Remembering disabled victims of filicide
Today the disability community gathers in person and through digital means to remember disabled victims of filicide – disabled people murdered by their family members or caregivers (ASAN).
I had intended to start my blogging with something less heavy, but actually, what could be more worthy of my thoughts than remembering our role as human beings showing up for other human beings?
I am completely new to this national day of mourning. Thank you to Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) for making it such an important date to remember, and bringing it to my attention. I’ll let them be your source for statistics and ways to connect and share, because they do it so beautifully. https://autisticadvocacy.org
I did want to share my clinician’s experience and thoughts. When I was a first year graduate student and I was about to be a (student) clinician for the very first time. I got to work with a wonderful supervisor, and a family new to communication intervention. I was nervous and excited! My very first client of all time was a little girl. She was there because she was not saying any words yet. I remember the first session so clearly, the way she looked nervous (probably because I looked nervous) and how once we both got lost in the play we were both laughing and being silly. I remember how several sessions later she spontaneously imitated the word pear as we were playing in the halls of the stuffy clinic while thinking about The Very Hungry Caterpillar book. She was warm, sweet, and opinionated! She got eye-glasses to help with her vision while we were working together that semester so I wore some fake glasses along with her. She did not want either of us to wear our glasses the first time, but then the next week she smiled BIG when she saw me put mine on. She was an amazing little girl. 💜 Thank you for teaching me how to connect! 💜
Three years later she was being seen in a private clinic by one of my former university cohorts. From that clinician’s perspective everything seemed fine. But the mom came home one day to find her husband had murdered their daughter and then killed himself. He left a note referencing how he just could not bear to see their daughter live like she was.
What was she like? I honestly do not know what the little girl was like at that point in time, and it does not matter. She was a human being.
The disability community is exhausted by so much, not least of which is the collective mindset that people who murder disabled people are doing it out of love. It is not love. It is fear. We all have a responsibility to show up in the million different ways we can to change this mindset.
Murder is an extreme conclusion, to a pretty twisted concept we are served all the time: disabled people are lacking, broken, and are a burden to themselves, the people who love them, and to the wider community. If any of this sentence seems reasonable to you, you’re not alone. We have internalized it through media (fiction and otherwise), and even some of the research literature. It must stop. Any conclusions, therapy decisions, and laws coming from this sentiment are detrimental to the disabled community and to our wider community as a whole.
Compassion for families in struggle includes professionals and lawmakers making changes to support the families, not agreeing that that murder was their best option.
Clinicians: adjust your own mindset, and then work to provide different frames for your families if needed. They can be subtle moments like providing feedback about how your client taught you something in the session. This happens to me all the time! Families sometimes lack feedback about how their children are contributing to their community. And they are, they always have, we instead often focus on what we see lacking.
Activists and lawmakers: we need better supports in place for the disabled individuals and their caregivers.
Filicide is an extreme, but we all have a role to stop the mindset that brings about that conclusion.
Disabled people are as different in their disabilities as they are in what they contribute to our society. There is no lesser person on this planet. We all deserve to do better.
My heart goes out to all the lives cut short, and all their surviving, heart-broken loved ones.
Thanks for reading,
Calina