Autism and Murder

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2111728/Murder-suicide-mother-shoots-dead-autistic-son-turning-gun-herself.html

Sullivan described Mrs Hodgins [who murder-suicided her son and herself] as someone who 'adored her son. They were very close.'

She added that however parents with autistic children are 'very close to that line of going over the edge.'

So, all parents who consider their children autistic are near-murderers, and that excuses this murder?

Did she really adore her son? Were they close? Or is that a blatant lie to save face for the murderer?

In comments we see further defenses of the murderess (no need to skim, these are simply consecutive comments, from the start, skipping one snarky anti-US comment about gun control):

Society should stop forcing and guilt tripping women to keep disabled feotuses.

i have two beautiful autistic boys and it is hard looking after them and you can some times feel like you are on your own in this. i have also had to go on medication to cope and had crisis out to check on me as i have been so ill from looking after my boys and got to a point i could not cope.

Walk a mile in any mothers (or fathers) shoes before judging on a case like this.

I have an autistic child with moderate learning disabilities. She will never be independent. I've had to take anti-depressants to cope.

An absolute tragedy, I have two autistic sons - and life is not easy.

I can see why parents cant take it anymore.

Very sad. I wish she had gotten help.

the human suffering are just left to fend for themselves. So Sad.

The school which he attended should have provided the parents with a complete list of things that they can do to help ease their mind and try and gain some independence for their son. There are group homes that would have been available to him

This is not the only story like this.

http://www.10news.com/news/30820120/detail.html

San Diego police sources told 10News Corby [who murdered her son] was a stay-at-home mother pushed to the edge handling a difficult child with autism.

Pushed to the edge? Who did that? The police themselves are blaming the child for pushing the mother to murder him.

On this one we get comments like

This is a tragic loss of life. However, I must say that until you have an autistic child you have no idea of how difficult it is to raise an autistic child.

Either parent could have reached out to someone is all that I'm trying to say.

Definitely. There is no shame in asking for help when the meltdowns cause so much stress.

When my son was at his meltdown-iest as a young toddler, I would usually put him in a secure location (like the crib when he was younger, or in his bedroom with his toys) and walk away from the situation until he calmed down and we could start again. This way, I did not feel overwhelmed and he was able to learn self-soothing skills. It is such a shame that this mother apparently snapped and did something this drastic instead of just walking away for a little bit.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/09/mother-killed-autistic-son-trial

A mother strangled her severely autistic son with her coat belt before trying to take her own life, a court has heard.

The prior one also reportedly tried to kill herself after the murder ... but apparently didn't try very hard.

The article is filled with statements excusing, defending and justifying the murderess, like this:

"He was not toilet trained even by the age of 11 and still wore nappies."

But it's lacking condemnation of the murderess.

The court heard Freaney and her husband Richard, a 48-year-old former RAF officer, had been having marital problems. She had moved out of the family home and had been living in hotels for about a month before Glen was killed.

"before Glen was killed"? Before she murdered him! And what do marital problems have to do with anything?

You might expect marital problems to be used to demonstrate she was a bad person who mismanaged her interactions with other people, which fits the fact that she is a murderess. But instead the article uses it to defend her.

No comments on that article. So next (and FYI I'm not being selective here, I just googled and clicked a few and then started pasting awful quotes, which are extremely easy to find):

http://www.thefastertimes.com/specialneeds/2010/02/26/thoughts-on-an-autistic-child’s-murder/

In his press conference, the stunned and shattered father, estranged from his ex-wife and son for the last two years, said he had no idea what provoked his ex-wife to kill their child. “To be honest, she was the most wonderful mother I’ve ever seen.

So, mother murders child. Father defends her as a "the most wonderful mother" to the press. The mothers in that newsroom, who he is saying are worse than murderers, failed to object enough to be noticed by the article.

Her oldest friend, Dr. Marcus Conant said, “She went to clinics all over the country looking for new treatments, grasping at straws

He consider it hopeless because the kid was just too bad. Nothing was going to work. This is excusing murder.

I [as a parent of an autistic child] suspect the whole story evokes an image we recognize at least a little: a mother utterly alone with a child she can’t save.

This blames the child.

Jordan [the murderess] made one message clear: “He was in so much pain. I had to stop it.”

This blames the child too, and even claims he was murdered for his own good. She mixes up her suffering with his own. This is common in psychiatry: parents/relatives/etc are unhappy but everyone refers to this as the child/patient suffering.

Eight is the time you stop putting your energy into fighting the autism that stole your child and start learning to enjoy the child autism has left you with.

This is excusing a murderess by reinterpreting fighting with her child as "fighting the autism", for the child's benefit, even though she made it clear how much she was willing to fight her child literally to death.

This might be what Gigi Jordan never found and what parents of newly diagnosed children should remember. Number One: Don’t go it alone. ... Number Two: ... there will be happy moments.

Shouldn't number one be "don't murder anyone" and number two be "or break any other laws"? Then number three, stop hating and blaming your child, and stop fighting him.

This story has 12 comments. The first 11 are positive -- glowing. The final comment, by an autistic child, says she should have dumped him on other people to take a break instead of murdering him, which implicitly sympathizes with the murderess.

What kind of thinking is behind all this sympathy for murderers of autistic children? Perhaps it's similar to the sympathy for murderers like Jack Kevorkian who kill unwanted persons whom many people, apparently, think ought to be dead.

http://lifewithoutrad.blogspot.com/2009/01/fits.html

When I have a RAD fit I feel MAD. I fake cry and scream. WHEN MY MOM LEAVES THE ROOM I PLAY BUT I AM SCREAMING SO SHE THINKS I'M UPSET. I hurt my Mom's feelings. I want to STOP throwing fits. They are not fun anymore.

This is disturbing because it's dehumanizing a child in the child's own voice, and it's spreading very nasty claims about the child, e.g. that he is a faker who is trying to torture his parents and who hates his own actions and wants to be stopped (implicitly: by force, anything that works to make him stop).

When you think a child is intentionally torturing her mother and plotting against her, and the child hates her actions and wants to stop, but a disease makes her unable to, doesn't that paint a picture of a child who shouldn't exist in the world? Wouldn't it be a mercy if she stopped throwing her fits because she died? Who would cry over that? She'd be glad to stop -- it's what she supposedly asked for -- and her mother would be glad not to be tortured anymore. Right?

But the commenters on his blog see it differently. They don't recognize is as the same kind of thinking behind the murders of autistic children, and the sympathy those murderesses get. They, too, are the kind of people to sympathize with murdering unwanted/disliked/deviant children. So they just say things like:

Oohh! I love naps, too!

I am so impressed

And that's all the comments so I clicked on another post at random and found:

http://lifewithoutrad.blogspot.com/2009/01/being-normal-little-kid.html

I love that you are going to use a lot of tools today.

These sound like great tools to use today, J!

I play time4learning like you do and I have heard you are doing great on it keep up the good work.

I LIKE the pinnk suit idea! Almost as much as the grumpy black balloon idea.

Keep up the good work.

This is deeply wrong and disturbing. And it's directly connected to the murders of autistic children and the sympathy those murderesses get.