Child Abuse Accusations: Enough

I'll admit that I have been known to write long, sarcastic rants bitching people out (sometimes unfairly) if I think they're jerks. Still, there are some very basic lines that I won't cross. Making accusations of child abuse to score points in a debate is one of them.

There has been quite a lot of this from both sides of the biomed debate recently, and it needs to stop. This sort of behavior intimidates decent parents who may not even be involved in the biomed debate but just want to blog about their family's life with an autistic child. They're very likely to have second thoughts about starting (or continuing) a blog when they see threats to report parents for abuse because they use biomed products, or threats to report parents for neglect because they are not using any therapies, or wild accusations that all the parents on one side or the other are beating their kids.

And we need more parent blogs, whether or not they agree with everything we have to say. We need more people writing about the real-life experiences of raising autistic children so that society can see many points of view, not just the grossly distorted propaganda of Autism Speaks and other slimeballs who use images of hopelessness and of child murder as a deliberate tactical ploy to manipulate parents' emotions and exploit them financially.

What's more, I really hope that the child abuse accusations are just idle rants and that no one has been following through on threats to call child protective agencies. You know what happens when an autistic child gets put in foster care while suspicions of abuse or neglect are investigated? Marcus Fiesel happens. Routine drugging to make a child docile happens. About 85 percent of children in foster care in the United States are on some sort of psychiatric drug, sometimes multiple drugs (and by the way, this has nothing to do with the recent increase in the number of children identified as autistic; it's been like that for decades). Physical and sexual abuse by other foster children with serious emotional problems can happen, even when the foster parents are decent and responsible. A news article that I read in the wake of the Marcus Fiesel murder cited a research study showing that children who have been in foster care have a higher rate of post-traumatic stress disorder than combat veterans.

I don't care how much you hate a certain parent's opinions, think he's a total asshole, or believe that his kid would be better off with almost anyone but him. Unless you know that his kid is in actual danger (and you don't, because all you've seen is a lot of Internet hot air, which tells you almost nothing about how he treats his kid in real life) you have no business making a child abuse report that could result in the kid being unnecessarily placed in foster care. Nobody has the right to put an innocent child at risk because of a personal vendetta against the parent. Not ever.