Exploiting instead of protecting the vulnerable with disabilities -
I found it disturbing in the latest new article from The Guardian showed the Australian police exploited a vulnerable boy, a thirteen year old autistic boy to become a terrorist – after purporting to protect us the public from harm they decided to groom a boy already fixated and easily influenced to become a terrorist and then charge him as soon as he turned 14 years old since he was old enough to be charged.
The boy, given the pseudonym Thomas Carrick, was later charged with terror offences after an undercover officer “fed his fixation” and “doomed” the rehabilitation efforts Thomas and his parents had engaged in, a Victorian children's court magistrate found.2 Feb 2024 The Guardian
Why aren’t they charging real terrorists and stopping them? not feeding an autistic boy with teaching to turn him into one when his parents had asked for help, yet instead the police used this boy. Do police have hearts of stone or are clearly so racist and discriminatory against those with disabilities they do not care because they are so hardened with their own ideology of no one in disabilities, no one in aged care, and no one of another race matters, especially not a first nations person as we all have seen. So shocking they did this to a vulnerable young person who did not understand what he was doing. Autism is real. Despite the groanings of Bill shorten trying to cut the autistic off the ndis system, as if they don’t have a disorder, they actually do.
How can this act of deception using a young boy come to be ? It is Australia we expect he police to protect us yet when this autistic boy’s parents asked the police to help them with their son’s fixation instead of giving him a psychologist to help him break the fixation – the police gave him an undercover cop to feed him teaching to make him want to become a terrorist and then charged him for it. How devious and how cruel – it seems racism had a part to play as the boy also spoke another language – our police should be ashamed. As noted in the guardian
“It’s scarcely believable that, as the court found, the JCTT encouraged an autistic 13-year-old boy in his nascent and naive fixation with Islamic State. The boy, who cannot be identified for legal reasons and known by the pseudonym Thomas Carrick, is an NDIS recipient and has an IQ of 71. By any measure he is clearly an extremely vulnerable young man.”
Also noted (Newhouse and Fine 2024 The Guardian 7th February)
“The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability found evidence of a systematic criminalisation of disability across Australia. “
They should be criminalizing the actions of the Providers in disabilities who harm our vulnerable children like my son was hit to the head at a respite house and punched in the arm at a day program by the support workers. The police refused to question the workers or investigate the organizations. They are money making businesses perhaps. Is that why? Instead of punishing the criminals who hurt our children they are criminalizing those who have a disability. This is backward. This is ignorance and cruel. Choosing to dominate those who are weak and vulnerable including those who are aged, like the 92 year old who was tazered by a tazer happy police constable and died. Those like the recent tazering and deaths of those with mental illness. The police have been brutal and largely unaccountable for their behaviour.
They need to change the way they think and the way they operate or we are returning to the Dickens era of hurting the poor, the vulnerable, those with disabilities getting exploited – especially children and youth. The police need to be taught to actually show care to these young and fragile ones and yes even to the aged - the police appear to have no understanding or teaching on those so vulnerable - yet they themselves could be one of them one day why cant they do the right thing? Is their job so well paid they have to do little to earn it or are they being taught not to care at all? Have they all become exploitive bullies – like many of the providers became as the disability sector got taken over by business people who didn’t care about those with disabilities but only the money they could make out of them, including the government itself. Bill Shorten always talking about the money in the NDIS and getting rid of autistic kids off the system to have more money. How nice.
Noted by Chris Douglas (Pearls and Irritations – politics, Human Rights, February 10th 2024) what the Australian authorities and their police did was a breach of the United Nations Convention of Children’s human rights. They waited until the boy was `14 years old to then charge him with the things they had enticed him to do as undercover they fed him terrorist ideas. Since a 14 year old is considered in Australia able to know what he did was morally wrong. However, this boy was autistic, and this boy had an IQ of 71 he had no idea what was right or wrong and he was tricked. It seems criminal that the police are not even in trouble for this. I am sure if they had done it to a well off white Australian family there would have been hell to pay. This is discrimination and exploitation of a disability person coupled with racism and classism or picking on the poor. Yes there are poor people in Australia.
Noted in the article “A child with autism can be easily groomed, but rather than protect the child from harm, as police often do to protect children from online sexual predators, they feed his interest in the terrorist organisation Islamic State, leading him to commit the offences for which he was later charged.” (Chris Douglas 2024 Australian Authorities Breach UN conventions of rights of a child) The writer of the article is going to approach the UN regarding a breach of human rights of a child concerning the police’s purposeful radicalization of this young person of 13 years old.
The judge dropping charges against the boy although he had already spent time in prison and was traumatized from the ordeal - a fourteen year old! (The Guardian 2024) The judge commented - “The community would not expect law enforcement officers to encourage a 13-14 year-old child towards racial hatred, distrust of police and violent extremism, encouraging the child’s fixation on ISIS.”
Yet the police were not punished or held to account. This seems unbelievable that they were let off. This shows a bias against those with disabilities by not only the police but the justice system and it is wrong. Why encourage a disability boy into terrorism? Aren’t there enough terrorists to charge yet? It seems that those with disabilities need protection from the police who were supposedly there to protect the public and especially the vulnerable.
Noted in The Guardian article (2024)
“If Thomas had come from a wealthy family and attended a private school, would the police have acted the way they did? If you live with a disability or come from a vulnerable section of society, different rules seem to apply.
Sadly, in 2024 in Australia, some police appear to think it’s standard operating procedure to criminalise being disabled, young, poor, LGBTQ+, being a person of colour or First Nations.”
The writers of the article in The Guardian work for the National Justice project and call this discrimination of vulnerable groups in Australia “a national disgrace” and I have to agree. We can do better than this and Australia must.
All the best
Anndrea x
sign my petition for CCTV cameras to stop abuse in disabilities and have evidence so that perpetrators will be charged for harming our disability children and adult
change.org/disabilitycameras