Disability Day of Mourning, an annual vigil, is shining light on the deaths of disabled people at the hands of their loved one. Photo: Myriams-Fotos via Pixabay
Like many disability advocacy projects, Disability Day of Mourning, a vigil held each year on March 1, was born out of a keen sense of frustration.
In 2012, Zoe Gross, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network’s current director of advocacy, was appalled by the media coverage and community reaction surrounding the death of George Hodgins, an autistic California man who was killed by his mother in a murder-suicide. She couldn’t abide by the idea that the best course of action was a planned dual vigil and that some people in the area were empathizing with the murderer, even sharing that they had had similar thoughts in the past.
“I felt I had to do something because I felt that was really inappropriate,” Gross told DJA, “Just that he can’t be memorialized separately from the person who took him out of this world. It didn’t sit right with me.”
Disability Day of Mourning honors the victims of filicide—in this case where a family or household member kills a disabled person. Vigils are held internationally, including online, and ASAN hosts a site, disability-memorial.org, that highlights the stories of those murdered and an anti-filicide toolkit. From the site, you can download a list, each year featuring a call for coordinators to host events in their area. The list has grown to such a point that the goal each year is to name each person who died in the previous year at least once.
Data on the rates of disability-related filicide is hard to come by, but the underlying story is often the same. A family member of a Disabled person sees their relative as a burden, or thinks they are “putting them out of their misery.” Many of the cases on ASAN’s site are related to so-called mercy killings, where public opinion has made it seem as if being dead is better than being disabled. When media regurgitate that narrative verbatim, advocates say, that makes these murders feel natural or normal.
Despite this longstanding narrative, Gross says that, when the project first began, it wasn’t always welcomed by other Disability organizations.
“When it started, it was a controversial event. And people who are more in the mainstream disability organizations didn’t want to be associated with it because it was considered to be anti-parent. And the view I take is that most parents don’t murder their children and I don’t have any issue with them,” Gross said.
Gross says she’s seen that shift in the last 14 years, but that media still have to ask themselves if how they are covering these sorts of stories is equitable.
“If you find yourself focusing more on the difficulties faced by the murderer, if you find yourself portraying them in a more sympathetic light, just step back and question why is that?”
She also has a message for the current administration.
“We’ve been trying to push back against rhetoric from the Trump administration saying that autistic people’s lives are tragedies…that autism destroys families, autism destroys children. That rhetoric is the rhetoric of filicide.”
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