Thursday, September 24, 2015

Call for Stories: Neighbors Trying to Control Your Disabled Child

Yesterday I published a brief post on Flowers v. Gopal, in which some rich California folks are trying to declare a neighboring autistic child a public nuisance. I'll have more to say about the case, including answering the, "but but he wasn't a nice kid!" comments I'm getting (short version: If he didn't have autism and they wanted to sue, they'd use personal injury law or something, not public nuisance. Public nuisance law presupposed it's uncontrollable. Anyway).

I'd like to collect other stories about the ways that neighbors have tried to control your disabled child through the legal system - either lawsuits, calling the police, or calling child protective services or departments of children and family services (or whatever your state has), or trying to get the school to expel your child because of their behavior to other children, etc. 

You can post them in comments (now with Disqus, which hopefully will work better). You can post them on my Facebook threads. You can send them to me over email. If you send them to me over email, I can keep them confidential.

Please share widely.