Christine Vester: Humanity Over Handcuffs: Protecting Autistic Lives in Legal Battles

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Christine Vester shares her mission with Humanity Over Handcuffs, a national advocacy movement protecting autistic individuals from being criminalized by the justice system.

Her organization supports families, educates legal professionals, and works toward reforming a system that often treats neurological differences as criminal behavior.

• Autistic behaviors like lack of eye contact, shutdowns, and sensory overload often misinterpreted by police as aggression or defiance

• Families seeking help unexpectedly find themselves battling a legal system unprepared to understand autism

• Courts routinely fail to consider autism as a mitigating factor, treating autistic individuals like typical defendants

• Prison environments create traumatic sensory overload for autistic individuals, who may face targeting by other inmates

• Incarceration carries long-lasting consequences, creating barriers to housing, employment, and community reintegration

• Humanity Over Handcuffs is developing resources connecting families with attorneys, mental health professionals, and support systems

• Change requires judges, attorneys, legislators, and CIT trainers working together to create more compassionate approaches

You're not alone and not powerless.

Our children are not broken, autism is not a crime, and together we can show what justice should really look like—humanity first.

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