Autistic Hedgehog

The Wendrow case. My thoughts on the Wendrow case…hoo boy. I didn’t know about the Wendrow case until I received this ask, and in the end, I had to have my husband read up on it for me, because I couldn’t get through a single article without crying. They were that nauseating. It’s hard to elucidate my feelings on this, when every article I found didn’t bother much with facts and chose instead to exonerate the father and lavish stomach-churning amounts of pity on him. 

Trigger Warning: Rape, abuse, ableism.

For those who don’t know, the Wendrow case involved a young non-verbal autistic girl who, via a method of communication known as Facilitated Communication, made claims that her father had raped her multiple times. To make a long short story, in the end, because she couldn’t perform like a trained monkey in court, her father was acquitted. 

Do I sound bitter? I can’t help it. The articles really were gross. Just the very fact that the police taking the girl’s word as true is regarded as them “not trying to find the truth” is enough to make me want to cry. My feelings on the matter are thus a bit tangled, and revolve mostly around the criticism (dare I even call it) of Facilitated Communication, which is so rife with allistic privilege, I want to slap someone.

Those who are tested—yes, tested—sometimes prove unable to communicate via FC under pressure, and people (all of them allistic) generally ask “How could it be that someone who can otherwise write speeches etc. etc. etc. with this form of communication suddenly can’t use it in a testing environment?” And because they’re allistic (and maybe because they don’t remember or know how uncomfortable testing environments are) they figure, hey, FC must not really work, and it must be the words of the Facilitator and not the autistic person themselves.

They think this because they’re allistic and thus they’ll never be stuffed in a box like a guinea pig and asked to prove that their method of communication is viable, knowing all the while that if they fail, their rights as a human beings will be stripped from them. 

So when using FC in court, all the girl was able to produce was gobbledegook, which led to the father being acquitted. Her Facilitator, according to my husband, was painted really atrociously in the articles, while the father was held up as the poor victim of a misandrist witchhunting country out for tasty tasty manblood. And maybe he is innocent, but when I think about this, I can’t help but doubt. Consider how many allistic women can’t handle the pressure of a rape case. Hell, I know that I, having already faced the pain and horror of being judged unfairly due to my struggles with communication, might not be able to handle what they asked of this girl. I, who can speak for myself, am not sure I would’ve fared any better in court. 

I can’t sit here and accept that FC doesn’t work and the father is innocent, because I know what it’s like to be autistic from the inside. And even if he is innocent, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because no matter how many times FC does work, it’s cases like this one that will be used as precedent instead. It’s cases like this one that will be used to strip autistics of their rights and force them to remain in unsafe environments.

In all the furor to condemn the case, no one in the press stopped and thought. They didn’t think “holy shit, this girl might have been sent back to a man who constantly rapes her.” That’s the thing. She might well have gone home to a place where she’s raped every day and can do nothing to defend herself. And even if she wasn’t, other autistics will be, helped along by this case. And I can tell you how that makes me feel: It fucking terrifies me.