Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi,
I am an autistic adult who is a parent. Since having my daughter I went through a terrible time with social services who set me up to fail and removed my daughter from me because I have a diagnosis of autism. It took me two years to fight for my daughter back and through this time social services and Cafcass used the so called deficits of my autism to justify the removal and to stop the return of my daughter. Thankfully the judge saw through this and returned my daughter concluding in her judgment that I parent my daughter to a high standard.
I want to know how many my adults will autism who are parents have been through a similar situation. How many parents with ASD and other disabilities and or impairments are being targeted by social services and having their children removed? If you have experienced this please tell your story because the current system is outrageously discriminative against parents who have a disability and or impairment and I would like to raise awareness of the current failures within the current child protection system which is targeting parents with disabilities and or impairments so that change can happen.
There is a lot of fear mongering in this thread. Many of us are autistic parents with absolutely no involvement with social services. I'm even a qualified social worker but not working in children's services, and my autism is declared to the regulator.
Autism isn't a reason in itself to remove children from their parents, behaviour/actions are. I'm sure there are cases where processes haven't been followed properly BUT the social workers don't get involved for no reason in the first place. They don't just appear one day because they've found out that you are autistic.
Dear M,
I would like to challenge your comment relating to your claims about 'fear mongering in this thread'. Fear mongering is not a fair comment for this thread in particularly when parents are sharing their own lived experiences of the discrimination they have received from Local Authorities. Like I have raised many times this is a real issue, you might have not personally experienced it but that doesn't mean it does not happen. A lot of parents are too frightened to speak out, not only that Family Court puts all cases under gagging orders to prevent case's being spoken about, this law was originally made to protect the child however the problem is if the case was unlawful society doesn't hear about it unless the judge decides to wavier the gagging order, which is unusual. Hence why the general public aren't aware that this is a problem. The most important thing is for this to be a place where autistic parents who have had similar experiences to be able to share them without fear that they won't be believed. The more people who come forward the better.
I research this area, I train professionals about how to work with autistic parents, I work with many other professionals including independent social workers who have seen case after case of autistic parents having their human rights violated.
I am working with a group of people trying to raise awareness and make MPs aware that this is happening. It takes time, but watch this space, it will come out eventually.