Below is the text of an artcle, entitled "Recognition - Young Authorship", which had been sitting quite happily for 5 months on an autism website. I won't yet, just yet, say which website, because the organisation is still seeing a lawyer about its website vetting system and the article's removal might not be permanent. But neither have I been given any guarantee, after a week, that it's not permanent. If it is permanent, its removal is abject compliance with the wishes of a hate mailer, and that obviously is illegal.

I had already spoken out in the Cross Party Group in parliament, on there being an internet vendetta conducted by some home educating parents, against anyone who expresses views they don't like on the education bill. I had mentioned the hate mailer in a parliamentary submission, actually before she discovered this article and started sending sexually filthy hate mail to the website that had hosted it. The vendetta started in a group advertised in Freaks Geeks and Asperger Syndrome, which book Luke Jackson's mother admitted in the Times 16-8-02 is 12/13 by her, so not really by Luke at all. The article is not about the education bill, so the hate mailing campaign shows that the vendetta makers now also want to suppress any speaking out about child authors whose chance was destroyed, and any expressions of unhappiness with the Luke Jackson machine for not caring about the issue.

There is nothing legally wrong with the article: it clearly consists of political opinion. E.G. calling it horrible how adults use Luke Jackson's personality cult, is not a personal attack on him. If there was anything legally wrong with the article it would not have been accepted in the first place, nor remained in place for months with no problems. It has been removed by personal edict of the chair of a constituted charity that has a committee. It is apparent from this, as from unproductive letter writing to big organisations: that in the world of Asperger Syndrome services, some leading figures are rating it necessary for their own career prospects, not to upset the public perception of Luke Jackson in any way, and they can be nobbled to censor writing that does this.

Meanwhile, don't you think Jacqui Jackson wronged every aspie child in Britain, when she said on TV on August 1: "They don't write books, like Luke does"? That type of thing is why it was necessary for me to write the article, and for Asperger support workers to want it kept on the web in defiance of intimidation.



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>In all human organisations promoting causes, there is a temptation
>to do what makes the cause look its best to casual observers. Group
>psychology prefers everything to look positive and happy-clappy,
>than to be tarnished by any unfair experiences an individual has
>had. To look out only for the group, to let the dominant crush the
>inconvenient, is the level of primitive animal psychology that
>aspies always pride themselves on being above. Does that mean, on
>grounds of clinical need we can tie all the community of autistic
>organisations to rise above it too? That means, reliably and
>enforceably, to always back wronged individuals against groups in
>every case that ever happens, no matter how inexpedient.
>
>I think clinical need is a brilliant argument to use. We can't
>relate to groups, with the animal instincts of dominance and
>submission. We can't say the right thing all the time and guess what
>people want to hear. So any aspie can call foul any time any
>organisation concerned with our needs ever behaves unfairly as a
>group against an individual. The beauty is, you don't even need a
>majority of aspies to make the effort to do this, nor need to win a
>vote. Just 1 aspie is always medically in the right when they take
>this stand. But, if the 1 aspie is not just going to bring group
>exclusion onto themself by taking the stand, as has happened to me
>in an internet group on education, then the ground must be prepared
>before these situations arise. In research surveys of our needs, in
>groups you get on well with, in activities, and if you take part in
>any medical stuff, individual fairness is a clinical need for
>aspies. Cite it as one, at every opportunity you get. An
>orgnaisation can't deny it without sounding wrong towards aspies'
>social difficulty, then the organisation is tied to do the right
>thing when an example arises.
>
>Suppose you have been wronged by a group advertised in a book, and
>you can't make autistic organisations affix a warning about this to
>every copy sold? How bad that feels shows why you don't feel cared
>about, supported, even accurately represented to the public, by any
>organisation whose head office remote from your life just wants to
>have a happy-clappy image of doing good deeds for the poor dears,
>without responding to personal hurts. Aspies are bright enough that
>the difference between alienation and inclusion hinges on having a
>democratic voice in how AS is portrayed. This even includes the
>criteria for diagnosing it: without the difficulties with metaphor
>or facial reading I didn't have the confidence to count myself an
>aspie until other aspies in a support group gave me it.
>
>At present, a small closed aristocracy of famous authors obsessed
>with praising each other, and national organisations with
>businesslike images who don't want to advertise stories of injustice
>with groups, are the public voice of AS. To change this, it only
>needs a few people to keep asserting that the whole point of
>supporting our social relating problems automatically proves we must
>have explicit immunity from group rejection experiences. Then
>ordinary aspies will have to be listened to and allowed a platform
>to speak out every time we find anything socially unfair in the
>direction AS's public image is taking.
>
>I want to assert that I don't want to benefit from any fundraising
>sport activities with these rules: "The interests and reputation of
>the charity are of paramount importance. The society may at its sole
>discretion withdraw your place on any challenge if it believes it is
>in the best interests of the charity." and "If you are refused entry
>to the country you are visiting, any additional costs are your own
>responsibility." There is a group actually doing this, with these
>outrageous arrogant rules for the nice caring fundraisers. This is
>how I would change the rules: "Individual fairness is of paramount
>importance, and regardless of the best interests of the charity you
>are guaranteed never to have your generous emotions abused by a
>rejection", and "If you are refused entry to the country you are
>visiting, we will all turn round and come home with you and be
>contractually obliged to trash the country in our next literature."
>
>My greatest cause of pain in AS publicity concerns its use of child
>authors, that's Kenneth Hall and Luke Jackson. The wild adulation
>they are getting, is all written as if they had succeeded wholly on
>merit and as if any child with the same abilities could have the
>same success, implying no one else has the abilities. this is doing
>a poisonous mass injustice to both aspies and non-aspies, because it
>shows no awareness that most children who want to be authors are
>being denied the chance, by the volume and abusively tight
>enforcement of school homework that has existed for the past
>generation. I challenge you to look at the record and see that since
>Lindsay Brown in 1978 no child author has emerged to success,
>without having some special factor in their life outside school to
>protect them from homework ruining it. Kenneth Hall is home
>educated, and Luke Jackson, with his horrible personality cult
>labels of unique and amazing, simply had the adults interested in
>his dietary problem, to protect his chance to succeed. So they are
>creations of circumstantial luck most people don't have, and until
>them no non-famous children at all had succeeded as authors since
>1978: a sinister lost generation, that I belong to. Can any aspie
>suffer a more wounding pain of oppression from the present AS image
>machine, than this? - to read the words "It is not often that a 14
>year old boy gets a book published", after I never asked to be a 14
>year old boy with too much homework to get a book published?
>
>There are other reasons, captivity of mind, international law on
>slavery, the abusivensss of mad expectations, children who have
>committed suicide, for holding as I do that homework is a crime
>against humanity. but to every destroyed child author, aspie or not,
>who is upset by Luke, I have an offer. I'm a child author whose
>completion of a sci-fi novel was prevented by criminally idiotic
>life ruining homework in this way, but before it was, I was lucky
>enough to get child author publicity in Welsh newspapers, South
>Wales Echo 20 August 1980 and Western Mail 19 January 1982. The
>point of boasting of this is that it vindicates the genuineness of
>destroyed child authors' experience and shows from historical record
>that we exist. So all destroyed child authors without any historical
>record of their own, you can refer to this in order to have the
>confidence to speak out. Don't live in fear that no one will believe
>you were a child author.
>
>At present this is my top hurting issue, for demanding an
>opportunity to speak out against its present treatment by leading AS
>publicists, that leaves out any recognition of people hurt by a
>common and serious trauma. If we already had the clout we can build,
>to get our social justice feelings voiced by automatic right through
>the big autistic organisations, an alienating pain like this
>couldn't happen.
>
>Maurice Frank - July 2003