Torture in the Name of Treatment: The Mission to Stop the Shocks in the Age of Deinstitutionalization

Abstract

As autistic activists, Shain M. Neumeier and Lydia X. Z. Brown have been working to close the Judge Rotenberg Center in the US, which has engaged in some of the most egregious forms of such abuse, and more generally to end the use of coercive and abusive forms of “treatment” for autistic and other disabled people, for the past ten years. During that time, both of them have worked toward this goal through multiple avenues, including policy and legal advocacy, grassroots organizing, and media outreach. They believe that the neurodiversity movement’s history is rife with instances of individual and systemic abuse, violence, and trauma which they have been focused on naming and ending.