This title is clickbait. A man harassed the victims of a mass murderer and happened to be autistic. Here's a hot take: if you're not mentally competent to be held responsible for the crimes you commit using a tool like a computer or a gun, you should not have access to that tool.
If you go there, then the blame should be placed on the parent, not the kid, since he was the one giving access to "the tool". But this is a serious lack of empathy. Being the parent of a neurodiverse child is difficult. The first thing is that you cannot relate to him in the way that you can with a neurotypical child. You have to understand the full spectrum of his differences, but how can you ? This is a job psychiatrist already struggle to do.
You can observe your child, ask him question and infer based on those observation, but that will not necessarily give you the full picture.
The article is a prime exemple, the kid was "happy" and never displayed before the behaviour that landed him in trouble with the law, so how the father should have expected that his child might go online and say horrible thing ? And to be fair, the same is often true even for neurotypical child.
Probably a good idea for any kid to be honest. The internet is not a safe place. But a lot of parent are not tech savy, and a heavy handed approach might lead your kid to try to hide his activity from you. It is not simple.
I have a pretty high bar for requiring parents to helicopter parent their kids, but this sounds like a good example where it really should be required.
Either the article is overblowing his autism, or else the parent should have understood his autism required a lot more observation of his behavior. I'm not a parent so I don't know how modern parents handle dealing with the internet with their teenagers, but I certainly know that it is a Thing that you have to worry about. It would seem very obvious to me that if you have an autistic kid who is getting on the internet that you'd need to be worrying about everything that they're doing.
I'm sure he was getting groomed by trolls in internet chat rooms, that he thought were "cool", and this is a good case of where the parent really needs to be more concerned about what friends their kid is hanging out with, and they need to not just plug the kid into the internet as a babysitter.
never displayed before the behaviour that landed him in trouble with the law
How do you know that? His word? His parents' word? All we know is he's never before harassed someone to the point they went to the police and the police followed it up with the relevant platform, got his information, and filed it.
Being the parent of a neurodiverse child is difficult.
What's this have to do with the price of tea in China? I'm not saying the police should have showed up and shot him if he didn't cooperate like a neurotypical person would. I'm saying being autistic doesn't make the consequences and liability for your actions just evaporate.
Agree. And ultimately this does happen under various legal frameworks around the globe.
The trouble is I suspect this man did have the capacity to understand what he was doing and what it was doing to the victims. And so he appears legally culpable.
A hot-take is simply a controversial opinion - but not necessarily an indefensible one.
Oftentimes people will have a genuinely good, well-informed and reasoned opinion but can’t put it into the right words - or it gets misinterpreted thanks to ambiguity of intonation-less text - and ends-up getting ratioed.
It helps to attach a pepper emoji so people know you’re at least being self-aware.
