ONE

Autistic people are less likely to commit intentional violence than neurotypical people.

Even so, the repetition of autism and violence in the same stories reinforces existing prejudices about autistics and makes people believe we are especially violent. These beliefs are reproduced throughout society, including among people you know. Many people believe autistics are simply an especially more dangerous group than others, and where we have been making progress at convincing others to look at the facts, certain parent and professional groups have successfully claimed that “severely autistic” people, at least, are dangerous.

TWO

Autistic people are more likely to be the targets of intentional violence than neurotypical people. This violence may come from classmates, family members, professionals and the police.

This includes a distressing rate of parents murdering autistic children. The rate is so high that the autistic community has established an annual National Day of Mourning for disabled people killed by family and carers. Rather than blame the aggressors, society tends to blame the targets and suggest that they need to be less autistic in order to avoid violence. When your existence in a family member’s life is regarded as “pre-punishment” for a crime not yet committed against you, the crime begins to seem almost reasonable.

Autistic activists and advocates are thus constantly aware both of the physical dangers inherent in living among neurotypicals and the fact that many neurotypicals regard violence against us as acceptable, if not desirable.

THREE

The level of service provision for autistic children and adults is inadequate. Many in the older generation of autistic activists and advocates grew up without services and many still struggle to exist without them.

We know all too well that a dearth of services is devastating, for us and often those around us. Moreover, autistics are routinely denied access to goods and services available to others, which places an additional burden both on us and on those who pick up the slack.

FOUR

However, the services that are available to autistic people and their families largely focus on control and trying to make autistic people seem less autistic. Or they involve inappropriate “behavioral health” interventions. They may be available only in segregated and/or disability-specific congregate settings.

These services are themselves devastating. The effort at masking autism they demand is partly responsible for the extremely high rates of suicidality and completed suicide in the autistic community, separate from the risk factors that affect both autistics and allistics. There are indications they promote high rates of post-traumatic stress disorders and other mental health issues.

FIVE

One of the consequences of distress in autistics and other people with cognitive and communication-related disabilities is violent or violent-appearing actions related to frustration, trauma, meltdown, and efforts to communicate, and actions intended to harm others (intentional violence) are rarely clearly distinguished from actions which convey distress which can potentially result in inadvertent harm, or even from incontrollable movements relating to dyspraxia, spasms, seizures, etc., which can result in unavoidable harm to others.

The distress caused by coercive services is thus one factor in autistic violence, as are failure to take seriously and learn from the reports of adult autistics with experience being inadvertently “violent” or engaging in violence before they understood the consequences of those acts, and what helped them to address those problems.

The response to this distress tends to be an increase in coercion, up to and including Level III aversives (the most notorious of which is the remote control shock device (still in use at the Judge Rotenberg Center as we await enforcement of a federal ban)), which would be judged as child abuse if parents implemented them themselves.

SIX

One of the consequences of the autism establishment’s relentless socialization on the importance of masking is that parents whose children do not mask effectively are encouraged to see this as a failure and a guarantee of future suffering. Only autistics who approximate typical behavior are seen as capable of having good lives, despite the experience of many adult autistics (but then also, few efforts are made to investigate what autistics who do not mask need to live good lives, and the services these people need are often not provided, too). This contributes to parental distress and a sense that they and their children are doomed, which is a factor in parental violence against autistics.

SEVEN

As part of the traditional services, autistics are encouraged to be docile and compliant and let perceived authority figures, including those they have just met, do what they want. This effectively grooms them for later predators and makes them easier targets of violence, including sexual violence.

EIGHT

When autism, violence and services are linked, there are two ways it is likely to go:

EIGHT-A

The lack of services is seen as a mitigating factor in violence against autistics. This overlooks a number of things.

For one, many of the high-profile cases under discussion involve families who have significantly more services than most, or who turned down services.

For another, many of the families who struggle most with access to services are loving and nurturing.

For a third, intentional violence is a choice. People who feel as if they may commit violence have options. Admittedly, few are very good options, but when the alternative is murder even lousy options like dropping your child at the ER become plausible.

For a fourth, it suggests that having an autistic child is especially burdensome, and the data do not bear that out. There is, for example, a common but false stereotype suggesting that the existence of an autistic child wrecks their parents’ marriages. In fact, autistic children’s families are demographically similar to allistic children’s families. All children involve joys and sorrows, and while the experiences of parents of autistics and neurotypicals are different, parents of autistics who resist the dominant narrative that the only path to happiness is successful mimicry of neurotypicality report similar quality of life to parents of neurotypicals.

EIGHT-B

There is a suggestion that autistics should be controlled better and earlier. This would, in fact, produce some decrease in any behavior that is to be controlled, but it comes at substantial cost down the road. And since mass murder is not caused by autism, it would not address that.

NINE

We know that murder apologism in the form of linking autistic filicide to lack of services increases the filicide rate. We know that moral panics about uncontrolled autistics leads to restrictions on self-determination, integration, civil rights and quality of life. When you promote conversations that link autism, violence and services without considering what you hope to achieve, how best to achieve it, what the risks are, and how best to mitigate them, or if you are unprepared to do the work to balance the benefits and costs of such a conversation, you risk causing harm where you intended to help.

Filicide and other violence against autistic people is one conversation. The services conversation is another. They are both important, but they are separate. Mixed, they can have deadly consequences.

TEN

Autistic people are people. We learn and grow. We love. We experience loneliness. We know joy and despair. We are curious about our world. We can be by turns eager, terrified, and grief-stricken. We don’t always act in ways that neurotypicals and other allistics understand. Our efforts to communicate and socialize are not always understood or welcomed. But we are people. And we are here in the same spaces as everyone else. We see and hear these conversations. We understand them. And they often cause us immense pain, because we see the accretion of prejudice, of fear and hatred, the looming consequences of a public being shaped toward increasing coercion and violence.

That alone is not a reason to not have the conversations. But it is a reason to do it thoughtfully and responsibly.