Commentary
By Robert Hill and John Harvith
Because the Oct. 19 PBS "Frontline" program, "Prisoners of Silence," displayed a one-sided approach to its discussion of facilitated communication and special education professor Douglas Biklen's words -- employing skewed depiction of research, inaccuracies, omission of pertinent information and distortion -- we feel that members of the University Community deserve to hear in some detail why "Prisoners of Silence" lacks credibility.
To begin with, the program's producer-director-writer, Jon Palfreman, made it appear as if all students who facilitate typically look away from the keyboard and have their hands and messages controlled by facilitators. Because of the problem of facilitator cueing, which Biklen pointed out in his first article on FC, in the August 1990 Harvard Educational Review, Biklen asks those working with him to do all they can to have students become independent in typing and thus prevent cueing from occurring. Palfreman was well aware of this, but chose not to use footage he had of a student typing independently (Sharisa Kochmeister, who was featured Sept. 7 on the CBS program "How'd They Do That?") or even mention the fact that some students are typing independently.
Palfreman had viewers believe that all tests done to date report negative findings for facilitated communication (FC) when, in truth, a number of studies provide evidence that the method works. He chose not to do a filmed interview with, or mention, the work of leading pediatric neurophysiologist Dr. Margaret Bauman of Harvard University, whose brain research findings in the field of autism are consistent with the time of communication one finds with FC. Palfreman never explained that those with autism have difficulty initiating typing and isolating the index finger in order to type and therefore need constant assistance in the early stages of facilitation.
Nor did Palfreman identify as a Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Schawlow of Stanford University, who he depicted in the program merely as a parent operating on blind faith. In reality, Dr. Schawlow wrote to Palfreman to state that facilitated communication works and to explain why the tests designed by Biklen's critics reflect bad scientific practice ("the so-called validation works ... have been so stupid as to disgrace the name research .... As a physicist, I know that you have to be careful no. t to disturb the system you are measuring. But that is exactly what many of these experiments did.").
Palfreman cut footage that would have allowed Biklen to explain fully why the "double-blind" tests his critics employ aren't sound scientifically: One of the principal anomalies found in those with autism, in addition to extreme anxiety, is a word-retrieval problem--the inability to name objects on demand. The students freeze, become anxious, and then, according to Biklen, look for cues from their facilitators. In his testing of students, Biklen asks them to type anecdotal information unknown to their facilitators but verifiable by family members. None of this was reported in Palfreman's program.
In addition, Palfreman also failed to use footage he had of Biklen recommending the use of independent facilitators to verify facilitated communication sin case of sexual abuse allegations and to then use the courts to establish whether students making such accusations were lying, fantasizing, or telling the truth.
And the program concentrated on showing bad technique in facilitation, where students are looking way from the keyboard, as if this were the norm, when Biklen insists that it is essential for students to look at the keyboard for valid communication to take place.
Palfreman treated as a mystery the idea that students who facilitate can read, whereas it is well known from special education articles starting in the 1960s that some of those with autism have shown early reading abilities, acquired not only from looking at educational children's television but from absorbing information from signs and labels on everyday objects and from taking books to bed with them. The program also made the fallacious blanket statement that those beginning to type through facilitation employed perfect spelling and grammar and conveyed complex thoughts. Actually, the spelling of most has been hit-and-miss and the grammar unconventional, all of it varying in quality, sophistication, and reliability from child to child, even though some students share the same facilitators. Finally, Palfreman neglected to mention that Biklen's most vocal critic, Dr. Howard Shane, is not a medical doctor, but holds two Ph.D.s, in speech pathology and audiology, from Syracuse University's School of Education.
We are frankly shocked and dismayed that a PBS program, of all things, would adopt a particular thesis and then skew information and selectively withhold contradictory evidence in order to make everything point toward one conclusion, misleading the viewing audience in the process. The scientific community and the general public deserve better, to say nothing of people with autism and their families, whose lives hang in the balance.
Hill is vice president for public relations; Harvith is director of national media relations. An earlier version of this article appeared in the Oct. 25, 1993, Syracuse Post-Standard. Reprinted with permission. from the Syracuse Record.
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