FOXNews.com - Autistic Boy Accused of Terroristic Threats
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Shane Finn, a 14 year old autistic boy, was suspended from school, arrested and charged with a felony. He was charged with with making terrostic threats. Shane Finn functions on a third grade level and has an IQ of 75. He does not understand what he has done wrong, according to his mother, and he has difficulties expressing himself.
As a mom of an autistic boy, I understand the situation. It's my worse nightmare. That my son would be arrested based on actions that have been misinterpreted by others. It happens all the time and needs to be stopped. New legislation needs to be brought about to protect our children.
Our children are different. They think and react differently. This needs to be taken into account for every incident involving an autistic child. In this case, the child should not have been suspended or arrested. Obviously, something is wrong. The parents and school counselor or Psychologist, should have been brought in to talk with the boy and the teacher.
Two years ago, I was blessed with discovering how to communicate with my son. During the second week of our communicating, he told me he wanted a gun. He was 9 at the time. I asked him why. He said he wanted to kill himself. I was so upset, I just broke down crying.
It took us a week of him asking for a gun to kill himself and me telling him no, before we were able to get to the bottom of it. He didn't want to die. He wanted to go see God and have God make him normal. Then, he wanted to come back to us. I explained that it didn't work that way. That was the end of it. He didn't want a gun or to die anymore.
With an autistic child, linear thinking tends to trip us up. An autistic child can say one thing or draw one thing, and it may have a specific meaning to you. For the autistic child, however, the meaning may be something completely different.
That's why laws need to be in place to protect our children. Behavior plans in school are great, but they don't protect our children from the school calling the police and having our child arrested. My heart goes out to Shane Finn and his family. I cringe to think what kind of affect this is having on him emotionally.
1 comments:
I wrote an article about this with plenty of my opinion. You can view that here- http://newsflavor.com/world/usa-canada/autistic-boy-charged-with-terroristic-threats-after-drawing-picture-of-gun/
It is heartbreaking and enraging. I do not have an autistic child, but I do have a handicapped child. These teachers, school board, and legal officials involved should be ashamed of themselves. Thank you for adding coverage to this story. I hope that it gets miles of media attention so that we can help this family and future families from facing the same thing.
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