D ISA B ILIT Y J USTICE A ND SPIRITUA LIT Y
Department of Justice investigation, and condemnation
from two United Nations Special Rapporteurs on torture.
The center continues to operate today. Dozens of parents
and other relatives of the center’s residents turn out in droves
for the annual hearings on Beacon Hill, clamoring that the
center’s treatment is necessary and life-­saving for their children,
who they claim would die from their self-­injurious
behaviors if left untreated by the Judge Rotenberg Center’s
shock device. And so, year after year, the hearings function
as little more than well-­practiced ceremonies in which
disabled activists like me come to protest the abuses at the
Judge Rotenberg Center while parents deride us for daring
to suggest that they stop trying to help their children in the
only way they can conceive of.
The Crisis of Disability Is Violence
Ableism, Torture, and Murder
BY LYDIA BROWN
V O L . 2 9 , N O . 4 , FA L L 2 0 1 4    |    © 2 0 1 4 T I K K U N M A G A Z I N E     |    D O I : 1 0 . 1 2 1 5 / 0 8 8 7 9 9 8 2 -2 8 1 0 0 74 	 T I K K U N    31
lydia brown, president of the Washington Metro Disabled Students Collective, is an activist focusing on violence against multiply
marginalized disabled people. Lydia previously worked for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and was the Institute for Educational
Leadership’s Patricia Morrissey Disability Policy Fellow.
A
ndre mccollins was eighteen years old in 2002
when he was a student at the Judge Rotenberg Center
in Canton, Massachusetts. Like many of the
students at the center, a residential institution for
people with disabilities, Andre is autistic and has other mental
disabilities. One day in October 2002, a staff member
told McCollins to take off his jacket. He said no. That was
direct defiance and disobedience to directions from staff.
The Judge Rotenberg Center staff then pressed a button on
a remote control connected to a powerful electric shock device
that McCollins, like dozens of the center’s students, was
required to wear. McCollins screamed and dove under the
nearest table in a futile effort to hide from staff members
who were already clambering around chairs to grab his arms
and legs. They hauled him from under the table, physically
pinning him as they strapped him facedown into restraints.
Once McCollins was immobilized on the restraint board, the
staff continued to administer shocks. Over the next seven
hours, they shocked him thirty-­one times. On the mandatory
report, all but two of the subsequent shocks were for screaming
in pain or tensing up in fear of the next shock.
Since 1971, six students have died in separate but preventable
incidents at the Judge Rotenberg Center, which was
forced to relocate from Rhode Island and close its sister
facility in California following continual allegations of
abuses such as food deprivation, forced inhalation of ammonia,
and prolonged use of restraint and seclusion (isolation in
solitary confinement). Originally founded for the ostensible
purpose of treating those with the most severely dangerous
self-­harming or aggressive behavior, the Judge Rotenberg
Center now houses children, youth, and adults with a variety
of disabilities, as well as some residents referred through the
juvenile justice system as an alternative to incarceration.
Over the past four decades since its opening, the center’s
practices have spawned numerous state investigations, a
Members of Occupy the Judge Rotenberg Center demonstrate outside the
FDA headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.
TaylorC.Hall(tchallmedia.wordpress.com)
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32   T I K K U N 	 W W W.T I K K U N . O R G    |     FA L L 2 0 1 4
name of public health and welfare constitutes no violation of
rights. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes went so far as to argue
in his decision that the Virginia law permitting sterilization
of those with mental disabilities was in the public interest,
to prevent the nation from “being swamped with incompetence.”
When referencing Carrie Buck, whose case the court
was considering, Holmes wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles
are enough.” That decision has never been overturned.
Not much later, in Germany, the societal fear of disabled
reproduction led to the mass internment of disabled people
in concentration camps under the Nazi regime. In addition,
in the United States, this fear led to vociferous arguments for
legislation that would prohibit deaf people from marrying or
having children.
One of the most chilling ways in which our media and legal
systems participate in violence against disabled people is in
the lenience and understanding shown toward parents who
murder their disabled children. In these cases, the justifications
abound — disabled children are described as burdens
on their families who are thus stressed from caring for them
and who one day might just snap from that stress. While
there are undeniably elements of sexism, racism, and classism
that impact media coverage of cases in which parents are
accused of murdering their nondisabled children, the differences
are stark.
In October 1993, Robert Latimer of Wilkie, Saskatchewan,
murdered his daughter, Tracy, who had cerebral palsy,
and claimed it was a compassionate killing. Latimer consistently
argues that he did the right thing. During a CBC News
interview in 2011, eighteen years after Tracy’s death, he said,
“It was something that had to happen . . . she’d had enough,
that was it, we were done.”
Unlike most parents who murder their disabled children,
he served seven years in prison. Of the few even charged with
murder, only some parents who murder their disabled children
serve any prison time. After the November 1996 murder
of Charles-­Antoine Blais, for instance, his mother served
only a year in a halfway house, after which the Montreal
autism society hired her as its spokesperson.
On March 16, 2012, ten days after the murder of autistic
man George Hodgins by his mother in Sunnyvale, California,
autistic activist Zoe Gross organized vigils in memory
of our dead across the United States. The very same evening,
Latimer appeared live on a Global News internet discussion,
defending his crime alongside a mother of two disabled
people who argued that parents should have the legal right to
murder their disabled children. Two weeks later, four-­year-­
old Daniel Corby, who was also autistic, was murdered by
his mother.
The vigils have since become an annual observance. Each
year, the list of names that we read grows longer. Even as we
speak the names of our dead, more of us fall victim to the
violence of ableism.
Forced Labor, Sterilization,
and Homicides
For a large segment of the autistic activist community, the
Judge Rotenberg Center represents the pinnacle of evil,
the height of torture in the name of treatment. Yet for all of
the egregious human rights abuses that take place there, this
institution is merely one of many that continually enact violence
on disabled people. I know adults with developmental
disabilities living in group homes who are not permitted
by staff to spend time alone with their romantic and sexual
partners. This is in fact common practice, as we who are disabled
are frequently presumed incompetent. I know others
who were once forced to slave away at monotonous tasks like
sorting paper clips, earning only a few dozen cents per hour.
As if to further underscore the inhumanity of these practices,
at the Judge Rotenberg Center, students are shocked
for pausing or slowing down while counting popsicle sticks.
Grossly underpaid labor such as this is legal for people with
disabilities under a section of the Fair Labor Standards Act
of 1938, as long as the employer claims that the workers’
disabilities adversely impact their productive capacity. The
law explicitly states that blind workers, as well as those with
intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, or mental illness, may
be paid less than minimum wage. Another provision in the
law further weds this practice to the inherently exploitative
nature of institutional settings by authorizing subminimum
wages for disabled people working for the institutions in
which they live.
In 1927, the Supreme Court decided in Buck v. Bell that
involuntary, forcible sterilization of disabled people in the
At a candlelight vigil in Sacramento, a mourner from the Autistic Self
Advocacy Network weeps for the hundreds of disabled people who have
been killed by their parents or caregivers.
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conditions will be reproduced. Yet we are systematically excluded
from history and policymaking, on top of the erasure
we face within our own communities.
Rejecting Pathologization
The pathology paradigm of disability demands adherence
to a single template for human existence defined as normative
and therefore ideal. Any deviation is evidence of deficiency,
defect, or disorder, and must be ameliorated, hidden,
or eliminated altogether. The pathology paradigm thrives on
capitalist society’s insistence on quantifying human worth,
and assigning value based on productivity.
Disabled bodies/minds exist under constant surveillance
both by systems that require compliance with ablenormativ-
ity — the ableist notion that being abled is not merely default
but ideal — and by our own selves in an attempt to hold ourselves
to the standards of ablenormativity. And we are forced
to make sacrifices. Sacrifice our identity, survive another day.
Sacrificing our way of communicating and our way of moving
becomes necessary for survival. Even in otherwise progressive
and radical spaces, ableism is allowed not merely to
proliferate, but to prosper. In queer spaces, for example, the
disavowal of responsibility to disability justice has become
almost an art — as though one set of marginalized identities
is worthy of empowerment and validation and another can
simply be discarded as undesirable.
Only in the intimate conversations among we who are disabled
is it possible to imagine a future in which our lives are
not marked by constant violence. In our own spaces, we have
begun to recognize our individual and collective traumas.
We have begun the process of unlearning the repetitive litany
of I am unworthy, I am damaged, I am broken, I do not deserve
anything good, and we have begun to learn to love ourselves
and our ways of existing in the world. We have begun
to reject the disability hierarchy that replicates disability disavowals
across disabled identities — for example, eschewing
mental disability while affirming pride in physical disability,
or rejecting psychiatric disability while celebrating autistic
pride. Legal, political, and social systems enable institutions
such as the medical-­industrial complex and practices such
as compliance-­based behavioral interventions to dominate
our lives, but bit by bit, we are building new ways of doing
community. With the rise of Disability Cultural Centers like
the one pioneered at Syracuse, the introduction of laws and
policies with strong enforcement mechanisms to protect our
rights, and the continual development of disabled communities
united across our struggles, we have laid the groundwork
for the future. We have not yet achieved disability justice, but
we are working to end the structural violence of ableism. ■
Dehumanizing Rhetoric
When clinicians administer electric shocks to disabled people
as punishment, it’s not considered torture, but treatment.
When parents murder their disabled children, it’s not considered
an act of violence, but an act of love. When disabled
people are imprisoned in insti­tutions, it’s not considered a
deprivation of freedom, but necessary and humane. When
teachers smear hot sauce into disabled students’ eyes, or
force disabled students to climb inside bags, or tell disabled
students that they are retarded and don’t belong in class, it’s
written off as an isolated incident, despite the innumerable
accounts of similar behavior. Damning reports from the U.S.
Government Accountability Office, Mental Disability Rights
International, the Council of Canadians with Disabilities,
TASH, and the Autism National Committee document
repeated cases of disabled people subjected to inhumane
treatment.
Violence against disabled people is so rarely recognized as
part of an insidious system of socio-­cultural values that systematically
values certain types of people while dehumanizing
the rest of us. We live in a society profoundly steeped
in ableism. The belief that it is better to be dead than to be
disabled rests on the presumption that disability itself is loss,
burden, and tragedy. Our lives are routinely devalued and
deemed unworthy of even the most basic human dignity by
policymakers, celebrities, and scientists alike.
Disabled people are disproportionately more likely to become
victims of rape, domestic violence, and murder than
those in the general population. And the particularly terrifying
underside of these statistics is that disabled people are
also disproportionately more likely to be trapped in situations
of dependency — on social services, on housing assistance,
in vocational rehabilitation, on mental health services,
or under the restrictions of guardianships — that empower
abusers at the expense of their victims.
For all the deeply ableist rhetoric surrounding psychiatric
disabilities and autism in the wake of tragedies like the
2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Connecticut, or the 2014 shooting in Isla Vista, California,
the reality is that we exist in a strange limbo between
commodification, spectacle, and erasure. Disabled people
become props useful for political expediency in demanding
gun control and cuts to empowering mental health support
networks — take, for example, Congressman Tim Murphy’s
campaign to eliminate protections for people with mental
illness as a means of supposedly protecting the public from
dangerous and unstable people. Disabled people become
caricatures of disability stereotypes that are used as arguments
for the necessity of access to abortion, for fear that our
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