I try my best to stay composed and get him into the car, but I couldn’t help myself. “He is a child! He is autistic! How do you feel picking on an innocent child?”. They didn’t care, he was an annoyance and they had no empathy. I got into my car and burst into tears.

Autism – friendly day for shopping centres?
Autism awareness has become more widespread this century, and greater numbers of children with subtle symptoms are now diagnosed at young ages. But decades ago, doctors rarely diagnosed people towards the subtler end of the spectrum. “Fifty years ago, nobody would call autism what we call autism today – they would just be consid- ered