Rosemary Crossley
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Rosemary Crossley is a bestselling Australian author and advocate who, together with Anne McDonald, wrote Annie's Coming Out, the story of Anne's controversial release from a large Victorian care home for children and adults with severe disabilities. Anne's story went on to be made into an award winning film titled Annie's Coming Out (also called A Test Of Love) in 1984 starring Angela Punch McGregor and directed by Gil Brealey, the screenplay for which was written by Rosemary's partner, Chris Borthwick with both Rosemary and Annie as contributing writers. The communication technique featured in the film, Facilitated Communication is today widely used by people with Cerebral Palsy and has become extended to many in the Autistic population in spite of widespread controversy regarding the assumed mental retardation of functionally non-verbal people with autism. Rosemary Crossely established DEAL (Dignity, Education and Learning) communication centre, training people in the use of facilitated communication for a wide range of functionally non-verbal people and wrote a second book called Speechless; Facilitating Communication for People Without Voices about the experiences of several people who first acquired communication through this technique. Today, after several functionally non-verbal autistic authors have proven their ability to progress via facilitated communication to independent typing, some of this controversy has been quashed though much resistance remains.
