Locked with a padlock in the bedroom for fear of their son | Madrid

Francisco Gil, a 49-year-old computer scientist, and his wife, a social psychologist, who is one year older, never imagined experiencing something similar. Francisco’s wife does not want to give his name and delegates the account of the facts to him. The couple has three children, and the two oldest (21 and 18 years old) have left home for the same reason: the youngest, Pablo (figurative name), 16. Every night the couple closes their room with a padlock to avoid An aggression from your son: he has an 88% disability, an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and behavior problems. In other cases, the situation can be managed by the parents, but not in the case of Pablo: he is almost two meters tall and weighs 100 kilos. That’s why when he gets angry it’s difficult to control. Francisco Gil can show four reports of injuries, two complaints to the municipal police and three psychiatric hospitalizations for the attacks suffered by his son. All this, during the last seven months.

And they can’t anymore. They are sold out. They take antidepressants. They live hanging by a thread. They love Pablo, but they can’t govern him since he turned 14, his physical size took on those proportions and he began to become aggressive. They need someone, an institute, a specialized center, to take care of him, but his case is not contemplated while he is a minor: his right to have a disability prevails. There is a legal vacuum. That is the response of the Community of Madrid, of the Ministry of Social Policies. So his last resort is to go public. And it is hard for parents to admit that they are afraid of their child. Now, as a last bullet, the family has filed two complaints with the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office to see if they managed to get a judge to order Pablo to enter a residence. They have an appointment on May 8 to declare as “harmed”.

“The situation has become so dangerous that we have decided to hand over custody to the Community of Madrid so that they can enter one of the residential centers it has for minors with disabilities,” explains Francisco. “But they have not granted it to us,” he denounces. The centers to which Francisco refers are only accessible to minors who have been separated from their families to protect the minor. “The law expressly prohibits that protection measures be issued due to a situation that affects the parents, not the child, that is, that the minor does not need to be protected by his parents, and that he be kept or protected for the specific fact that he has a disability, mentally eliminated or autism spectrum disorder ”, he responded to the Department of Families and Social Policies of the Community of Madrid. Until Pablo turns 18, he will not be able to access the public residences offered by the region for people with ASD.

The couple lives in the Chamberí district. Francisco recounts how he has spent three years with his guard up, ready to jump in front of Pablo if he pounces on his mother, because he says that the boy has a special fixation on her, but he also attacks his other two children, who have had to leave home. Francisco acts as a bodyguard who accompanies him in his daily routines, necessary so that he does not get upset. It is the one he respects the most, he says, perhaps because he is the one who gives him food, although on one occasion he left him “semi-conscious with his head” and almost “ripped off his thumb.” Carefully, every morning he wakes him up, gives him breakfast, cleans him, helps him get dressed, gives him the sandwich his wife has made, and walks him to the car. Then comes the mother’s turn, who acts as a driver. It is the only moment in which mother and son are left alone; separate her by a plastic screen that she uses as an improvised security barrier in case she jumps at her.

The mother always has one eye on the road and the other on her child. If she begins to notice the warning signs — words that she repeats and that only they understand — the woman slides her hand through an opening in the plastic with a pill and says: “Here, a piece of candy.” When they manage to get to the specialized school for minors with ASD, the critical moment arrives: the mother has to accompany Pablo to the door, which has sometimes cost her the young man “drags her on the floor, ripping up to 20% of her of the hair and death with force”. When leaving, the school staff accompanies the young man to the car and his mother takes him to the door of the house, where his father is waiting with a bun or a bag of potatoes, “as is the routine,” he says. . And she explains that skipping it costs them “brutal beatings” that have been repeated every month. When he doesn’t have an urban camp, Francisco takes him to the subway to see trains: “They freak him out, we stay at the station for a while and then we take the subway and take a walk through the suburban.”

Sometimes he receives the support of an assistant, thanks to a grant he receives from the Community of Madrid of 750 euros per month. The family has also tried to admit Pablo to a half-stay medical center, but the only one that admits minors into the community is the Mentalia de Guadarrama Hospital. This hospital, in particular, does not admit patients with dual disorders, such as Pablo, who has autism and a severe disability. So it remains to wait for the complaint filed with the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office.

People with ASD are not, by far, violent, experts explain. Each case is unique: they are various neurodevelopmental disorders that affect the way those who suffer from them relate to each other. Ana Vidal, coordinator of the ProTGD association for people with autism, recognizes that during adolescence some young people develop violent behaviors because it is a complicated stage and because of their difficulties in communicating. Both she and Luis Simarro, a psychologist specializing in autism who has treated Pablo and his family, affirm that these cases are exceptional. “But more and more cases of minors with autism are being detected, so it is more and more likely to happen,” says the psychologist. The presence of students with ASD in non-university education has doubled in the last 10 years, according to data from the Spanish Autism Confederation.

cedar keeps her

If Pablo were of legal age, he could request access to one of the seven concerted residences of the Community of Madrid for people with intellectual disabilities, a high level of dependency and serious behavioral disorders, or the other 10 specific for people with ASD, who have between 20 and 30 seats each. “Of course it hurts us to give up custody, but it doesn’t mean we abandon him, we want to be able to visit him and spend time with him,” explains the father. Relinquishing custody of the minor contemplates that they would no longer reside with him, but would continue to have parental authority over him. In fact, very few parents give up custody of their children voluntarily, as explained by a spokesman for the Ministry of Social Policies: “It occurs in cases in which, for example, the child has a rare disease and the treatment is very too expensive for parents to finance.” “It is more common for them to declare themselves helpless,” he adds, which means losing parental authority over the child.

Pablo must take 25 pills a day. Before leaving home, he has already taken about five: to treat the epilepsy he suffers from, to counteract the side effects of that medication and to keep him calm. “And eight have been taken away”, Matiza Francisco. “It is the only way to treat him, we have tried all the therapies that exist and we have gone to dozens of doctors, but none have managed to help with his behavior”

The last pill he takes a day is one of medicinal melatonin, which knocks him down at night. Before including this pill, her parents say that they will not be able to sleep peacefully. The young man woke up and either attacked his middle brother, with whom he shared a room, or ran away from home. Now, in addition to the pill, they lock themselves in the room. Because if not, they don’t even rest, the mother assures: “I can’t sleep until we lock ourselves in.”

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