3:58pm June 19, 2014

➸ This Way of Life: Murder of Autistics (Autistic History)

Every kind of content warning possible for murder of disabled people, if you click on the above link (which goes to an archived copy of the website) or read this post.

But it scares me how fast people have forgotten this page.

Including people who have compiled a lot of their sources from that page originally. Who have forgotten this page, or at least not mentInioned it.

This page was put together by Joel Smith. He and I did 100% of the research involved. Nobody helped us. Lots of people hindered us. This research involved trawling through years of horrible, gruesome news stories and cataloguing everything about them. Hunting down detailed information about the victims, and the perpetrators, and exactly what was done to them. Details you wouldn’t want to know. Details that you would vomit if you knew. And then making this list in remembrance because we thought that it mattered that much.

There are some things where I am ambivalent, or don’t even care, about who remembers who coined a phrase, who did certain work. But I care very deeply that in all the latest incarnations of lists like this one, Joel and I are not credited for the work we did or the flaming we suffered. Sometimes we had families of the murdered children writing to us saying we didn’t understand, that if we did understand we’d side with the murderers. I’m sure if you’ve written such a list yourself, you’ve eventually gotten similar stuff. But it’s horrible. And we went through horrible things on every possible level to put this together. And it would be nice if somewhere, even in a tiny tiny corner somewhere, when these lists are being discussed, someone said that Joel Smith did it first with help from Mel Baggs. Because this is one area where I can say that not only did our work matter, but the suffering that went into that work mattered as well.

It was like creating a graveyard. An online graveyard. For people that we knew, could just as well have been us. For people we cared so deeply about that we lost sleep over their stories. We had to read detailed descriptions of mothers who tried to kill their kids in three different ways, over and over it not working, begging their kids to just let go and die already, and when the kid was finally dead, the society rallied around the murderer and got them not a sentence for murder but a suspended sentence for manslaughter.

Understand also that neither Joel nor I believe that the criminal justice system actually provides justice. But it is meaningful — and it can’t not be meaningful — the discrepancy between sentencing for parents who murder nondisabled children, and parents who murder disabled children. And it’s meaningful that our societies rally around these murderers. And it’s meaningful that this is, as far as we can detect, a worldwide phenomenon — limited by our own linguistic abilities, unfortunately, but we have tried to look into it as far as we can, and we can’t find a country where it’s better for disabled children who have been murdered by parents and caregivers.

I am willing to bet that any largely-disseminated list of autistic people murdered by parents and caregivers, ties back to this list in some way, because we were the first people to do it, and for many long years we were the only people doing it. I don’t know how Joel feels, and I don’t often demand credit even when I want credit. But this is something where I feel very strongly that Joel Smith and Mel Baggs should be names associated with any subsequent lists, as the people who created the first master list, which was the most horrible labor of intense love and grief that either of us has ever experienced. This isn’t just an article we churned out. This was people’s lives, one by one, overwhelming us some days to the point where we could barely communicate with each other about the matter. This was people who could’ve been us, could’ve been our closest friends in the world, could’ve been our family members, could’ve been our loved ones, could’ve been our significant others. Could still be us.

I’m sure that anyone who has ever worked on a list like this knows the feeling. And I’m sure that nobody meant to leave us out. And I’m sure people will understand why we might want to have even a small bit of credit given to us for being the first to put something like this out there.

The earliest archived edition of this page I can find (on an earlier version of the website) is for April 10, 2003. But it might go back further than that. That’s only when the Wayback Machine first found it. But I can remember clearly the day it went up. I can remember the work that went into the first version. I can remember the work that went into continuing it. Every time we heard of a new murder, past or present, it was “oh God it’s another one, please no”. And then we’d have to learn all we could about it. Have to. Because we were the ones making the only existing memorial to murdered autistic people. There was nobody else. It was do it, or leave them unremembered.

And that’s why credit can matter. I feel stupid asking for credit for the both of us, I feel selfish (especially given the focus is and always should be the people who were murdered), and yet I also feel justified, given what we went through to put this together. Joel and I have both survived attempts on our lives. This is major PTSD territory. That we did it anyway means how much we cared. I know there are new lists today. I know they are somewhat different. But I think somehow, this old list needs to be remembered and honored for what it was (including the source of many names and information for the new lists), including credit to the two people who made it.

Otherwise it feels to me like one more piece of history disappearing into the dust, and two more people’s work forgotten. Nobody was compiling this kind of a list, in 2003. Except us. There were a lot of firsts for the autistic community, in the decades between 1985-2005, and this may not have been one of the more pleasant one, but it happened. And those firsts have a habit of vanishing into everyone’s collective memory black hole after only a few short years.