Autism cannot be considered a factor in crime only after crimes have been committed
Are people with autism spectrum disorder particularly vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism? The loudest claims that this is true come from autistic people suspected of terrorism offences. Any budding neo-Nazi autistic teen eager to avoid jail will plead to the court that their pathway to hatred was laid by the obsessive, absolutist, often credulous worldview the disorder can impose.
The argument often works, and is why defendants arrested for such offences often find experts to testify post-arrest they meet the criteria for autism. The arguments also can work in the court of public opinion. A self-professed Hitler-loving teenager, with a stated desire to bomb synagogues, will be reframed as a victim of the fixations caused by her disorder based on a post-arrest diagnosis. The media is eager to join in with worries that a failure to understand the unique “vulnerability” of autism leads to the unfair criminalisation of poor neo-Nazi, Islamist, etc youth. Experts, too, are eager to testify that the autistic absolutist worldview — the disorder’s tendency to produce social isolation, and obsessive mindset — make terrorist ideology harder to resist and thus reduce culpability. The data certainly suggest something similar, with something like one quarter of those in Home Office data on Prevent referrals being on the spectrum (a “staggering” number, in the words of the government’s former terrorism reviewer).
Given how many autistic people, and their advocates, insistently say autism makes them at particular risk of extremism, it is no surprise that the bodies tasked with keeping the rest of us safe from extremists have flagged autism as a risk factor for terrorism. What other conclusion could there possibly be from how constantly autism is blamed, by autistic advocates, for the most dangerous and depraved conduct? Yet, when Ofsted, in a training annual, echoed this exact argument by autistic advocates, the National Autistic Society criticised them for an approach that might “demonise or stigmatise” the autistic.
The goal is to get society to ignore the link between autism and extremism because it is an uncomfortable, politically incorrect fact
The nonsense of such a statement is evident from the fact that the National Autistic Society has never criticised an autistic terrorism defendant for “stigmatising” his fellows by blaming autism for vulnerability. Nor should pointing out a relevant and true link be defined as stigmatisation or demonisation, which by definition are unjustified or false associations.
This is, however, nonsense with a purpose. The goal is to get society to ignore the link between autism and extremism because it is an uncomfortable, politically incorrect fact. There is, it seems, a desire to make autism only a defence, but never a red flag — never discussed in the context of risk management, never identified as a proactive factor to monitor. The consequences of this denial are serious. They inhibit science, for a start. Studies, trying to avoid offence, will claim that there is no link between autism and tendency to extremism while providing cover for defences with the tortured contradictory acknowledgment of a consensus that autism “may provide the context of vulnerability to engage in extremist behaviour”.
This is an exceptionally dangerous form of identity politics. Ignoring a serious risk factor to extremism has a human cost. A terrorist’s bomb or bullet kills just as efficiently if unleashed under the influence of autistically disordered hatred or neurologically healthy hatred. We have evidence, pleaded by experts hired by autistic terrorists and endorsed by courts, that autistic people tend to be more rapidly radicalised than others on the pathway to violent extremism. Given this, there is a moral duty for responsible institutions to be quicker to flag for referral an autistic child showing signs of terrorist sympathies. This, though, seems not to matter to “human rights” groups arguing, ludicrously, that the overrepresentation of autistics makes terrorism prevention unlawful.
This puts ideology ahead of common sense. It has led the National Autistic Society to demand that we do not listen to the voices of autistic people in such situations (who are the first to blame their autism for vulnerability). It creates public pressure to make the police reluctant to arrest an autistic teen showing interest in pipe bombs, killing Jews, or recruiting terrorist cells.Yet, the exact same voices would insist it’s unfair, discriminatory, cruel, or otherwise unkind to ignore an autistic terrorist’s mitigation arguments that autism contributes to terrorism. The end result of this activism is a world happy to allow terrorists to plead after they are caught that autism made them vulnerable, but that forbids the government from recognising that fact in prevention. Disregarding prevention but keeping the defence is having things both ways — in favour of terrorists. Nor does it do autism any favours to redefine all activism around terrorists. It ignores the non-criminal, non-extreme autistic people, who are as likely to be victims as anyone else. Personally, as an autistic Jewish person, I am far more concerned about stopping the people afflicted with my disorder who want to blow me up in a synagogue than about stigmatising or upsetting the aspiring bomber.
We cannot be held hostage by such hypocritical activism. The government has a duty to the entire populace to seriously assess all the contributing factors to extremism and take preventative measures. There is no room for cowardice or fear of hurt feelings. We must go by the data and the best practice. The conversation about helping autistic people will go nowhere if it ignores one of the most important threats to the healthy development of children with the disorder. For the sake of both public security and the wellbeing of Britain’s autistic population, we must have an open conversation about how this disorder primes its victims for radicalisation.
