“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.” — Maya Angelou
“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” ― Paulo Freire
Autism Injustice
Challenging the Criminalisation of Autistic People
One of the last sanctioned areas of institutionalised discrimination in the UK.
CONTACT: info@autisminjustice.org
We are a support and campaign group of autistic people and their families/friends, set up to hold Government and other public bodies accountable for injustices and abuses against autistic adults and children
The short term aim of our campaign is discussed here.
Discrimination, injustices and abuses of police power against autistic people are not the result of “a few bad apples”. They result from a systemic culture of indifference, and often corruption, that goes to the very top of all parts of the criminal justice system; a phenomena described in relation to the death of George Floyd as “wickedness in high places”.
Our longer term aims are:
That criminal justice and care professionals follow the laws, guidelines and policy that already exists to safeguard autistic people and fully acknowledge neurodiversity.
That these professionals, and society at large, understand neurodiversity so that autistic people’s appearance and/or behaviour is not misunderstood and misrepresented in a way that discriminates against them and puts them at risk of serious harm.
READ ALL INDIVIDUAL STORIES HERE
(some of whom cannot be identified to protect their anonymity.)
What do we learn from the stories on this site:
“Decision making concerning health care matters should be made by clinically trained professionals and not police officers.” – College of Policing, Authorised Professional Practice: Mental Health
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that Care in the Community, that was suppose to follow the mass closure of Victorian mental asylums in the 1980s, has collapsed;
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that instead of Care in the Community, Victorian mental asylums have now been replaced by private hospitals (some owned by American corporations charging the NHS as much as £730,000 per patient a year) run on prison lines and by people with less skills and training than those who worked in the former Victorian asylums;
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that some autistic people end up criminalised in the actual prison system as a default for effective Community Care;
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that proper Community Care could be provided at a fraction of the cost the NHS wastes on over medicating and assaulting autistic people in private hospitals, or the MoJ spend on criminalising and incarcerating them prisons;
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that aspects of Care in the Community has been replaced by police acting as de-facto front line mental health workers without the training or skills of mental health nurses or social workers who require a minimum 3 year training;
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increasing evidence that the NHS are handing over significant funding directly to the police to carry out safeguarding responsibilities that are properly their own and that of Local Authorities;
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that Government funded watchdogs, such as the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC), are colluding with covering up assaults and Human Rights abuses against autistic people in an attempt to maintain public confidence in the police at the expense of upholding justice;
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that in the process, the lives of autistic people, their families and carers are being torn apart: leaving a trail of physical and psychological damage; ruined reputations and retention of inaccurate and prejudicial data; and often financial ruin in its wake: “no one should have to fight year after year and decade after decade in search of the truth” Theresa May speaking on Hillsborough;
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and finally, that politicians, Select Committee Chairs, and Government Ministers, have failed to acknowledge, scrutinise or address these abuses in spite of them having been continually brought to their attention—successive Health Ministers’ string of broken promises to the parents of autistic people locked up in private hospitals is the most gross example of these failures.
We don’t need new laws, we need those in power to make sure that laws are applied equally to police officers who transgress them (if not more so because they are upholders of the law) as they are to minority groups they frequently target. The stories told on this site are evidence that those in authority are breaching the law in their treatment of autistic people, that lack of accountability is systemic, and that the criminal justice system as a whole (both fragmented yet glued together) is designed to break people down and give up from getting the justice they are entitled to.
COMPLEMENTARY CAMPAIGNS: