White Paper – Media Coverage of Murders of PwD by Caregivers – 5
SECTION TWO: OVERVIEW—Filicide in America and the Media When parents and caregivers murder their disabled children, spouses, siblings or clients, the news media far too often rushes in to explain, justify, and forgive the murderer. They produce “killer-centered” stories that link disability to hardship, hardship to murder, and erase the victim’s life and death from the narrative. Judges, prosecutors, and juries tend to go more leniently on murderers whose victims are disabled, and the media tends to report such light sentences as understandable rather than outrageous. Reporters almost never quote experts on disability rights, nor do they ask people with disabilities to comment. Instead, local beat reporters, chasing deadlines, quote neighbors who blithely state that the murderer truly loved his or her victim. Comment threads and social media hashtags proliferate emphasizing empathy for the killers, but rarely seem to ask about the victim. Overall, such coverage leads to further dehumanization of people with disabilities, spreads the idea that their lives are worth less than non-disabled lives, and contributes to the exclusion of people with disabilities. While many disabled people have long recognized the prevalence of this issue and the problems with the coverage, awareness intensified thanks to the work of then-college student Zoe Gross in 2012. Gross, who now works for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN - see their statement in section 5 of this document), founded the “Disability Day of Mourning” (DDoM) in collaboration with ASAN, Not Dead Yet, and the National Council on Independent Living, as “a nation-wide vigil commemorating the lives of people with disabilities murdered by their parents or caregivers.” It’s now global. The website for the DDoM, provides a list of names of victims dating back to 1980, from which we drew our initial data set. ASAN also publishes an anti-filicide toolkit. Thanks to the work of these selfadvocates and their allies, the disability community is increasingly helping to contextualize filicide and related violence as a systemic problem, rather than regarding each death as a discrete tragedy. That awareness has not permeated media culture, nor is there a great wealth of crossdisability scholarly analysis (see the resource section for a partial bibliography). We hope that our spreadsheet will provide a useful starting point for journalists or scholars looking for data or context. Most importantly, though, we hope to fundamentally change how journalists report filicides and related murders by caregivers of people with disabilities. To support our research, we compiled data, based on media reports, on 260 deaths from January 2011 to December 2015 and included 219 deaths in our sample. While we are certain this is a significant undercount in the number of deaths of this sort, even this