Secondary Effects

A few days ago, I spent the afternoon with a group of women. We had met, generally through online groups or professional contacts, and kept in touch. Some of them I was meeting for the first time, others I already knew in person. We laid out food we had made the previous day or picked up hastily on the way, cold meats and cheeses, quiche, boiled potatoes with butter, chocolate brownies. We sat on the deck in the sun, drinking ginger beer and talking. We gossiped - yes, gossiped! - a bit. We told jokes where we knew what was coming and laughed before the punchline had been spoken.

I don't think at any point we mentioned the Sandy Hook massacre. News had only just started to be filtered through to us. Maybe we didn't feel like there was much worth saying. Maybe, with the majority of us working in education in one way or another, it hit too close to home. We hadn't yet realised that - like every one of us - the shooter was autistic, and that once again the term would start being banded around as synonymous with lack of empathy, lack of feeling and violence.

Parents stepped up their search for normalcy, because normal people don't commit violence, because clearly forcing your child to stop moving or communicating in the way that's easiest and most natural to them is the best way to prevent a massacre. Someone claimed to have phoned the police about an autistic person they know of, fearing they may become violent with no further evidence than the fact they're weird.

Not many people have talked about the six year old autistic victim, Dylan Hockley. We haven't much either. We're too busy trying to defend ourselves. We haven't talked much about the other issues that relate to us as the gun debate - and I can't believe it's even a debate - steps up, about the number of autistic people, predominantly young men, shot by police, and about how that's supposed to just be accepted.

A lot of what I want to say can be summed up by Julie's post, There is no Depression in New Zealand, which mostly but not altogether could apply to my experience of being autistic (and mental illness is not something entirely foreign to me either) - this is just my version of it. There is of course a need to challenge the stereotypes that get applied, the associations with violence that have no basis in fact, the refusal to meaningful acknowledge perpetrated against those with mental illness and autistic people.

And of course it's hard to process events like this. We all want to live in a world without them, to find some magic key that means they won't happen again.  But if the cost is prejudice, if it's our acceptance of child abuse, if it's persecution and ultimately leads to more violence, we are only floating further from any kind of solution.

Conversations I want to have

The following was recently published in 'Thinking Differently', the quarterly newsletter of Autism New Zealand Inc.

'Your Letters'

This is an excerpt from a letter we received from one reader, who had been married to a man with Aspergers Syndrome. She discovered he'd been sexually interfering with her 11-year old twin daughters and eventual divorced him. The letter is extensive, but she presents a valid point of view, based on her experience.
"The Law is there to protect others from those behaviours. Aspergers should not be exempt from the law or being locked up. I do believe many serial killers and rapists have Aspergers. They can be cunning and devious. Aspergers do commit crimes, probably more often than normal people. We matter too."
H---- F--- (abridged)

I'm angry and saddened that it was written, more so that Autism New Zealand saw fit to publish such an offensive letter whilst stating that it presents 'a valid point of view'. But I'm perhaps most frustrated at the way it has set the agenda, that to counteract this it feels necessary to scrabble round for statistics saying that we're not any more likely to murder or rape than "normal people". I don't want to have to come up with examples of how we're the good "Aspergers" who pay our taxes and follow the law and have never had so much as a speeding fine. Those aren't the conversations I want to have.

I don't think there's any way to usefully engage with the idea of 'serial killers'. Is regular murder not shocking enough? There really aren't enough serial killers out there for this to be a meaningful discussion. I don't believe aspies are any more likely to be rapists than the general population. If there's evidence of a statistically significant disparity, that needs to be looked at, but in a country and world with the rates of rape and associated violence that exists, along with the terrible conviction rates and limited government willingness to do anything about either, I feel there are more important things to engage in that idle speculation about who does it most.

But let's leave aside the serial killers and the rapists for a second. Let's talk about the aspies who end up in the justice system for vandalism, for theft, for getting into fights or retaliating against violence. Lets talk about those who have not done what they're accused of but can't stand up to questioning or navigate the legal system (as a teenager I admitted to shoplifting I hadn't done (fortunately avoiding a criminal charge) because security guard told me I had no choice but to admit it and I believed that, literally, and because I didn't see any way anyone would understand my compulsive need to read song lyrics anyway). If the main backbone of the conversation is that statistically most of us are law abiding, if those of us who can go round flaunting our jobs and our taxpaying and our relationships and our degrees and our mortgages and our nice clean criminal records, then we're feeling good about ourselves and changing absolutely nothing.

So instead, let's have a conversation about a world which makes things unbearable for us, and when we lash out, potentially at people or at objects, the solution is not to change the environment to prevent a reoccurance, but to punish us. Let's have a conversation about how difficult legal systems are to navigate, how atypical facial expressions or eye contact are so often assumed to mean guilt, how a neurotypical person can sometimes avoid a charge for a minor offence with a "sorry mate" whilst pedantic questioning of language and the nature of the offence is almost certainly going to lead to an arrest. Let's talk about how atypical movement or gestures or reasons for going to places is viewed as grounds for suspicion, how silence is viewed as stubbornness or lack of co-operation, how literal interpretation of questions is viewed as rudeness. Let's talk about how the effect is doubled, tripled for people already disadvantaged in our legal system.

Let's not be afraid to have a conversation about prisons. When people say we don't lock up autistic people/mentally ill people/intellectually impaired people, I always want to ask what the hell they think prisons are other than a dumping ground with disproportionate rates of all of the above. And I get why we're afraid to talk about this - we've spent so long trying to say that we're good people really, we're not scary people, we could be your neighbour. But we need to challenge the assumption that there's a perfect correlation between 'in prison' and 'bad person', or that crimes exist in some kind of vacuum as an indicator of someone's morality, rather than being socially constructed.

Yes, it is worth challenging such obvious bigotry, the inaccruate assumptions, the stereotyping and the offensive language. And then let's move on. If we're talking about Aspergers and crime, let's talk about parents who murder autistic children and are then treated with sympathy, about autistic people who have been raped and are then told their non-verbal communication is inadmissable in court. Let's talk less about how some cunning and devious aspies can apparently get away with everything (something I'd guess would have far more to with the numbers who get away with child abuse generally) and more about how the legal system fails aspies on both sides.