Schools’ torture of youth as they scream and beg for help is legal in the United States of America. Today. In 2012.

I wish I was exaggerating. I’m not.

Reporters from MyFoxBOSTON were granted access to record graphic video of a teen being restrained, face-down, and electrocuted 31 times at the Judge Rotenberg Center “school” years ago:

The video, which shows former resident Andre McCollins screaming, writhing in pain, and begging for help, was played at the start of McCollins’ trial against the Canton-based Judge Rotenberg Center. 

The Rotenberg Center convinced a judge eight years ago to seal the video, and the battle continued up until Tuesday morning when their attorneys asked Superior Court Judge Barbara Dortch-Okara to bar FOX Undercover’s camera from recording the video as it was played. 

Dortch-Okara denied the center’s request, clearing the way to give the public the first look at how these controversial electric shocks are used. The video was taken by one of the center’s classroom cameras. 

McCollins, then 18 years old, was shocked 31 times that day in 2002. Lawyers for the center and its clinicians say it was part of the treatment he needed to quell his aggressive behavior.

There are three people in my life who I know are survivors of youth torture camps like these. One particularly moving account is told by my good friend Xandir, who later did an interview for violet blue’s website and told his story at a sexuality-themed reading series. In Xandir’s case, certain media attention was even more frustrating due to the reports consistently misgendering him and focusing on a “gay” identity, which wasn’t even accurate.

I’m horrified that, in Xandir’s words, an “industry [that] banks on the exploitation of all children” like this exists, but I’m equally horrified *by the surprise* so many people seem to express when young people speak up about the abuse they face on a daily basis. While Xandir’s case is more extreme than many, and Andre McCollins’ case is possibly even more extreme, these human rights violations share the same root: Adultism. Like religious bias, racism, sexism, and so many other oppressions, there exists a pyramid of hate (see page 23) on which abuses like the ones we’re referring to in this thread are actively supported by “small” acts of abuse (i.e., microaggressions) routinely endured by young people and routinely dismissed by adults.

While I hope we’re actually moving in the right direction, need we remind people that school officials have the legal right to physically hit students for “misbehaving” in 21 of the United States, and parents still have the legal right to do so in 50 States? And this isn’t just some light-hearted paddling, but physical beatings that result in emergency hospitalization.

As recently as 2008, over 200,000 children have been hit by adults at standard public schools in the United States. In Britain in 2010, a law giving school officials even more rights to physically abuse, non-consensually search and confiscate young people’s belongings and bodies was passed.

Moreover, anyone who naïvely believes that kyriarchical intersections aren’t at play here is sorely mistaken. Take, for instance, the case of Alabama “disciplinarians” (a euphemism for “abusers”) paddling 17 female-identified high school seniors for violating “dress codes.” IN 2010! TWO-THOUSAND-FUCKING-TEN. (Obviously, this upset me.) And for more on the intersection between adultism and sexuality, I’d recommend you watch my KinkForAll Washington DC presentation, unimaginatively named “Sexual adultism: The tragedy of youth sexual oppression.”

One useful resource is the Join if you hate school! group on Facebook, whose website is School-Survival.net. The website archives news stories of institutionalized child abuse across the world, provides a forum for discussing all the issues above, and seems to be pretty active. (They’ve a Twitter, too.) Another pretty good group is the National Youth Rights Association. And YouthRights.net is a wiki filled with links to more information.

The point I’m trying to make clear is that while torture camps like the Judge Rotenberg Center are very obviously worth burning down, so is the entire traditional public school system.

Schools are YOUTH PRISONS. They are literally architected in exactly the same way as prisons are. Their inmates are legally (and extra-legally) punished for trying to escape. They are silenced from voicing criticism. They are threatened with jail or are forced to wear GPS devices so their movements can be tracked if they don’t show up. They are served similar sub-par foods.

Schools are designed with conformity and social control as their goal. Schools are political precursors to prisons—especially for non-white demographics. There is nothing worth saving about modern, industrialized schooling. Schools destroy creativity and critical thinking.

Given all this—and that all this happens in public schools without nary so much as a public outcry from adults—is it any wonder torture camps like the one we’re all outraged about exist? Seriously, people! Schools are fundamentally tools of adult oppressors and we will all be better off when every last one burns down.

If we can’t have compassion for youth, we are doomed. We were not all dark-skinned. We were not all female-identified. But we were ALL young once.

(The above was a comment of mine originally posted on Facebook.)