Dealing with autistic adults and adolescents can sometimes be difficult.  I know many of us can be quick to take offense, even where none was intended – which is rather curious when you think about it, because autistic children tend to start out being socially naïve.  At some point, these naïve children can become nervous, reactive adults.  Why is that?  It seems kind of like a transformation from one extreme to the opposite extreme.

Well, the problem with naïveté is that it leaves us vulnerable.  Autistic children are more likely than neurotypical children to accept unfair offers (Hartley & Fisher, 2018; Wang et al., 2018).  Autistic people are less good at detecting lies (Williams et al., 2018). We’re less good at recognizing and understanding bullying when it occurs (Hodgins et al., 2018), and we’re more likely to comply with others’ requests and demands (Chandler et al., 2018).  We’re even prone to continuing to rely on our prior beliefs about people’s trustworthiness after their actual behaviour gives us reason to not trust them (Maurer et al., 2018).

Our social naïveté makes us more vulnerable to bullying and victimization.  The autistic children who are most socially vulnerable are also the most bullied (Sofronoff et al., 2011).  Furthermore, it is often autistic people’s own friends who bully us or try to take advantage of us (Wirral Autistic Society, 2015).

Now, we may indeed be slower to learn when we shouldn’t trust people, but we do learn in the end.  We have bad experiences in interpersonal interactions, so we learn to expect that we will continue to have bad experiences in the future.  Therefore, many of us will take action to protect ourselves.  But how do you take appropriate action when you’re not sure who is a danger and who isn’t?  How do you protect yourself when your social skills aren’t up to the task of accurately determining when someone is genuinely friendly and when someone is exploiting you?  Or when you can’t always tell the difference between genial teasing and outright mockery?

If you can’t tell what’s happening in an individual instance, you have to rely on global rules.  It’s a sad but telling fact that autistic children who play alone are much less likely to be bullied than those who want friends but struggle to make them (Anderson, 2014).  Isolating oneself can be a rational response.  So can making the assumption that any ambiguous action by another person – for example, teasing, or a simple disagreement between friends – was intended to be hurtful.

Of course, when I say it’s rational, I mean there’s a reason, an explanation – not that it’s necessarily the right thing to do.  I would encourage autistic people who’ve come to expect hostility from others not to give up.  Yes, we have to be vigilant about others’ motivations, but there are contextual cues and behavioural cues that we can sometimes use as reassurances.  And ultimately, retreat and reaction are strategies that will only hurt us.

Meanwhile, to those who interact with autistic people, please try to remember that many of us have experienced trauma and victimization.  Please try to be be patient and sensitive.  And if one of us is taking things too personally, try not to leap to the assumption that their behaviour is a pathological autism symptom.

References

Anderson, C. (2014, October 7). IAN research report: Bullying and children with ASD. Retrieved from https://iancommunity.org/cs/ian_research_reports/ian_research_report_bullying

Chandler, R. J., Russell, A., & Maras, K. L. (2018). Compliance in autism: Self-report in action. Autism. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361318795479

Hartley, C., & Fisher, S. (2018). Do children with autism spectrum disorder share fairly and reciprocally? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3528-7

Hodgins, Z., Kelley, E., Kloosterman, P., Hall, L., Hudson, C. C., Furlano, R., & Craig, W. (2018). Brief report: Do you see what I see? The perception of bullying in male adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3739-y

Maurer, C., Chambon, V., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., Leboyer, M., & Zalla, T. (2018). The influence of prior reputation and reciprocity on dynamic trust-building in adults with and without autism spectrum disorder. Cognition, 172, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.11.007

Sofronoff, K., Dark, E., & Stone, V. (2011). Social vulnerability and bullying in children with Asperger syndrome. Autism, 15(3), 355–372. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361310365070

Wang, Y., Xiao, Y., Li, Y., Chu, K., Feng, M., Li, C., … Ke, X. (2018). Exploring the relationship between fairness and ‘brain types’ in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnpbp.2018.07.008

Williams, D. M., Nicholson, T., Grainger, C., Lind, S. E., & Carruthers, P. (2018). Can you spot a liar? Deception, mindreading, and the case of autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1962

Wirral Autistic Society. (2015). Mate crime in Merseyside. Retrieved from http://www.autismtogether.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/WAS-mate-crime-report-June-2015.pdf