Domestic Hate Murder Coverage Style Guide

(GREAT BIG WARNING: This post deals exclusively with parents who murder their disabled children, and the ableism in media coverage of these murders.)

I woke up this morning to news of yet another autistic child murdered by their parent. In this case, the child is Glen Freaney, whose mother is currently on trial for strangling him last May. As usual, the grief I felt for Glen was aggravated by rage at the deeply ableist way his murder was covered in many of the articles I read. I have written before about journalists' tendency to express sympathy for parents who murder their disabled children. This time, I decided to take a new approach.

Since it is apparently very difficult for journalists to write respectfully about disabled children whose parents have murdered them, I took it upon myself to create this style guide. If you are a journalist about to begin covering one of these cases, please take these simple tips to heart:


DO NOT write that the victim “suffered from” their disability. Not only is this incorrect terminology, but it is very inconsiderate when in this case what the person really suffered from was being the child of a murderer.

DO talk about who the victim was as a person. What did they like? What were their hobbies? What were they struggling with? Did they like ice cream? What was their favorite color? If you don’t have enough space in the article to talk about the person whose murder you are covering, I recommend that you make room by cutting the obligatory paragraph where you write in horror about how they still wore diapers when they were killed, or how they would have needed 24-hour care for the rest of their life, as if these things were mitigating factors in the crime. It’s not wrong to write bluntly about the victim’s disability, but it absolutely is wrong to use the facts of the victim’s life to garner sympathy for the murderer.

DO NOT ask the readers to put themselves in the shoes of the murderer. DO NOT prominently feature the same old interviews by double-talking fellow-parents-of-disabled-children, who say that while they cannot excuse the murderer’s action, they can understand it. DO NOT seek opinions from experts on the suffering of murderous parents. DO NOT end your piece on a “thoughtful,” “balanced,” note in which you ask a provocatively open-ended question about whether society should really hold the murderer to blame for killing their own child.

DO interview the same people that you would usually interview in a murder case – the victim’s friends, teachers, faith leaders, whatever. Oh, you can also interview those of the victim’s family members who didn’t think that killing them was an awesome idea.

DO NOT lay this corpse at the feet of the special education system, or Medicare, or SSI. There are plenty of problems with each of these systems for you to investigate in detail. Please, do an exposé or five on how this country doesn’t adequately care for its disabled citizens. But DO NOT state or imply that the natural, logical consequence of these failed systems is child murder. If you want to link this specific tragic event to a larger societal ill, DO critique the ableism in a society where child murderers can find sympathy if their victims meet the right requirements.

DO use the phrase “hate crime” where appropriate. DO NOT FUCKING DARE refer to the murder as the desperate act of a loving parent. DO NOT try to tug the reader’s heartstrings with paragraphs upon paragraphs detailing the murderer’s worries for their child’s future. DO remember that if the murderer was concerned about their child’s future, they would not have prevented their child from having one.

DO remember as you write this article that when a parent murders their child, this is a bad thing.

Autism Awareness Month (Self-Advocacy Remix)

So, April is Autism Awareness Month. This is, unsurprisingly, a month dedicated to making neurotypical people (people who don't have autism or other brain disabilities) aware of autism. Like any other time when a lot of people are talking about autism, the opinions of actual autistic people often get ignored. So here are some things that I, as an autistic person, would like non-autistic people to be aware of during Autism Awareness Month.


1. Discussions about autism should prominently feature the thoughts and opinions of autistic people.
Just like discussions about women should center around women, and not, you know, their husbands, brothers, fathers, boyfriends, and any other men in their lives. If you can't understand why someone who has a particular disability (or any other kind of identity, for that matter) would know more about it than someone who doesn't, then I don't know what to tell you.

If you want to learn more about autism, watch "In My Language." Read "Don't Mourn For Us." Don’t trust people who don’t have the experience of being autistic to tell you all about us.

2. Yes, autistic people have feelings.
Again, I think this is pretty obvious, but a lot of people tend to think we don't feel emotion. So for the record: we have feelings. If we don't express those feelings the same way as other people, that does not mean they are not there. If we don't or can't communicate those feelings to you, that also does not mean they are not there.

3. Autistic people also have empathy.
A lot of people believe that autistic people do not experience empathy for others. In my opinion, this is due to a) prejudice and/or b) confusion about the psychological-technical definition vs. the commonly-used definition of empathy. We don't lack the ability to share other people's pain or happiness, which is how the word "empathy" is commonly used. What many of us do lack is the ability to tell what someone else is thinking or feeling without them telling us. I don't really think this is a big deal because it wouldn't even be a problem if people told other people what they were thinking or feeling instead of trying to make other people figure it out telepathically. This would make communication easier for everyone, including neurotypical folks.

4. Autism isn't [just] a social disability.
It has lots of other components, including cognitive differences, gross and fine motor problems, executive dysfunction, special interests and obsessions, and sensory issues. Focusing on the social problems that autistic people encounter leads to a very inaccurate understanding of autism. It also places too much blame on autistic people for the social ostracism we encounter, a lot of which comes from ableism. For more on the “social skills” issue and why it is messed up, read this.

5. The medical model is not a great way of thinking about autism.
Taking a medical-model approach means viewing autism as a disease in need of a “cure.” According to this view, a person has autism the same way they might have the flu – it’s an illness afflicting them, not an integral part of their personality. This is why people say things like “I want to bring my child out of autism” – because they genuinely believe that inside every autistic person is a normal person waiting to get out.

The reality is that autism doesn’t work that way. It’s built into our brains, and though each person’s brain grows and changes as they get older, we will always be autistic. This is who we are, and a lot of us are just fine with that. Therefore…

6. Having a passionate interest in making sure that no more autistic people exist is actually kind of offensive.
Seriously, think about this one. Think about an identity that you have, something important, something that makes you who you are. Now imagine how you would feel if there were lots of widely-respected groups devoted to making sure that no one who fit that description, no one like you, would ever be born again. This is one of the reasons that so many of us oppose research into the causes of autism: even though finding out more about the human brain is usually really awesome, in this case we fear any research into cause would just lead to a prenatal test for autism, and thence to ability-selective abortions.

7. Passing is not necessarily the best thing for autistic people to do.
A lot of early-intervention therapies for autism focus on getting rid of “weird” autistic behaviors and training children to act more normal. If these children then master the art of conformity and go on to become “indistinguishable” from their neurotypical peers, this is regarded as a great success. But few professionals consider the effect on autistic people of having to hide who we are and present ourselves in a way that feels inauthentic. In fact, though passing may open doors for us that would normally be closed, it often comes at a great psychological cost.

For the most part, people think nothing of asking autistic people to change everything about themselves in order to meet the demands of neurotypical society. But they rarely consider that it is also possible to change those societal demands in order to include autistic people.


I don’t quite understand the meaning of “awareness” in Autism Awareness Month. It’s incredibly rare to meet someone who is unaware of the existence of autism. However, I encounter myths and misinformation about autism wherever I go. I think this is as far as “awareness” can progress when the conversation surrounding a minority group is controlled by the majority. Of course neurotypical people can still contribute valuable insights related to autism – but only we can speak about it from experience. If your goal this April is to become truly aware of the realities of autism, you’re going to have to listen to what we have to say.

April Snark

Julia’s facebook status: April is Autism Awareness Month. I am a person, not a puzzle. It’s not rocket science.

Me: Oh, that explains why I can't find a box cover with your assembly instructions on it. Silly me!

Julia: It's okay. We have poor visual search skills, remember.

Me: Oh, the epic snark makes April bearable.

Julia: I do not snark. I am not capable of wielding language that well. I don't even know what I am saying.

Me: Oh man, you're right! Actually, I'm not even aware of your existence as a distinct human being, right now. Or mine, for that matter. Gee, how am I typing this?

Julia: It's your facilitator, not you. Duh.


Later:

Me: by the way can I put our snarky status comments up on my blog?

Julia: …I was just about to ask you
If I could do that
YES OF COURSE
(autistics don’t realize that we are individuals because we all actually think exactly the same thing!)

Self-injury, complicated realities, and Big Emotions

[TRIGGER WARNING for discussion of self-injury, obviously.]

Tonight, I'm thinking about Sam.

Sam is a real kid, but he isn't really named Sam. I worked with him last summer. He was about eight years old and nonverbal, and he often seemed very frustrated with the language barrier between him and other people. He was small and blond and energetic. Oh, and he bit himself. A lot.

Sam would put his fingers in his mouth and just chew, until layers of skin were missing from the pads of his fingers. The staff worried about infection and permanent damage, and tried their best to discourage this habit. But I was more than worried. Whenever I saw Sam chewing on his fingers, my heart beat faster and my stomach felt sick.

I'd felt this horror before. In high school, I had a few friends who cut or bit or burned themselves, and I found this very difficult to deal with. The same horror that I felt with Sam would rise up inside me, with the same result – I couldn't let go of my Big Emotions and just talk with my friends, person to person, about what they were going through. This meant that I often handled the issue in a really clumsy way. I would assume that if my friends hurt themselves, it meant they were feeling certain things, and I didn't quite understand when they tried to tell me that my assumption was wrong. Worse, I would sometimes get so caught up in my Big Emotions that any discussion of self-injury ended with me crying about my feelings, rather than supporting my friends.

Although Sam and I never had a conversation, the same clumsiness started to creep into my work with him. As I got caught up in my horror, I forgot how to relate to him as another person, and this meant I didn't work with him as well as I could have.

Fortunately, Sam and I had a breakthrough. One day, as we sat in a circle watching some other kids practice their handshakes, Sam was chewing on his fingers. I gently pulled his hand down, and then gave him my hand to play with instead. By that time I'd decided that Sam didn't bite for the sake of biting. He did it because of how it felt – on a sensory or emotional level, I couldn't tell. At any rate, I knew he wasn't going to bite me. And he didn't. He turned my hand over and investigated the cracked spots on my fingers, where I had picked at the skin.

It wasn't until I saw his raw fingertips right up against mine that I realized we might have something in common.

You see, I kind of, sort of, self-injure too. I don't do any of the things that people think of when they hear the phrase "self-injury." I compulsively pick at my skin, sometimes to the point of bleeding, scabbing or scarring. This is essentially a stim – I'm driven to it, and I find it a very absorbing activity. A tendency toward acne and skin irritation facilitates this by always providing me with some blemish to pick at.

I've heard that picking at one's skin is generally thought of as a "secondary behavior" to more serious forms of self-injury such as cutting. For that reason, I'm hesitant to write about myself as someone who self-injures because I don't want to appropriate other people's experience. But thinking that other people's behavior might come from the same need as mine does helps me understand, and even just making the connection helps me interact with people in a more human, less freaked-out way.

A lot of people bring up self-injury when they are talking about how horrible autism is. They'll give examples of autistic people harming themselves, and use those to fuel their argument that autism shouldn't exist. Amanda wrote about that in her excellent post on disability-related logical fallacies (scroll down to "Shocking Behavior Fallacy"). Basically, people take the shock and discomfort that they feel when contemplating self-injury, and turn that into a prejudiced argument.

Well, I have a lot of friends who self-injure sometimes, both autistic and not. I have found that if I want to help them, listening to what they have to say works far better than jumping all over them with my shock and discomfort. What I learned, once I started listening, is that self-injury means different things to each person. Some of my friends do it in a stimmy way. Some of them do it to cope with stress. Some of them do it for the sensory input. Some of them have found ways to do it that they find healthy and safe. Some have done themselves permanent damage. Some have become addicted and are trying to quit. Some of them would like to stop doing it, but can't make it their top priority right now, or don't have the spoons to give it up. Actually, that last one is pretty much how I feel, too.

My point here, if I have a point, is that self-injury is a really complicated issue, both in general and as it relates to autism. It's different for everyone, and no one is helped by that one-size-fits-all, knee-jerk horror that I used to feel whenever the topic came up. Because that horror wasn't about my friends who were self-injuring – it was about me. And viewing someone else through the lens of your self-centered horror is not a good way to help that person.

One day last summer, when my regular attempts to get Sam's hand out of his mouth had failed, I handed him my prized stim toy, a rubber ball filled with red glitter. Watching him turn the ball through his cracked little hands, I felt the same connection to him that I felt when he held my hand in his, touching my raw patches with his own. After that, I knew there were two ways that I could react to Sam. I could recoil from him, scared of all the ways in which he was Other. Or I could hold his hand and remind myself of all the ways that we are the same.

Tragedy Time

[I wrote a slightly less polished version of this in German for class last week]


I’m talking with a friend, and it’s going well. She wants to know what I did over the summer. Because I trust her, I tell her that I volunteered at a program for autistic kids.

Her eyebrows go up like she’s watching a sad movie. “That’s so heavy!” she exclaims. “Was it really hard?”

I don’t know what to tell her. I try to explain that being autistic isn’t a tragedy like people think. I tell her that the kids are still kids, that actually the hardest part was getting along with my co-workers. But I didn’t like her breathy “that’s so heavy!”, so there are some things she doesn’t get to know. She won’t find out that when I was a kid, I went through the same program.

---

A lot of people think that autism is a tragedy. Some say it’s so bad that we have to find the genes, we have to prevent it. They say that autistic kids ruin their parents lives, that autistic adults ruin their own lives. They think that the world would be better without autism. Without us.

---

People say, “You don’t seem disabled.” But they always have an explanation for why I’m so different. “You don’t seem disabled,” they say, “but you do seem kinda weird.” Or “you seem shy.” “I thought that you were just really sheltered.” “I thought that you were from another country.” “I thought you were on drugs.” People make up lots of explanations for me. Autism is never one of them.

Lots of people don’t want to think about disability, about autism. They’re afraid of these things. They think that disability is the same thing as sadness. That autism is so heavy. They don’t want to change their minds.

“You don’t seem disabled.” “I thought it was something else.”

Of course you did.

---

“What did you do over the summer?” another friend asks.

“Not much,” I say. “How about you?”

Disability and Division

One of the attitudes about autism that really bothers me is the idea that autistic people are divided into neat little groups that have nothing to do with each other. Functioning labels – “high-functioning” versus “low-functioning” – exist to separate autistic people into categories. Once these categories have been formed, it’s easy to start generalizing about differences between the groups. Some people might say that “high-functioning” autistics are valuable and “low-functioning” autistics are not. Others might say that “low-functioning” autistics are actually autistic and “high-functioning” autistics are really just normal people who want an excuse to be mean. There’s a lot of prejudice reflected in these categorizations, and no truth.

Curebies – that’s a somewhat pejorative term for neurotypicals who want a cure for autism – are often really into the categorizing thing. If you say to them that as an autistic person, you find the idea of eliminating autism offensive and scary, they will quickly try to divide you from the people that they want to cure. They might say, “You can type/talk/pass/go to school, so you’re not really autistic.” They might say, “Of course we don’t want a cure for people like you; we want a cure for people with more severe autism.” They might say, “How dare you think that you have anything in common with my severely autistic child?”

Answer: I think I have something in common with another autistic person because we are both autistic.

Sadly, some autistic people wouldn’t agree. “Aspie” supremacists protest the removal of Asperger’s syndrome from the DSM because they don’t want to share a diagnosis with people who “might have to wear adult diapers and maybe a head-restraining device.” (Amanda at Ballastexistenz and Bev at Square 8 have both written great posts about why this attitude is such a problem.)

When I say that I identify as autistic, or start talking about disability politics, people sometimes bring up the perceived categories of autism. They ask me, “Do you know what severe autism looks like? What do you have in common with people like that? Why shouldn’t we look for a cure for those people?”

Those people. People like that, as opposed to people like me.

My parents were alarmed when I came home from college with a renewed interest in disability. They’d spent a lot of time teaching me how to appear neurotypical, and here I was talking about the autism spectrum, and identifying with the autistic community. They recommended that I spend the summer working with non-verbal, non-passing autistic people, people who they thought of as entirely different from me. I think they hoped that when I met these people, I would get scared and decide that I didn’t have anything in common with them after all.

It didn’t work.

Earlier this week I was approved to start an ASAN chapter based at my school. I’ve spent the summer with autistic kids, and now I’m looking forward to hanging out with other autistic adults during the school year. One of the things that I really want is for the chapter to be representative of people across the spectrum – verbal and non-verbal, passing and non-passing. I don’t want to stand apart from other autistic adults just because they do things that some neurotypicals think are scary. I don’t want to be another person trying to put as much distance as possible between myself and “those people.” “Those people” bear the brunt of our society’s horrible ideas about autism. “Those people” are just as much a part of self-advocacy as I am.

Those people. People like that. People like me.