How facilitators control words typed in facilitated communication without realizing

Editor’s note: This article is a supplemental story to an April 11 Daily Orange story, “Double Talk: Syracuse University institute continues to use discredited technique with dangerous effects,” which examines SU’s Institute on Communication and Inclusion’s history of promoting facilitated communication. That story can be found here.

Janyce Boynton was shocked and confused at the results of a double-blind test designed to determine authorship in facilitated communication(FC). The test clearly demonstrated that she, at the time a facilitator, was the one controlling the words typed through FC, rather than the non-verbal person she practiced with.

The test came not long after Boynton in 1992 facilitated Betsy Wheaton, a 16-year-old girl from Maine, into accusing her parents of sexual abuse. It indicated that those accusations — along with similar accusations that had been made against other parents and continue to be made through FC — were and are unsubstantial.

Her surprise and confusion boiled down to two questions: How could it be possible that she was controlling communication without realizing it? And how was it possible that unsubstantial sexual abuse allegations are so frequently made through FC?

It was at first difficult to grasp. But it eventually began to make sense to Boynton, who then quickly abandoned FC.

The method was popularized in the United States by Douglas Biklen — the former dean of Syracuse University’s School of Education — and is still practiced at SU’s Institute on Communication and Inclusion (ICI).

Experts such as Howard Shane, a speech pathologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, say that a facilitator’s ability to control authorship in FC without noticing is because of an “ideomotor effect.” More commonly referred to as Ouija board effect, it occurs when people have motor activity without being consciously aware of it.

Boynton described the process:

“When you’re facilitating, you’re so distracted by other things. You’re carrying on conversations, you’re asking and answering questions, you’re trying to look at the person to see if they’re looking at the keyboard,” she said.

“Your brain is so engaged that you lose sight of what’s happening with your hand,” Boynton continued. “… It actually goes away rather quickly. And that’s what makes it feel like it’s working because the more you practice it, the more the movements feel really fluid.”

But many still wonder why it is that unsubstantial sexual abuse allegations are made during FC as frequently as they are. There are several theories, but Boynton believes there are two main reasons.

For one, there is a strong link between children with disabilities and sexual abuse. Children with disabilities are about four times more likely to suffer from abuse, according to a study conducted in 2000 and published in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect.

Adding to that, facilitators believe they have a close, emotional relationship with the people they work with, Boynton said.

That’s in part because during FC training workshops, facilitators are told that the FC users are trusting the facilitators to help them speak out, Boynton said.

“So you get this sense in your head that you’re the only one this person trusts,” Boynton said. “And then you get overly protective and you have that thought in your head that maybe they’ve been abused.”

“It’s a circle,” she added. “I believed the communication was coming from her and then I was reacting as a person, like, ‘Oh my god, this is really happening to her. It must be really serious.’”

Boynton also described that process in her 2012 paper, “Confessions of a Former Facilitator.”

Shane, who co-authored a 1998 study which demonstrated the ideomotor effect in FC, said that Boynton’s paper “perfectly captured it.”

At the time Boynton facilitated Betsy Wheaton into the allegations of abuse, FC had been practiced in the United States for several years. It was hard for her to accept that, for all that time, FC hadn’t been a valid method, even when trained facilitators such as her practiced it.

But it became easier for Boynton to understand when she thought back to the FC workshop, held at the University of Maine’s Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies, at which she was trained.

The workshop lasted only two days, Boynton said. It was mostly lectures and, when she actually practiced FC, she practiced with others attending the workshop, rather than with a nonverbal person who is supposed to need FC.

“Then the instructor goes around and checks everyone off and then we were set free and good to go,” she said. “Not even, ‘You need to follow up with this.’ It was, ‘You’re certified. You can go.’”

The training she received could be tied indirectly to SU. Leading the workshop was Alan Kurtz, the coordinator of education and autism at the University of Maine Center. In 1990, Kurtz took Biklen’s first graduate course on FC, according to an email sent from Kurtz to Boynton which Boynton shared with The Daily Orange.

Jim Todd, a psychology professor at Eastern Michigan University who has long worked to debunk FC, has also attended FC workshops in an effort to become an expert on the method.

One training session he attended was led in part by SU institute officials Marilyn Chadwick and Sheree Burke. Todd had similar experiences as Boynton and also said that the workshops “don’t train people to do what they claim that facilitated communication is.”

“They claim facilitated communication is just backward pressure to prevent the person from being impulsive,” Todd said. “You avoid any influence and if the person is starting to repeat letters, you prevent them from doing that. They don’t train that. When people do exactly what FC is supposed to do, those are the parents that claim they couldn’t make it work.”

But it was because of the training she received that Boynton believed in FC. She believed what the trainers were saying and believed it enough to practice it.

All of that was stripped away, she said, when she was tested.

“The conversation stops in your head,” she said. “And it’s just you. And you’re like, ‘Holy sh*t, I’m moving this kid’s hand.’ And it’s not an easy thing to admit that you went through all that time talking to yourself.”

“It was really emotional and at times it’s still emotional,” she added. “You don’t want to hurt people, and I did.”