5 Year Old Autistic Girl threatened with an ASBO

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Better a crack addict next door than a policeman with the
arbitrary power to threaten me with a court order just because
I looked at him the wrong way.
(Yes, I am officially ticked off about the whole mess).

I must remember that the next time I get a phone call and it's a wrong number, OR that the postman delivers my neighbours mail to me by mistake, that it only happened BECAUSE I HAVE AS!! !! !! They are all out to get me!! !! Just me . Especially those policeman in their dark black uniforms. The number of people who have been sent to court for merely looking at a policeman the wrong way must be into the millions by now. Must - never - look - at - policeman,

Mind you, at least I have those nice crack dealers next door that I can depend on for support.

It's plain wrong for children as young as that.

From what it sounds like, I don't think they'd be able to do stuff like that.

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You've challenged me once, ManErg;
is your latest remark a double dare? I accept!

Canada does not have Anti-Social Behaviour Orders,
and I don't want them to ever be part of Canadian law.
I find them to be an unwarranted extension of police power
that constitutes a direct threat to the civil liberties of any
innocent person.

Canada does have a roughly similar procedure for dealing
with assaults to property and person in the form of a peace bond,
payable by a person suspected of such an assault. The person
so suspected would forfeit all money paid as a peace bond if he/she
violates its conditions (not so different from violating the terms
of a conditional discharge or of probation).
The critical legal safeguard associated with a peace bond, however,
is that the police have to go to a criminal court in order to obtain it.

An ASBO in England can be granted by a magistrates' court: As I
understand it, that practice is tantamount to a guarantee that the ASBO
will be granted on summary judgement without any chance for
a defendant to present evidence on his/her own behalf.
(The magistrate in a magistrate's court is most often a senior police officer,
who is not likely to provoke the anger of his enlisted men by saying "no".)

I find the legal safeguards associated with the ASBO procedure insufficient
at present to protect the innocent against unjust application of this power by
police; that may not be your finding.

Hi Douglas,

Glad you accepted it in the light hearted way it was intended!

ASBO's in general are one debate. But irrelevant in this case as the child didn't actually have an ASBO served on them anyway. The newspaper article is spurious - it exists purely because the Daily Mail has an agenda to denigrate those in power (not a bad agenda, but you can only stoop so far) and somebody wanted to show their bling and new hairstyle off.

Autistics ARE victimised, but not in this case and I'm dismayed at how easy it is to stir up a crowd using a piece of fiction, distortions of the truth, people failing to check on the original source and draw their own conclusion.

I was once the victim of a really nasty, totally unprovoked assault by a bunch of lads who fit the typical ASBO offenders stereotype. I know several other people who this has happened to, as well. There are people out there who get their sadistic kicks from violence against those they see as 'other'. There may be some, but very, very few in the police force like that. The much-maligned police force were very supportive to me. The police aren't perfect, the lawyers are worse , but there are far more guilty psychos walking free than innocents locked away.

You miss the point here, someone would have made a complaint for the letters to be sent. So even if the police were not in the wrong, the people making the complaints were. That is the issue here.

So what were the people who bothered to make the complain initially doing? Innocently complaining about an Autistic child (and her probably Autistic siblings)

Also you might want to read the comments at the bottom of the article.

There are a lot better ways of dealing with that problem than ASBOs. Legalizing the drugs would help...

they police have a 'good name'!

The UK has a reputation for nanny state-type garbage. This is just like the 'Extreme Porn' law and the lolicon banning.

Not what I got from the news article. The people complained about *some* children. The police then sent letters to several households who they believed to have children of the right age. The letter was mistakenly sent to the house in question with the very young children.

Why haven't the NT households who received warnings get their faces in the papers? They could equally argue that the media is showing favouritism to the family with and autistic child and are discriminating against NT children.

The article is an interesting example of how tabloid newspapers spin a non-story to get their own ideology across. The Daily Mail wants to sell newspapers to people who believe the UK is decaying under the current government and we need to get another lot in to fix the mess in our police force, hospitals, schools etc.

Several of the comments at the bottom of the page point out that some of us can see the manipulation going on here. That people are reacting emotively without actually READING THE ARTICLE!! !! They are just reading the headline and jumping to conclusions.

In that article, at not point does it state that children were threatened with ASBOS. The letters mentioned "Anti Social Behaviour" and this has got distorted to become an ASBO. Technically I believe the headline "Children get threatened with ASBO" is libellous because the children did not actually get threatened with an ASBO!

Notice the use of the word 'childless' to describe the couple who complained about children kicking footballs at their windows. The tabloids like to hark on about 'good old family values' and part of that ideology is that normal (hence good) people have children (as well as jobs, watch sport, go out to the pub with their mates etc etc). Pointing out that the couple who complained (which they have every right to do, imagine having footballs kicked at *your* windows, it could be very distressing) are 'childless' is another tactic to manipulate the gullable reader (and sadly that appears to be most readers) and reinforce the idea than people who are childless are 'not one of us'. It doesn't say their ages, maybe the couple are in their early 20's?

What does anyone expect from The Daily Mail?