We have been traveling this road for a while. You know the one. The one that eventually leads to the disabled being persecuted.
COBB County, Ga. (CBS46) -- A Cobb County 12-year-old student faces felony charges after threatening to burn people and property at his school. But, he has Autism and his family argues, the proper protocols for students with disabilities were not followed prior to charges being filed.
Jadon Ringland's family told CBS46, he was only repeating what he saw and heard in a video game, repeating phrases is a diagnosed symptom of his disorder, also known as "scripting." We don't want him to think he's a bad child," Tovah Ringland said. The mom explained how her son is completely unaware of his felony case.
Autism is a developmental disorder which causes physical and verbal behavior challenges.In Jadon's case he experiences "scripting," or formally named Echolalia. Experts often cite scripting as a coping mechanism, CBS46 found. The action causes him to repeats phrases or words from anything like songs, movies or even video games, according to Ringland.
Thank you to lgmcp below regarding further details:
Fuller details here: kesq.com/…
Jadon’s favorite video game is Red Dead Redemption… Clips posted online show the main character creating what the game calls “fire bottles” with gasoline then burning everything his path … “He said at school, he was going to get a fire bottle, a bottle with gasoline and fire, and burn the teachers and the school.”
The parents believe he was scripting scenes from Red Dead Redemption, his favorite video game. I am not sure why a 12 year-old child would be playing such a game, and that is a discussion for another day. But nonetheless, Echolalia is a behavior that does not carry with it intent, or even cognition.
Autistic children are not one size fits all. The catastrophic ignorance propelling the pathetic excuses for thinking in this country is a virus itself. But while it is hard to pinpoint exactly how the prosecutor expects to get a conviction or even what the office hopes to accomplish, discrimination and abuse against autisitc children is not new.
Charging pre-teens is not a new phenomenon either.
[EVERETT, Wash] – (MTN) Snohomish County prosecutors have charged an 11-year old autistic girl with two felony counts of assault 3 after a May 17 incident in Everett. In a police report, officers claim that although they were no visible injuries to either officer, the child’s words and actions warranted the charges against her. Despite the child not being of the age of culpability in Washington, flaws in the police report, and documentation of significant mental impairment, prosecutors continued to move forward with the criminal charges. Malcontent News is not identifying the child by name because this is a juvenile case.
I don’t suppose I have to go into the litany of horriffic abuses persons with mental illness have endured over the centuries. But a prosecutor in Georgia thinks that a well understood and frequently diagnosed behavior of children on the spectrum rises to felony culpability on the part of a 12 year-old.
So let’s call it “felony autism.”
Why not also do “felony depression?” How about “felony OCD?”
Or how about we get away from the business of treating differently abled grade schoolers like pariahs, and actually give them respect and good treatment and help them assimilate as independent people?
Oh what am I thinking? That would take away the cruelty and as we know..
The cruelty is the point.
-ROC
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-ROC