Shannon Des Roches Rosa www.squidalicious.com Content note: this article discusses murder, disability, and mental health. There is a horrifyingly typical coupling of devotion with murder, whenever disabled people are the victims. A recent example is Ruby Knox, an autistic young woman, who was murdered by her mother Donella, in Blenheim, New Zealand. Donella drugged Ruby, then suffocated her. Both the reporting and the judge on the case portray Donella as a “loving mum who was driven to kill her daughter.” I’m here to say: Fuck that. I need you — and judges and reporters everywhere — to understand that, however difficult it may be for families to support their disabled loved ones, murder is never excusable. There are always other options. Always. That last message is especially important when you consider that disability-related filicides like Ruby’s are more common than the occasional high-profile story might have one suppose — according to Julia Bascom…
Tag: George Hodgins
Vigil for George Hodgins, Sunnyvale, CA Photo © Steve Silberman The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, Not Dead Yet, and the National Council on Independent Living have set aside this Friday, March 1, to remember the lives of people with disabilities who lost those lives at the hands of their family members or caregivers. We understand that this is difficult statement to comprehend and that many people’s first reaction may be to assume that such events are extremely rare. Unfortunately, such domestic violence is not unusual at all, even its most extreme form, the killing of a disabled people at the hands of their caregivers. In its latest statistics from 1999, the FBI reported that children under the age of five in the United States are more likely to be killed by their parents than by anyone else; parents were responsible for 57 percent of these murders. But while the murder of…
Shannon Des Roches Rosa www.squidalicious.com www.blogher.com Two days ago, Patricia Corby was ordered to stand trial for the murder of her four-year-old autistic son, Daniel Corby. During testimony, the local District Attorney’s Office Investigator said that Corby “…felt like she had no life. She wanted Daniel to be normal.” This seems like a good time to revisit the post below, which I wrote for BlogHer.com after another Autistic, George Hodgins, was murdered by his mother Elizabeth — just three weeks before Daniel died. —- Obviously, I’m feeling angry and confrontational. Explosively so. With good reason: George Hodgins, a young autistic man from my son’s school, was murdered by his mother Elizabeth (who then committed suicide) earlier this month. Mainstream media reports have focused almost exclusively on how difficult life was for his mother, framing parents killing disabled children as an understandable tragedy, while parents killing typical children is considered a…