Violent and wrong: Elliot Rodger's crime should not taint my child

Another boy, another gun.

A little later, another photograph.

Brown hair, brown eyes. Slanting cheekbones. A way of tilting the head.

Scrutiny. Debate. Then - aha! He had Asperger's.

The pain of the parents of the children killed by Elliot Rodger is unimaginable. The pain of the parents of Elliot Rodger is unfathomable.

What I can describe is the pain of a another parent, one whose child has Aspergers and who is this morning trying to formulate a response to yet another story in which their child's diagnosis is being held up as an explanation for murder.

While I type this, my daughter is asleep upstairs. It's half-term, and she's tired. Her room is still dark, the curtains closed. I went in earlier to wake her, then changed my mind. She was so fast asleep, so lost in her dreams, that I couldn't bear to disturb her. Instead I stood in the shadows and listened to her soft breathing and to the spring rain pattering on the windows. I looked at her and I thought: my little girl. What will the world make of you now?

I haven't slept. I am indignant, fearful and full of rage - like many others out there adding their voices to this collective shriek of pain. I am in the worst possible state to attempt to present an argument. But when others are shouting such nonsense so loudly, I feel as though I have to try.

For as long as I have known that my daughter was autistic, I have fought against autism stereotypes. My daughter's autism is an essential part of her, but it is not the essence of her. She is sweet and funny and clever and sparky and eccentric and arty .. for so long my biggest frustration was that everyone wanted to label her as Rainman. The number of times Dustin Hoffman's stuttering mathematical genius has been cited in conversations about my daughter's diagnosis is so many I have lost count.

But faced with the conversations I am reading today - the ignorant, block-headed tweets and comments about "kids with Asperger's disease who kill other kids" - I could almost wish back those days of clumsy cliche. They seem so innocent now. That my daughter's diagnosis puts her, in so many lazy, unthinking people's minds, alongside the likes of Rodger and Adam Lanza, who fatally shot twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook elementary school, is horrifying.

It's very hard to speak for all people with Asperger's Syndrome. To those denouncing them all this morning as potential mass murderers, I would point out that when you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism. However, if I may be allowed one generalisation with which to fight back - most people with Asperger's don't want "revenge against humanity." To say today that all people with Asperger's are potential killers is as reprehensible and wrong-headed as Rodger's own assertion that blonde women were collectively to blame for his unhappiness.

Listen to me. Listen to me.

Autistic people are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators.

Some people with autism have difficulty understanding other people. But it does not follow to say that every person who has difficulty understanding other people is like that because he or she is autistic.

To say that Elliot Rodger did this because he is on the autism spectrum is like saying Elliot Rodger did this because he was a man, and white.

Autistic people who commit these acts are no more representative of  people with autism than white male serial killers are representative of white males.

Listen.

As Emily Willingham wrote in her fabulous paper for Forbes earlier this week, the real unifying feature of most mass murderers isn't autism or brain injury, "it's anger and rage, often blasted outward at innocent targets by means of easily accessible firearms."

And in this case, not only is the role played by firearms far more relevant than where Rodger might have been on the spectrum, but - as Jessica Valenti writes in the Guardian today - to dismiss him as a madman also glosses over the role that misogyny and a sexist society played.

I would write more, I would write on and on, but my daughter has just woken up and come down to see me. She is standing in front of me smiling, hair mussed, anticipating a good day. I tell her I love her. She tells me that she loves me back, then goes to cuddle her little sister.

There is a lot to be sifted through and assessed in the Santa Barbara killings. Of all of these things, Asperger's is a detail. It is not a pre-determination.





Grace Under Pressure: Going The Distance as an Asperger's Mum is published by Piatkus in the UK and by New World Library in the U.S.