Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:27 pm on 9 June 2021.
According to the reports, whistleblowers state that children were punished for engaging in autistic behaviour and the health and safety of staff and children were absolutely shocking, and young people were mismanaged, so behaved in challenging ways, which led to them being locked away. But this is symptomatic of so much of the casework that I have on behalf of autistic constituents and/or their families, where highly paid people in power, so-called experts, fail to understand their autism, fail to identify their communication, sensory and processing needs in order to communicate with them in an effective, respectful way and pushes them into crisis and then punishes them for not responding in a neurotypical or predominantly neurotypical way, affecting their care, their social care, their health services, access to housing, and many other things. How on earth are we finally going to tackle this endemic and deep-rooted problem raised so often through the cross-party autism group in previous Senedd terms without putting in place statutory duties for local authorities and health boards and giving autism and neurodevelopmental conditions in Wales a statutory identity at last?