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

Oh hey the papers have explained all now, change my vote. Nah nah nah not listening to you, I don't understand.

How fair will it be for an election to be swung by the psychology of "don't understand" towards unfamiliar situations?

NB - ELAS is for folks of any politics, short of racism against other members, and so is this blog. Any party view suggested by this post is only personal. Write a counter to it if you like.

I have a particularly strong hate and sense of moral cause against what should be termed "the don't understand trick". This is when folks wilfully resist hearing a new idea of an upsetting fact, and evade having to make any response to it, by the device on insisting that they don't understand it.

There is no honesty in folks saying they don't understand. It is part of how narrow mindedness and respectability perpetuate themselves: oh no you can't go saying that to them, "they won't understand."

All communication is tyrannically shut down when thick yobs decide to keep saying they don't understand every time you say anything else than they want to hear, or is already familiar to them. Being up against this like a brick wall unless you only say what they want to hear, you are silenced. It is a vicious socially controlling device.

The don't understand trick is the greatest weapon of bigots and unfair obstacle to getting anything heard that's not what popular culture already wants to believe. If anything your hearer does not want to hear, or any new idea, is conveniently not understood, your voice is silenced. Your right to communicate is gagged. This is clearly out of order if the mob refuse to want to understand things to do with personal safety or schools endangering children. Think of an Open University study of anti-sexism where a boy enjoyed cooking in the privacy of home but was concerned to keep it secret from so-called friends because "they won't understand". Contemplate the evil of how, for trying to explain aspieness to folks who are unfamiliar with it, you can get labelled as a rubbish hard to understand character, while someone else for writing exactly the same things in books read by an autism familiar audience get labelled as a good recommendable author.

Of course a person can have genuine failings at following language and must be entitled to ask for explanations, but that is the point: willingness to understand. They would ask you to explain, point by point, the specific points where they are not following you. Players of the "don't understand" trick never do that. The "don't understand" posture is a refusal to listen, a withdrawal of patience from you getting the point across at all, rejecting of any further explanation you have. This is what proves it is a trick device. When you are genuine in not grasping what someone has said or written, you can itemise exactly where in the text your unclarity is and ask for explanation to clear up those bits. This is a posture of willingness to listen, of accepting the validity of the person getting their point across, and you see how utterly different it is to the hostile wall created by the "don't understand" posture.

That shows no one ever actually needs to say "I don't understand". You simply need to say instead, what does this word/phrase mean? can you explain this bit? how do you get from here to there? etc.

I have found an excellent revealing way to weed out the bullies who are using the "don't understand" posture as an oppression device. It proves from experience that my perception of this is right, and it needs sharing, it could be very useful for forcing folks to listen to you properly. When someone goes into the impatient posture that they don't understand so are not going to listen any more, then you invite them to go through what you have said, word by word, to pinpoint exactly what they don't understand so that you can explain it. They will always run a mile from this invitation. It utterly catches them out in the unjust evil true intent of their "don't understand" posture. You can test this out for yourself, the proof that the "don't understand" posture is an emotional abuse.

So, the election? Today the press are trying to muddle everyone with the situation around a Labour government's relation to the SNP. Following Miliband's renunciation 2 days ago of any deal with other parties, now several front pages saying: oh look, we've caught them out, they will do a deal. This is based on some of the Shadow Cabinet explaining that a minority government would go from vote to vote talking to other parties to get as much as it can of its own business through. That is not a deal. That is what Miliband already explicitly explained that that is not a deal. It is exactly what happens when there is not a deal, it is the way any minority government has to function, the other parties can jostle with it on passing or not passing each item of its business. It's the way the SNP minority government of 2007-11 worked, getting business through with Tory support so often that to be logically consistent these papers should accuse it of having a deal with the Tories, exactly what is terrible for the SNP ever to be seen by its voters to have. But logically consistent is what these headlines have an interest in not being. To understand what it or is not a deal takes willingness to listen to explanations and understand the system. For the real human minds of many voters, knee jerk prejudice is easier and saves mental effort. Oh look, this headline has made it sound like this means a deal, so it probably does, so it does. Conclusion reached, end of story, mind closed to further listening.

Because the story is written to fit prejudice that what the politician says is likely to be lies, the voter leaps to the simple conclusion that it is indeed lies in this case. To make any effort to understand the system would be an unwelcome mental effort. It could threaten 2 things for the voter, (i) a prejudice, (ii) their self-esteem of being right in leaping to the hasty conclusion. because these things are threatening, they must be shut out of mind, by insisting: no no no, I DON'T UNDERSTAND. Even if they would understand perfectly well if they chose to listen. So now, anyone trying to explain the technicality of why a minority government's work to pass each vote is not a deal, and why these shadow ministers have not confessed there will be a deal, will just get "I don't understand." And that psychology in enough voters could change the election's outcome.

The voting reform referendum in 2011, already, appeared swung by a "don't understand" prejudice. The argument that the proposed new system took more effort to understand, succeeded in appealing to voters to reject it. That worked better as an argument than the case that it was a fairer system. So this is totally capable of happening. Now in this multifaceted election, that recent rejection of reform is a real pain to all the folks voting tactically or frustrated that voting the way they want won't match with dealing with the contest most threatening to happen in their seat. They have the unjust "don't understand" psychology to thank for dumping them in it.

Maurice Frank

a famous aspie does not mean all is right for us.

Let's see. You've come for a look at what aspies are all about because you heard the news about Susan Boyle? Splendid: here's what the media should be telling you. Are they?

• Our heightened physical sensitivities, including to fabric and heat, are biologically incompatible with dress codes and make them an assault on our physical wellbeing. Our existence abolishes all work dress codes and school uniforms. This has been known for years and the big charities have not been choosing to push it.
• Because some aspies find it easier to focus on the written word than the spoken, there is a correlation between aspies and child authors. There is a succession of books by aspie child authors, and there is a child cruelty offence done in long history of big charities' total avoidance and failiure to publicise that there are WRONGED child authors, like me, whose chance to write was destroyed by harmful school pressures and homework.
• With the big charities' big failings to speak for us where needed, you can see how seriously we have needed the voice developed for us, to contribute into professional awareness and policymaking, by the AUTISM NETWORK SCOTLAND, developed out of Strathclyde University and now a part of the national strategy. It's invaluable, and its creation is the great success of the scene in Scotland. So IT NEEDS COPYING IN EVERY COUNTRY. If you are outside Scotland do you think your aspies deserve not to have any ANS?
• The NAS is to be complimented on attending properly to striking off its contact list a bent autism legal service that advised me to surrender in a dispute with a council tax malpractice where I was in the right by statute law and won. There needs to be a media consumer exposee of bent services that will prey on their clients instead of stand up to councils - you want to know more, you need it publicised.
• Likewise you want to know that aspies' local groups can't be corrupted and seized control of by malpractisers bent on hushing up emotional abuses, as happened to a group near us, defunct since stood up to by an earlier post on this blog describing its malpractises: 28 Feb 2011, Invitation to an autocratically restricted group's members to escape it and join us.
• It's only the same common sense that all the details should be published of the ways we have been harmed by schools and by child psychiatry. Aspie kids not safe until these things stopped, and how do you stop them unless you have heard widely what they are? In a safely non-deletable way on paper: for it's no good putting them in an Amazon e-book where the site's lawyers reserve a power to turn round and say, no no no, delete to be on the safe side. So the media are turning their backs on child safety unless they read this and chase after these things' publishing.
• Where competitive jobsearch utterly has never worked for us, the approach that works is to have aspie employment services who talk through both our strengths and our limitations with an employer to work out a working niche for us. But more ethical accountability upon these services is needed, to prevent the malpractice of them turning round and claiming that a third party problem that arises after you are in a job is not in their remit to deal with. By obvious definition, a remit to support employment automatically includes any problem that affects the work's doability or the work environment's justice in any way. This an item I am holding Edinburgh's new local Autism Plan responsible to put right locally.

Maurice Frank