Samantha Crane's interesting take on elopement.

Severely autistic children often run away from home for reasons that are not necessarily apparent.  There have been instances when these children have drowned or been hit by cars and killed.  Parents of these kids often have to put locks on doors to prevent them from endangering themselves.  These behaviors are often referred to as "elopement".  

For this reason, the government and other individuals have advocated using tracking devices on these children.  Legislation, called Avonte's law (named after a child with autism who drowned) to get these tracking devices to the public have been proposed in congress.

Ari Ne'eman and other members of the neurodiversity movement have fought these tooth and nail, claiming that this is a violation of autistic individual's  civil rights.

In one article Ari Ne'eman even stated one reason that children elope may be due to physical and sexual abuse from their parents and service providers.

Samantha Crane, a neurodiversity activist and one of the autistic public members of the Interagency Autism, Coordinating Committee, has recently weighed in on this matter on twitter with the following words of wisdom about elopement:

Yeah the term often is used to problematize behavior that's completely reasonable from our perspective - people put us in situations that are intolerable, then call it "elopement" when we try to leave.

— (((Sam Crane))) (@Samanticka) September 11, 2018

To date, several ND autistics have been appointed to the IACC and zero pro-cure autistics, even though two were nominated and turned down.  Some may not agree with me, but I think I'm being charitable to Samantha in stating that comments such as these from an official of the U.S. government whose policy recommendations are financed with taxpayer money are somewhat insensitive in light of the fact many severely autistic children have died because of this problem.   

At a recent IACC meeting, Ms. Crane played a rather crafty game of bait and switch when Jill Escher, the mother of two severely autistic children, wrote to the IACC complaining that the autism diagnosis was too broad and trivialized the very profound problems of her children.  Ms. Crane's response was "how do you know I don't have seizures, GI problems, or these other problems like Escher's children, but I'm not going to talk about my life." 

This is a woman who has graduated from Harvard law school, never needed a diagnosis until she was in her early 20s (I guess she's now about 35) in order to obtain accommodations to enable her to attend law school.  Why she did not need these as an undergraduate at Swarthmore college and why she did not need a diagnosis in the 1990s in order to obtain services under the IDEA when she was a child will remain a mystery.  This is because when I asked Samantha if she had a legitimate diagnosis and if she could provide documentation either to me or the government she stated she was professionally diagnosed, but I was crossing boundaries by asking these questions.  I complained about her behavior to the president, my senators and congressperson, the secretary of health and human services and Joshua Gordon, director of the NIMH who runs the IACC.  My concerns so far remain unanswered.

Neurodiversity often bullies and harasses people and makes outrageous statements, but very few people want to get involved and complain about them to the government and private sector organizations such as autism speaks.  Many parents are too busy fighting for services for their children or going through the day-to-day hassle that rearing an autistic child entails to put up a fight.

However, considering all of the children who have been killed by elopement, I hope that some parents of severe autistic children will take some sort of action against people such as Ne'eman and Crane. Just think about it.  Their children's lives could be at stake.