Autistic girl's brother becomes collateral damage in abuse case

The Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson devoted two columns (here and here) to the recently dismissed abuse case against the father of an autistic girl. The 14-year old girl, who is unable to speak, accused her father of rape. She did this using facilitated communication in which a school aide assisted her in typing out messages on a keyboard. Testimony obtained through Facilitated Communication has repeatedly been shown to be unreliable as evidence in court. Messages obtained through this method have been shown to originate with the facilitator rather than the autistic person.

The girl's younger brother, who has a milder form of autism called Asperger's syndrome, was also drawn into the case when he was questioned by an investigator without his lawyer present and under circumstances which were considered by experts to be inappropriate and damaging to the boy.

Videotapes were made of the interrogation and excerpts are available on-line.

The 13-year-old brother was questioned by a police detective in early December 2007 after his father was arrested for allegedly raping his sister; his mother was charged with allowing the abuse to happen. The boy and his sister had been placed in foster homes. The interrogator, a police detective, appears to have ignored Michigan child abuse laws which prescribe rules for questioning juveniles in sexual abuse cases. The rules warn investigators to avoid threats, promises, and leading questions, but the investigator used all of those things during his interrogation. As Brian Dickerson reports:

For nearly an hour, Detective Joseph Brousseau had grilled the boy about accusations that he and his autistic sister had been sexually molested by their father.

No, the boy insisted, he'd seen nothing to support the detective's lurid suspicions. Three times, he offered to take a lie detector test.

But Brousseau hammered away, challenging the boy's honesty, his manliness, his loyalty to his disabled sister.

Again and again, the detective told the boy his body language betrayed the burden of a terrible secret.

"What if I told you that one of those videotapes confiscated from your parents' house had you in it?" the detective asked suddenly.

The 13-year-old straightened. "Was it me doing something sexually?"

"I don't think I'd be bringing it up if it wasn't," Brousseau answered. "That's what I'm trying to tell you -- it's going to come out."

If it were merely what it purported to be -- the disclosure of a deviant father's treachery -- the videotaped exchange would be excruciating enough to watch.

But the truth is a good deal uglier than that.

Charges have been dropped. In fact, prosecutors now concede, much of what Brousseau told the boy during his Dec. 4 interrogation was a fabrication.

The damage to the family and especially to the disabled 13-year old brother in this terribly flawed case is incalculable, but a lawsuit by the family is a possibility.

Michigan abuse case against father of autistic teenager dismissed

The Detroit Free Press, on March 11 and March 12, 2008, reported that a judge has dismissed all charges against a West Bloomfield, Michigan man who was accused of raping his 15-year-old autistic daughter. The accusations were supposedly made by the girl through a highly controversial method called facilitated communication. The girl, who is unable to talk, was assisted by a teacher's aide in typing out messages on a keyboard. At a hearing in February, the girl was unable to answer any questions in court when the teacher's aide was prevented from hearing the questions being asked. Experts testified that in cases like this, the messages are consciously or unconsciously those of the facilitator and not the autistic person.

The case against the girl's mother for not stopping the rapes has also been dismissed.

While defense attorneys said there was never any basis for believing the abuse had occurred, the prosecutors said they decided to ask for a dismissal in the case because the girl refused to testify. Assistant prosecutors said they met with the girl four times. In one interview, the girl said, through her teacher's aide and by pointing at yes-no cards, that she was afraid of her father and did not want to testify. The interview was not taped, however, and there was no written record.

According to the attorney for the girl's mother, when the girl was reunited with her father, she ran into his arms and could not stop hugging him. The girl had spent four months in foster care and her father 80 days in jail.

In a separate civil case that sought to remove both the girl and her brother from their parents, a judge ordered the children returned to their parents.

Recent autism studies

An article published in Science News, January 12, 2008, p. 19, reports on recent studies attempting to unravel the possible genetic causes of autism.

Geneticist Mark J. Daly of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has found a small stretch of chromosome 16 that promotes autism when it is in an altered form. It is found in about 1% of children with the disorder. The study looked at 751 families with two or more children with autism or a related disorder, for a total of 1,441 affected children. The researchers found additional evidence of both DNA deletion and extra copies of genes within the chromosome 16 area in children diagnosed with autism. In most of the cases, the altered genes arose spontaneously, but some were inherited from parents.

Another study, led by geneticist Aravinda Chakravati of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, identified a small area of chromosome 7 that showed a link to autism. A specific gene on chromosome 7 makes a protein essential for neural communications.

In another study reported in Science News, September 29, 2007, p. 197, researchers found no association between Mercury in vaccines and climbing autism rates. The study was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and enrolled 1,047 children from 7 - 10 years old. The researchers compared the amount of Themerosol, a Mercury based preservative used in vaccines, that children received through the first 7 months of life and the results of a battery of tests for language, memory, motor coordination, attention, and intelligence. They found no correlation between the amount of Mercury the children received and performance on the tests.

In another study by the California Department of Public Health, researcher Robert Schechter found that the prevalence of autism in children aged 3 - 12 years old has increased gradually from 1995 to 2007, even though Themerosol was removed from vaccines from 1999 - 2001.

Science News is available on-line only by subscription.

Take the high road...

“…take the high road. There’s less traffic.” Leonard Pitts, Jr., columnist for the Miami Herald

More on abuse case based on allegations made through facilitated communication

The Detroit Free Press reports more developments in the case of a 14-year-old autistic girl who accused her father of rape through facilitated communication, a widely discredited communication technique where a facilitator holds the arm or wrist of the girl over a keyboard while she spells out messages.

Family Court Judge Joan Young ruled that the girl could continue to use facilitated communication at school, but that she could not use it to communicate about the pending case against her parents. The judge was alarmed that West Bloomfield police had questioned the autistic girl's mentally-impaired brother on December 4, 2007, without notifying his guardian and without a parent or attorney present. She said this is not to happen again.

A column by Brian Dickerson, "Crying rape through a Ouija board", also appeared in the Free Press on 2/6/08. He concludes that "...the gravity of the state's allegations can't camouflage the weakness of its case. Barron [the District Court judge] should call an end to this travesty now, before a higher court does it for him."

Respite evenings in Chelsea, MI

The Chelsea Free Methodist Church is offering families of special needs children one respite evening per month for free. The program, called Rest and Refresh, is open to families of children with physical, emotional, or mental disabilities. Siblings may also attend.

One Saturday night per month, the church, which is located at 7665 Werkner Road in Chelsea, MI, will offer respite from 5-9 p.m. Volunteer care givers will be selected based on the child's needs. All volunteers are required to submit to a background check and will go through an orientation for the program.

A family orientation night will be held on Saturday, February 23, 2008 from 5-9 p.m. at the church. The first respite care evening will be on Saturday, March 8, 2008.

For questions about the program, call Liz Graves, Rest and Refresh Coordinator, at (734) 475-8801. For an application, call (734) 475-1391 or email info@chelseafmc.com.

In abuse case, prosecution's witness sheds doubt on reliability of facilitated communication

It is hard to tell what is motivating the prosecution to continue with this case [see posts from 1/24/08 and 1/30/08] involving a 14-year-old autistic girl who has accused her father of rape. The girl cannot talk, but she uses a highly controversial communication technique called facilitated communication where a facilitator guides the hand of the girl over a keyboard and assists her in spelling out messages. Defense experts who testified at a hearing last week said that the communications are from the facilitator, not the girl, and that the technique has no scientific validity. The judge agreed that the technique is not scientific, but will hold another hearing on February 22, 2008, to determine the girl's competence. He did not disallow the use of facilitated communication.

An article in today's Detroit Free Press says that the girl's mother is asking a Family Court judge to remove her daughter from the school she is attending, because she is afraid the school and prosecutors are trying to influence the girl by coaching her. The article also reveals more about a hearing last week where even the prosecution's witness doubted the reliability of the communications from the girl:

[The Assistant Prosecutor Andrea] Dean sat red-faced during one hearing last week while an expert witness she had called, Dr. Sandra McClennen of Eastern Michigan University, voiced concerns about the prosecution's case, saying investigators ignored pleas to verify the claims with a second facilitator
...

Under questioning, McClennen said protocols call for abuse claims to be verified using a second facilitator who is unaware of the allegation. But after she explained the protocol to a social worker on the case, a West Bloomfield Police officer returned her call.

"The gist of it was, 'We don't want your services,' " McClennen testified.

The girl's father has been in jail since December 1st and the mother is free on bond with charges of neglect and witness tampering. This story is being reported by Free Press staff writers John Wisely and L.L. Brasier.