by Prof. Charlotte Valeur, Founder and CEO of ION

The Harm to Neurominorities

The use of autism, ADHD, and other forms of neurominority types in legal proceedings, by both defence and prosecution, has become increasingly significant in recent years. How these neurotypes are framed can have a profound impact on case outcomes, sentencing, public perception, and the long-term treatment of neurominorities in the justice system.

The way autism, ADHD, and other neurotypes are selectively used in court, either to excuse, pathologise, or criminalise, can also have widespread negative consequences for all neurominorities. When the legal system reinforces stereotypes of people of minority neurotypes as dangerous, incapable, or manipulative, it fuels public stigma and misinformation. This, in turn, affects employment, education, healthcare, and social inclusion.

People of minority neurotypes who have never been involved with the justice system may find themselves distrusted, denied opportunities, or subjected to increased surveillance and control simply because of their neurotype.

Incarceration rates remain alarmingly high for neurominority individuals who are consistently significantly overrepresented in prisons worldwide. Many are punished not for being criminal but for being different and misunderstood.

This issue is now further compounded by regulatory threats. In the U.S. for example, the NIH’s proposed Framework for Autism Research (FAR) risks undermining the neurodiversity movement by prioritising cure- and deficit-based narratives. Critics argue this may result in funding being diverted toward behavioural modification therapies, such as Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), instead of supporting rights-based, inclusive interventions. These developments echo the troubling legal pattern of turning difference into deviance.

The Legal Double Bind: Used by Defence and Prosecution

Minority neurotypes can be used by defence teams to humanise defendants or mitigate culpability, but the same traits are often weaponised by prosecutors to portray individuals as dangerous, manipulative, or unreliable. In both cases, the person is reduced to a diagnosis.

Even more troubling is the misuse of neurodivergence by individuals themselves to excuse harmful behaviour, such as claiming social ineptness due to autism in cases of sexual harassment. This not only undermines the credibility of legitimate neurominority voices but fuels public misconceptions that all neurominorities are volatile or socially incompetent.

The courtroom narrative often becomes the public narrative, flattening minority neurotypes into reductive stories of dysfunction or deviance, rather than recognising us as complex human beings navigating a world not designed for us. 

Beyond the Courtroom: Generational Damage

The public narrative shaped in the courtroom often becomes the societal script. For example, autistic youth excluded from school due to misunderstood behaviours may find themselves fast-tracked into the criminal justice system. This pattern is especially harsh for neurominorities ethnically different to the majority ethnicity, who are more likely to be misdiagnosed or criminalised than supported.

The article draws parallels between the treatment of neurominorities and other marginalised groups who have historically been pathologised, criminalised, and stripped of their agency such as queer individuals, racial minorities, Indigenous communities, and disabled people.

Root Causes: Education, Eugenics, and the Ethics of Inclusion

Behind the systemic exclusion and legal misrepresentation of neurominorities lies a deeper root: the ideology embedded in education policy. The seeds of injustice are sown early. When education systems fail to identify, understand, and support neurominorities, they often push these individuals onto a path of exclusion, misdiagnosis, or institutional harm. These failures echo throughout public services, including the justice system.

A growing body of research highlights how neurominorities are particularly vulnerable during legal proceedings, susceptible to coercion, misinterpretation, and false confessions. Cross-examinations by barristers can become ethical minefields, exploiting communication differences that are neither understood nor accommodated. In such conditions, justice becomes conditional.

More disturbing still is the way some policy frameworks appear to uphold outdated eugenicist ideologies. Rather than acknowledging systemic failings, institutions often revert to pathologising difference, framing neurominorities as predisposed to criminality or disorder. This narrative conveniently absolves government and society of responsibility for creating inclusive environments, allowing them to deny accountability or compensation.

This is particularly evident in departments like Education and regulatory bodies such as OFSTED. Whether through unconscious bias or embedded class-based assumptions of intellectual superiority, policies continue to reflect a hierarchy of human worth. If this isn’t eugenics, it’s something chillingly close.

The concept of epistemic injustice, where knowledge from neurominority individuals is discounted or excluded, is central to understanding how systemic inequity persists across education, law, and public services. Neurominorities are not only marginalised in experience but also in voice.

It is time for a reckoning?

We must open space for public debate about what it means to build a neuroinclusive society, not just as a moral imperative but as an economic one. If the education system continues to “write off” children with minority neurotypes, we should not be surprised when they end up in systems of care, punishment, or unemployment.

Blaming parents, blaming schools, blaming children, it serves no one. What we need is a new societal vision: one that views neurominorities not as liabilities but as natural expressions of human intelligence. They are evolutionary contributors with insights and abilities essential to humanity’s future.

Inclusion is not charity. It is survival.

1. Use in Defence: Humanising or Pathologising?

Mitigation of Culpability

Defence lawyers often introduce a diagnosis of autism, ADHD, or other neurodivergent traits as part of a mitigation strategy. The argument may be that the individual’s neurotype contributed to:

• Diminished capacity to understand or regulate behaviour
• Impaired communication or social understanding, leading to unintended consequences
• Sensory overwhelm, executive dysfunction, or impulsivity, particularly in ADHD cases

Example: An autistic defendant involved in a confrontation may be argued to have misinterpreted social cues or acted in a heightened state of anxiety due to sensory triggers.

Vulnerability and Systemic Failure

In cases involving young or marginalised individuals, the defence may highlight the neurodivergent person’s history of being failed by the system, e.g., excluded from school, misdiagnosed, or unsupported in mental health care, arguing this context as a contributor to the behaviour in question.

Risk of Inappropriate Punishment

For defendants with autism or ADHD, incarceration can be particularly traumatic. Defence teams may argue for alternatives to prison (e.g., therapeutic or supported environments) by emphasising:

• The person’s difficulty coping with the structure and unpredictability of prison life
• Risk of abuse or deterioration in mental health
• The lack of adequate support within custodial settings

2. Use in Prosecution: Risk Framing and Othering

While less frequent, prosecutors may use neurodivergent traits to cast doubt on a defendant’s credibility or imply risk or volatility.

Portrayal as Unpredictable or Dangerous

In some high-profile cases, autism or ADHD has been used to suggest a person is:

• Prone to obsessive behaviour or rigidity
• Unempathic or “socially disconnected” (in the case of autism)
• Impulsive or volatile (in the case of ADHD)

This framing risks reinforcing stereotypes and has been widely criticised by neurodiversity advocates.

Questioning Reliability as a Witness

Neurodivergent witnesses, especially autistic individuals, may present on the stand (e.g., different affect, eye contact and difficulty under cross-examination). Prosecutors (or even defence barristers) have historically used this to:

• Undermine their perceived credibility or truthfulness
• Argue that their memory or interpretation is flawed

3. Forensic Assessments and Diagnostic Timelines

Late Diagnosis Under Scrutiny

Many neurominority individuals receive diagnoses only after being charged or incarcerated. While this often reflects the failure of earlier systems to identify their needs, it can be seen as strategic or self-serving, especially by prosecutors or public opinion.

Expert Witnesses

Courts increasingly rely on clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurodevelopmental experts to interpret how a neurotype may have impacted behaviour. However, the lack of legal professionals trained in neurodiversity means these reports can be:

• Misunderstood or selectively quoted
• Dismissed if they don’t serve the narrative of guilt or innocence

4. Intersection with Other Vulnerabilities

Autism and ADHD often intersect with race, gender, class, and trauma histories, and how a neurotype is used in court often reflects wider systemic biases.

• White male defendants with autism are more likely to receive mitigating narratives.
• Black or working-class neurodivergent individuals may be overpathologised or criminalised, particularly when behaviour is misunderstood through a cultural or racialised lens.

5. Impact on Justice Outcomes

Positive Trends

• Greater awareness of autism and ADHD in legal systems is leading to better access to accommodations during interviews and trials.
• Sentencing reform discussions are increasingly acknowledging the need to treat neurodivergent offenders differently, especially in youth justice.

Risks and Ethical Concerns

• The weaponisation of diagnosis (either to gain leniency or paint someone as unstable) can reduce a person to a label.
• It can also deepen public misunderstanding, reinforcing the myth that neurodivergent people are inherently more likely to commit crimes, when in fact they are often at higher risk of being victims.

When Neurotypes Are Used as a Personal Excuse

• An emerging concern within both legal and public discourse is the misuse of neurodivergent identities by individuals attempting to excuse harmful or criminal behaviour, particularly in cases such as sexual harassment, domestic violence, or manipulation.
• While it’s crucial to acknowledge the challenges that come with neurotypes like autism, ADHD, or others, this misuse of diagnosis can undermine legitimate neurodiversity advocacy and reinforce damaging stereotypes.

• For example, when someone accused of harassment claims they “didn’t understand boundaries because of their autism,” it risks feeding a narrative that all neurodivergent individuals are socially inept or dangerous.
• Such claims can be deeply harmful to the wider community of neurominorities, who already struggle against assumptions of unpredictability or incapacity. Accountability and neuroinclusion must go hand in hand, recognising difference should not become a loophole to avoid responsibility.

Parallel Punishments: Drawing the Line Between Neurominority and Other Criminalised Identities

Drawing lines between neurominorities and how other minority groups have historically been treated reveals a disturbing pattern: systems, including legal, educational, medical, and societal, often respond to difference with control, containment, or conversion rather than understanding and inclusion.

What Happens When Normal Becomes Law? Differences in the Crosshairs

1.From Difference to Deficit: Pathologising the ‘Other’

• Neurominority people (e.g. autistic, ADHD, Dyslexic etc individuals) are often framed as having disorders rather than differences, implying something is wrong that must be corrected.
• LGBTQ+ individuals, especially in the past but still present in some countries, being medically pathologised (e.g., homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder until 1992 by the WHO).
• Racial minorities have been historically subjected to “scientific racism”, where difference was framed as biological inferiority or criminal propensity.

Shared outcome: Marginalised minority groups are dehumanised through “objective” systems like science, medicine, or law, reinforcing the need for intervention or suppression.

2. Behavioural Conversion and Social Conformity

• Autistic and other minority neurotype children have for decades been subjected to ABA and other conversion therapy designed to make them appear more “normal” to others, regardless of their own wellbeing.
• Queer individuals were, and in some places still are, forced into conversion therapy to conform to cis-heteronormative expectations.
• Indigenous children in Canada and Australia were placed in residential schools aimed at erasing their cultural identity and enforcing Western norms.

Shared outcome: The goal is not acceptance but assimilation, replacing identity with compliance to the dominant model of “normal.”

3.Criminalisation of Identity

• Black and brown neurominority youth in the western world, are disproportionately punished in schools and criminalised for behaviours linked to their neurotype (e.g., “defiance” or “disruption” in ADHD).
• Young Black men are statistically more likely to be diagnosed with conduct disorders than ADHD, reinforcing a narrative of threat rather than support need.
• Muslim communities in many countries are subject to state surveillance and treated with suspicion for their beliefs or behaviours.

Shared outcome: People are punished for who they are, not just what they do.

4. Denial of Voice and Self-Definition

• Neurominority people are often spoken for by professionals, parents, or researchers rather than having their own voice and agency recognised.
• People with intellectual disabilities have historically been denied legal personhood, including rights to marry, work, or make decisions.
• Trans people are often required to have external validation or diagnosis before they can access gender-affirming care.

Shared outcome: Systems demand external validation of someone’s identity while denying their right to self-identify. No voice and no agency.

5. Selective Empathy and Unequal Protection

• An autistic white man in court may be described as “misunderstood” or “vulnerable”; a neurominority person of other ethnic background may be portrayed as a danger.
• Similarly, white female victims of abuse often receive more media and legal empathy than women of other ethnic backgrounds or migrants.
• Disabled people are often infantilised and seen as “inspirational” when they succeed, but simultaneously denied systemic support when struggling.

Shared outcome: Protection, empathy, and justice are distributed unequally based on the intersection of identities.

From Patterns to Power

These patterns are not coincidental, they reflect a societal impulse to enforce normativity and punish deviation. Neurominority, like race, gender identity, sexuality, and other forms of difference, disrupt the idea of a single correct way to think, behave, or live. The legal system, and society at large, often responds to that disruption not with curiosity or compassion, but with coercion.

“The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Built This Way”

Understanding these parallels helps us see that the fight for neurojustice is part of a broader human rights movement: one that insists all people have the right to exist as themselves, not just as approximations of what the dominant group decides are the norm.

Call to action!

What Needs to Change

• End the over-incarceration of neurominorities, especially in youth justice systems.
• Reject behaviour-conversion approaches (like ABA) and oppose policies that push for “normalising” rather than supporting neurominority people.
• Oppose models like the NIH’s FAR model unless it centers neurominority voices and rights-based frameworks.
• Mandatory neurodiversity training for legal professionals, judges, and law enforcement.
• Access to fair, early diagnosis to prevent late-stage misuse or misrepresentatio
• Creation of specialist neurodiversity courts or pathways, akin to mental health courts in some countries.
• Guardrails against misuse of diagnosis, ensuring people are neither unfairly punished nor unfairly excused based on a misunderstood label.