Existing
Autistic and Watching Public Discourse on Autism
(in the United States)
On
Our Abuse and Murder
Issy
Stapleton: Blaming the Victim
Kelli
Stapleton tried to murder her Autistic teenage daughter Issy in
September 2013, by locking them both in a van with gas grills under
the pretenses of camping. By the time she was talking to Dr. Phil
from her jail cell, waiting to be sentenced in a plea deal for first
degree child abuse instead of attempted murder, people wrote in
comments on an article criticizing the lack of autistic
representation on the Dr. Phil episode:
-
that
our voices were not needed,
-
that
Issy was violent,
-
that
Issy should have been institutionalized like so many mentally
disabled people have been,
-
that
if she were Kelli Stapleton, maybe she would have considered killing
her son, too:
[image description forthcoming]
The
sad fact is that if you reported this parent, it is likely nothing
would happen; after all, it is acceptable, in many people’s eyes,
to consider getting rid of your disabled kid when it’s stressful.
We are expensive, and stressful; Autistic people are explained as
such by Autism Speaks co-founder Bob Wright:
Autism
is a growing public health crisis in America today; it affects nearly
1% of our children and it demands an appropriate level of response
from the federal government through the reauthorization and expansion
of the Combating Autism Act… Thanks to the 2006 Combating Autism
Act, we have made tremendous strides in federally-funded and directed
research. However, the need for investment is greater than ever if we
are to meaningfully address the scope of this enormous problem and
the social and economic burdens it places on our nation.
Thus
you have the mainstream public educated as such about autism. You
have news reports leaning in favor of parents; articles discuss the
stress of the parent, the financials of the parent.
The
Articles Talked About the Burden of Autism.
These
articles of course came out when Jillian McCabe threw her
six-year-old son, London McCabe, off a bridge in November 2014, an
NBC article titled “Jillian McCabe was ‘Overwhelmed’ Before
Autistic Son’s Fatal Plunge,” came out, discussing the burdens
she was facing. It makes no mention in the headline that she threw
him off the bridge to kill him. It justifies her reaction to his 2011
diagnosis of autism. The article goes on to quote a psychologist, Dee
Shepherd-Look,
“a psychology professor at California State University, Northridge,
as saying, “quite frankly, I am surprised this doesn’t happen
more often. These children are really unable to be in a reciprocal
relationship and the moms don’t really experience the love that
comes back from a child — the bonding is mitigated… That is one
of the most difficult things for mothers,” followed by saying
autistic children can be “rigid and oppositional.”
Jillian
McCabe murdered a six-year-old child.
Psychologists
and the press excused her.
Dropping
The Charges Against People Who Abuse Us
The
Land twins are two autistic young men in Rockville, MD. Authorities
discovered them “locked
in an empty basement room that reeked of urine. The only light in the
room did not work. The door was secured with a deadbolt from the
outside. The one small window was not large enough for them to crawl
through in case of emergency.”
The ensuing Washington Post article excused their parents with the
headline “Coping
with adult children’s autism, parents may face ‘least bad’
decisions.”
There
is no least bad decision when locking people in filth. To compound
matters, the Montgomery County prosecutor dropped charges. As the
Autistic Self Advocacy Network statement reads:
The
Autistic Self Advocacy Network is outraged that the Maryland
prosecutor’s office has dropped all charges against a couple that
imprisoned their autistic sons in a filthy basement with no furniture
or electricity. When the prosecutor’s office declined to pursue
charges, they joined a pattern of treating violence against people
with disabilities as acceptable and excusable rather than worthy of
zealous prosecution and condemnation. We are appalled that even in a
case of such severe abuse, the lives of people with disabilities
continue to be deemed less valuable than those of people without
disabilities. ….
On December 23, 2014, however, Montgomery County prosecutors
announced that charges have been dropped. Since removal from the
home, the autistic men have been placed in a residential facility.
Their parents, who abused them, have visitation rights.
On Applied
Behavioral Analysis and Normalization
Another component of the cure culture
which seeks to fix Autistic people is normalization therapies, most
prominently ABA, or Applied Behavioral Analysis. It
teaches compliance training, forcing an Autistic child to be obedient
at all costs. This leads to a much higher rate of sexual abuse later
in Autistic people's lives, because they learn that their body is not
their own to say “no” with; as Sparrow Rose Jones wrote in a blog
post about a girl she observed being forced to make eye contact:
Father
picked her up and carried her to the car, the whole way praising her
submission. “Good eye contact, Janie.”
What
did Janie learn that day? I’ll give you a hint: it was not that
people are more trusting of those who make good eye contact...
Janie learned that adults can have whatever they want from her, even
if it hurts... Janie learned that her body does not belong to her
and that she has to give others access to it at any time, for any
reason.
ABA thus teaches Autistic children that
they cannot say no, and that their neurology is wrong and shameful. A
prime component behind ABA has also been the moniker and metaphor
“Quiet Hands,” in which
is the forced quelling of Autistic stimming, or self-stimulatory
behaviors such as hand-flapping and spinning. It is a natural
expression of an Autistic person, but “Quiet Hands” immediately
strives to to shut all that down. As Julia Bascom, autistic activist,
writes in a blog post: “Thanks
to applied behavioral analysis, each student learned this phrase in
preschool at the latest, hands slapped down and held to a table or at
their sides for a count of three until they learned to restrain
themselves at the words,” and “When I was a little girl, I was
autistic. And when you’re autistic, it’s not abuse. It’s
therapy.”
One former ABA therapist even documents why they left:
Compliance
training and harmful therapy goals are two of the biggest problems
with many forms of ABA, but there are plenty of other concerns that
Autistic people and their allies have raised about the ABA they
experienced. This
is by no means an exhaustive list, but some further concerns
include:
-Using
explicit aversives to actively discourage unacceptable behaviors
(seethis
post by
Ink and Daggers).
-Withholding all rewards unless kids ask for it
or earn it, including food, breaks, and affection.
-Not allowing
any free time or only very small breaks in 5-hour/8-hour days (again,
see this
post by
Unstrange Mind, which also details many other problems with ABA,
including the goals meant for normalizing kids).
-Not recognizing
motor apraxia, which may give the appearance an Autistic person does
not understand a command, when in reality, they may not be able to
get their body to obey them because they experience a disconnect
between their mind and their body (again, see this
post by
Ido Kedar, this
postby
Amy Sequenzia, and this
post at Emma’s
Hope Book).
-Allowing behaviorists to have too much power
(see this
post by
Real Social Skills).
-Using verbal prompts (“quiet hands,”
“nice hands,” “hands down”) and physical prompts to
prevent children from stimming (again, see this
post by
Julia Bascom).
-Using functioning labels to define a child’s
abilities (see this
post at
Musings of an Aspie and this
video by
Amythest Schaber).
-Routinely using physical restraints as a
solution for kids engaging in violent or destructive behaviors,
instead of as an absolute last resort that is recognized as being
harmful (see this
post by
Real Social Skills and this
checklist for identifying sources of aggression at
We Are Like Your Child).
-Not presuming the kids to be competent
and, relatedly, not providing adequate means of communication
(see this
post at
Emma’s Hope Book and this
post by
Ido Kedar).
Of
these things, the ABA I was part of included all but the first.
ABA
is, terrifyingly, regarded as the
intervention
for autism.
Its
teachings dictate we are broken.
On
Cure and Prevention
Autism
Speaks: Calling Us Burdens since 2005
“But
I remember that was a very scary moment for me when I realized I had
sat in the car for about 15 minutes and actually contemplated putting
Jody in the car and driving off the George Washington Bridge. That
would be preferable to having to put her in one of these schools, and
it is only because of Lauren, the fact that I have another child,
that I probably didn’t do it."
You may think that this is some random parent of an autistic child,
but this, in fact, one of the executive directors of Autism Speaks,
Alison Singer. This is from their video “Autism Every Day.” A
link to the summary of the video may be found in the footnote. It
premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, to a wide audience.
The
Ransom Notes Campaign (2007)
The
Ransom Notes Campaign occurred in 2007. The NYU Child Center decided
to place “ransom notes” from autism and Asperger's syndrome on
billboards everywhere.
Autism
We
have your son.
We
will make sure he will
not
be able to care for
himself
or interact socially
as
long as he lives.
This
is only the beginning.
Asperger's
Syndrome (Cripchick, 2007)
We
have your son. We are destroying his ability for
social
interaction and driving him into a life of complete isolation.
It's
up to you now.
Joseph
A. Kras notes in his article that
The
"Ransom Notes" campaign was based on the medical model of
disability. The ads depicted childhood psychiatric conditions as
problems that need to be fixed and children with these conditions as
abnormal outcasts from society. Their — or, rather, their parents'
— -only hope is to pay someone money to get them liberated from
their disorder and returned to normal society. From a social
constructionist standpoint, NYU CSC's so-called "public service"
campaign constituted yet another huge disservice to people with
childhood psychiatric disorders, such as autism, Asperger syndrome,
depression, and ADHD.
The
medical model is still a prevailing view society has of autism.
Steven Kapp notes
noted “The
medical model aspires toward normalization, symptom reduction, and
elimination of conditions identified based on deficits said to cause
functional impairment in major life activities.”
This is a common goal of autism therapies.
The
Combating Autism Act (Now Autism C.A.R.E.S. Act)
The
Combating Autism Act, as it was known until 2014, provides federal
funding for research into autism. This is the federal standpoint on
autism. And it is not a good one. One billion dollars has been spent
since 2008. Only 2.4% of it went toward services for autistic people
and their families, and only 1.5% of it went toward research on
autistic adults.
More information can be found here:
http://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ReformCAAFactSheet_r1.pdf.
The
Cure and Treatment Research is Growing
This
helps no one who is currently alive.
This
is the discourse and funding propagated by Autism Speaks.
