Don't Normalize Murder: Dallas Filicide

The Dallas Morning News has a piece on parents, as they age, contemplating murdering their adult kids. Explaining away these murders as understandable, however, promotes the notion that it's a reasonable act. The risk of contagion with such reporting is high.

Reporters: read ASAN's anti-filicide kit before writing about filicide, please. And if you are going to write about the murders of disabled people talk to the experts on preventing the murders of disabled people (i.e. ASAN is a good start). Talk to disabled people. The story above quotes a parent who runs an organization, which is fine I guess, but talk to disabled people.

Bad Disability Journalism: Filicide Stories

Here are two stories recently on murder and attempted murder of disabled children. They follow the same pattern I discussed here in which the murderer is praised as a kind caregiver who inexplicably murdered their children/attempted to murder. No disabled people are quoted. We learn little or nothing about the victim of violence, their story erased. The event is treated as isolated, rather than as part of a pattern (it happens about once a week).

• ABC News says "overwhelmed" mom tried to behead son.
• WaPo says "doting grandmother" who spent years caring for kids murdered her granddaughter. Worse, what we learn about a surviving child in the second paragraph is that he has incontinence. I should not know anything about this teenager's bathroom support needs unless I am in the position of needing to assist him. 

Reporters reporting on violence against people with disabilities should reach out to leaders in the disability community with expertise on violence. This is journalism 101. More broadly, tell victims' stories.

Crime reporting is a highly specific beat. A crime reporter is going to cover violence in lots of different communities. I believe, though, that they generally do better in other communities where they see patterns and talk to local members of those communities. For disability, each murder is treated as a one-off tragedy in which the killer's "hardship" narrative takes prominence over the victim's story.

For more, see Autistic Self Advocacy Network's anti-filicide toolkit.

Murder and Disability

Two pieces:

- Murder in Australia, with the killer treated sympathetically because the victims were disabled children.

- A Jewish disabled person writes about Aktion T4, when the Nazis killed disabled people before they got around to killing others. This struck me especially hard:

A reading of Hoche and Binding’s “Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life” shows the similarity between what they said and what exponents of practical ethics, such as Peter Singer, say about the disabled today. As recently as 2015, Singer, talking with the radio host Aaron Klein on his show, said, “I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.”

Murder of Disabled Family Members

1) A man in PA killed his wife and daughter, then himself. "Some said they had never seen Mary Scully or her adult daughter, who was disabled." TW: Filicide.https://t.co/CXayRz9NBW

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) November 28, 2017

This tweet is a small thread of resources on filicide in response to a recent story from PA. In Chicago, of course, folks are discussing the suicide of a woman who murdered her autistic son. I choose not to link to her story, as the press coverage is full of sympathy for her.

Let's instead think about a society so ableist in which a disabled adult and her mother are "never seen."

Savannah Leckie

Savannah Leckie, an autistic teenager, seems to have been murdered by her mother. The autistic community, led by ASAN, has long sought victim-centered narratives when such murders happen. This, from Ozark County Times, tells us about Savannah.

Over the next few weeks, we will see increasing discussion of the killer's mental health. We won't see local reporters calling ASAN (or other good groups) for comment, linking Leckie's death to the pattern of murders of disabled people by their caregivers, etc.

But at least there's one story that really mourns the human we've lost. It's something on this bitter morning.

Disability Day of Mourning - Washington D.C. - 2017

“Katherine Lavoie spent the last moments of her life with her husband pointing a gun at her. Olivia Clarence was four years old, and the last thing that will ever happen to her was her mother cutting off her air. Olivia’s brothers, Ben and Max, ended their lives the same way. They were three years old.”

Julia Bascom, executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, reads these words from a sheet of paper that she holds in steady hands. Her voice is quiet, but it carries through the meeting room of the National Transitions Youth Center, a small office building near Foggy Bottom in Washington, D.C. Bascom seems tall in her black dress, almost ministerial, as she leads a small congregation of mourners in a ritual of shared grief. It’s March 1st, 2017, the Disability Day of Mourning, and we’re about to recite the names of the dead.

I wrote for Pacific Standard on murder of disabled people and the way the victims are erased from their own stories, based on my visit to DC and the Disability Day of Mourning this year, plus the Ruderman Foundation white paper on filicide.

Coverage: Ruderman Report on Media and Filicide

Two stories this week on the Ruderman Family Foundation report on the media coverage of filicide of disabled people. The report, for which I was the lead author, found:

Approximately once a week, a person with a disability is murdered by a family member or caregiver. We have found that when these murders are covered, they are often called “mercy killings” which perpetuates the stigma and myth that the life of a person with a disability is not worth living and that it is a kind deed to end such a life. Such coverage simply must stop. It is dehumanizing and dangerously continues to stigmatize disability. We’ve found that the voices of the victims are nearly always erased to favor the perspectives of the perpetrators. This too must stop.

A disabled person is killed by their caregiver at least once a week. There are patterns in these cases. There are patterns in how we talk about them.

David Lohr, senior crime reporter for Huffington Post wrote "How Murder Victims with Disabilities get Blamed for their own Deaths." He did his own reporting on the Alex Spourdalakis case (a Chicagoland murder, with which we also lead the white paper) and framed the findings this way:

The study found that taking a life ― something typically not tolerated in society ― is sometimes treated as acceptable in the justice system when the victim had a disability. Killers are commonly portrayed as angelic caretakers who killed out of mercy, or who could no longer bear the burden and snapped. Those perpetrators often face less than vigorous prosecution, the study found.

“The message is that murder is a reasonable response to disability, and courts will treat you lightly if you murder a disabled child, parent or spouse,” David Perry, a disability rights activist and author of the Ruderman report, told The Huffington Post.

Vilissa Thompson, an advocate and licensed master social worker from Winnsboro, South Carolina, said there is an obvious discrepancy in how the law and the public treat parents and caregivers accused of killing someone in their care.

“When someone, especially a child, is killed, it is called a hideous crime, and there is an urgency to punish the person responsible,” said Thompson, a contributor to the Ruderman report who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease. “But when it comes to the disabled kids, there is this gross level of excusing that behavior.”

In Paste, Annamarya Scaccia summarized the report, then published a Q&A with me.

Paste: That was the one thing that stood out to me—that none of the reporters had any thought to contact a person with a disability.

Perry: It goes against basic journalistic practices. And I think it’s because most journalists don’t see disabled people as an identity group and the disability rights community as a group you would reach out to. Journalists are just not instinctively picking up the phone and calling the Autistic Self Advocacy Network or the Arc or United Cerebral Palsy or whoever it might be. That needs to become an instinct for journalists across the country.

This is one of the lines I keep repeating. Journalists know how to report. We are supposed to go to all sides for comments and framing, but when it comes to disability, that happens pretty rarely.

Grateful to these reporters for covering our study. More work ahead!

Murder Responses: Swans vs Disabled Human

A terrible crime has been perpetrated in Michigan, and the comment thread is outraged. A family of swans was run over.

Meanwhile, a Michigan woman killed her disabled son (he had cerebral palsy), and the comment thread opened with, "this is wong, but understandable" and "she must have cracked under the strain." It improved thanks to being shared on Twitter and various other folks entering the thread, but the initial take is telling.

The journalism here (a topic I'm studying for a White Paper) is fine. Reporting is neutral. But the comments become a locus for revealing the ways that disabled lives are so easily devalued.