Thousands of
children in the U.S. (and in other countries) are born with a severe mental
handicap known as autism. No doubt, the classification of autism includes many
different specific disabilities, but autistic people are unable to communicate.
As a consequence, no one really knows if they are able to learn.
In the last
decade or so, a revolutionary new method of dealing with autistic children was
invented. First used in Australia, it was rapidly adopted by many institutions
in the U.S. It is known as Facilitated Communication (FC, for short), and the
principle idea behind it is that autistic children can learn but just cannot
communicate what has been learned. FC is a tool to help the person communicate.
FC works like this.
An autistic person is placed in front of a small keyboard. Next to this person
sits an adult (the facilitator), who merely holds the autistic person's arm
above the keyboard, so that a finger hangs down and can hit keys one at a time.
The keyboard is connected to a printer that prints the letters being typed. In
theory, these letters (words) represent the autistic person's thoughts.
When first
introduced, FC seemed the most remarkable technology in the history of autism.
Autistic people changed from being perceived as severely retarded to being
perceived as of normal intelligence, merely needing help to communicate. Social
workers were delighted, as were the parents of these children.
Everything with
FC seemed fine. Not everyone was convinced that it really worked, but it seemed
harmless at best. Then, however, things took a turn for the worse. Some of the
FC transcripts graphically indicated sexual abuse. When these transcripts
appeared, children were yanked from their parents and put into foster care.
Families were being separated by the state because of the typed words. FC was
no longer harmless. If the typed words were true, FC was helping to free kids
from desperate situations. If the typed words were not true, however, FC was
destroying families.
How was one to
decide if the typed words were true? A smart lawyer brought into one of the
abuse cases devised a clever test. His idea was to decide WHO was authoring the
words -- the autistic child or the facilitator. This test was not quite the
same as deciding if the typed words were true, because even if they came from
the child, they might not be true. But if the words were not coming from the
child, then they most certainly were not true.
The problem in
deciding whether the words came from the child was that FC was usually done in
a setting in which both the child and the facilitator were given the same
information; the facilitator knew what answer was expected, so could possibly
be influencing the answer in subtle ways. In essence, there was a correlation
present -- both the facilitator and child were being exposed to the same
environment.
The test to
decide who was authoring the words was simple in hindsight: the child and
facilitator were shown different objects and the team was then asked to describe
what they saw. It would become immediately clear who was typing the words.
And the test
proved decisive: the descriptions were always of what the facilitator saw. FC
was a fraud
The kind of
test used to debunk FC is known as an experiment. In the absence of the
experiment, we had no way of knowing whether the words came from the
facilitator or child. The experiment manipulated the normal mode of FC in which
both the facilitator and child were given the same information to a mode in
which they were shown different information. By deviating from this
"natural order" of things in a specific way, it was easy to find out
that the child was not choosing the keys.
Copyright 1996-2000 Craig M. Pease &
James J. Bull