Murder and Social Endorsement Part II

2 December 2008 – Denver, Co, USA This second post on Nancy Lofholm’s story, Autism’s terrible toll: Parents risk hitting “a breaking point,” in the Denver Post, focused around the murder of Jacob Grabe who had Asperger syndrome and was allegedly shot to death by his father Allen on September 11, 2008 (see previous icad post Autism: Recent toll of violence from September, 2008). Coincidentally, both my story from September and the Lofholm’s use the word toll in the title, but it is interesting to note that the Denver Post refers to the Toll that autism takes on parents and families and the my earlier story refers to the Toll that violence takes on people with autism. This second icad post deals with some of the actual content and reasons why this article is dangerous.

The Denver Post story suggests that there is something so inherently stressful about raising a child with autism. It implies that it is understandable or even somewhat excusable if parents reach a “breaking point,” which is the euphemism used to mean kill or abuse their children. In the article, it says, for example:

Autism is a maddening disorder of scrambled brain development that can lead some parents to snap, experts say. Autistic children suffer abuse and are killed at higher rates than normal children.

The idea that we can explain child abuse or child murder as a product of child characteristics is neither supported by research or useful. 

If Ms. Lofholm wrote a story about how stressful it was for husbands to have independent women as wives and how some of them just snap under the stress and kill or abuse their wives, I hope there would be a lot of feedback on why this kind of thinking is both wrongheaded and dangerous. If she wrote an article on how some bigots find it extremely “maddening” to see people among racial minorities asserting their equal rights, and sometimes they just snap and commit hate crimes, I hope that most people would take exception. Of course, it is true that abusive or homicidal husbands often find their wives’ independent behavior to be a source of stress, and it is also true that some bigots consider minority members “who don’t know their place” to be at blame for driving them to violence… but this does not make their crimes any more excusable. Blaming a child or a child’s disability for the parent’s violence is no more rationale and no more excusable.

I do empathize with parents of children with autism and other disabilities, who sometimes face a lot of stress and often lack adequate supports. I have great respect, and I am happy to celebrate those who face these challenges. Those who respond to those challenges with abuse or murder, are no better or worse than other child abusers or child murderers. The truth is that most children who are murdered are murdered by a parent (60 to 80% of child murderers) and most parents who kill their children are stressed over something, whether or not the child has a disability. 

While many people believe that abuse of children with disabilities is somehow related to the stress that they cause their parents, this theory is not consistent with research or common sense. A classic study by Mary Benedict and colleagues measured stress in families of children with severe disabilities and and also kept data on child maltreatment. She did find that some families experienced high levels of stress and that significant numbers of children with disabilities were abused, but there was no relationship between stress level and abuse. Also, the excessive-stress-and-I-just snapped theory does nothing to  explain why sexual abuse of children with disabilities is increased by as large a margin as physical abuse.

Is autism of Asperger syndrome more stressful for parents than other disabilities? In fact this is a meaningless question. Children with autism and Asperger syndrome are all individuals, the effects of autism are highly variable, every family faces different challenges and has different supports. Parenting some children with autism  (such as those with severe self-injurious behaviour) is extremely challenging; others much less so. The same does for children with other disabilities. Parenting a child with a seizure disorder can be very stressful for parents who are having dozens of seizures every day with frequent injuries, parenting a child with ell controlled epilepsy who has not had a seizure in years is a lot less challenging So, I think it is fair to say that children with autism and their families face challenges similar to the challenges faced by other children with disabilities and their families. There is variability across individual children and families that is much greater than variability based on the category of disability.

The Denver Post article, also says:

Studies have shown that about 20 percent of autistic children are abused, compared with about 1 percent of other children. Those who deal with the disorder place the abuse even higher.

I don’t know what study they are referring to, and I have never seen a study that actually says this. If there is one, it is seriously out of step with other research. Most research suggests that about 10% to 15% of children without disabilities experience child abuse. Some epidemiological studies that have attempted to compare abuse of children with autism to other groups of children have not found any significant difference. The classic Sullivan and Knutson study of 55,000 children in Omaha was probably the best study for comparing rates of abuse in children with and without disabilities. In that study, about 9% of school-aged children without disabilities had been abused and about 31% of children with disabilities had been abused. This study did not find significantly elevated rates of abuse among children diagnosed with autism, but it did find the highest abuse rates among children with behaviour disorders. In fact, most large scale, well controlled studies have failed to demonstrate that there is a clear link between autism and abuse. It is important to recognize that the failure to find something does not mean that it doesn’t exist and there are a number of technical reasons that could obscure the link between autism and child abuse. However, for now, i is correct to say that the link between disability and abuse has been more clearly demonstrated for other disabilities. All things considered, as a researcher, I think that there is probably about the same link that exists between a number of other disabilities and  autism.

Lastly, I want to comment on why I believe the ideas in this article are dangerous. To understand child murder, it is less helpful to focus on what motivates some parents to kill their children but rather on what stops most parents from killing their children. This is not being glib. The reality is that raising any child is a lot of work, stressful at sometimes, and heartbreaking at others. At times even the sweetest child is an intrusion on our lives. However, most parents do not kill their children for some combination of four reasons: (1) Love and attachment, (2) Guilt,  (3) Shame, and (4) Fear of Punishment. In most cases, this is the order of importance. Parents who claim to love their children but hate their autism are at best conflicted. Autism is a pervasive disorder, saying you love the child but hate his or her autism is a bit like saying I love you but hate everything about you or saying I love the child I wish you could be, not the child you are. Guilt in pure sense is the next best safeguard. In this sense, Guilt is about how one feels about one’s own actions, even if noone else knew or cared bout it. Shame is different, it is about how one feels about how others view the act. In most people guilt and shame interact but in some lack one but care about the other. The final and least effective safeguard is fear of punishment, the practical sense, of “will I go to jail, be hung, lose my job, etc.” It is the weakest of the lot, but the last resort when the other three fail. For most people who commit intimate crimes such as killing a child, the key to being able to commit the crime is being able to construct a rationale in their own mind that the violence is somehow justifiable. So many parents will think about killing their child but turn back from the abyss, social endorsement through articles like the article in the Denver Post helps people on the edge construct the justifications that allow them to go over the edge.

Tags: Autism, Homicide