Bullies – its time to reconsider what’s ‘normal’.
With up to 60% of people with Asperger’s Syndrome reporting being bullied in secondary schools on a daily basis we have an epidemic of intolerance which points at a currently undiagnosed and far more widespread and damaging pathology than Asperger’s Syndrome will ever be. Others reports put figures at closer to 90%.
What kind of soulless society is being bred with this sort of damaging hierarchical dynamic being so commonplace? Who is helping bullying (but seemingly ‘normal’) individuals so threatened with difference and diversity they feel compelled to corner already disempowered and vulnerable people and further disempower them? Who taught these children that they had the right to be judge and jury over others? It’s time we called it what it is… children lacking empathy, emotional intelligence, a sense of justice and equality. Often these individuals band together with followers and wannabes, as if their power in numbers justifies their self righteous, presumed ‘normality’.
Who brought these people up? Video games? DVDs? TV? Where was their moral and emotional education and where did society, community and family fail to reinforce REAL empathy, a real sense of equality? Were these swept aside in favor of keeping up with the latest trends or making sure little Johnny or little Joanie were reminded too often of their own presumed ‘normality’ or even encouraged to strive for some kind of celebrated, presumed superiority? How much would such children fear falling from these lofty, artificial heights and fight to maintain these mindsets?
Just because someone can PERFORM a semblance of empathy (for whatever vested interests of inclusion or popularity) for those they consider worthy as their ‘peers’, doesn’t make it REAL empathy. Similarly, just because someone on the autistic spectrum lacks a simultaneous sense of self and other or has a processing or visual perceptual challenge which makes them too literal to understand the deeper significance of what they see or hear or read body language or facial expression, this doesn’t equate to a lack of empathy (as often wrongly presumed).
Who failed to teach so called ‘normal’ bullies of the rich social tapestry of diversity or equality in difference? Who gave these bullies the presumptions they were so much more normal than others till their narcissism could no longer perceive the pathology of THEIR own condition, THEIR lacking? If we teach such children that others are ‘broken’ versions of themselves, we are may be reinforcing the bullies own superiority and reinforcing paternalistic ‘sympathy’ in others – neither of which promote a diversity friendly version of equality in difference.
Sixty to ninety percent. SIXTY to NINETY PERCENT.
As 1 in every 150 people (and climbing) becomes diagnosed on the autistic spectrum, may we seek to stay visible in their communities, be invited to their classrooms, graduate to teach their children and educate their communities. May we present them where we can with our intact humanity, our lack of hierarchy, our rare realness and honesty, perhaps even humility, and lay at their feet our stories of additional social phobia, social anxiety, depression, PTSD which we’ve lived with, perhaps risen above. Let us lay these at the feet of those who gave such blessings to us for many of us on the autistic spectrum are so much more empathic and human in spite of, sometimes because of such things, than some of them may ever be.
For this, let us help them and their children and their children’s children, to stop hiding behind bravado and smug assurance of their own mythical ‘normality’.
Adults with autism can also step forward to offer to support those in the community who are marginalised, friendless, vulnerable, even traumatised and remind them to stand tall, stand strong and that they are not broken or damaged ‘non autistic people’ at all, but damned fine people with autism.
Donna Williams
Hi Donna,
I’m a regular ‘lurker’ to your blog and always read it with interest.. However, this time i wanted to say a great big thank you..
Just now – it’s the easter holidays, i have one son, who’s eight and has a diagnosis of AS. He is funny, articulate, loving, thoughtful, all those wonderful things and more – but he has no-one to be/play with over these school holidays – no-one wants to play with the ‘special needs’ kid. 🙁
The thank you is for putting into words what i have struggled to articulate to others – it’s not always the ‘kid with special needs’ who needs the support and help – it’s very, very often the other children (and more often, adults) around him that need educating………
((hugs))
You write the bullies are “children with a severe impairment in empathy, a severe impairment in emotional intelligence, a severe impairment in sense of justice and equality.”
Wrong. They are children. You view them as adults. Yes if they were adults they would have what you mention, but they are not adults. Children/adolescents, quite often, do not have developed capacities for empathy, emotional intelligence, sense of justice and equality, and much more. They’re learing. Unfortunately those who are shy, different, “wierd’, “strange”, and whatever, will sometimes be subjected to their verbal and physical outlashes. An issue: make parents, teachers, school officials aware of how to observe for signs of this abuse, instruct children that they should report all instancts of abuse right away (and to use phone-video of it or tape recordings if they can do this). This will smoke out the abusers and subject them to being helped about how to treat the disadvantaged, different, disabled, etc, better.
Many Asperger’s individuals are bullies themselves. many take out their frustration with their problems on others (girls, younger children, parents) with verbal and sometimes physical abuse).
True Alen,
one struggle I have is that I see all humans as equal. I do see children as ‘just small undeveloped humans’ so I see them similarly to how I see adults who may also be more or less developed. I also think some kids choose to develop a sense of justice, empathy, equality from very young with little help, whilst others it is either not in their vested interest or personality makeup to do so regardless of whether modelling is provided or not. We all have strengths and weaknesses and those for whom empathy, justice, equality are their weaknesses need more than modelling, they need to find a vested interest in why having such traits may work for them even if they don’t come naturally to those individuals.
You are also right that SOME kids with Asperger’s are bullies. But I’ve worked with over 600 people on the spectrum in 12 years as a consultant and I can certainly say its my experience that these kids aren’t the usual among kids with Asperger’s. I’ve met them and I’d say that among those teens with Asperger’s I’ve seen the bullies constituted perhaps 10% of this population. Compare that to 90% of the Asperger’s population being bullied on a daily basis. One factor may be that one of the bases for bullying is an intact sense of simultaneous self and other enough to consistently and cohesively PERCEIVE heirarchy. As lack of simultaneous self and other is one of the most shared and striking features of those on the autistic spectrum, perhaps this explains why bullying by those with Asperger’s isn’t as high as bullying to those with Asperger’s. Also, those who are daily being bullied may be more likely to vent on the next most vulnerable person to themselves, often those who love them and will forgive them or their younger, weaker siblings. Others of course just clam up and hide what’s happening to them.
Hello,
Thank you for your thoughts. I am curious as to what “sense of simultaneous self and other” means. It is not clear to me.
Dear Donna,
I just devoured ‘Nobody Nowhere’. I have cried, I have had shivers all over my body. I am considered “normal” I suppose, but I don’t really see myself that way at all. I am a support worker working with people with learning difficulties, some of them with some degrees of autism, but not very many. I would love to work more with people with autism – I have read three autobiographies by autistic people now and I am fascinated. Just the fact that they exist, that they are part of humanity, makes me think that there cannot (by definition) be anything wrong with them. They are part of us. We are all connected. I practise yoga and meditation regularly, and there’s so much from those eastern philosophies that I believe could help us “normal” people understand you. But then, I have always believed in “individuality” more than in “normality”. We are all unique, regardless of which “society-built category” we fall into. We are all unique, we all have a Heart which is the most important thing we have and should listen to, as much as (or more than?!) intellectualised/societised “rights and wrongs”. Categories and labels and value judgements which society provides, they make most of us stop paying attention. But those of us who still pay attention, and look deeply, they can see that autistic people are like all of us: they want to be happy. I don’t know if I’m talking nonsense. It doesn’t matter. I’ll stop here. Thank you so much for being you. Thank you so much for writing your books. You have reached my heart, completely.
Love,
vio
Thanks for bringing attention to the awful treatment that many kids with asperger’s and other types of autism have to live through. I was one of those kids a long time ago and am still recovering in some ways. Might never recover in other ways.
I think that both descriptions (Donna’s and alen’s) are true of the child bullies. It may not be their fault that they are how they are, but that does not change the reality of the way their behavior affects the children that they are bullying. I agree that it is up to parents, teachers, and other caretakers to teach these children that ‘different’ does not equal ‘bad’ and to value and respect other people. Still, the actual behavior of these bullies needs to be dealt with in a way that stops them from doing it while they are learning not to do it!
“…remind them to stand tall, stand strong and that they are not broken or damaged ‘non autistic people’ at all, but damned fine people with autism…”
YES. Thank you for that 🙂
A good post there. One thing I was taught was that most bullies were cowards. I experienced bullying in my last five years of compulsory education. Most of this was name calling, or through persons trying to get me to do silly things, which were against my will.
Sometimes it was jealousy. They probably wondered how they draw like me, or recall chunks of seemingly useless information. Most of it died down when they had to study for their GCSE exams and focus on coursework. I found it better at college, because of the wider age range in each class.
A simultaneous processing of sense of self and other is one in which people can read a facial expression/body language/keep up with incoming language and actions of another person WHILST consciously experiencing their own expression, thoughts, feelings with the capacity to monitor and alter those according to perceived social or personal interests.
In a lack of simultaneous processing of self and other one perceives other but loses processing, expression, monitoring on the self level or, conversely experiences self but cannot process, monitor or modify according to information that is simultaneously coming from a source that is ‘other’.
I wrote extensively about this in my 9 books, perhaps most clearly in Everyday Heaven, and in The Jumbled Jigsaw.
… Donna Williams
http://www.donnawilliams.net
Thank you for your honest and powerful post. Having dealt with bullying in my past and currently working on dealing with it through my blog, I couldn’t agree with your comments more.
I also have a great friend, who’s son has Aspergers and must deal with the cruilty of being bullied at school daily. He has little idea what he can do about it and why it is due to his Aspergers. Thanks for bringing this to the forefront.
I still don’t understand why do you insist you’re not a broken normal. You don’t really know. You only think you know.
Hi Tommi,
I understand your theories, the whole psychoanalysis and birth trauma idea, but every case of autism is different. Some people become diagnosed autistic after disintegrative disorder at age 2-3 before which development was usual. Some of these cases were encephalitis, so nothing to do with birth trauma.
There are also those with autism who have been recently found to be the offspring of first cousin marriages in which both strengths and genetic weakening were multiplied resulting in things like gut, immune, metabolic and co-morbid disorders which overwhelm development in the first years. Again, this is genetics and not birth trauma. My father’s mother was the offspring of first cousins who in turn were also the children of first cousins. Diabetes, Coeliac, ADHD, Bipolar, Dyslexia, Social Phobia, Asperger’s and Autism have all been diagnosed on my father’s mother’s side and more recently ASD has been found on his father’s side too. So he brought his own predispositions to the genetics table.
On my mother’s side there was substance abuse and my view is she was certainly dealing with her own major traumas before and after my birth and my view is she may have had untreated post natal depression on top of her existing challenges. So your theory of a child being influenced by a mother’s severe chronic stress and what her own body goes through may well be true for half of my case and there are many children with fetal alcohol effect who have autistic traits. However, a strong inter-generational maternal history of familial substance abuse, suicides, agoraphobia and OCD also fail to indicate typical developmental patterns.
Added to this, I had jaundice at 6 months and chronic infections from 6 months, and was ultimately diagnosed with and treated for two primary immune deficiencies (coeliac and diabetes already ran on my father’s side and colitis on my mothers). Against that health background I was, like many children in the 60s, taken to catch measles and mumps when I was 2. But with no functioning immune system, I finally fought off the measles I’d been carrying after getting normal immune function at age 36. So 34 years of carrying measles is not good for the brain at all.
And I also then dealt with the loss of the welfare sister who’d cared for me from 6 months to 2 and a half, then the death and loss of my grandparents (who were my primary carers) at the age of 4. My view is that degree of loss has got to effect attachments, especially in a child already very developmentally compromised.
So clearly the history is very layered, but as an autism consultant I’ve found many children diagnosed with autism with similarly layered histories. For example it’s not unusual for me to meet a child who became progressively more autistic after a big birthday party (that one surprised me), after a parent escaped a violent partner or the marriage broke down, after there was one of more house moves in succession, or a after younger sibling was born before they were 3. So it’s useful to consider how often we are labeling progressive and untreated childhood depression, even catatonic depression as autism and we need to look at things like 2nd hand stress and can a young child ‘catch’ their parents untreated depression.
It may equally be a far more holistic picture in which a combination of things came together – genetic weakening including gut/immune/metabolic disorders, genetic damage which may have already effected three generations of mothers and their children due to inter-generational substance abuse, Acquired Brain Injury from viral infection, and topped off with trauma relating to loss and abuse. So, we clearly can’t put all that down to a theory of primal pain and birth trauma.
Sometimes we have to dare to see more holistically, more 3D. It may well be that once we dissect out all the contributing causes which contributed to ‘autistic presentation’ and autistic patterns of development, there is nothing called ‘autism’ left except personality.
[…] On May 17th, 2009 at 9:32 am e Tommi Olanne Says:I still don’t understand why do you insist you’re not a broken normal. You don’t really know. You only think you know. […]