Uploaded to inforM October 7, 1994 Subject: International Coalition on Abuse & Disability List From: dick_sobsey@psych.educ.ualberta.ca (Dick Sobsey) What is ICAD-L? ICAD-L is an electronic mail network on the topic of abuse & disability. When did it start? ICAD-L began in September of 1993. Who belongs to ICAD-L? To belong to ICAD-L a person must have access to an electronic mailing address with a gateway to internet. This includes users of Internet, America On-Line, Compuserve, and most other similar networks. Currently about 120 people in eight countries have joined. They include researchers, clinicians, people with disabilities, parents, and others interested in this topic. What does it cost? There is no charge for belonging to ICAD. The service is provided for free. If you pay a charge to your network for electronic mail received or sent, those charges will depend on use. How may I Join? To join, you must send an e-mail message to: listserv@ualtavm.bitnet that reads SUBscribe icad-l yourfirstname yourlastname The listserver will acknowledge your message. If you have any difficulty contact: dick_sobsey@psych.educ.ualberta.ca How can I use the list? Once on the list you will receive mail from other list members on conferences, books, news, research and other things related to the topic of abuse and disability. You can also post messages to the list at any time and messages posted to the list will go to all list members. As a list member, you will also receive information on how you can use the ICAD ftp server, another free service. This allows the downloadinng of more extensive documents (e.g., grant reports and conference presentations) on this topic directly to your computer. You will also be able to place your documents on this server to allow access to others. What kind of information is available through ICAD? The following examples are excerpts from icad postings: subject: Aversive treeatment Cotter assured us that the project was a great success and and that no one suffered. He credits his idea for this work to Ivar Lovaas, pointing outthat it was watching Lovaas use of shock with autistic children in California that gave him his inspiration. When the ethics of Cotter's work in Viet Nam were questioned by Levy, Cotter wrote back claiming that Levy was unamerican and claiming that his experiment was personally evaluated and approved by B.F. Skinner. This might have been the last that we heard of Cotter, if it were not for Thomas' (1988) expose of the CIA based on documents obtained through thefreedom of information act. He provides some additional information not included in Cotter's original description of his work. He suggests that Cotter's work was funded by the CIA as part of their brainwashing "depatterning" studies. He indicates that William Buckley, the CIA agent who ironically died as aresult similar medical torture many years later in the middle east, acompanied Cotter to The Bien Hoa hospital for the study and that the patients were actually Vietnamese prisoners of war. He tells us that the Vietcong prisoners had been chosen because they were what the Agency doctors classified as 'typical cases of communist indoctrination'" subject: Sexual Assaults & Transportation Services Child sexual abuse and sexual abuse of adults with disabilities is a frequent problem with special transportation programs. Data from the Abuse and Disability Project suggests that about 10% of sexual abuse and assault oif people with disabilities is perpetrated by these transportation providers. These problems have occurred across Canada and the United States. Two kinds of transportation services have have been associated with these assaults. First, taxi services conttracted by schools or similar agencies to bring people to special programs have been a source of many problems. This provides another rationale for integrated education. Second, specialized Transportation Services for The Disabled have had problems in a number ofcities. For example, Jacques Perron, 34 year old operator of "The freedom Machine," a transport service for people with disabilities, was sentenced to 9 years in prison in Ontario for unlawful confinement and sexual assault of a woman with cerbral palsy on three different occassions (Gerrard, 1992) . He was acquitted on similar charges of sexual assault involving another passenger with cerbral palsy. subject: GOOD NEWS ON QUALITY OF LIFE John Bach and Denise Campagnolo of The University of Medicine and Dentistryof New Jersey deserve kudos for their excellent quality of life study on ventilator-assisted people. They measured quality of life for this groupusing a standardized scale and also measured quality of life for theircaregivers. Perhaps most importantly, they asked the caregivers to rate quality of life for the people they cared for.