Australian school locks boy in cage

[Aidoneus]

Australian school locks boy in cage
By Kathy Marks
10 February 2004

Education authorities in Western Australia yesterday defended the actions of a Perth school where an intellectually disabled boy was locked in a purpose-built cage.

The fenced enclosure at Kenwick School was built on the advice of a behavioural expert who said the 12-year-old boy would benefit from a place to cool off. Its existence was discovered by Sheila Simons, who found out that her grandson, Neil, had been confined there for up to 80 minutes at a time.

Mrs Simons, who is Neil's guardian, won a battle to have the enclosure dismantled, but is demanding the dismissal of the school principal and an apology.

School records show that Neil, who has an autism-related disorder, was locked up nearly every day and sometimes several times a day. He frequently took off his clothes, urinated and defecated inside the enclosure, which was surrounded by a 3.5m-high wire fence. There were no lavatory facilities and he had no access to water. On one occasion, a group of pupils at the school - which caters for children with disabilities - threw stones at him.

The Western Australia Department of Education's assistant director of student services, John Brigg, yesterday defended the use of "withdrawal facilities" or "low stimulation areas" as legitimate and widely accepted.

--snip--

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/australasia/story.jsp?story=489714

[David Zephyr]

1. How Could Anyone Do This To A Child?

What kind of people are we to do this to a challenged child?

Heartbreaking.

[DuctapeFatwa]

3. they imprison immigrant children, some of whom sew their lips shut

so desperate are they to escape the immigrant concentration camps.

it doesn't work. They're still there.

google Woomera

[Eureka]

5. Yep, I'm hanging my head in shame

The fools running our country have caused REAL aussies quite a lot of disgrace with this sort of thing.

Googling Woomera is a good idea, but there are many others too (we have lots of deserts) and they even tried outsourcing, ie shipping them off to tiny pacific nations until those nations can't keep them any longer and the Kiwis have to end up taking them.

The craziest thing is mandatory detention has been around for ages and ages (my neighbour was detained at Villawood when he first came here in the fifties), but it adds a new "Compassionate Conservative" angle when they start putting the facilities in the middle of the desert.

It seems govts around the world (Bush*, Blair, Howard, to name but a few) are becoming more and more brazen with their abuses and so little is said about it.

On the matter of the poor kid in a cage, I read a local report (local paper, cant find a link yet) that the kids guardian signed an agreement saying the cage was ok, but I can't confirm that.

Either way, cages are not the solution to behavioural problems. Damn it, I breed dogs and horses and cages don't even work as a behaviour modifier for them.

How hard is it to be a reasonable human these days?

Yours in Disgrace

Eureka (an Aussie, and becoming less and less proud)

[David Zephyr]

10. Eureka, Australia Has No Claim to Such Sickness.

It's universal. Sad.

[Eureka]

11. Bummer, I thought we were special :-) n/t

[DuctapeFatwa]

12. It is the world's shame, Eureka, as are US atrocities

Rogue regimes will do what they do. Railing at them is as futile as railing at a suppurating wound for oozing pus.

It is up to the rest of the world to either disarm the brutes, or wait their turn to be shredded by bombs or caged and left to die slowly in the camps.

[Eureka]

13. Bring on November

We have a chance to get rid of our mob at around the same time as * will get his comeuppance (with any luck).

Then we only have to wait, oh about 50 years, before we can safely display our nationality outside our borders :-( But, we have to start somewhere.

[David Zephyr]

9. Cruel Monsters! "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught"

"You've Got To Be Carefully Taught"
by Rodgers and Hammerstein from South Pacific. . .

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

[boobooday]

2. Compassionate Conservatism, Australian style?

Why build schools when we can just lock our children in zoos?

Disgusting!!!

Wasn't there a story a while back about some day care center in this country where the workers were duct-taping the children to chairs in front of a television (not even playing Teletubbies, but Jerry Springer -- surely cruel and unusual)?

Yeah, apparently we have a shortage of people to take care of our children and old people so we just chain 'em to the doghouse and forget about it.

Why can't all those people who need jobs help take care of our needy citizens???? And get a paycheck that allows them to live with dignity. Oh, now I've gone off the deep end . . .

Oh that's right -- all needy people are needy because of some moral failing. I keep forgetting. Better re-read Bill Bennett . . .

http://www.wgoeshome.com

Jeanette

[JPace]

4. Barbaric......

people's ability to cause suffering
to children amazes and shocks me.
This was from educated people?

Tell me this is not true.

[Djinn]

6. general issue devil's advocate

I'm not going to suggest that this was acceptable but just a question to think about - when a school has to cater for ALL it's students and one student screams, bites, hits, spits and defecates in and around the school - not this child specifically but many schools in Australia now have to provide for kids with intellectual or emotional difficulties and to do this without any extra funding when schools are already underfunded is hard. Schools also have to deal with the parents of other students screaming at them because of the behaviours THEIR child has had to put up with from a special needs kid. How would you feel if YOUR kid had shit thrown at him/her at school? would you maybe demand that child be removed REGARDLESS of how much you agreed with equal access to education?

Before anyone takes this the wrong way this isn't me calling for these kids to be removed from state schools BUT parents and school communities need to decide whether the outcomes are worthwhile - ie will the child actually gain anything from attending a "normal" school and whether those gains outweigh the disadvantages to the kids already there - if a teacher has to spend 75% of her/his class time with ONE student how is that fair to the other kids.

Like I said I'm all for getting kids with physical/emotion or intellectual difficulties into mainstream schools but only with adequate resources. Also some kids gain very little from the experience depending on levels of impairment, ability to complete tasks, ability to learn social rules etc sometimes these kids would be better off in tailored needs classes/schools but often their parents insist on mainstream schooling and teachers and school bodies are placed in an impossible position because they can not please everyone

also on edit - this is a media beat up to some extent do you call the area a "time out" area in which case it is used by MANY MANY organisations dealing with kids and adults with "challenging behaviours" to use the jingo or do you call it a cage which summons images of bread and water, keeping in mind the challenging behaviours can and often do involve violence, sexually innapropriate or violent behaviour, infection risk behaviour (spitting, defecating) they had been advised by experts to get a "time out" area - had this "cage" been a room of the exact same size that was INSIDE the building this wouldn't be a story

[AndyTiedye]

7. This Wasn't a Mainstream School

and they should have known better.

"Time Out" is one thing. A cage is something else.

[Djinn]

8. true

but I was speaking generally about the issue not this kid specifically. As a teacher there what would YOU do with a child throwing shit around, how would you respond to other parents asking why they should put up with that, how would you protect other kids without denying this one, where would you "time out" this child, keeping in mind it needs to be locked. All I'm saying is that the teachers will be vilified by a lot of people who don't know the circumstances.

I've spent years in the disabilty field, and I certainly don't agree with caging a kid, or discrimination against people with disabilities - just wanted people to see the difficulties involved here

[Matilda]

14. It's about the "bottom line".

Governments are eager to save wherever possible in order to bribe
voters with promises of tax cuts come election time, and cutting
funds to "special" schools is one way - not too many people are
likely to kick up a fuss. If one teacher has to look after more
children than he/she can handle, then locking up the most troublesome
is one way of coping. It isn't good enough, but unless the
community gets up in arms in a major way, nothing will ever change.

[Djinn]

15. exactly

unfortunately most people don't give a shit because it doesn't effect their children, I've seen many cases of parents at the absolute end of their tether trying to bring up a child with severe disabilities and "challenging behaviours" (I hate that industry term but can't think of a short improvement) with no help from anyone, then one day they loose it and hurt the child and the whole world comes down like a tonne of bricks calling them bad parent's - when often the very fact that they have kept the child with them at home for so long prooves they are actually super human parents.

[KamaAina]

16. I am an alumnus of "time out" rooms

and no, I'm not the only DUer with autism or Asperger's either.

At no time, ever, would any of the myriad schools that I attended have countenanced the building of "a 3.5m-high fence" (that's 11 and a half feet!) to keep me "fenced in". Every place I've been uses actual rooms, supervised by actual staff, as "time out" rooms.

How would you feel if YOUR kid had shit thrown at him/her at school?

The article notes that the boy defecated inside the enclosure, and does NOT specify whether he threw any fecal metter while enclosed, let alone at any other students while not enclosed. It also notes that there were no lavatory facilities in the enclosure, and that he had been in there for up to 80 minutes at a time. Perhaps he just had to go?

[Djinn]

17. again

I wasn't talking about THIS specific case and I stated a few times that I think this school was in the wrong - just know from experience that other parent's always complain and (atleast here in Oz) people working with or looking after people with disabilities often are put in no win situations, had the school not seperated the kid (and again I acknowledge they went about it in a REALLY bad way) the story may well have been "school allows child to attack other students"