Stop focusing on Jonty Bravery’s autism – it’s putting children like mine at risk

“Autistic Jonty Bravery ‘frequently assaulted’ his carers and had been arrested” ... “Autistic Jonty Bravery was in council care but ‘frequently assaulted’ his carers”. I’m quoting from a tabloid newspaper, which felt the need to repeatedly remind its readers (on separate occasions) that “autistic” Jonty Bravery is, you got it, autistic.

Bravery is in the news because he did something unimaginably terrible. He pushed a six-year-old boy off a 10th floor balcony at the Tate Modern in London. The child survived, but still uses a wheelchair as a result of his injuries. Bravery has been jailed for 15 years.

The events in question are every parent’s worst nightmare and I don’t propose to play the role of unnecessary addition to Bravery’s defence team here. What troubles me, as the parent of an autistic child, is the way that story I used as an example, and others, have zeroed in on that one aspect of Bravery, putting it front and centre. Autistic thus becomes code for violent, scary, murderous.

My son is autistic, and he’s the polar opposite, both in terms of his nature (he abhors violence) and in terms of his obsessive following of rules (even to the extent of picking me up for poor parking).

As Jane Harris, director of external affairs at the National Autistic Society, says: “It’s important to remember that the vast, vast majority of the 700,000 autistic people in the UK are law-abiding – sometimes particularly so because of a propensity to know and stick to the rules.

“We know many autistic people and other supporters are worried that the high-profile nature of the case could risk warping public understanding of autism.”

Just so. I greatly fear the impact on my son if increasing numbers of people latch on to the word “autistic” and use it as the basis for taunts or worse.

That is an all-too-real danger with secondary schools, where differences are frequently singled out and used to demean and bully. He’s already heard the phrase “that’s a bit autistic” used by other pupils in a pejorative fashion.

He also found a twisted comment below one of the articles covering Bravery’s misdeeds in which some vile creature had suggested it be made legal to hunt autistic people for sport. Others just said they should be made subject to the death penalty.

You know what? It’s the “normal” people who swim in that sort of swamp that scare me. It isn’t just in secondary schools where this sort of thing has a real-world impact. It gets picked up on by officialdom too.

People on the autistic spectrum can exhibit challenging behaviour. With the right care it can be managed. But the right care can be extremely difficult to obtain. It’s often so bad it doesn’t deserve to be described as such.

The case of Bethany, an autistic girl locked up for 24 hours a day without human contact, recently became a cause celebre thanks to the campaigning efforts of her father.

It even drew a vanishingly rare apology from health secretary Matt Hancock, in response to which Bethany’s dad has since tweeted: “This isn’t and was never just about Beth.”

With good reason. Some 80 civil society groups and experts last year provided evidence on cases like Bethany’s for a report by Redress, an organisation that seeks justice for torture victims. A whole chapter was devoted to torture in healthcare settings.

When a tragedy like the one at the Tate occurs, and when it’s explicitly linked to autism, it feeds into a baseless narrative that equates “autism” with “dangerous”. It feeds into risk assessments that say the only way to deal with autistic people is to lock them up and throw away the key.

The court hearings have suggested autism may have played a role in Bravery’s behaviour. But he had other conditions too. As Harris says: “It would be wrong for us to speculate about what led to this particular tragic case.”

I understand the construction of news stories. Reporters have to convey a lot of information in a limited number of words to a tight deadline. This can lead to an overreliance on convenient shorthand. Bravery’s autism was also cited in the trial, which makes it relevant to reports on the case.

But the media and society need to take care. Autistic people like my son are now being put at risk, people who are far more likely to be victims of crime rather than the perpetrators of it, not to mention the victims of inadequate care. That may have played a role in Bravery’s case too.