Caged

Many posts have discussed restraint and seclusion in school..  It happens at home, too. In Los Angeles, KTLA-TV reports:

The parents of an 11-year-old boy with autism so severe he cannot speak were arrested after police allegedly found him living in a dog kennel inside a home in Anaheim, authorities said Wednesday.

Officers were called to a residence in the 1300 block of Garrett Street (map) at about 6:15 p.m. Tuesday to help Child Protective Services investigators who had received a tip that a young boy was living inside a cage, according to Lt. Bob Dunn with the Anaheim Police Department.

After talking with the parents, officers went inside the home and discovered a fairly large cage, described as a “large dog kennel” containing a mattress, the Police Department stated in a news release.

It appeared the parents had been keeping their son inside it, possibly because the boy was prone to violent outbursts, Dunn said. He emphasized the investigation was in its preliminary stages.

“Perhaps, as a part of his autism, he would have outbursts on occasion. As he’s grown older, the parents had difficulty adapting to these outburst and controlling them,” Dunn said.

“Putting him in that cage may have been a way for them to try to, in their way, control what was going on,” he said.

The boy appeared clean and to have been well cared for otherwise, and did not have any visible injuries, according to Dunn.