Towards a global autistic advocacy

CW femicide, ableism.

A 15 year-old autistic girl with epilepsy, Malini Persad, was killed last week in my home country of Trinidad and Tobago, by a 52 year-old man.

Violence against women and girls in Trinidad is such a significant issue that hers wasn't even the only murder or case of a missing girl that took place on the island that week.

Trinidad and Tobago is an extremely small twin island in the south of the Caribbean, where male violence against women and girls is rampant and steadily escalating. This includes femicide.

Malini's autism has been a particular focus of her murder by people in the country trying to make sense of yet another girl killed.

What I've found concerning, though, have been the calls for increased control and surveillance of autistic children, along with assertions that this control is necessary to keep them safe from this type of violence because their brains function "abnormally".

The violence that Malini suffered is converted into a problem with her brain, rather than the actions of the man who victimised her and the culture and structures that allow for disabled women and girls to be victimised. I'm particularly afraid of these calls for increased surveillance over autistic people at a time when autistic and disabled people are already experiencing a risk of mass reconfinement in institutions globally.

Disabled women and girls, including autistic women and girls, do experience high rates of abuse -- but this is because disability can create a starker power imbalance that perpetrators of abuse can then leverage to their advantage. Our response should not be to invoke even more control over an already highly controlled population in the name of keeping them "safe". It should not be to further restrict the movement and freedom of women and girls.

I want to stress that these beliefs are not the fault of Trinidadians: these ableist beliefs about neurodivergence being “abnormality” have been inherited from our colonisers.

And now the widespread eugenicist rhetoric in the US, spearheaded primarily by Health and Human Services Secretary, RFK Jr, aimed at eradicating the so-called "threat" posed by autism, will only further increase this ableism across the globe. This will lead to an intensification of violence already being experienced by autistic people in the Global South.

The violence and injustices that autistic people across the Global South face are being heightened by the ableism emerging from the Global North, and yet are rarely uplifted in mainstream autistic advocacy.

I see the same ableist rhetoric that is emerging from the US being reflected in the language and beliefs emerging from Trinidadians towards autistic people. This in a place where there is no organised autistic-led advocacy, where most autistic advocacy is led by people who are not autistic, and where the responses to neurodivergence remain deeply carceral (another colonial inheritance). Where autistic voices are generally considered irrelevant when it comes to issues that affect autistic people and where it can be extremely hard for people to access any information on autism that is anti-ableist.

Autistic people across the globe are also vulnerable to other forms of violence: like the extreme risks of femicide and kidnapping in Trinidad and Tobago. If we were to de-center the experiences of white autistic people of the Global North, we could see just how central to autistic advocacy many other forms of justice, including migrant justice and reparative justice, are.

If we can recognise that autism itself is a spectrum, then we can hold that same understanding for the experiences and forms of violence being endured by autistic people around the globe.

The struggle of autistic people for freedom from control and violence intersects with many forms of oppression and injustices and these can look very different depending on where we are on the map.

If we care about autistic people, if we care about pushing back against the heightened eugenics and ableism that are threatening autistic people, we have to be able to make these global connections. This fight, this resistance must be global and multidimensional in nature.

I carry so much grief for anyone in the Global South who lives and dies and endures extreme violence without the world knowing. The threats towards autistic people fuelled by Trump’s eugenicist “Make America Healthy Again” agenda will have catastrophic impacts on the Global South.

In accordance with the principles of Disability Justice, I believe that our autistic advocacy must be committed to cross-movement organising and must center the leadership of the most impacted.

That includes de-centering the experiences of the most privileged autistic people and recognising that autistic people will not be safe and free until the people of the Global South are.

I do not know what the specific circumstances of Malini’s murder were, but I do know that neurodivergent individuals’ safety won't be achieved by exerting greater control and surveillance over an already overly controlled population or by focusing on the role of our supposed “brain abnormalities” in the violence we suffer.

I believe that we find ourselves in a moment where we can no longer continue to silo off issues affecting disabled people. People of the Global North can no longer fight for their disability rights at the expense of the rest of the world. We can no longer fight for gender justice without understanding its intersections with disability justice. And we can't fight for autistic freedom and safety without understanding that there are systems and structures that uniquely affect autistic people around the world.

“A multidimensional approach makes it possible to avoid a hierarchy of struggles based on a scale of urgency whose framework often remains dictated by prejudice. The challenge is to hold several threads at once” - Françoise Vergès.

"This country, Trinidad and Tobago, has made a routine out of heartbreak. Death is not an anomaly; it is choreography. [...] There is a death in this country everyday that doesn't make the news." - Rajendra Ramlogan, professor at the University of the West Indies.

"Trinidad has become a terrifying place for women and girls. We live in constant fear. We are not protected." - Antonia Vasquez, Malini's family member.

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If you would like to support the women and girls of the Caribbean, you can support the call for reparations to the Caribbean by following the calls to action by the Repair Campaign on social media. You can also make any offerings and educational resources around autism, neurodiversity, disability justice or care work free or low cost to people of the Global South. And you can stay informed about the violent conditions that Caribbean people are facing. Bearing witness is an important step towards making change.

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