Thread by @NeuroClastic

For the victims of institutional violence, and especially if you’re autistic and do not understand the source of the hatred that gets directed at you or how people can even imagine such cruelty, the physical abuse is often not the worst.(cont) #StopTheShock #JRCSueMeToo

It is the terror—the abject torture— of not knowing when. You have to be hyper aware of everyone’s moods at all times and try to adjust your behavior to their unpredictable ire that seems to come from somewhere you’ve never accessed. We talk a lot about the electroshocks at JRC.

But the spaces between the shocks, 24 hours a day strapped to a torture device and being around people tasked with using it to control you— that’s the unrelenting anxiety that will cause you to lose yourself and come unglued. It’s neverending.

And when your abusers praise you for compliance, give you a small comfort here and there, you have to resent it and hate it because that anger and fight and desire to protest is literally the only thing that holds your last shreds of dignity in place.

Because when everything is taken from you, even your freedom, your bodily autonomy, your access to self-determination, your access to human connection— all you have left is your protest and your anger, and losing those is worse than death.

Many autistic people experience motor disinhibition and apraxia. 87%. Unlike autism, apraxia and disinhibition does have a severity scale. This means we can’t always stop movements, sound/speech, and impulses (disinhibition) or we can’t always initiate movement (apraxia).

At least 17% of autistic people experience chronic catatonia but the real figure is likely much higher. We’ve seen behavior plans from JRC. Kids are shocked for motor disinhibition. That’s illegal. It’s a federal crime.

It does not matter if it’s legal. That doesn’t stop it from being torture. It doesn’t matter if a small handful of doctors and politicians and judges go along with it. Look at this country’s history. Look at what happened and still happens in residential schools.

The GED is not just torture when it’s used. It is torture for every second it’s not being used, too. It’s torture knowing the people around you will do that to you and there’s no pattern, routine, or adjustment you can make to stop it. It’s indignant like a Scarlet Letter.

You wear this brand that shames you as soon as anyone lays eyes on you. What JRC does not accept is that when someone has nothing to lose, when they know they don’t even have autonomy, they have no anchor to their very identity and sense of worth.

JRC is trying to do that to NeuroClastic by threatening a lawsuit. We do not have enough privilege to stand on our own merits. We can be punished and intimidated and threatened for reporting the voices of our community.

We do not have the privilege to stand on our own merits.

Let that sink in.

We operate with integrity and are trying to clean up messes we didn’t make out of sheer love for our kids and community. But we do not have the privilege to even be seen and accepted for what is objectively and factually true.

They have the privilege to have the audacity to totally rewrite the objective, easily-observed truth and claim that they have never harmed anyone— any of US— and they can purchase the rights to do that to us.

We are almost exclusively led by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. We are all autistic. Most of us are extremely poor. The only thing we have is community and the truth, and they are attempting to make us unreliable witnesses.

They have demonstrated time and again that their privilege matters more than our very lives, and they can unabashedly claim to have never harmed anyone??

Their clients get shocked for saying no. We have copies of those behavior plans. They’re in the public domain. They claim they have the support of research and doctors and CITE SOURCES FROM PEOPLE ON THEIR PAYROLL. They do this with impunity at a cost of $276,000 a year per kid.

They make us seem like we’re unreliable and hyperemotional and hyperbolic because we used the word “torture.” They undermine access to reliable communication and ignore 99.9% of scientific and medical literature and present themselves as the scientific authority.

This is the world we live in, and we have had enough. We are not “bad” or “unreliable” because we protest or are angry. We just want our people to not be abused and tortured. We just don’t want to raise our children in a society that would let this happen.

These are our children, and we love them. They are not our biological children, but they are a part of our village. We believe in their health, dignity, rights, safety, and autonomy.

The world can get behind prosecuting people who shock animals. Can you imagine if a red panda at a zoo wore a GED… riots would happen. But they have made it socially acceptable and legal to do this to our children.

If we knew for certain that a person was going to engage in a terror attack that would kill thousands of people, that person could not be interrogated with a GED or any form of torture— even if it would save innocent lives to have that information.

But it’s legal to shock an autistic for pressurizing their ears— self-soothing. 🥺 It’s considered a “pre-cursor behavior” to aggressive or self-injurious methods. Yes, in a way it is. They’re trying to self-regulate.

That’s proprioceptive feedback. The skull is full of joints and we all massage our temples, or pull on our hair when we’re stressed. They’re just VERY stressed. The answer to that is never going to be to shock them preemptively.

We know how to do better. Even the vast majority of the ABA professionals say this is cruel and do not want to be associated with it.