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2:49am November 14, 2011

➸ Tickled Pink: Trigger Warning: Violence Against and Abuse of the Disabled

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anautisticpersondrinkstea te ha preguntado:

it’s been hitting me just now how okay it is in our culture to abuse and even kill autistic people. especially if we get out of line. *she was frustrated, it’s okay.* casey anthony got no sympathy for being frustrated. for being stressed out. NT…

A few resources you all may be interested in, regarding severe abuse and murder of autistic people in particular and disabled people in general. I shouldn’t need to warn anyone they’re disturbing.

Murder of Autistics was on a friend’s old website, the link is through the Internet Archive. It’s a list of everyone we could find, as well as sentencing information. It was hell to research. Among other things, this one woman talking all about how mad she was that it took so long for her daughter to suffocate and die. Autism advocacy organizations tend to support the murderers and claim it was all lack of services – even when the child was not living with their parents, and the parents had to go out of their way to get them home to kill them. Incidentally, when people claim in the media that it’s lack of services that causes them to murder disabled people – the murder rate goes up. 

That last bit of information was something I got from Dick Sobsey.  He has a son with a severe intellectual disability, is an educational psychologist, and seems to have devoted his life to studying abuse and murder of disabled people. He has a book with a ton of information if you can get your hands on it for cheap enough – it’s out of print. It’s called Violence and Abuse in the Lives of People with Disabilities:  The End of Silent Acceptance?  He runs the International Coalition on Abuse and Disability. That was a link to their blog. 

Another good book on the topic is called Four Sight. It’s short and by four people, two of them disabled at the time of writing. (Since then, one has become disabled.) Cal Montgomery, Dave Hingsburger, Dick Sobsey, and… someone I forget, it’s late at night. 

And last but not least, the organization Not Dead Yet. Their blog is Not Dead Yet News and Commentary.  Their old website from the Internet Archive is Not Dead Yet. They work against just about every “better off dead” idea out there targeted at disabled people – murder by caregivers, “mercy killing”, euthanasia, and assisted suicide. 

(Which sometimes are all the same thing – the founder of the Hemlock Society, now known as End of Life Choices to sound less menacing… I think he was the one who isolated and abused his disabled wife, told her she was sucking the life out of him, psychologically screwed with her head, and convinced her to kill herself.  Then wrote a book on it.  He tried the same thing on a later wife and she got away and tried to tell the world what he was doing. He used his influence to tell people she was mentally unstable.  The people at the head of most right to die campaigns are really scary. And the Hemlock Society, while claiming only to advocate voluntary euthanasia, have spoken out in support of parents who killed disabled children who were in no position to communicate such a choice. Much like the Autism Society of Canada actually gave a job to a woman who drowned her little boy in a bathtub. The amount of society supporting this stuff is terrifying.)

Anyway, if you’re looking for information those are good sources.