NZ Skeptics Articles

Janyce Boynton

Janyce Boynton is an artist, educator, and advocate for evidence-based practices in the field of communication sciences and disorders. As a speech/language clinician in the early 1990s, she became involved with facilitated communication - her story was featured on Frontline's “Prisoners of Silence”. She left teaching to pursue her artwork but has continued to be active in educating people about the dangers of FC and other facilitator-influenced techniques. To date, she is one of the few facilitators world-wide to publicly acknowledge her role in producing FC messages and speak out against its use.

Has FC Changed since the early 1990s? Part 1

1 September 2025

Someone asked me recently how I thought FC had changed since the early 1990s. My initial reaction: not a whole lot. If you're talking about the mechanics of the technique itself, very little has changed. That's why the reliably controlled studies to explore FC authorship conducted between 1990 and 2014 remain relevant. Facilitators still use physical, verbal, and auditory cues to influence and control letter selection. With some variants of FC, like Spelling to Communicate (S2C) and Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) the boards are generally held in the air, something critics of FC raised concerns about in the earliest studies of FC, but proponents chose/choose to ignore. In addition, facilitators (still) insist they can provide these cues to their clients without influencing or controlling letter selection. There was and still is no reliably controlled evidence to prove proponent claims that FC (in any of its forms) produces independent communication (e.g., communication that is free from facilitator control). And facilitators, still, prefer to market FC through popular media rather than face scrutiny under reliably controlled conditions (e.g., message passing tests that screen facilitators from test protocols).