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Misinterpreting Autistic Advocacy as Fabricated or Induced Illness (FII)
- Zoe APUK
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
How misunderstanding, systems-generated trauma, and safeguarding practice harmed my family
By Claire Lux
Introduction: When misunderstanding becomes risk
This article is written from lived experience, but also from the distance and clarity that only became possible once safety returned.
I am an autistic and ADHD parent who spent years navigating education, health, and social care systems while advocating for my children’s unmet needs. During that time, my advocacy, communication style, and trauma and survival responses were repeatedly misinterpreted through a safeguarding lens. What followed was escalation, suspicion, and profound systems-generated trauma that reshaped my family.
What happened to us was not an isolated incident. It reflects a wider pattern affecting autistic parents across the UK. When systems fail to understand autistic cognition, autistic communication, and autistic survival responses, misunderstanding is too often treated as risk. That misinterpretation can escalate into safeguarding concern and, in some cases, suspicion resembling fabricated or induced illness (FII), even when no such behaviour exists.
This article explores how that process unfolds, why autistic parents are particularly vulnerable to it, and why outcomes change so dramatically when understanding replaces suspicion.
The Double Empathy Problem in safeguarding contexts
A foundational concept missing from safeguarding practice is the Double Empathy Problem, articulated by autistic scholar Damian Milton. It explains that communication breakdowns between autistic and non-autistic people are not caused by a deficit in the autistic person. They arise from a mismatch between two different communication and meaning-making systems.
Autistic parents often communicate with depth, precision, and context. We seek coherence. We notice inconsistencies. We correct inaccuracies. We return to unresolved issues until they make sense.
Professional systems, by contrast, often rely on brevity, implicit assumptions, hierarchy, and authority-led narratives. Information is partial. Decisions are delayed or made off-record. Clarity is rationed.
To an autistic nervous system, vagueness signals unpredictability and threat. The response is not manipulation or obsession, but an increase in clarification, detail, pattern-tracking, and urgency. This is adaptive autistic communication under perceived risk.
Within safeguarding contexts, however, these autistic traits are frequently misread as pressure, fixation, emotional dysregulation, instability, or challenge. The autistic parent experiences danger. The professional perceives difficulty. Only one party is penalised for that mismatch.
When safeguarding frameworks do not account for the Double Empathy Problem, misunderstanding becomes pathologised. In this context, misunderstanding itself is treated as risk.
When neurodivergent families seek support in neuronormative systems
Neurodivergent families are routinely required to seek support within frameworks that are not designed for neurodivergent children or neurodivergent communication. These systems prioritise linear narratives, behavioural compliance, and standardised pathways. Autistic families operate differently.
Autistic parents often advocate because systems are not meeting need. That advocacy involves research, persistence, detail, and escalation through formal routes. In systems designed around compliance and deference to authority, this advocacy can be misread as oppositional or pathological. The parent becomes “anxious”.
The very act of seeking appropriate support becomes evidence against the parent.
This mismatch creates immense stress for the entire family. Children remain unsupported. Parents are scrutinised. The system responds not by adapting, but by escalating control.
This is the breeding ground for systems-generated trauma.
The early narrative: distress reframed as parenting
For us, the difficulties did not begin dramatically. They emerged gradually during my eldest child’s time in preschool. He coped until he could not. He presented with a clear PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance) profile, although this was not understood by the setting, which instead formed the view that I was the problem.
His panic around school was framed solely as separation anxiety and over-attachment. The prevailing narrative became that I was too anxious, too involved, and insufficiently boundaried.
The only way to get him through the school door would have been to force a distressed child into an environment he could not tolerate. I refused to do that. That refusal was then interpreted as further evidence that I was the cause of the difficulty.
Even after local authority and social care assessments confirmed that he clearly required specialist autistic provision in a specialist school, the narrative did not shift. The reality was that no suitable provision or transition pathway existed in the city where we lived. In the absence of appropriate provision, I commissioned specialist support myself, involving a specialist tutor travelling a significant distance.
The local authority later agreed to fund this support only after legal correspondence threatening judicial review. Even then, the approach was actively resisted. The local authority wanted the situation managed in-house through a family engagement worker rather than specialist provision. That worker remained involved for fourteen months and ultimately signed off with work-related stress, as it was not possible to meet my son’s needs within that framework.
Throughout this period, my son’s neurodevelopmental profile, sensory needs, and later confirmed genetic condition were minimised. When I continued to seek specialist understanding and appropriate support, this was reframed as over-pathologising rather than advocacy.
By this point, the system had already settled on the conclusion that the cause of my son’s distress was me. Having established that narrative, it proved extremely difficult to reverse. At the same time, there was a clear lack of capacity and resources to meet my son’s very significant PDA-related needs. Rather than acknowledge this, responsibility was displaced onto me, and I was positioned as the “barrier” to education.
This resulted in escalating scrutiny and judgement, including the involvement of social workers and family engagement staff in our home. These interventions did not address my son’s needs. Instead, they increased pressure and surveillance in an environment which should have been his safe space, compounding his distress rather than alleviating it. This led to him wanting to stay safe at home with me, his safe person, which was then treated as evidence of attachment issues / codependency and many other social care labels.
Tribunal, coercion, and the weaponisation of distress
By the time the matter reached the SEND tribunal, the context had already been shaped by safeguarding escalation. Both of my children were subject to child protection plans. I was informed that if I accepted the maintained special school placement the local authority was proposing, my son would be removed from child protection. If I did not, escalation would continue.
The distress created by prolonged pressure, unsuitable interventions, and fear was then relied upon as evidence to justify the local authority’s position at tribunal, including the assertion that my neurodivergence was exacerbating my children’s needs.
I was positioned as a safeguarding risk, and it was asserted that my son could not be educated through EOTAS (Education Otherwise Than At School) for a further year, until a suitable school placement might become available once he turned seven, alongside a longer transition. The implication was clear. I was required to concede or risk losing my children.
The tribunal judge ultimately ordered 37.5 hours of provision and made it explicit that this was not a fabricated or induced illness case. However, my advocacy was still criticised, and responsibility for implementation was left to the local authority to “handle”.
The consequences were catastrophic and aligned precisely with the risks I had warned about. My son lost the specialist tutor he had worked with for two years, a relationship built on trust, understanding, and safety. At the same time, my marriage broke down and my husband left.
What followed was not resolution, but further destabilisation, confirming that the safeguarding framework had been used not to protect, but to compel compliance in the absence of suitable provision.
Monotropism, advocacy, and misinterpretation
Monotropism is a theory of autism describing the tendency to focus attention deeply on one thing at a time. In safe environments, it is a strength, enabling clarity, expertise, and sustained problem-solving.
In unsafe environments, monotropic attention narrows around unresolved threat. This can become all-consuming until coherence is restored.
Safeguarding systems frequently misinterpret this as rumination, fixation, or pressure. In reality, it is the autistic brain doing what it must to stabilise uncertainty. When monotropism meets systemic threat, autistic parents appear more intense, more persistent, and more distressed. These traits are then misread as evidence of risk rather than as responses to danger.
This misinterpretation plays a significant role in why autistic parents are disproportionately vulnerable to FII-like suspicion.
The pattern repeats
The same cycle later occurred with my youngest child, who had an autistic profile layered with medical trauma. Again, distress was interpreted behaviourally rather than neurodevelopmentally. Despite clear indicators for specialist provision, concerns were reframed as parenting issues.
Our family was placed under child protection for supposed educational neglect. Although no formal FII diagnosis was made, suspicion shaped every decision. Suggestions were raised that my children might need assessment away from me.
Interventions escalated to untrained carers being placed in our home to force school attendance. They had no autism training, no PDA understanding, and no trauma awareness. The situation rapidly became unsafe.
This was not a parenting difficulty. It was institutional harm.
Outcomes matter
When I was threatened that unless I agreed to my children being forced into unsuitable education settings the local authority insisted upon, escalation would continue, I had no remaining safe options. Both children were extremely anxious following unnecessary physical restraint by unfamiliar staff in our home. To protect them, I moved to a different local authority.
Safeguarding involvement was removed immediately upon our arrival in our new home. Shortly afterwards, child in need involvement was also stepped down and ended. There was no change in my parenting, no new intervention directed at me, and no therapeutic input at that point. The only variable that changed was the professional interpretation of the same family.
Professional reports were reinstated. My explanations were accepted. Decision-making shifted from suspicion to support.
My eldest was approved for full-time EOTAS and he is making great progress and engaging very well.
My youngest is transitioning into specialist provision after a year of EOTAS to bridge this, and he’s happy there.
Their confidence and capacity are emerging more and more.
If I had been the cause of my children’s difficulties, this would not have happened. A change in geography would not have produced recovery. The outcome demonstrates that the earlier safeguarding narrative was not an accurate assessment of risk, but a consequence of misinterpretation within a system unable to meet need.
The environment created the harm.
Changing the environment resolved it.
Internalised blame and trauma consequences
One of the most damaging outcomes of prolonged safeguarding scrutiny was internalised blame. Over time, repeated doubt eroded my trust in my own perception. I experienced intense cognitive dissonance. I understood my children’s needs intimately as their full-time carer, and professionals who understood PDA advocated alongside me. Yet our voices were consistently shut down.
Eventually, the local authority escalated matters by erroneously reframing the situation as child protection in order to force compliance. At that point, my voice was removed altogether. Chronic self-questioning set in. Reality became unstable, not because it was unclear, but because it was repeatedly overridden by those with power.
By the time safety returned, I required trauma therapy to process what had happened. I have been in therapy for several years and am now preparing to begin EMDR. It took years to feel safe enough to even attempt this work. This was not evidence of parental pathology. It was the predictable psychological consequence of prolonged threat, disbelief, and coercive pressure.
Autistic parents do not emerge unscathed from years of scrutiny. We carry the trauma long after the system has moved on.
Recovery from systems-generated trauma
Recovery began only when the environment became safe.
It has involved rebuilding trust in my own judgement, restoring nervous system safety, grieving lost years, and reconstructing identity after prolonged invalidation.
This is not a return to who I was before. It is reconstruction.
Reclaiming voice and narrative has been essential to that process. When a person’s reality has been repeatedly overridden by those with power, recovery is not possible through silence or compliance. Healing requires the restoration of voice, meaning, and authorship over one’s own experience.
Conclusion: misunderstanding is the risk
Autistic parents are not a risk to their children. They are at risk from systems that misunderstand them.
When autistic communication, monotropism, advocacy, and trauma responses are misread through a neurotypical safeguarding lens, families are harmed and children are delayed from receiving support.
The problem was never me.
The problem was never my children.
The problem was misinterpretation.
Understanding autistic parents is not optional. It is essential to safeguarding practice that truly protects the entire family.
Claire Lux is a neurodivergent parent, advocate, and former solicitor with lived experience of navigating EHCPs and complex education, health, and social care systems. She supports neurodivergent families, particularly where needs are complex or situations have become overwhelming, from a trauma-informed, neurodivergent-affirming perspective. Claire Lux Neurodivergent Sanctuary and Advocacy
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