Tom Wildie

Three childcare workers have been stripped of their accreditation, with one convicted of assault, after a six-year-old child with autism was smacked and had soap put in their mouth as a form of punishment.

Kathleen Burton was charged with aggravated common assault after the incident on December 14 last year.

She pleaded guilty to a charge of aggravated common assault in the Joondalup Magistrates Court on February 28 and was fined $700, as well as being ordered to pay court costs of $100.

Saskia Adysti

Albany will be the first town in Australia to trial an autism alert card.

The card will help authorities and emergency service providers to better understand people with autistic behaviour, as most patients find it difficult to communicate with others about their disability, particularly during an emergency.

The card will also have two emergency contact numbers of the card holder.

Great Southern Police District Superintendent Dominic Wood said the card would provide better security to those with autism.

Sarah Collard

Eleven-year-old Charlotte Dainton and her nine-year-old brother Joseph are obsessed with iPads, miniature golf and cartwheels.

They also have speech and developmental problems stemming from autism and both struggled in mainstream education.

Their mother, Sonya Dainton, is now among a growing number of parents who are choosing to homeschool their children, because they say the education system is failing them and not providing the support their children need.

Carla Hildebrandt

An angry Mandurah mother has lashed out at the state government after being told a specialised education program at Halls Head College has been axed.

Late last year, Wannanup resident Sally Finlay said she was told her autistic son who had attended the Halls Head College Targeted Learning program, would have to find alternative education because the program would not be offered in 2018.

Jemma Lilley’s fascination with serial killers goes back at least a decade to the crude online novel she wrote about murder when she was a 16-year-old living in her ­native Stamford, England.

Indeed, she had hoped to ­become a serial killer.

Lilley once boasted that she knew how to commit murder and get away with it.

She wanted to kill and the feeling was getting stronger. And when she finally lived out her fantasy with her obsequious housemate Trudi Lenon in June last year, Lilley gloated that police were too dumb to catch her.

Tim Clarke

A YOUNG man with autism was targeted for murder by two woman who lured him to their home, stabbed and garotted him and then buried his body under a concrete slab and floor tiles in the back garden, a court has been told.

Jemma Victoria Lilley, 26, and Trudi Claire Lenon, 43, today went on trial for the murder of 18 year old Aaron Pajich who went missing from Rockingham in June last year.

Peta Rasdien

An incident during which a six year-old autistic boy left school and walked a kilometre away before he was found by a community member has left his parents distressed and demanding answers.

John Butler Primary College principal Brett Lewis said there was no excuse for the ‘deeply regrettable’ incident.

By Nicolas Perpitch

The Western Australian education system is failing to meet the needs of some highly disabled children because of inflexibility and a lack of expertise, according to an experienced educator.

Stephen Breen, the immediate past-president of the WA Primary Principals Association and a teacher and principal for 42 years, has been joined by disability advocates in criticism of the Education Department's inclusion practices.

AAP

It would be wrong to infer that children with less severe symptoms do not have autism, says Professor Andrew Whitehouse from the Telethon Kids Institute.

The so-called 'autism epidemic' is due to an increase in the diagnosis of children with less severe behavioural symptoms, not because there are more children being born with the disorder, a new Australian study shows.

There has been a 20-fold increase over the past 30 years in the prevalence of autism, which is now thought to affect at least one per cent of the Australian population.