I'd like to raise awareness for the problem of disabled homicide victims; the problem being that there are far too many of them. Disabled people have a much increased homicide risk, and the type of disability doesn't seem to matter much--whether physical, mental, psychological, or sensory, visible or invisible, the homicide rates are increased.
Over the last few years I have been working on three projects:
Autism Memorial
This is the first and oldest of the projects I started, and it's quite simply a memorial to autistic homicide victims. Whether they died by direct murder, neglect, or in a few cases committed suicide after years of harassment, they deserve to be remembered. At this point, I have 281 memorial pages, and there are two more I'm working on right now.
Memorial Annex
This is a database I started when I realized that I was coming across many news stories on homicide victims who were disabled, but not autistic. It's much more bare-bones and is meant as an aid to researchers. The entries are tagged for police-related deaths, family/caregiver-related deaths, and autistics, and I have limited them to post-1980 deaths only. There are currently between 1000 and 1100 entries.
Disability Day of Mourning
I've been working on this for less than a year, so it's the newest database. I'm working on it for ASAN. Every year on May 1, there's a vigil for people with disabilities killed by family members and caregivers, and those are the cases that are on this site. The front page is still pretty plain, and the memorial pages themselves are bare-bones, but at the moment I have 469 memorial pages (and a few more deaths than that, since some pages commemorate multiple murders, usually of siblings). The original Disability Day of Mourning list was thirty-some names; by last year it was about 160 names. Now it's getting too long to read at the vigil.
Yes, it's depressing. But it's easier for me to do this than not, because if I didn't, I'd feel like I was letting these people be forgotten.
27 Nov 2015, 11:59 am
