ADDENDUM::Not Just the Wendrows: Sex Abuse Cases Dismissed After Facilitated Communication - ABC News

"A therapy no better than a Ouija board."

An earlier case (1990s) involving "facilitated communication" that destroyed another unsuspecting family.

Two decades after unfounded sexual abuse allegations and a controversial autism communication tool turned her family's life upside down, Suzette Wheaton is angry to hear that another family has found itself in similar straits.

"It still makes me mad that something like that can happen," Wheaton, now 55, told ABCNews.com. "It has happened to a lot of people and it's just aggravating that something like that can happen to a family and just destroy them."

In the early 1990s, the Wheatons were part of a disturbing trend: families whose autistic children accused them of sexual abuse -- allegations leveled through a technique called facilitated communication.

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Speech pathologist Howard Shane, of Children's Hospital Boston, an ardent critic of facilitated communication, was involved in the Wheaton's case as well as several other of the 1990s FC sex abuse cases. When he was brought in to testify in the Wendrow case, Shane remembered a prosecutor questioning his expertise, noting that it had been 15 years since he had researched FC.

Shane said he hadn't continued research on facilitated communication for a reason.

"It'd be like suggesting that we continue to study cold fusion or bloodletting," Shane said. "When it's over, it's over."

[Note::The "facilitator" that Shane refers to in his continuing comments in regards to the Wheaton case is Jaynce Boynton. I make reference to her experience in my write up concerning Gigi Jordan. Boynton subsequently went on to pen Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator. An overview of how she "became involved with FC, how the sexual abuse allegations surfaced, and what happened when my belief in FC was challenged through scientific testing."]

At least two families entangled in unfounded sex abuse allegations linked to FC in the 1990s have sued law enforcement authorities as well as Douglas Bilken, the Syracuse University professor who introduced FC to the U.S. The lawsuits were both later dismissed but in 1997, in a separate case, a New York family won $750,000 after a jury found Orange County, N.Y., officials liable for failing to properly train its employees to "use the difficult and unproven technique of facilitated communication," according to The New York Law Journal.

In that case, an 11-year-old girl was removed from her home after she typed out sex abuse allegations with the help of a teacher. After being shown a demonstration of FC, a judge was not convinced the girl was in fact communicating through the technique and the girl was reunited with her parents.

There has been at least one case of an abuse conviction in which initial abuse allegations surfaced through facilitated communication. In 1993, a man was convicted of abusing an 11-year-old facilitated communication user at Heartspring, a special needs center in Witchita, Kan. The man's conviction was upheld by the Kansas Supreme Court, though Heartspring later stopped using facilitated communication.

Sad to say but Bilken is still Dean of the School of Education at Syracuse University.

Not Just the Wendrows: Sex Abuse Cases Dismissed After Facilitated Communication - ABC News