World Autism Awareness Day

In December 2011, Helen Green Allison MBE passed away. It’s fair to say she wasn’t a household name, but for those who came into contact with her work, her legacy and impact have been immense. As a founder of the National Autistic Society (NAS), she was responsible for creating an organisation that is now the leading UK charity for those with autism.

And yet despite the work of Allison, the NAS and their counterparts throughout the world, autism is still something that remains misunderstood. Over the last few years, in film and TV, a new stereotype has arose – the child with autism who struggles to communicate but who has the innate ability to not only tackle complex mathematical problems but use that to… Well, predict the future, or see the fundamental patterns behind the universe. And this isn’t intended to be anything other than sympathetic, as in Kiefer Sutherland’s series Touch, but it does portray autism as, effectively, some kind of superpower. Maybe this is a narrative conceit that allows writers and producers to sneak autism awareness onto primetime TV, but how helpful is it really?

Today is World Autism Awareness Day (WAAD). I have a vested family interest in this and so it’s worth supporting WAAD just so that people can get some idea of what autism and Asperger Syndrome actually are. That’s not an easy job – the autistic spectrum covers such a range of traits at differing levels of severity that everyone needs to be treated as an individual. There are no generic, one-size-fits-all answers.

But this is a good thing, because we all deserve to be treated as individuals; no-one should be labelled by their disability or their diagnosis, they should be labelled by their personality, likes, dislikes, their story and their heart.

That may come across as somewhat idealistic, especially in a world where misunderstandings of autism lead to things like the controversy over whether it’s caused by vaccines or the Gary McKinnon case. But the fact remains that Autistic Spectrum Disorders affect a significant part of the population and anything that can raise awareness of its realities is a positive thing. The child you think is misbehaving in a supermarket as people make muttered comments about poor parenting may be autistic; the socially awkward IT technician at work may have Asperger Syndrome. And each one of them is an individual, not a diagnosis.

(More information on autism is available at the NHS website.)

Human Trafficking Awareness Day 2013

Today is Human Trafficking Awareness Day. Here’s a repost of a piece I wrote for Anti-Slavery Day last year – the issues remain relevant.

We think we know what slavery is, most of us. It’s Wilberforce and ‘Amazing Grace’, the American Civil War and and Abraham Lincoln. It’s a thing of the past, a historic barbarity.

And yet human trafficking to the UK is rising. Rising.

It’s almost unbelievable. This sort of thing should be non-existent, not getting worse. Sure, it’s not endemic in this country – 946 victims last year, a tiny fraction of the population – but that almost makes it worse. It’s a hidden sin operating in a shadowy world that most of us fortunately never encounter. I mean, people are being trafficked here for forced organ removals. It’s near impossible to comprehend, like the news and a exploitative horror movie have somehow got scrambled.

But the reality is that 712 adults and 234 children were thought to be victims last year, forced into prostitution, street crime and the sex industry. Slavery’s not a thing of the past, it’s still alive and getting worse.

That’s just in the UK though. Globally, human trafficking is up there with drugs and arms dealing as one of the top criminal money-spinners. Statistics are hard to come by, but World Vision states that between 500,000 and 4 million people are trafficked, 80% of them being women and 50% being children.

Well of course they are. Because this sort of thing always seems to lead back to the exploitation of women or children.

And let’s not kid ourselves. This – Well, let’s be crass and brutal and call it a market – exists because there’s a demand for it. Victims end up working in brothels and sweatshops and lap-dancing clubs and fields and mansions because they’re seen as just another commodity. And it’s not just the traffickers involved in this, it’s those who use these ‘services’ – heck the porn and mobile phone industries are massive and neither of them are particularly fair trade.

Hey, look, I own an iPhone.

The demand’s there alright. Some of it comes from me. Not intentionally, not really knowingly, but maybe that’s what happens when the primary model of human interaction prioritises consumers over community.

I don’t know how to fix this problem. I know there are organisations out there fighting for the victims of trafficking and modern slavery, and God bless them every step of the way. But I recently heard something wise – how do we fight things that are bigger than us if our engagement with organisations or politics has to be limited? Sure, we donate, we write to MPs, but that doesn’t feel like enough, so what then?

Just for a moment, forget they exist.

In other words, we can’t put all the onus on the Government or Stop the Traffik. We can’t leave them to fight a battle for which we ‘re all responsible. So forget they exist for a moment – what choices do we make, day-to-day, that could minimise slavery? What purchases have to change? When do we have to open our eyes?

I don’t do this anywhere near enough. I’m glad there are people out there fighting, but I’m fractionally making their job harder. That’s a tough admission to make, but it’s true.

And slavery is getting worse.

December 21 2012: It’s not the End of the World (2)

Part 2 of my previous repost:

So, anyway…

Did you know that one of Christopher Columbus’s motivations behind his expeditions was a desire to help fulfill conditions so that the Second Coming could take place? Me either. This tied into the millennial twitchiness that surrounded the approach of the year 7000 (7000 Anno Mundi that is; this calendar counted years from the Creation of the world), twitchiness that influenced a bunch of mystical works throughout Europe, which in turn influenced Christopher Columbus. The unnerving thing about this is that 7000 AM is the equivalant of 1492 AD, which is when Columbus discovered America. He saw the discovery of the New World as being a culmination of God’s plan, and although it didn’t lead to the end of the world, I guess 1492 could be seen as apocalyptic for the Native Americans, the Aztecs, and everyone else who got trampled in the rush to create a new world in the New World.

Of course, Europe had just experienced the development of the printing press, and was about to embark on the Reformation, which meant the ability to interpret the Bible was suddenly available to the masses. You can see this in England in the mid-1600′s; the Civil War shook the foundation of society, and maybe it’s no coincidence that the execution of Charles I in 1649 coincided with the development of a bunch of millennial and apocalyptic groups – the Levellers, the Diggers, the Ranters, the Quakers, the Muggletonians, the Fifth Monarchy Men. And because of the whole ’666′ thing, 1666 was expected to see the End of the World. I guess if you were in the middle of the Great Plague and then the Great Fire of London, it might have seemed like it was.

This all burnt itself out – after all, how many times can the world not end and a complete overhaul of society fail to come about? The apocalyptic vibe jumped across the Atlantic and really kicked off in the mid-19th Centrury. The main example of this is the story of the Millerites. William Miller figured that the Second Coming was due to happen on October 22 1844. An estimated 100,000 people eagerly awaited the moment when Jesus came back to Earth. It didn’t happen.

This become known as the Great Disappointment which, frankly, is the greatest example of under-statement in history.

Twitchiness wasn’t just seen in the big religious movements. I guess the end of A world, the mutation of a society, the moment at which things stop being how they used to be can be seen behind some of the moral panics that keep cropping up every so often. Hidden enemies threatening to undo civilisation are seen behind every shadow. Witches stalked the fields of Europe, and of New England, and some figured they had to be stopped. It’d be nice to write that off as something that only happened in history, but look at fifties America – the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch-hunts kicked off in 1950, ruined the lives of a lot of people, then faltered in 1954. This just happened to be the year in which Dr. Frederic Wertham published The Seduction of the Innocent, a tirade against comic books that saw homosexual propaganda in the relationship between Batman and Robin, and corrupting, hidden images hidden within the art. The brief flap surrounding this lead into the age of Rock and Roll, when the bottom half of Elvis was banned from TV.

So what’s the point of thinking about all this, about flicking through a bunch of books and reading a whole lot more Wikipedia entries? Well, maybe the idea of the END is hardwired into us, just like we seem to be pre-programmed to tell certain kinds of stories. This theory is a double-edged sword; on the one hand it can get out of hand, exploding into fanaticism and bloodshed and people achieving infamy over a pile of corpses. Today it threatens to explode into a modern crusade, fought with nukes and satellites, passenger planes and dirty bombs. Be honest, seeing those planes fly into the WTC…There was something apocalyptic about that.

On the other hand, the idea of the End – if not of the world, then of the live upon it, if not of that then of our way of life – forces us to confront some home truths; truths about the way we treat our environment and the effect we have on the species that surround us, truths about the way we treat our neighbours and the ‘other’, truths about the way we abuse our beliefs to justify the darker angels of human nature.

So if the End is due to come from environmental collapse, maybe we should look at the way in which we contribute to pollution or climate change. If the End is going to be the result of a clash of ideologies, maybe we should be more interested in building bridges than stockpiling canned goods. And if the End is going to come from the hand of God, then maybe we should consider the spiritual side of our nature, and in all things be as prepared as we can be when the End finally comes.

But for now, the End hasn’t come. So turn round, hug your loved ones and make the most of life. It’s the only one you get.

December 21 2012: It’s not the End of the World (1)

And so December 21st 2012 has finally rolled around, and the UK is still here at least, although I admit we’re not in the Mayan time zone. Today being the End of the World is a belief that has gone from being a fringe concept alluded to in The X-Files and on conspiracy websites to achieving mainstream notoriety, although I’m not sure that many people are taking it particularly seriously – I think even the Mayans are perplexed at how the whole thing has blown up.

In response, then, I thought I’d repost a couple of entries from a gazillion years ago… Well, 2005. Some of the references are dated now, but I think the point still stands.

Originally posted September 5th 2005, which may help put things into context
It’s hard to watch the news lately. The pictures of a devestated New Orleans and its Gulf Coast neighbours are bad enough, but what gives the whole situation an apocalyptic air are the reports coming from the aftermath – looting, abandonment, refuge camps, failure to respond, the breakdown of civilisation’s fragile mask. You start wondering what would happen should it affect your town, your home. You start thinking about the end of the world, or at least the end of the little worlds we build up around us.

I think deep down within humanity there’s a sense in which we’d like the End to happen on our watch – sure, science reckons the universe will die gazillions of years after we’ve all passed on, but we keep on coming up with cataclysmic scenarios that will hasten our passing from this life.

So Christianity has the Rapture and premillennialism and RFID-as-the-Number-of-the-Beast. Science has a bunch of theories; the heat death of the universe, for instance, or the Big Crunch. And then there’s climate change, be it part of a natural cycle or accelerated by the activities of mankind. A meteor strike, like the one that took out the dinosaurs. Or maybe we’ll face a real technopocalypse, like the panicked frenzies surrounding the Y2K bug, or nanotechnologists’ theorising about the Grey Goo scenario.

Then there are comets. In 1066 Halley’s comet hung in the sky, four times the size of Venus, signalling the Battle of Hastings and the death of Anglo-Saxon England. When Halley made its 1910 tour of Earth, there were fearful newspaper reports about the possibility of millions dying of cyanogen poisoning as the result of passing through the tail of the comet. And when Hale-Bopp turned up in 1997, the Heaven’s Gate cult took a mass-suicide assisted trip to the spaceship they believed was following it.

And then there’s plague. I think I’ve been around for the latest wave of death-by-scary-diseases frights – Salmonelle, Ebola, BSE, now its Bird ‘flu, and let’s face it, if the AIDS crisis in Africa doesn’t have apocalyptic overtones to it, I don’t know what does. Estimates put the European death toil of the Black Death of 1347-50 as up to a third of the population, with more worldwide – and this was on top of the little Ice Age, which had major effects on the human population for the following 400 years. The Spanish ‘Flu of 1918 wiped out between 25 and 50 million people worldwide – right on top of World War I, the war that saw the end of the 19th century world and that lead directly to World War II, which pretty much put a stake through the corpse of the old Europe.

Yeah. World War II. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Aushwitz. Dresden. The rape of Nanking. Japanese prison camps. Suddenly industrialised genocide and nuclear weapons emphasised the possibility that carnage on a grand, even worldwide scale, were possible. We entered the nuclear age, culminating in such reassuring events as the Cuban Missile Crisis, Chernobyl, and Ronnie Reagan’s laser-beams-from-space ideas. I remember when they said they were developing a Star Wars program. That sounds a lot cooler than it was when you’re the type of kid who wanted to grow up to be Han Solo.

Some would say that this is all very maudlin, and it makes me feel very small in the face of it all. On the other hand…Well, that’s another post…

In Memory of Sophie Lancaster

I wrote this a while back, on the International Day Against Intolerance, Discrimination and Violence Based on Musical Preferences, Lifestyle and Dress Code. As today would have been Sophie Lancaster’s birthday, I thought it was worth a repost.

Back in 2007, Sophie Lancaster and her boyfriend were attacked and beaten in Rossendale, Lancashire. Sophie subsequently died from her injuries at the age of 20. The motive for the attack? Sophie and her boyfriend were goths.

I remember the news of this attack breaking, and being shocked at the senselessness of it all. That senselessness has lead to August 24, the anniversary of Sophie’s death, being commemorated as the International Day Against Intolerance, Discrimination and Violence Based on Musical Preferences, Lifestyle and Dress Code. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but in a world where the Sophie Lancaster Foundation is necessary, the day is worth remembering.

While labels can sometimes be used positively – consolidating a community, perhaps, or drawing together those with an affinity to each other – they’re also a curse. Too much of our worth can come from labels, superficial tags that can’t possibly represent the whole person, and at some point that can become dangerous. The teenagers who attacked Sophie and her boyfriend were living under a label, culture and mindset that saw ‘moshers’ as The Other, aliens to be attacked rather than fellow humans with different preferences in fashion. And while it’s horrifying that musical taste should become a life-and-death issue, it’s sadly unsurprising when we’ve been spending years killing each other over race, religion, gender, sexuality… Too often we base our labels around what we’re against rather than what we’re for, and when we do, bad things inevitably happen.

(Of course, this affects public policy too. In the wake of the UK riots, politicians were quick to blame things on criminality, dismissing such issues as poverty and a breakdown in authority. Maybe there’s some truth in that, but it’s still a them-and-us mentality.)

So maybe there’s an opportunity today; to listen to a genre of music we’ve never bothered with before, to chat with someone outside our clique, to rise above our labels and comfort zones. Because no-one should die because of what’s on their iPod.

PS. It’s just occurred to me that this story has thematic links with Deborah Bryan’s excellent but heart-rending posts on bullying over at The Monster in Your Closet…