In the meantime, it should never be used to accuse someone of something and certainly not be used in a court of law. I am shocked that it has happened again. My heart goes out to the family.

The Wendrow family in the lawsuit has charged the police were directed in part how to investigate the case. The facilitator the school had trained and utilized as been discredited completely in the information she had provided. The prosecutor has been charged with ignoring and circumventing specific judicial orders and failing to follow standard protocol.

Julian Wendrow, after spending 80 days in jail has been completely exonerated. A national mens support group has been very vocal in how this case was handled.

In retrospect it seems that this case from the first was tainted with ignorance and zealous, even dishonest prosecution. A very loving and tightly knit family was ripped apart and no one is willing to accept responsibility for the erroneous decisions that kept occurring.

Or, perhaps I should say, “Hauska tavata!” (which exhausts all the Finnish I know except for a few phrase-book essentials such as “Missä on vessa”).

Yes, indeed, the prosecutor did what is described. The hugging and touching you note resembled the kind of casual affectionate contact that parents and well-liked teachers sometimes have with children. In many other situations it would have gone unnoticed — or at least unremarked. In the courtroom, the actions suggested that the relationship between the prosecutor and child had become too personal. To some, a message was being sent. With the parents only a few steps away, but prevented by the court from being seen by their daughter, the prosecutor and facilitators were signaling to all whose child the girl really was. Even if such intent on the part of the prosecution team was imagined by some the parents’ supporters, the insensitivity of the actions was not. This was not a child temporarily bonding with or being comforted by a neutral, court-appointed caretaker. This was a child being doted over during the two-day hearing by the same prosecutor and same facilitators who were accusing her parents of years of systematic rape. “Impartiality” was not the operative term. The devastating effect of all this on the family was clear, painful to watch, and, if their newly announced lawsuit is any indication, enduring.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080912/NEWS03/809120414/&imw=Y

The qualified immunity protections enjoyed by prosecutors, judges, police, and school officials against charges of professional misconduct and malpractice make such lawsuits difficult to win. However, this was not an ordinary case marred by ordinary errors. In addition to the malpractice issues that arise when credentialled educational professionals devote untold sums of taxpayers’ money to a discredited intervention, there are those amazing videos of the police trying to elicit testimony by lying to the girl’s developmentally disabled brother. Complicating everything further could be the ongoing ethics investigation of the chief prosecutor for improper actions in another, similar false accusations case (fronted, coincidentally, by the very same assistant prosecutor). More information about these things can be found in the links below:

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080316/NEWS03/80316001
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080316/COL04/803160557
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080822/NEWS03/808220399

Thank you for your interest in this case, which is obviously garnering world-wide attention. It will not only be fascinating to see what happens, but the outcome will speak volumes about the state of our justice system in Michigan.

Jim

Why the hell was the prosecutor doing this?! If a teacher or a psychologist did that, there’d be charges; so what is going on with this prosecutor? Especially given the nature of the charges levelled at the parents in this case…

I apologize for not responding earlier to your comment (I guess I might say, I have been very busy with “work” at my college). I’m very interested in your noting the “psychology of influence” and how it plays or part, or might play a part, in FC and also in any attempts (by a parent; therapist; teacher) to “interpret” and “translate” the communications (verbal and non-verbal) of an autistic child.

And thank you for mentioning Rapid Prompting. I’ve seen the videos and read the guide — a lot to consider.

Thank you very much again.

Sorry about not getting back sooner to your question about FC articles. It’s been a busy time. The folks at my job are interested in having me do something they call “work.”

Obviously, I think the main issue in FC is facilitator control. We know it happens. We find it literally every time we look for it. We are seeing it right in front of us in Michigan when the facilitator projects her Christian religious metaphors onto this Jewish child. Thus, I am interested in the psychology of influence itself. How do people, who seem otherwise rational, come to believe that they are not influencing the communications–sometimes even after they have been shown, without question, to be doing so? Thus, I really like Daniel Wegner’s work. His article, “Clever Hands: Uncontrolled Intelligence in Facilitated Communication” is literally a new classic.

His other work along the same lines is also excellent–with the added benefit that you can get most of it on the web.

Remember, I am a Skinnerian behaviorist recommending that you read articles by a consciousness researcher. These must be really good. Seriously, they are some of the best empirical analyses of belief in personal control and agency that you will find. In the same vein, the article “Facilitated Communication as an Ideomotor Response” from Psychological Science is quite good–and scary. I think the willingness of people to so quickly assume that there are not controlling the output they so clearly are controlling is key to the problems we see in FC, especially in this case in Michigan.

If we could get B.F. Skinner’s 1934 Atlantic Monthly article, “Has Gertude Stein a Secret,” on the web, I’d have a link to it. Skinner was actually an English Literature major in college, and hoped to be a writer. (It is an inside joke with him that he says he “failed” as a writer after writing than a dozen books, including a novel.) The Gertrude Stein article is really about “automatic writing,” which is writing while being unconscious of the specific content. Automatic writing is a real phenomenon that the hypnosis people are very interested in. Skinner talks about how Stein used this technique in some of her works. Behaviorists are interested in this because complex linguistic behavior occurs without any awareness at all. Technically, they say that the stimulus control of the behavior we call “awareness” is distinct from the stimulus control of the verbal output itself–which is lacking entirely in pure automatic writing. The relevance here is not just the awareness issue, but that we see similarities between the kind of content produce by automatic writing and what we often see in FC, especially the extended pieces and poetry. Essentially, the facilitator is engaging in automatic writing but attributes the output to the person with autism. I think all those “content analyses” of FC that have come out of Finland and Italy in recent years would be much more interesting as analyses of the facilitators’ automatic writing than the communicators’ supposed thoughts.

Of course, I am going to recommend something really obvious. But now it’s available on the web, and should be read by anyone who does behavioral experimentation or interacts with other organisms: Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. von Osten). This book, published almost 100 years ago, is second to none in showing how behavior can come under the control of movements so small the person doing the influence does not even know he or she is making them. In this case, the horse look like he was intelligent because he stopped responding when he saw the tiniest display of “anticipatory withdrawal” in the person asking the questions. Essentially, the person relaxed a bit when the horse arrived at the right answer. An entire commission was unable to figure this out, and it took Oskar Pfungst to do the work–essentially using what we’d now call “single-blind” and “double-blind” tests–to find the source of control. People really did believe that the horse was showing what the FC people would now call “unexpected literacy.” The morals of the Hans story are (1) that we should never underestimate the sensitivity of another organism to the behavioral cues we are sending and (2) never assume that we can detect cuing just by looking. I really believe anyone who thinks that cueing can’t occur without touching, as they try to make happen Rapid Prompting, needs to read the this book and take in its message. Then, if they have the strength of their convictions that the communication they see is genuine and independent, they should do the double-blind tests that their leaders tell them to avoid.

These are my recommendations. Even if they were not all what you might have expected, I hope they are interesting and helpful.

Jim

What a mess.