Susan Moreno of MAAP, Cassandra Cult Recruiter

Now that the hate group FAAAS has been quite thoroughly exposed on numerous Internet sites with regard to its nasty claim that autistics are unfit for family life, there hasn't been much obvious activity from its supporters in recent months. Unfortunately, that does not mean Cassandra adherents in the United States have come to their senses; it simply means that their propaganda efforts have gone underground, so to speak.

A conference entitled Knowledge is Power will be presented on October 10-11 in Kansas City by MAAP Services and the Autism Asperger Publishing Company. One of the scheduled activities is a "spouse workshop" by Susan Moreno, director of MAAP, and consultant Julie Donnelly. Autistic individuals will be excluded from this workshop, according to its description, so that "candid discussions" can take place.

Presumably Ms. Moreno thought that by avoiding any mention of Cassandra or Maxine Aston or FAAAS in the conference materials, she could entice unsuspecting spouses to sit through a presentation of their repulsive ideology, while also flying under the bloggers' radar. However, as we all know, a person's associations can be quickly searched with a few keystrokes. Take a look at this page on the FAAAS website detailing the content of a previous Moreno-led spouse workshop (as usual, it's a partial URL because I don't give active links to their hate site).

faaas.org/doc.php?40,288

After claiming that autistic people commonly cause our spouses to suffer "embarrassment and isolation," the description of the previous workshop went on to state explicitly that it was a Cassandra presentation:


Cassandra Syndrome, Cassandra Affective Disorder or the Cassandra Phenomenon was named to describe the symptoms of stress (low self esteem, depression, anxiety, often seen in partners of individuals with an autism spectrum disorder. Other symptoms partners may experience include lethargy, loss of libido, changes in mood and a weaken immune system. CAD was named after a mythical princess who was granted the gift of prophecy but cursed with the fact that no one would believe her even though she was right. Experts such as Maxine Aston feel it is brought on by emotional deprivation.

After highlighting the above issues in the presentation successful techniques and strategies to address these issues will be presented…


I've noticed that recruiters for the Cassandra cult always follow the same basic script. First, they lure non-spectrum partners into relationship workshops from which the autistic partner is excluded; after that, they lead a group whinefest complaining about all the faults, real and imagined, of autistic partners; and then they finish the presentation with a hard sell for Cassandra books and future workshops, which they claim are absolutely essential to recovering from the hideous depression and misery caused by living with an autistic partner. Never mind the pesky little detail that their marks weren't feeling particularly depressed or miserable before the Cassandra gang got them in its clutches.

This is pretty much the same modus operandi followed by exploitative cults of all sorts. Cult indoctrination tactics generally begin with deception of the potential recruit, such as by describing a workshop or other presentation in very bland and innocuous terms, so that he or she doesn't suspect there is anything out of the ordinary going on. The next step is isolating the person from family members, such as by holding an event in an out-of-the-way location where telephone use is not allowed, or (as with Susan Moreno's workshop) by specifying that family members may not attend. The group leader then encourages recruits to vent about their problems, for which the cult's ideology is presented as the only real solution, while becoming increasingly emotional about it. Because of the social pressure to agree with the group, the highly charged emotional language, and the isolation from family, the recruits end up being much more vulnerable to the cult's sales pitch than they might otherwise have been.

The way to counteract such groups' influence is, of course, to shine a very bright spotlight on their devious schemes and make those cockroaches go scuttling for cover. To any of my readers who might have been thinking about attending the conference, I suggest that you stay away; MAAP doesn't deserve a penny of your money. If you have a friend or family member who is considering going, warn them about the spouse workshop. And if you have already registered or have a specific reason to attend, well, then, you may want to stop by the spouse workshop for a few minutes and give Susan Moreno and Julie Donnelly some candid discussions of quite another sort.

After all… knowledge is power.

A Brief History of Cassandra

As Tony Attwood begins his US speaking tour at a conference in Hartford, Connecticut, where he is scheduled to appear tomorrow, autistic rights advocates from ASAN New England are making it clear that the bogus concept of "Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder" is discrimination based entirely on neurology and that the autistic community cannot stand for that.

Because some people are still wondering what the controversy is about, I'm providing a brief explanation of the history and nature of this purported disorder, directly from a primary source: The Asperger Couple's Workbook (Maxine Aston, Tony Attwood; Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009).

Chapter 9 of the book (viewable in part through Google Books) explains that the term "Cassandra" comes from a Greek myth and refers to a prophet who was cursed with never being believed. You can find more information here about the Cassandra story and the actual characteristics that were attributed to Cassandra and Apollo in classical mythology. I've quoted a short excerpt (which is fair use under US copyright law) from the book below:


"This feeling of not being believed is typical of how many NTs feel when living with a person with undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome.

Over the years the terminology for the effect of Cassandra has changed. Before Cassandra it was referred to as the mirror syndrome by the Families of Adults Affected by Asperger Syndrome (FAAAS) and then referred to as the Cassandra phenomenon (Rodman 2003). Terminology has since progressed from Cassandra affective disorder and now more appropriately Cassandra affective. The Cassandra phenomenon was first made public at the Families of Adults Affected by Asperger Syndrome (FAAAS) conference in 2003 as Cassandra affective disorder (CAD) (Aston 2003b) and finally Cassandra affective deprivation disorder (CADD) (Aston 2007).

…CADD is the result of emotional deprivation due to the fact that one partner, affected by Asperger syndrome, is unable to provide the emotional support the NT partner needs to stay healthy within the relationship."


It bears repeating that no legitimate research has ever been conducted to support "Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder." Maxine Aston simply made it up. Although it's likely that she never would have gotten into print and would have been widely dismissed as a crank if she had made such claims on her own, her association with Tony Attwood over the years has enabled her to feed off his professional reputation and thereby gain an appearance of credibility.

And sadly, judging by Attwood's continued unwillingness to repudiate the crankery and bigotry of Aston and FAAAS, it seems he's a willing participant in their schemes.

Tony Attwood FAAAS Poetry Slam

There has been a lot of discussion on Wrong Planet and other sites about ASAN's petition calling on Tony Attwood to stop associating with FAAAS and Maxine Aston, to which Attwood replied by attempting to defend those associations via a form letter on the FAAAS website and other places. ASAN reposted and critiqued the letter, and by now this online war of words has been going on for two months. Attwood still hasn't seen fit to simply pick up the phone and call Ari Ne'eman, which gives the rather unfortunate impression that he can't bring himself to speak with a self-advocate as an equal.

As several people have pointed out, the petition was never intended as a personal attack on Tony Attwood, but as a constructive criticism. To be clear, my posting on the subject isn't motivated by any grudge either; in fact, I have to give him credit for his high level of energy, chutzpah, and crowd-pleasing skills. He is a masterful promoter. Because he has been so successful in positioning himself as a trusted figure in our community, however, I feel very strongly that Attwood has an ethical responsibility not to abuse that trust by associating with those who would harm our community.

The content of his website clearly reveals that such associations are still ongoing. As of today, a Google search showed 39 results for FAAAS on Tony Attwood's website. On one of his pages, Attwood touts an anthology of horrid poetry and essays called "The Book of FAAAS," which includes an article comparing autistics to prickly cacti and their non-autistic partners to wilting affection-starved roses. I'm not going to quote from it, out of consideration for readers who might not have a barf bag handy.

But it got me thinking, why should FAAAS have a monopoly on bad writing and ridiculous analogies? As I see it, we should create our own collection of sorta kinda poetic stuff making clear what we think of the situation. Feel free to post 'em in the comments, dear readers. Literary talent is definitely not required. Here's my contribution to get things started:

SKUNK CABBAGE

In yonder swamp skunk cabbage grows,
With shiny leaves of gleaming green.
The stench makes plain it's not a rose,
No matter how much it may preen.
Its foul reek assails the nose,
And many voices call for change.
Will Attwood listen? No one knows.
His lack of action's mighty strange.

FAAAS Social Work Seminars: Lessons in Hate

Before I slog once again into the fetid swamp that is FAAAS, I'm first going to mention a recent advocacy success in Maryland, where new legislation has been passed to safeguard the rights of citizens with disabilities regarding child custody and adoption proceedings. The fact that a person has a disability, whether mental or physical, now cannot be a reason for finding that the person is unable to care for a child, in the absence of specific evidence relevant to the family's circumstances and the child's best interests.

Meanwhile, in the less enlightened state of Massachusetts, which is ground zero for the hatred and destruction of families wrought by FAAAS, true believers in Maxine Aston's Cassandra cult are teaching continuing education seminars that indoctrinate social workers to treat autistics as defective and unfit to live in families. FAAAS member Harriet Simons regularly teaches such seminars at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, such as this course in April. A similar program was presented in December by Grace Myhill, a social worker who is currently leading Aston-based support groups that are, to my great disgust, sponsored by the Asperger's Association of New England (AANE). Here's a link to the program's ugly content, from which I quote briefly:


"When a woman attempts to work through a problem in the relationship, the man with AS may respond to his partner’s feedback, expectations, requests or demands with denial, withdrawal, or even verbal or physical abuse. His rage or depression, problems with stable employment, or limited ability to parent then become additional stressors for the wife."


Nasty stereotypes like this have a long history of leading to actual discrimination against people with disabilities, including the serious issue of discriminatory treatment in child custody matters that the Maryland law addressed. Those who call themselves autism advocates while endangering our families by promoting the bigoted views of FAAAS and Maxine Aston in their associations, such as Dania Jekel of AANE and Stephen Shore (who recently wrote the foreword for Kathy Marshack's repulsive book that compares a relationship with an autistic person to living in prison, a war zone, and "a black hole of nothingness"), should be aware that they do so at the risk of losing whatever respect they might have had in our community.


Edit, June 4: I have just been informed that an Australian law firm, LAC Lawyers, has a page on its website advertising family law services "for people who have been affected by someone with Asperger's" and quoting extensively from the Potential for Abuse article that was recently removed from the ASPIA website in response to international condemnation.

http://www.laclawyers.com.au/legal/Asperger%27s-Syndrome.aspx

To take action against this blatant appeal to prejudice and disability stereotyping, I've provided a link to a site that explains how to file professional disciplinary complaints against lawyers in New South Wales.

Cassandra's Impact on Autistic Victims of Domestic Violence

Much of the criticism surrounding the faux Cassandra disorder invented by Maxine Aston, wherein she claims that being in a romantic relationship with an autistic person causes psychological harm to a non-autistic partner, has focused on the efforts of associated hate groups such as FAAAS to stereotype autistics as violent and unfit for family life. This false portrayal reflects a longstanding prejudice, recently addressed by ASAN President Ari Ne'eman, that people with disabilities are "inherently unfit as spouses or parents." To the extent this baseless prejudice is given credence by family law judges and social workers, it endangers the basic human right to marry and raise children. I received an e-mail just this morning, discussing the Cassandra scam and the harm caused by disability stereotypes, from a woman who wrote that "until I was 24 I wouldn't have been allowed to get married in many states in the USA. Why? Because I am epileptic."

Such stereotypes can be especially dangerous to autistic victims of domestic violence. Like other people with disabilities, many autistic people who are victims of abusive relationships are particularly vulnerable and may have great difficulty escaping from a life-threatening situation. If, because of the bigoted stereotype that the autistic partner is always to blame for family problems, an abused autistic's cries for help go unanswered, this could result in her death at the hands of her abuser. The feminist disability rights group F.R.I.D.A. points out that domestic violence against women with disabilities is widespread and that much more action needs to be taken to stop it. (For those of my readers who are in Illinois, there will be a F.R.I.D.A. rally at the State Capitol in Springfield on May 22, 2009, from 1:00 to 5:00 PM, addressing the issue of domestic violence against women with disabilities; please consider attending the rally to show your support if you can do so.)

I have reprinted below, with permission, a statement from an autistic woman who wrote of her struggle to escape a violent marriage and how difficult it was for her to explain the abuse to others. Fortunately, she was able to escape safely and to find people to help her. Others in her situation have not been so lucky.


I am having a very hard time explaining why I stayed so long, etc., because NTs do not seem to understand why a person with my apparent intelligence believed so many lies. I know this is a common thing among battered women, but trying to explain how an abuser would manipulate an intelligent woman's gullibility and social anxiety so well is very hard any time I have to deal with anyone who is not experienced with autistics or battered women in general. He is already using my inability to process information quickly to manipulate the court process by changing potential settlements at the last minute, while we are in court, so that I can't comprehend them in a meaningful way while I am on a time limit to sign. I have a very good attorney (legal aid turned us down so I had to pay for my own which is going to be very problematic financially since having a very good one is crucial and not cheap). We are very lucky to have one CPS finding against him and irrefutable evidence of infidelity (which is more useful than undocumented testimony about physical abuse, since he is of course lying about the extent of the abuse and trying to take advantage of the fact that the children are too young to go to court).

I am astounded by the lack of information on abuse against autistic partners right now and so saddened by the whole "cassandra" myth. My husband used my quirks as excuses for beating and cheating on me although from his perspective, having a wife who was afraid of conflict, absolutely faithful, very easy to lie to, easy to isolate so that no one else would know about the abuse and report it, and unable to conceal anything (including hidden bank accounts that I tried unsuccessfully to use to get out), was a huge plus. I have a friend who is a former attorney and battered women's advocate and is trying to help me communicate with my lawyer right now, which has been very difficult so far, but I am still very scared. Thankfully we have already gotten an agreement for no unsupervised visitation but it will still be very hard to endure the rest of the proceedings which may last a year or more.

The thing that gets me is that I know that as typical as I am of women on the spectrum in so many ways, I am sure there are a lot of people in my position who are suffering in silence. I was lucky that there are two staff members at the shelter with autistic family members who have helped advocate for me when the group living situation has become unbearable, but I don't know how it is in other shelters and suspect many other autistics in similar situations may not be so lucky.

I will have to look for that book next time I am at the library. It was a Gavin De Becker book that finally helped me read the nonverbal signs well enough to recognize the risk and get out quickly the day that I am sure I would have ended up dead or too injured to get the kids out in time. I continue to think the fact that I managed to find homes for the pets, get access to the car (I have never been allowed to have my own), and get the kids out of the house in less than two hours that day was a miracle.


Edit, June 27: Here is a link to a post by chaoticidealism on this topic, Cassandra's Opposite.

Tony Attwood and Isabelle Hénault, the World Is Watching

Clinical psychologists Tony Attwood and Isabelle Hénault have been very successful in book sales, speaking tours, and other presentations regarding autism. Unfortunately, they also are very closely associated with both Maxine Aston, inventor of the bogus Cassandra disorder, and the infamous Massachusetts hate group FAAAS, which has repeatedly claimed that autistics are violent by nature and abuse their family members. Both Attwood and Hénault are members of FAAAS' professional advisory board and presented at FAAAS conferences for several years beginning in 2000.


Conference photo, a.k.a. Tony Attwood's Hall of Shame

(l-r: Karen Rodman of FAAAS, Hénault, Attwood, Aston)


In March, both Attwood and Hénault gave presentations at a conference in Sydney, Australia, sponsored by a group called ASPIA, which claims to be a support group for people involved in relationships with autistics. Sound familiar? Yup, it's another hate group peddling the same old garbage. I posted a blog entry last month illustrating the hypocrisy, bigotry, and total lack of ethics in such groups and how they destroy relationships. Nonetheless, Attwood and Hénault have continued to appear at these events, no doubt because their association with the Cassandra cult has been very lucrative over the years. The Cassandra groups have provided them with buyers for their books, conference fee money, and increased name recognition. In return, the presence of credentialed psychologists at these events has given the Cassandra cultists an appearance of legitimacy, which has helped them to suck in new converts. Seems like a win-win situation—except for bothersome little details like integrity, decency, and the human rights of autistics and people with disabilities.

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has posted an online petition calling on Tony Attwood and Isabelle Hénault to renounce their Aston/FAAAS/ASPIA connections and to make a public apology to the autistic community, as well as to the cross-disability community regarding FAAAS' insinuations that all people with neurological disabilities are likely to be abusive. This is not the first time members of our community have raised the issue with Attwood and Hénault. Several concerned people have tried to discuss it with them in private. However, their usual mode of response has been to make nice soothing sounds, wait for the pesky autistics to go away, and then go right back to consorting with Aston and FAAAS. Not surprising, given Tony Attwood's history of minstrel show attitudes toward autistics. Now that it is all out in the open, we'll see if they respond in a more meaningful way.

I have stated before on this blog that minority communities, such as the autistic community, have both the right and the responsibility to police themselves and to ensure that those who seek to exploit their people under the guise of providing services are not allowed to do so. As we have seen with other civil rights movements, minority groups who struggle against intolerance can exert significant economic power by refusing to patronize vendors who knowingly spread intolerance. When professionals claim to have expertise in meeting the needs of the community's members, but are in fact spreading harmful stereotypes for financial gain, the community would be well within its rights to say to them: You're fired. Whether that happens with Attwood and Hénault will depend on their willingness, now that their unsavory associations have become widely known, to change their ways and make a genuine apology for the harm caused by their associations.

Maxine Aston's Cassandra Disorder Scam

Have you ever thought about how much fun it would be to invent a bogus disorder and to rake in the money from persuading gullible people that they were in dire need of your expertise and therapy? No, me neither. Most of us are ethical enough so that we would never consider such a thing. But Maxine Aston, notorious inventor of "Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder," evidently has no such qualms.

She was working as a marriage and relationship counselor in the late 1990s when she became aware of the new autism spectrum diagnostic categories and started thinking about how she could exploit that opportunity. There was just one little obstacle in the way of her scheming, which was her lack of autism-related experience. So she cooked up a clever strategy: Provide services to couples in which one partner had an Asperger diagnosis, and then leverage that experience into book contracts and a skillfully crafted public image as an Asperger expert.

Unfortunately, she didn't stop there. She also identified another potentially lucrative market: Women who recently had divorced or were divorcing Aspie husbands, and who would lap up a sympathetic counselor's assurances that they were not to blame for the divorce because autistic men were neurologically defective and unfit for marriage. To cover this blatantly unethical prejudice with a veneer of respectability, Aston proceeded to create "Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder," which she defined as a depressive condition caused by being in a relationship with an autistic person.

This so-called "disorder" has no medical or scientific legitimacy whatsoever. No professional association has recognized it, and there are no peer-reviewed studies of it. Aston lifted the "symptoms" straight out of the diagnostic criteria for Seasonal Affective Disorder. Although she maintains what she calls a research page on her website (maxineaston.co.uk/research), it contains only simple questionnaires that show no indication of compliance with institutional review procedures. Aston clearly lacks experience conducting formal research studies in an academic setting and is grossly unqualified to hold herself out as a psychological scientist.

Her shameless peddling of pseudoscientific rubbish and fleecing of emotionally vulnerable divorcees by purporting to diagnose them with a nonexistent disorder would be bad enough in itself, but that's not all. Aston has descended even farther into the depths of the ethical abyss through her long-term association with the Massachusetts hate group FAAAS, which repeatedly has urged social workers and family court judges to discriminate against autistic parents in child custody proceedings. Aston had full knowledge of this despicable agenda from the start, and she proudly touts her association with FAAAS on her website.

Although she asserts that as a member of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, she abides by its code of ethics and professional conduct, a quick look at BACP's ethical code suggests otherwise. Knowingly inciting disability prejudice and discrimination clearly violates BACP's prohibition against bias:


"Practitioners should not allow their professional relationships with clients to be prejudiced by any personal views they may hold about lifestyle, gender, age, disability, race, sexual orientation, beliefs or culture."


Tossing together a few half-baked questionnaires, which was apparently done with complete disregard for the institutional review process and the rights of the study subjects, can hardly be said to meet BACP's requirement of conducting sound research:


"All research should be undertaken with rigorous attentiveness to the quality and integrity both of the research itself and of the dissemination of the results of the research."


And I won't even bother to list all the ethical rules violated by concocting and profiting from a phony disorder, as that might take all day. Frankly, I find it quite astounding that Maxine Aston hasn't yet been brought up on unprofessional conduct charges.

FAAAS, Karen Rodman, and the Autistic/Asperger Meltdown Stereotype

Many of us think that we have no problem recognizing ignorant, prejudiced stereotypes when we see them. I discussed a particularly egregious example when I wrote a post last week about a newspaper article that claimed, without any factual basis whatsoever, that autistic individuals were prone to sudden fits of rage. The article even went as far as to quote Karen Rodman of the Massachusetts hate group FAAAS, who advocates exclusion of autistic children from the public schools, for the proposition that an autistic adult would be likely to explode in sudden rage if "you gave them the wrong sandwich."

As I also mentioned in my post last week, this stereotype has been conclusively debunked in the scientific literature. Statistical analysis has shown that autistics are no more likely to commit violent acts or violent crimes than their non-autistic counterparts (Murrie, Warren, Kristiansson, & Dietz, 2002; Barry-Walsh & Mullen, 2004). Let me say that once more, just to make sure there's no one who has missed the point.

Fact: Autistic people are no more violent than anyone else.

So why haven't we been able to bury this ugly stereotype? Is it because the haters are too strong and have the power to spread it everywhere, no matter what we do? Well, no, that's not really what is going on. To find the primary culprit, the autistic community needs to take a good hard look in the mirror.

All too often, when we get upset because we can't do something that a non-autistic person would take in stride, or when an autistic child gets upset for reasons that the parents may not understand, these behaviors end up being characterized as a "meltdown" or as an "autistic meltdown." Many people within our own community take it as gospel that it is a uniquely autistic trait to lose one's temper in everyday situations. Some of us even write blog and forum posts that describe anger issues as an "Asperger symptom" from which we suffer, or similar language.

And that's just plain wrong. To become upset and frustrated when struggling with difficult situations is not a uniquely autistic trait. Rather, it is a characteristic of the human species as a whole. Such behaviors happen just as often in the non-autistic population, but because the triggering events often are different, our society does not look at them in the same light.

Here's a brief scenario to illustrate the point: Let's say a mother takes her two young children, one of whom is autistic, with her when she does the grocery shopping. The autistic child starts crying because he is overwhelmed by the bright lights and the busy, crowded, noisy environment. The mom grabs a few groceries and hurries to the checkout. Then the non-autistic child starts whining and crying because the mom wouldn't buy her a toy. The mom pays for the groceries and angrily marches the kids out to the minivan. When she gets home, she's still fuming, and after sending the kids to their rooms to take a nap, she goes to an Internet support forum and vents about her son's "autistic meltdown" for the next half-hour or so.

All three people in this scenario lost their temper because they had trouble handling a stressful situation. The autistic kid hadn't yet developed the coping skills needed to deal with the sensory difficulties of the supermarket; his sister didn't know how to manage her frustration when she was not given the toy she wanted; and the mom got upset because of the noise the children were making and, perhaps, because of the embarrassment of being in a public place with two noisy children. But only the autistic kid was described as having a "meltdown."

Instead of using such negative and inaccurate language to describe our own behaviors and those of our children—which has the effect of stereotyping ourselves and giving the haters the rope to hang us with—we should take a proactive and non-stigmatizing approach and recognize that these problems are situational, rather than specifically autistic. When stress becomes a problem, we should consider what changes to our environment would help to reduce our stress. And—last but not least—from now on, let's reserve the word "meltdown" for circumstances where its use is more appropriate.

Such as, for instance, Chernobyl.

Vancouver Sun Prints Bigoted Article on Adult Autism

Although a Sunday article in the Vancouver Sun entitled "Researchers pulling back the veil on adult autism" contained a large number of offensive stereotypes and generalizations, actual cites to research were conspicuously lacking.

The author gave as an example of an autistic person an "office clerk who beat up a woman on his way to the bus stop one morning for the simple reason she was in his way." She further stated that "their social skills are disastrous" and suggested that autistic adults often receive a diagnosis after "they're reprimanded at work for making an inappropriate comment, or charged with harassing or stalking."


canada.com/topics/bodyandhealth/story.html?id=ea98c743-7305-439e-9ae8-3d32c3224f92


Karen Rodman, founder of FAAAS, was quoted as an authoritative source for such pronouncements as "There's no rhyme or reason (to an autistic person's behavior)." Here's a little background on FAAAS: The acronym originally stood for Families of Adults Afflicted by Asperger's Syndrome, but the second "a" was later changed to "affected" as a bid to improve the group's public image when FAAAS was booted out of the International Asperger's Year event because of its reputation as a hate group. Its membership is composed largely of spiteful ex-wives involved in bitter custody disputes with autistic men, and it has a long history of inventing imaginary psychological syndromes and throwing around nasty and groundless stereotypes.

Several autistic self-advocates wrote to Patricia Graham, the Sun's editor-in-chief, to express our concerns about the article. She replied that she did not believe there was anything wrong with it but that she would consider a correction if specific inaccuracies were pointed out.

So we provided some data. We cited the US statistic that only 4.5 people per year assert autism as a defense in a violent crime case, out of almost 1.5 million violent crimes per year (source: Autism Society of America). We pointed out that research studies have proven that autistics are no more likely than non-autistics to commit violent acts or violent crimes (Murrie, Warren, Kristiansson, & Dietz, 2002; Barry-Walsh & Mullen, 2004).

Unfortunately, we got no reply to that, and no retraction or correction was printed. I suspect that when Ms. Graham told us that she would consider a correction, what she really meant was "I'll consider it if I get some complaints from normal people, but I don't give a rat's patootie about anything you freaks have to say." Or something along those lines.

We need united action to make it crystal clear to Ms. Graham that prejudiced articles of this sort are totally unacceptable. Letters and calls from parents, professionals, and other allies are needed, as well as letters from autistic self-advocates. Also, if you have the time, please write blog and/or forum posts about the article and copy Ms. Graham's contact information, listed below:


Patricia Graham, Editor in Chief, Vancouver Sun
Address: #1 - 200 Granville Street, Vancouver BC V6C 3N3, Canada
Phone: 604-605-2318
Fax: 604-605-2668
E-mail: pgraham@png.canwest.com


In the wake of the Michael Savage controversy, there's a reasonable likelihood that Ms. Graham may be amenable to issuing a correction/retraction and a public apology if we can put enough pressure on her. Bigoted statements about autistic people can have real consequences in the form of lost advertisers, as Mr. Savage has discovered.