Rich B
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CarAudio.com Veteran
By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles
Last Updated: 2:11am GMT 24/12/2007
Seven workers at a home for teenagers with special needs have been fired for needlessly punishing two boys in their care with electric shocks - on the orders of a prank caller.
Staff at the residential centre in Boston, Massachusetts, subjected a 16- and a 19-year-old to shock treatments after getting a call from someone posing as a supervisor who said the boys had misbehaved. One of them needed treatment for first-degree burns.
The centre is the only facility in the US to use the two-second skin-shock punishments as therapy to change destructive behavior.
The treatments are rarely used, and only with parental, medical, psychiatric and court approval.
Despite this, and the fact that no one at the home had seen the boys misbehave, the staff members went ahead with the order, administering shocks to them while their legs and arms were bound.
One boy was subjected to 77 shocks, the other 29.
The caller was a former resident of the centre. The state agency concluded that the staff members at the residence, run by the Judge Rotenberg Education Centre, had ample reason to doubt the order.
Police are investigating and considering filing criminal charges.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/22/wshock122.xml
Last Updated: 2:11am GMT 24/12/2007
Seven workers at a home for teenagers with special needs have been fired for needlessly punishing two boys in their care with electric shocks - on the orders of a prank caller.
Staff at the residential centre in Boston, Massachusetts, subjected a 16- and a 19-year-old to shock treatments after getting a call from someone posing as a supervisor who said the boys had misbehaved. One of them needed treatment for first-degree burns.
The centre is the only facility in the US to use the two-second skin-shock punishments as therapy to change destructive behavior.
The treatments are rarely used, and only with parental, medical, psychiatric and court approval.
Despite this, and the fact that no one at the home had seen the boys misbehave, the staff members went ahead with the order, administering shocks to them while their legs and arms were bound.
One boy was subjected to 77 shocks, the other 29.
The caller was a former resident of the centre. The state agency concluded that the staff members at the residence, run by the Judge Rotenberg Education Centre, had ample reason to doubt the order.
Police are investigating and considering filing criminal charges.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/22/wshock122.xml
