A protest by Citizens Commission on Human Rights and disability rights organizations calls public attention to an electric shock device used at a Massachusetts school for autistic and disabled students.  The United Nations calls its use torture, and the FDA has proposed banning it.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) and the Stop the Shock Coalition of disability rights organizations protested Saturday at a school for autistic and disabled students to demand that the facility stop administering painful electric shocks to students as behavioral conditioning.  Protesters carried signs calling the practice torture, the position taken by the United Nations.

The Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) in Canton, Massachusetts, is the only school in the U.S. that uses an electric shock device to control students’ behavior.  For behavior deemed inappropriate, JRC staff deliver electric shocks to the students by means of a device that communicates to electrodes attached to the students’ arms, legs, or other parts of their bodies.  

The harm from the devices is detailed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which for a second time is proposing to ban the electric shock devices as used by JRC.

“These devices present a number of psychological risks including depression, anxiety, worsening of underlying symptoms, development of post-traumatic stress disorder, and physical risks such as pain, burns, and tissue damage,” the FDA wrote in its proposal to ban the device.  JRC students with intellectual or developmental disabilities are particularly vulnerable, the FDA notes, because it may be difficult for them to communicate about pain or other harm they experience from the electric shocks.

The FDA previously banned the device, but JRC prevailed in a lawsuit that found the FDA did not have the proper legal authority to do so.  In 2023, Congress passed an amendment to federal law giving the FDA the necessary authority, and earlier this year, the FDA again began the process that is expected to result in a final rule banning the devices as used by JRC.

Cheryl McCollins, whose 18-year-old son Andre was shocked 31 times over seven hours for failing to obey an order to take off his jacket, joined in the protest in Canton.  The 2002 incident received public attention a decade later, when a video of Andre McCollins strapped to a restraint table and being shocked, screaming, “Stop! Stop!” and “That hurts,” came to light during a lawsuit brought by his mother.  McCollins was hospitalized for more than a month following the incident.

In 2010, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture referred to JRC’s use of electric shock devices for behavioral conditioning as “torture” and sent an urgent appeal to the U.S. government to investigate.

The 2013 report of another U.N. Special Rapporteur concluded that the rights of JRC students subjected to electric shocks “have been violated under the U.N. Convention against Torture and other international standards.”

Nancy R. Weiss, retired professor and co-founder of the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities at the University of Delaware, has been active in efforts to ban the electric shocking at JRC for 30 years.  Putting JRC’s use of electric shock in perspective, she cites the fact that “you can’t use electric shock on prisoners, prisoners of war, or terrorists.”  

Despite the condemnation of the use of the device, efforts to date to prohibit its use in Massachusetts have failed.  In the most recent legislative session, a bill to ban it was allowed to die without a vote.  Similar bills have been introduced in the Massachusetts legislature every session for more than 10 years, with yet another bill expected to be introduced in the upcoming session, which convenes in January.

Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a mental health industry watchdog, is not waiting for the expected FDA ban.  “We will continue to push forward at the state and federal level until this torture is abolished once and for all,” says Colbe Mazzarella, president of CCHR New England.  Her determination is echoed by Stop the Shock Coalition organizer Elisa Hunt, who says, “We will not forget the voiceless human beings tortured every day, and we won’t let our legislators forget.”