NAS slaps aspie grassroots in the face again

The multiple signed letter to the NAS's trustees, just last year, on ordinary aspies' dissatisfaction with NAS's lack of accountability and responsiveness towards us, us on whose behalf NAS supposedly exists, might never have happened. NAS's Scottish director Jenny Paterson has shown, openly in her emailed reply to an enquiry from ELAS, that the big charity culture continues as determined as ever to seek to get away with arrogance.

This is a one-off answer, which an ELAS enquiry on their general standard of responding to contacts extracted. It followed 7 months of total silence from her towards the personal contact previously made. Hence it does not follow a spurt of correspondence. Yet she is rude enough to write a bureaucrats’ closure, a proclamation of final answer:
"this is my final position on our campaigning plans and priorities, and I am unable to offer any further assistance regarding child authorship."

Even nasty bureaucrats usually only do that after a spurt of correspondence when they have run out of evasions. She does it in her one-off late answer to something she had simply sat silent on for 7 months. See how aggressive that is? Hostile to an issue of maltreated aspie kids, an agenda the whole time against them and doing anything for them. Also she does this deviously so as never to actually answer what she was asked! For she was asked simply to mention that wronged child authors exist, in every literature that mentions or advertises successful child authors. That is not campaigning that needs any resources or time priorities allocated to it. She answers only to the practicality of big extra campaigning then rudely shuts down all contact with her on child authors at all, KNOWINGLY LEAVING NEVER ANSWERED THE SIMPLE NO-EFFORT ACTION THEY CAN TAKE!

Even her timing is sneaky: she sent this email on Sep 20, just 2 days AFTER the Autism Europe conference here in Edinburgh, which had NAS involvement, had ended. Avoiding this being out as an issue at conference time.

All autism workers and projects: you can’t ethically afford any connection with NAS, with an organisation that behaves like this.

Trefoil

www.facebook.com/pages/Trefoil/619203181449072

The FB page of Trefoil, a "working Asperger group", a self-employment project trying to start up, crafts and gardening. Seeking a grassroots level economy and making the point that it should be made easier to do. Arguing that such projects should be encouraged "to help take the unsustainable pressure off social services".

Link from James Smith a friend of ELAS from Teesside.

Action for Botton

A friend of ELAS from that region told us about the present shocking story of use of power in a charity to wind down a long-running support community for a mixture of autistic and learning disabled residents,Botton Village, www.actionforbotton.org/. Though the Botton story is in England, the entirely discretionary insecure nature of charity regulation is equally a concern here.

No matter how corrupt the goings on in any charity, OSCR (Office of Scottish Charity Regulator) has the power to choose whether it regards it as serving "public interest" to bother to do anything. The mere fact that an offence has happened in a charity, a supposedly legally binding constitution has been ignored, does not oblige them to do anything about it. e.g. Even an actual case where a charity closed a bank account belonging to a mental health advocacy group, seized it contents, and only informed the group after doing it, ignoring its constitution, OSCR declined to pursue. Likewise, the Charity Commission there described itself as having the power to "feel" whether or not a case requires its response. Thus:

"Your enquiry will now be assessed. If we feel that the issues do not fall within our regulatory remit you may not receive a response from us. However, if the issues raised fall within our regulatory remit we will aim to respond to you within 15 working days from receipt. Please do not send us a paper version unless we have specifically requested this." Thankfully the news from the Botton site is that the Commission has been induced by sufficient opinion to "take a fresh look at" it: www.actionforbotton.org/Betrayal-of-Trust/Breaches-of-trust

The Charity Commission guidance states:
"A power to expel a member must be exercised in good faith and not capriciously and the basic requirements of a right to be told the nature and details of the offence and reasons for the expulsion or suspension, a right to notice of the hearing and a right for the members to put his case are well accepted". But as the Botton campaign describes: "In 2012 they managed to alter the charity constitution by threatening every member with expulsion if they voted against a key proposal, as a consequence of which the board now has only independent trustees and nobody left to represent Camphill co-workers and their values."

www.facebook.com/action4botton

>Maurice Frank

None out of 3

Besides an NAS social group discriminatorily only for aged under 35, and how is that legal? there is still no adult aspie support in Clackmannanshire. The Forth Valley's position with small council areas has left it as a void in the national coverage, left on the sidelines whle the bigger more prominent conurbations get to set up services. What about a job placing service equivalent to Edinburgh's Intowork, which should be particularly important in this economically oppressive era?

The services that Autism Initiatives has developed in a wide spread across Scotland, Borders, Perth, Highlands, are being missed in the Forth Valley. The perception of why is alarming. It is perceived locally there, that the local dominance by Scottish Autism, headquartered in Alloa, is a discouragement to AI from setting up any projects in the Forth Valley void. That the 3 national autism charities are behaving territorially with each other, allowing each other to be the big boy in certain localities and not intervening in their patch.

Who does that fail to help? The autistic folks ourselves, who are supposed to be the point of all 3 charities' existence. If SA has not set something up in that locality, which AI can set up and has done in many other places, then AI should. Ain't that common sense?

Unless the charities function by common sense and not by mutual politicking, all their supporters and donors must ask themselves who the charities actually care about? Whose interests they work in?

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

lose a small object = sent away from your friends.

In the latest tabloid racist crackdown on our European friends, anounced today, for other EU citizens begging is going to become a deporting offence.

I see an autism discrimination in this, related to travel documents and their losability. The danger we are all in from having to carry travel documents, tickets or passports, which are capable of getting lost by human error, and the sudden enormous effects if they do get lost far from home. Still not yet taken up publicly by the big charities, I have long made a case that all travel documents' losability and stealability is a discriminatory extra endangerment of everyone with autism related conditions, and this makes a disability discrimination case against their existence.

This is because of "fine motor clumsiness", having an impaired physical skill at handling objects, especially small objects and small details. Arises in dyspraxia, attention deficit, Irlen's syndrome, and simply in autistic sensory overload.

So it occurs to me, for aspies who are other EU citizens. What if you lose your ticket because of autistic issues with motor skills, you are stranded in trouble up against transport systems being totally noncommittal and unhelpful to you, you are not going to get out of trouble quickly unless you can raise money for a new fare, so you beg? Sometimes I have been begged to in Edinburgh by folks with a story of needing to finance a journey home, and can't be sure they are making it up. In a desperate situation not your fault and whose capability to happen is utterly unjust, suddenly you can be sent back to your other EU country for it and not allowed back here for a year.

Exactly the type of serious emergency possibility that is why ordinary aspies need our direct voice, like through ANS, to force the big charities' and professionals' hands to take a position on it.

Maurice Frank

attack on the core of a genuine aspie scene

Picked up in conversation within Elas a morally shocking news of local group practice elsewhere, in south west England particularly. Not knowing how many groups this applies to, nor wanting to back them into a corner when it needs keeping easy for them to change away from this horrid practice, it is better not to name a particular group. Instead, to flag up that this needs checking out by prospective joiners of aspie groups in that whole reigon. There is an aspie group maybe several, run by one of the big autism charities, newcomers to the group are getting vetted, for their compatibility and whether they are disruptive, before they are being allowed to join.

Even worse, it is said to be existing women members of the group who want this nastiness done, in order to filter out men for acceptable non-lustfulness of character - that is gender discrimination and PC taken to a tarring attack on all men. For no clear line exists between social behaviour to befriend a group and social behaviour that a cliquey bully can conveniently interpret as sexual.

Both groups and charities included in these vetting practices are a direct cause of any suicides that result from the rejection experience. England still lacks an outlet like we have in ANS to pursue the cause of holding perpetrators to account on exactly those terms. Aspies who have already experienced emotionally damaging wrongs or feuds from what turn out to be other aspies, in other places, might then see the vetting charity for its own reasons decide to reject them and accept their adversary. That would be an emotional abuse.

These things are a test, and they must be kept glaringly publicly a test, of the aspie scene's genuineness in each region. For the many of us who have signed up to the message of "nothing about us without us", to speak for ourselves without going through the big charities, we know that our true voice is only through a free and tolerant aspie scene, without any purging rejections affecting who it consists of. It does not consist of the voice of the filtered favoured select of a big charity. That is a controlled puppet false scene.

The concept of "disruptive" is very obviously politically abusable. Throughout life it can be used for controlling and manipulating any group into consisting only of who it suits the folks already dominating it to have it consist of. This is a fundamental test of liberty and of being a genuine voice: any participant group of any nature that has a filter for being disruptive is an unfree facade and effectively a cult, and merits distrust accordingly. Anyone who determined to continue to pursue an item of fairness, an undoing of an injustice done to them, such as a rubbishing of their character or a kicking into an inferior social status, or a very practical exclusion that worsens their lives, can be called disruptive. Unscrupulous groups who prefer them to shut up and accept a noncommittal brushing off will do this. Every case of calling such a person disruptive is always a case of abuse.

Maurice Frank