Doctors and teachers occupy positions of high respect in our society: their pronouncements serve as stamps of approval in almost every area of endeavor. The aura of their rank also serves to blind people to abusive activities. Professional conferences and peer-reviewed journals, intended to foster standards of objectivity, may even validate and spread the abuse. For instance, journals popularize new diagnoses and aggrandize theories of discipline and contol. Abusers cite these authoritative sources when they promise parents relief from burdens associated with caring for children with special needs.

Thanks to the courage of parents who see their children as fellow human beings rather than problems, the pervasive abuse of autistic children in the name of teaching them “compliance” is now coming to light. Recent news articles have described beatings, suffocation, and deadly restraint. Many cases can be found here.

Jean Bowden spearheaded the fight to protect autistic children from the abusive use of restraints in the state of Massachussetts. After a video tape revealed the violence of the restraint methods teachers had used on her autistic daughter Abbie, Bowden confronted a solid wall of patronizing school officials, doctors, and bureaucrats, who all saw it in their professional interest to close ranks to defend an indefensible practice as a “behavior modification technique”. One of Abbie’s own doctors even offered to sell his opinion as an “expert witness”! Bowden persisted in her fight to protect her traumatized daughter, became a dedicated activist, and in 2001 Massachussetts passed a law that requires parental consent and mandatory documentation for the use of restraints.

Nothing is more rankist than posing inconvenient people as “problems” to justify dehumanization and physical violence as a scientific solution.