Facilitated Communication Nonsense still doing Harm

'Facilitated communication' and a P.E.I. family's nightmare

This nonsense continues in the 21st Century. :boggled:

http://ift.tt/295nhK5

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CHARLOTTETOWN -- When the P.E.I. businessman arrived at the group home in Charlottetown to pick up his daughter, two solemn RCMP officers were waiting for him. He immediately assumed his daughter was dead. "In those few seconds, I visualized a pile of bloody rags on the road, which was her body run over by a truck," he said in a recent interview, his voice shaking. The officers assured him the young woman was fine. But his sense of relief fell away when the Mounties handcuffed him, saying she had accused him of sexually assaulting her. "I said, 'Obviously, there's a mistake here, there's a communication problem,"' he said in a recent interview. "I knew it was false." It was Feb. 7, 2015. For the next six months, he and his wife were effectively prohibited from seeing their daughter as they were drawn into a bizarre legal nightmare that pitted them against police, the P.E.I. Health Department and the group home.

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Quote:

Independent testing -- later arranged by her family -- found the 35-year-old was incapable of making the allegations attributed to her. The clinical psychologist who did the testing said it demonstrated that questions put to the woman were actually being answered by group home workers using a disputed method known as facilitated communication. The father was never charged.

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Quote:

A judge later concluded the P.E.I. Health Department and the group home acted in a "deplorable" manner by ignoring the couple's attempts to have their daughter's communication skills assessed. The P.E.I. Supreme Court, in a decision released in March, found then-health minister Doug Currie failed in his legislated duty to conduct an investigation.

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Lots of good, sensible, indepth reporting. Worth a complete read.

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Quote:

Earlier this year, the P.E.I. Supreme Court awarded the parents more than $61,000 in legal costs, saying that even cursory review of the studies on FC "would have alerted the minister of health to the very real possibility the communications of (the woman) were not her communications." The court did not take a position on the validity of FC, but the decision clearly states that the technique did not work in this case. Had the woman's caregivers or the health minister followed the legislation requiring an investigation, "it would have become clear very early on ... (the) communications were not the communications of (the woman) but were the communications of the facilitators," the decision says. "Someone needs to be punished here," the father says. "There were people who didn't do their jobs."

At least the disposition of the case is rational but who would want to live through this? :mad:

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/29tLuuE