Fairness: the vulnerability law, What to expect

The law of vulnerable adult groups covers us ethically, it establishes that we must not be taken advantage of, financially, or emotionally, by anyone engaging in any type of support relation with us. Any support relation, that could be a formally employed or charity placed support or aspies showing each other support in the self organised scene.

Oh so nothing bad or hurtful ever happens in an autism service? ... obviously not so, but all bad happenings are breaches of vulnerability, the protection against them is there notionally and conceptually. Its enforceability in practice is what needs building stronger. The defined duty to vulnerability includes to prevent corruption, and what prevents corruption is transparency and accountability. So all losses of direct voice and accountability for aspies about service issues are breaches of the vulnerability law capable of contributing to suicidal feelings in persons made more vulnerable. Hence structures like ANS and regular participation in the autism local plans can never be taken away. ANS's imminent issue of a book compiled from a spread of ordinary aspie life experience, An Ordinary Life Too, will greatly strengthen the body of facts that establishes this. It will advance the accountability over uncorrupt protection of vulnerabilities, that comes from strengthening the claim of permanence upon these participative structures.

What does this mean you can expect in Elas, and any Asperger society self-organised independently from the problematic big charities?

• You are among folks who know it would be liably against the vulnerability law ever to turn socially corrupt and backstabbing to escape from answering a fairness issue, like the former Phad charity in Fife did which led very quickly to its break-up and demise in 2011 a bad outcome for all.
• Fairness is never an obsession. Fairness is never called an obsession, because fairness is a red line ethic, and red line ethics are never obsessions.
• For any fairness issue in your life that affects your relationship with any other members, e.g, something which their own invitation involved you in and resulted in an unfairness.Your pursuit of it, time unlimited, will automatically have the reliable solidarity and backing of the rest if the group. No one will ever dismiss it as an autistic rigid thought pattern or obsessive.
• You will never accidentally catch any member doing that when they think you are out of hearing. You will never be let down by a friend with a long back period of discovering this way that they were never real.
• You will never find the group dug in to stay noncommittal about your fairness issue.
• You will never see this include a member refusing to reverse a serious mistake that had worsened the wrong, such as the mistake of apologising to the party that wronged you after being lied to by them.
• You will never see the group suspend a normal routine of going for a drink after meetings, and instead all hasten home uncomfortably, by reason of wanting to avoid the issue.
• You will never hear anyone express in blunt words and a cutting tone of wordly-wise macho boredom the emotionally abusive view that you may have to live with a social injustice unsolved.
• You will never hear anyone argue that fairness to you should fall in the greater interest of the group.
• You will never find that the group get sick of the subject and start to sanction or socially reject hearing about it, when that leaves you with them expecting you to live in acceptance of it.
• You will never hear anyone use the word "unfortunately" as a weapon for any of these maltreatments of you.
• You will never see another member continue to belong to, and hear him keep mentioning its place in his social life, anything which has wronged or unjustly excluded you, if he has said nothing about efforts on your behalf to change that. Particularly if his own invitation had led to the wrong happening in the first place.
• You will never have anyone believe that you should live in acceptance of, and stop fighting, a wrong which has not happened to them.

These are not points that any autism group, any group in any support scene, can discuss and decide not to accept. You will not suffer these things because the group will ensure conscientiously that each other know, that it would break the vulnerability law, with many potential lines of liability, for any of them to exploit anyone's vulnerability by doing any of these unfair unsupportive things to them. They are all acts of emotional abuse, for they betray and kick away wellbeing and result in exclusion experience. Hence they all risk, as is well established illegal, well-motivating suicides by it. They are all actions whose breach of the vulnerability law is serious enough that they risk life. The members of every aspie group have a duty to ensure each other's awareness of this, to be vulnerability compliant.

You do not have to be a suicide risk to have this protection, e.g, you may be articulate enough with writing to fight back, but the group will know that if they wrong you they cause suicidal ideation in a less articulate person who sees it happen and encounters any similar wrong, now or later. So, because the group dares never wrong that person, they dare never wrong you either. Backing for total literalist fairness is your claim of right.

Maurice Frank