AGXStarseed
Well-Known Member
(Not written by me. This article is too long so check the link at the bottom of the page for the full article. For the best treatment that Autism got in 2015, see this article)
JB Reed/Bloomberg
In this post, I listed a few outlets and other resources that offer the best in autism- and disability-related reporting and storytelling, meeting criteria of respect for the people they write about and often for including autistic voices. That was the good.
Today, you get the bad and the ugly. What marks a story about disabled people as bad or ugly? A lack of respect for the people it describes or inclusion of their voices. A reliance on “inspiration porn,” the depiction of disability in a way that makes non-disabled people feel awesome and verklempt for a minute while still not grasping the full humanity of the disabled person. Characterizations of the disabled person as not quite human, as a burden or a monster or someone who, by simply existing with their condition or as they are, had it coming to them. And stereotypes.
The ugliest are the stories about murdered autistic children that seem to excuse the murderer. Those get the number one spot. Some outlets and journalists seem incapable of grasping how differently they write about a non-disabled child who is murdered versus the language they use around a disabled child, especially one with intense disabilities. In the former, the empathy is strong, the loss of the child, the pain the child might have suffered—it’s all palpable. We can all relate. In the latter, you get language that seems forgiving of the parent, the adult who murdered a child, because, well, the child was not normal.
Peter Berns, chief executive of the Arc, is quoted in the NY Times putting the problem as clearly as possible:
“You can find lots of examples of parents or other caretakers killing their loved ones,’’ he says. ‘‘Those are not justifiable homicides. They are the actions of folks who have significant mental-illness problems themselves. They’re criminal. No matter how severe the challenges are, you can’t justify the behavior.’’ He thinks media coverage of these kinds of incidents tends to give the impression that the slaughter of a child with a disability is somehow tolerable. ‘‘There’s too much of a bias that their lives really don’t have value,’’ he says. ‘‘There’s some sense that they’re better dead than living.’’
For those looking for help, a place to start is here.
And then there’s the bad, the treatment of autism as a risk factor for violence and murder, facilitated in subtle ways in news stories and in narratives like this one by Malcolm Gladwell, in which one—one—autistic teen’s obsessions are presented as a frightening generality and once again, autistic people are characterized as lacking empathy and thus capable of onlyGodknowswhat. One of my new year’s wishes would be that we could bury the conventional, shallow, and off-base interpretation of autistic behavior as unempathetic, one that relies on nonautistic translations of autistic communication instead of what autistic people themselves say about empathy.
Gladwell carefully selects only the ripest cherries to bake into his narrative of an autism stereotype pinned to a lack of empathy. He asserts that people with autism spectrum disorders “can stumble into patterns of serious criminality” (as can people of any neurobiology, in fact), claiming that it has “long been an issue in cases involving ASD teenagers and child pornography.”
With this assertion, he cites no data to support the “long” or the “cases,” plural, in a way reminiscent of Temple Grandin’s mother, Eustacia Cutler, who also attempted to link autism and viewing child pornography in a Daily Beast essay while offering no evidence for a risk association. If you’re going to claim a link as serious as this one, anecdata won’t be sufficient. Nor will infantilizing autistic men, claiming without an iota of evidence that “inside, they’re only 10 years old” ergo, they seek out 10-year-olds. Never mind that even people who really are that age are rather well known for seeking out adult magazines to view the adults they depict.
Gladwell offers just one source, attorney Mark Mahoney (not a clinician), who wrote a non-peer-reviewed position paper in 2009 (Gladwell calls it “recent”) that, while in many ways is itself empathetic, is also outdated. Mahoney was involved at the time in the defense of one–one–autistic young man who faced charges of viewing child pornography. He may well be the same one Cutler referenced in her Daily Beast piece.
READ MORE: http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywi...tism-got-in-2015-was-from-malcolm-gladwell/2/
JB Reed/Bloomberg
In this post, I listed a few outlets and other resources that offer the best in autism- and disability-related reporting and storytelling, meeting criteria of respect for the people they write about and often for including autistic voices. That was the good.
Today, you get the bad and the ugly. What marks a story about disabled people as bad or ugly? A lack of respect for the people it describes or inclusion of their voices. A reliance on “inspiration porn,” the depiction of disability in a way that makes non-disabled people feel awesome and verklempt for a minute while still not grasping the full humanity of the disabled person. Characterizations of the disabled person as not quite human, as a burden or a monster or someone who, by simply existing with their condition or as they are, had it coming to them. And stereotypes.
The ugliest are the stories about murdered autistic children that seem to excuse the murderer. Those get the number one spot. Some outlets and journalists seem incapable of grasping how differently they write about a non-disabled child who is murdered versus the language they use around a disabled child, especially one with intense disabilities. In the former, the empathy is strong, the loss of the child, the pain the child might have suffered—it’s all palpable. We can all relate. In the latter, you get language that seems forgiving of the parent, the adult who murdered a child, because, well, the child was not normal.
Peter Berns, chief executive of the Arc, is quoted in the NY Times putting the problem as clearly as possible:
“You can find lots of examples of parents or other caretakers killing their loved ones,’’ he says. ‘‘Those are not justifiable homicides. They are the actions of folks who have significant mental-illness problems themselves. They’re criminal. No matter how severe the challenges are, you can’t justify the behavior.’’ He thinks media coverage of these kinds of incidents tends to give the impression that the slaughter of a child with a disability is somehow tolerable. ‘‘There’s too much of a bias that their lives really don’t have value,’’ he says. ‘‘There’s some sense that they’re better dead than living.’’
For those looking for help, a place to start is here.
And then there’s the bad, the treatment of autism as a risk factor for violence and murder, facilitated in subtle ways in news stories and in narratives like this one by Malcolm Gladwell, in which one—one—autistic teen’s obsessions are presented as a frightening generality and once again, autistic people are characterized as lacking empathy and thus capable of onlyGodknowswhat. One of my new year’s wishes would be that we could bury the conventional, shallow, and off-base interpretation of autistic behavior as unempathetic, one that relies on nonautistic translations of autistic communication instead of what autistic people themselves say about empathy.
Gladwell carefully selects only the ripest cherries to bake into his narrative of an autism stereotype pinned to a lack of empathy. He asserts that people with autism spectrum disorders “can stumble into patterns of serious criminality” (as can people of any neurobiology, in fact), claiming that it has “long been an issue in cases involving ASD teenagers and child pornography.”
With this assertion, he cites no data to support the “long” or the “cases,” plural, in a way reminiscent of Temple Grandin’s mother, Eustacia Cutler, who also attempted to link autism and viewing child pornography in a Daily Beast essay while offering no evidence for a risk association. If you’re going to claim a link as serious as this one, anecdata won’t be sufficient. Nor will infantilizing autistic men, claiming without an iota of evidence that “inside, they’re only 10 years old” ergo, they seek out 10-year-olds. Never mind that even people who really are that age are rather well known for seeking out adult magazines to view the adults they depict.
Gladwell offers just one source, attorney Mark Mahoney (not a clinician), who wrote a non-peer-reviewed position paper in 2009 (Gladwell calls it “recent”) that, while in many ways is itself empathetic, is also outdated. Mahoney was involved at the time in the defense of one–one–autistic young man who faced charges of viewing child pornography. He may well be the same one Cutler referenced in her Daily Beast piece.
READ MORE: http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywi...tism-got-in-2015-was-from-malcolm-gladwell/2/
