Bristol County, MA – Family Court Judge Katherine Field denied a  motion to stop the use of electric shock on disabled students, a form of  punishment that has been controversial for years after news of the  practice first reached the public in 2013 when video surfaced of an  18-year-old student receiving dozens of shocks for refusing to take off  his jacket. 

“(The state) failed to demonstrate that there is now a  professional consensus that the Level III aversive treatment used at JRC  does not conform to the accepted standard of care for treating  individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” Judge Field wrote in her decision. 

The facility in question is the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center  (JRC), a special needs day and residential school in Canton, and it is  the only school in the country that still uses electric shocks on its students. 

Records show that at least 58 students at the school have received shocks as of August 2017. Despite the obvious ethical concerns with this practice, there is a  cult-like support among the staff and even some parents for what they  call “aversive treatment.” A statement from the JRC Parents Group reads: 

“As parents whose children attend and received  treatment at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC) we welcome the  court’s ruling and repudiation of Massachusetts government officials at  the Department of Developmental Service (DDS), who acted in bad faith  and impermissibly made treatment decisions for JRC Clients—our children,  just as officials within the agency had done in the 1980s and 1990s.”

However, the students being subjected to this abuse obviously  disagree, and there are several former staff members who are now  speaking out against the use of electric shock. Whistleblower Greg Miller, who taught at the facility from 2003-2006, told MassLive.com that he truly believed that this barbaric therapy was saving lives. 

“I believed in that place at first because I was told that it was  the only place in the world that could really save these kids lives and  most of them would be dead if they weren’t hooked up to the electric  shock,” Miller said. 

Miller said that electric shock was used on students for the smallest infractions,  even something as small as standing up or speaking without permission.  Eventually, he began to observe that the students were horrified of the  shocks and they were rarely aggressive enough to require such a painful  punishment.

 “I was seeing more and more ways I could do something other than shock the students,” Miller said. Miller ultimately quit, unable to cope with the ethical dilemma that came along with the job. The use of shock therapy has been proven to be ineffective, and it is  not used very often because other treatments work much better. 

“People don’t use it anymore because they don’t need to.  It is not the standard of care. There are alternative procedures that do  not involve aversives like electronic shock. And I am not talking about  drugs as an alternative. I am talking about other behavioral  treatments,” Dr. William Pelham, a behavioral specialist,  and director of the Center for Children and Families at the State  University of New York at Buffalo, told the New York Times. 

The things that have taken place at JRC have prompted calls for the  FDA to ban the use of electric shock as a punishment for students, but  the FDA has ignored the issue and even had protesters arrested for attempting to raise awareness about the issue outside of their headquarters.