Journalist – Historian – Speaker
The Dallas Morning News has a piece on parents, as they age, contemplating murdering their adult kids. Explaining away these murders as understandable, however, promotes the notion that it’s a reasonable act. The risk of contagion with such reporting is high. Reporters: read ASAN’s anti-filicide kit before writing about filicide, please. And if you are going to …
Here are two stories recently on murder and attempted murder of disabled children. They follow the same pattern I discussed here in which the murderer is praised as a kind caregiver who inexplicably murdered their children/attempted to murder. No disabled people are quoted. We learn little or nothing about the victim of violence, their story erased. …
Two pieces: – Murder in Australia, with the killer treated sympathetically because the victims were disabled children. – A Jewish disabled person writes about Aktion T4, when the Nazis killed disabled people before they got around to killing others. This struck me especially hard: A reading of Hoche and Binding’s “Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy …
1) A man in PA killed his wife and daughter, then himself. “Some said they had never seen Mary Scully or her adult daughter, who was disabled.” TW: Filicide.https://t.co/CXayRz9NBW — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) November 28, 2017 This tweet is a small thread of resources on filicide in response to a recent story from PA. …
Savannah Leckie, an autistic teenager, seems to have been murdered by her mother. The autistic community, led by ASAN, has long sought victim-centered narratives when such murders happen. This, from Ozark County Times, tells us about Savannah. Over the next few weeks, we will see increasing discussion of the killer’s mental health. We won’t see …
“Katherine Lavoie spent the last moments of her life with her husband pointing a gun at her. Olivia Clarence was four years old, and the last thing that will ever happen to her was her mother cutting off her air. Olivia’s brothers, Ben and Max, ended their lives the same way. They were three years …
Two stories this week on the Ruderman Family Foundation report on the media coverage of filicide of disabled people. The report, for which I was the lead author, found: Approximately once a week, a person with a disability is murdered by a family member or caregiver. We have found that when these murders are covered, …
A terrible crime has been perpetrated in Michigan, and the comment thread is outraged. A family of swans was run over. Meanwhile, a Michigan woman killed her disabled son (he had cerebral palsy), and the comment thread opened with, “this is wong, but understandable” and “she must have cracked under the strain.” It improved thanks …