Podcast Episode 057 – Remembering Autistic Victims with Online Memorials

Last updated on November 26, 2023

Podcast Episode 0057; Season 04, Episode 21; February 23, 2021

Quoting from the Autistic Self Advocacy Network:

Disability Community Day of Mourning

In the past five years, over 700 people with disabilities have been murdered by their parents.

Every year on March 1, the disability community gathers across the nation to remember disabled victims of filicide–disabled people murdered by their family members or caregivers.

We see the same pattern repeating over and over again. A parent kills their disabled child. The media portrays these murders as justifiable and inevitable due to the “burden” of having a disabled person in the family. If the parent stands trial, they are given sympathy and comparatively lighter sentences, if they are sentenced at all. The victims are disregarded, blamed for their own murder at the hands of the person they should have been able to trust the most, and ultimately forgotten. And then the cycle repeats.

Statistics: Autistic Victims of Family, Law Enforcement

Autistics are too often victims of physical violence. Filicide, the murder by one’s parents, is one of the top three causes of death in children under five. It is one of the top five overall causes of death among all children and teens. Autistic children are particularly vulnerable, as parents use the “trauma” of having an autistic child as a legal defense.

Encounters with police can also be dangerous for autistics, especially autistic persons of color. Individuals with a mental illness, including autism, are 16 times more likely to die during an encounter with police, the highest of any group studied. From 2013 through 2015, data show half of the police encounter deaths were people with mental illnesses or cognitive differences.

• https://autismmemorial.wordpress.com
• https://disability-memorial.org
• https://autisticadvocacy.org/melmemorial/
• https://autisticadvocacy.org/projects/community/mourning/

Guest Notes

Peter Joseph Gloviczki (Ph.D., University of Minnesota, Mass Communication, 2012) examines representation in the digital age. He is particularly interested in the ways that memorialization and mediated narration either hold space for or obscure voices that are most often othered or excluded in mediated discourses. He works as an associate professor of communication at Coker University. He also serves as an assistant editor of the Journal of Loss and Trauma (Taylor & Francis). Gloviczki is active in both the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and the Carolinas Communication Association (CCA). His first book is Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and his second book Mediated Narration in a Digital Age: Storying the Media World is forthcoming in the Frontiers of Narrative Series with the University of Nebraska Press.

• Assistant Editor, Journal of Loss and Trauma (Taylor & Francis)
• Immediate Past Head, Cultural and Critical Studies Division, AEJMC
• 1st Vice President, Carolinas Communication Association

Scholarly Books

• Mediated Narration in the Digital Age: Storying the Media World (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).
• Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Transcription (still) in Progress

I am still working on completing some interview transcripts. I am sorry that they were not completed in a timely manner. I use transcription services, but the results are far from ideal unless you pay additional fees.

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