Update Sunday 15 March: my story re: this young disabled and autistic boy being forced to get public transport has been picked up here.
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Today, my podcast returns to the ongoing story about Hackney council’s attempts to evict a disabled and autistic boy and his family from their council home.
Bailiffs were due again to evict the boy and his family on Friday just gone, but fortunately, a court saw sense and suspended the bailiff’s eviction warrant for 8 weeks because of the risk to the boy’s health.
In the meantime, the council has come up with a gross idea to test the boy’s behaviour on public transport.
The council’s proposal is to stick this boy and his family in temporary housing 10km* away from the school where he is settled. He’ll have to get public transport from the temporary housing to this school.
The boy’s teachers and medical supporters all say that the boy can’t cope with public transport and has bad meltdowns on it.
The council doesn’t believe them. It is proposing that an assessor of some sort takes the boy on public transport to get “direct observational evidence” of what happens.
In other words, the council wants to put the boy in an environment that he can’t cope with to record him not coping with it.
Is this actual abuse?
*Had 10k and missed off the m. It’s 10km.
Hi, Kate
I read word-to-word rather than scanning a page, and arrived at the same concluding paragraph question-line by internal dialogue before I could do so by eyesight.
And I point out that as a 2005/2006 cover duties care worker I studied online at the Training Opportunities for Social Care website toward an NVQ in Social Care. On the basis of what I learned there, I agree that the exercise Hackney Council has in mind is an example of child abuse.
Yes it is pretty bad. I was rather struck by it.
Needlessly cruel.
I was thinking again about the above matter at lunchtime today, and came up with this scenario: Given the imbalance of power here, the autistic child and his family are prisoners of war and what is proposed is a psychological experiment that should be outlawed as a war crime.
You know – you’re not far wrong. It’s pretty brutal. The upset that this is causing the family is horrific really – people talking about wanting to end it all and spiralling into deep depression. It really is assault by bureaucracy. DWP does it as well as you know. It is bullying of the first order. As you say, people have no real means of pushing back and you have to be feeling onto it to push back which of course a lot of people don’t when this shite is going down.
All this on top of the safeguarding concerns the paediatric doctor has raised?? This council is abusing the whole family!!
It has now become a Disability Hate Crime. Not one person has been charged under the Disability Hate Crime, so what’s it for then !! More abuse of power. Hackney are now the WCA.