - as C.S.Lewis said (i think the quote is from Mere Christianity, but it's about 10 years since i read it, so i'm not certain; i got it from Falling Off My Pedestal):

"Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busy-bodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

May the Judge Rotenberg Centre fall, whatever it takes for it to do so, and those in bondage within it become free.