Mariska Hargitay

[Guest guest]

Message sent to her thru her web interface at:

http://www.mariska.com/contact/

This viewpoint will probably carry more weight with her if she hears it from

more than one person.

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Hello, Ms. Hargitay:

I’ve been a fan for some time. In my opinion, “Special Victims Unit” is among

the best of the many various police procedurals currently airing, or indeed

ever. I am also gratified to see that you take advantage of your celebrity

status to endorse and support various worthwhile causes, addressing problems

such as drunk driving, Internet safety for children, and domestic abuse, to name

but a few. I note that you are now also doing voiceover work for PSAs for the

organization Autism Speaks. While your desire to support autistics is laudable,

I am concerned that perhaps your support for Autism Speaks is not guided by an

awareness of the organization’s problematic positions.

Firstly, the leadership of Autism Speaks consists entirely of non-autistics.

I’m sure I don’t need to explain why this is unacceptable. By way of

comparison, the NAACP’s Board of Directors consists primarily of

African-Americans, and the National Federation of the Blind’s board is composed

almost entirely of blind people (there are a few board members who are partially

sighted, but none has normal vision). This is as it should be, for obvious

reasons, yet Autism Speaks presumes to speak for autistics without allowing us a

voice in their leadership; indeed, there is virtually no autistic presence in

the organization at all. No one would accept an NAACP directed and run entirely

by caucasians, yet the analogous situation is what we find with Autism Speaks.

Even more problematic is that only four percent of the money Autism Speaks

receives goes toward actually providing services for autistics and their

families. By way of comparison, approximately ninety percent of the money

donated to the Red Cross goes toward relief and services. A Red Cross that

spent as little on its mission as Autism Speaks does would rightly receive

little support from anyone.

The bulk of Autism Speaks’ donations goes instead toward purposes that are less

productive and even in rather questionable taste, to put it mildly. In late

2009, for example, Autism Speaks produced a series of Public Service

Announcements (a term dripping with irony in this context) in which autism was

personified as a monster that kidnaps children and strives to ruin marriages.

Autistics were understandably less than thrilled with being portrayed as some

sort of lepers to be pitied and feared. Fortunately, the outcry resulted in

Autism Speaks pulling the announcements, but even so, it astonishes that they

were presupposed to be appropriate and proper.

In the " Special Victims Unit " season premiere of episode 11, titled “Unstable”,

Stabler and Benson begin an investigation by visiting an autistic boy whose only

interaction with the outside world is through a series of cameras and recordings

of the street outside his apartment. The boy has an uncanny ability to remember

the exact date and time that he saw a particular individual. He even shows

Benson that he “knows” her by pulling up the one tape in his large collection of

the time he saw her walk by her building several months ago. The autistic gives

Stabler and Benson their first real lead in their investigation. Without him,

the case would have been “dead on arrival”. Stabler and Benson express their

gratitude.

That scene was fiction, of course, but in real life, autism is, indeed, like

that: an unusual condition that provides the autistic with special gifts. Yet

Autism Speaks portrays us as something less than human and strives to wipe us

out with its fearmongering.

Please reconsider your support for Autism Speaks. I am autistic, and Autism

Speaks does not speak for me.

Best regards,

Parrish S. Knight