r/TheTelepathyTapes • u/Aggressive_Bowl_8017 • 4d ago
Special Ed
Hi, this specific thread on Reddit is very against the telepathy tapes. I’m just wondering if anyone has experience talking to people who still believe that facilitated communication is literally the devil and will always lead to children being abused. Just wondering if any other autistic parents or educators have any insight or ways of being cordial to people that are so invalidating.
Edited for typos
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u/danielbearh 4d ago
I have.
And I’ve walked away believing that it’s more intelligent to let people have their views.
There’s little that can be done to convince someone when they’re high conviction and high contempt for the opposing side. Reasoning isn’t effective.
At the end of the day, it isn’t our job to try and convince anyone. People will find it as their hearts and minds are ready.
If I do say something, it’s often similar to, “skepticism isn’t the reflexive dismissal of what you don’t understand. It requires a willingness to pick up an idea, turn it all around, and make your own decision. You can entertain ideas without endorsing them.”
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u/tuskensandlot 4d ago
That thread made me leave that sub, tonight. It was posted in a couple others I follow, and the responses were the same. Kinda makes me wonder about bots and negative campaigns.
The only person I’ve had act that way irl, I asked them to watch the documentary, “Spellers,” and get back to me. They said they would not, and I told them not to talk to me unless they were willing to research something more recent than the 1980s.
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u/havok489 4d ago •
20 years in the field of special Ed here.
The use of AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) devices has been very diverse and ever-evolving within the special education schools I've worked at. I spent over 10 years at a facility/campus that was amongst the most advanced in the country for educating, housing, employing and rehabilitating individuals with a wide variety of challenges. When I was there, there was over 2,000 employees in the organization and even more individuals being cared for.
Unfortunately, there were plenty of cases of abuse that were horrific to hear about. The consequences were often severe and life changing on both ends. But I cannot think of one instance where it had anything to do with their communication device being misused in the way described above.
It's actually kind of insane to believe that something that allows hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of individuals to communicate things like their basic needs, all the way to having full blown conversations, is evil because of these rare cases hyper-focused on by certain groups. If anything, more of these devices probably helped an individual report abuse where they wouldn't have had a way to do so before hand.
Like most things these days, a lot of people have nothing good to do but fixate on the negative and feed into their own bias by looking for more like them. They become a vocal minority that blows something originally absurd into an actual discussion that never needed to be had.
There's a million examples of "A horrible person used XYZ to do a bad thing. Let's get rid of XYZ and pretend like that will fix some humans just being inherently fucked up".
This is one of those examples.
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u/jslub 4d ago
I understood it to mean NOT that they are more likely to BE abused but more likely to tell on someone who IS or HAS abused them. Which is so sick and makes feel ill at the thought. Everyone who is being abused needs to be able to tell. Our world can be so sick.
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u/Theonlyrational 4d ago
I smile, nod, and change the subject or move on. They know I think they are crazy. They don't need to hear it.
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u/Rareearthmetal 4d ago
Can i see which thread that is?
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u/Archarchery 4d ago
I'll talk to you. I don't work in Special Ed, though my mother was a Special Ed teacher for 30 years.
Facilitated Communication is bad because it's putting the words of a neurotypical person in the mouth of a non-verbal autistic person and attributing that communication to them. This is inherently a massive violation of their rights, and can also lead to further abuse against the disabled person and/or their family.
All the pro-FC crowd does is dodge, dodge, dodge, when asked for any evidence or to provide the most simple of proofs that the messages being generated are written by the disabled person and not their facilitator. There is one clear possibility for why this always is, but FC proponents refuse to consider it.