I bullied an autistic kid. Wait, is he autistic?

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I forgot to mention an example of how it can happen without even understanding.

I remember before I knew what a lot of words meant, or even sometimes what the point of words was for, there was this kid that my mom dropped me off at his house a lot, and he was always calling his little brother a dodo. And I didn't know it meant anything, so I repeated it in the same intonation and everything. But his little brother must have taken it as me calling him a dodo even though I didn't understand what I was saying. My mother later told me not to do it, and I figured out what she meant years later.

Also I joke around with my friends a lot and we bug each other about traits we have but it's all in fun because we're all laughing at ourselves too. It wouldn't be all in fun if a person felt insulted though, then we would have to stop. A friend and I (both of us are autistic) both have trouble knowing when to stop sometimes and have unintentionally offended people. To us it's like a verbal equivalent of a pillow fight (and actually it often ends with us throwing pillows or koosh balls or other soft objects at each other).

Also my mother has a trait where she inadvertently copies people's voices, she falls into the accent of whoever she is speaking to, and sometimes they think she's making fun of them. She doesn't even notice she's doing it.

I've had my experiences with bulling. I remember how I was always picked on in the lementry school, not because I was an easy target myself, but because I hanged around people who were. One person (who I'm still friends with) was teased terribly and he lacked the courage to stand up to the bullies so I had to do it for the both of us.

Now this friend is about to become the classes Valedictorian and will probably make more money then all the kids that picked on him put together. Funny how these things work out sometimes...

I did the same. I got bullied in school, so I teased a girl in my grade about her last name because it all wasn't fair. How come I had to be teased and made fun of about being different and she didn't get teased and made fun of about her last name. That's why I say I was discriminated and treated differently.

I know I've said I hate bullies and I do but I also have empathy for them sometimes like this for example.

I used to beat myself up for what I did to that student but my mother told me it was all okay because I was a kid and kids tease thinking they are being funny but they're not. So my mother was actually telling me it was okay to make fun of someone about their last name? She also said it was a strange last name. Maybe that was the reason. My mother can be hypocritical.

Until some months ago I thought that autistics didn't bully for the following reasons (not in any order of importance):

1. We are withdrawn and 'in our world'.

2. We are gentle and kind people.

3. We have been bullied ourselves so we don't want to inflict similar pain on anyone else.

I still find it hard to believe that autistics bully.

I've been bullied by aspies on the internet. There was an aspie who sent me two nasty replies in my email when I responded to his post on IMDB when he said he has AS and is looking for a girl with AS and he was looking for love.

I knew an aspie in real life who abused his mother to get his way and he abused the kids in his school and the teachers but he still didn't get his way but he still couldn't figure out, it works at home, but not at school.

Heck I have been flamed by aspies on here. So they are just as bad as NTs because they're human. Some are just a**holes just like some NTs are.


EDIT:

Link to a thread about us who have bullied before:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt44464.html


How can you still find it hard to believe autistics bully? There is proof now that they do, What Chimchar said and that thread.

This is only true of some autistic people, and it actually doesn't require a whole lot of social engagement to do something like that.

As I noted in one of my previous posts, I managed to inadvertently hurt someone's kid brother before I even knew what most words were for, because I was echolalic and repeated the offending words, despite my general lack of social engagement with other kids and severe language problems at the time.

While that is not bullying in the traditional sense of intending to hurt people, it still would have been perceived as bullying by the other kid.

Similarly, some people with coprolalia (a trait in about 10% of people with Tourette's, which involves compulsively saying words that are forbidden in some way) are in a really bad position, because they will sometimes tic words that are highly offensive. One woman with coprolalia said in the documentary "Twitch and Shout", that she was standing in line at the bank behind a black man in a purple sweater, and she ended up shouting "Purple n****r" at him. (He apparently turned around and told her, "Lady, if you think n****rs are purple, you've got problems.") But she said she often has to avoid situations where she's likely to shout racist words at people who won't know that she doesn't mean them.

I have likewise had to learn, because of this, to try to avoid totally accidental things like the "dodo" incident. They might be accidental, but the other person doesn't know that, and I am not always in a position to explain.



As far as I can tell, we have every single level of morality available to the human race. There is nothing special about autism that makes us born with a higher ability to be ethical.

Certainly, autistic people are often stereotyped as being outright violent, which would make the "gentle" part a little hard to believe.



If that were true of everyone who has been bullied, there would be a lot fewer bullies in the world.

Often, our limited social perceptions at the time (and children's limited social perceptions in general) can cause us to be unaware that there are available courses of action other than either bully or be bullied, and we can learn that one way of doing things feels bad, so we try the other way.

Or, we take out our anger about being bullied on someone else.

One important thing to know is that bullying does not always feel like bullying. It doesn't always feel like setting out to hurt someone. It can be the result of social insensitivity.

Also, I know an autistic person who as an adult, like many autistic people I know, has ethics that I greatly look up to. (Many of which she has learned by violating them and then learning why they are wrong, which often instills them in a deeper way than simply knowing them already.) She used to beat other kids up on the playground. Why? Because if she scared them enough, she could force them to play with her. She knew no other way to "make friends".

This doesn't excuse it. But it explains why even autistic people can do it.



I don't.

I've seen, among autistic people, every single negative behavior that non-autistic people are capable of.

I've also seen, among autistic people, a tendency to have not worked out in childhood some things that non-autistic people do mostly work out in childhood.

This is because many autistic people lack socialization in large groups of people that resemble them (in roles other than "the outcast" or similar, as well), until adulthood or adolescence when they find groups like this one.

And it takes experience in such groups to fully understand the effects of certain actions within a group, and learn not to do them.

So, many times, we are adults who have never learned the lessons that most children have already learned or are in the process of learning, so we make all the same mistakes the average five-year-old will make on the playground.

Only, since we have the power of adults, the consequences of the mistakes can be much larger if we aren't careful. And also, we often are under the illusion that if we don't mean harm, we can't do harm. It takes us awhile in groups like these to even figure out the consequences of our actions a lot of the time, if we ever do figure them out.

And in some cases, the only reason we never bullied wasn't because we were better people than the bullies, but because we never had the power or social standing or equality or whatever, that is usually necessary to bully people, or to harm them in other ways short of bullying.

I know that, for instance, while not bullying, I have certainly intimidated you (or something like that) at times with my manner of talking to you. I had no clue I was doing that, and certainly didn't intend to, but it was still the result. And once I found out the result of my actions, I apologized. But it took me a long time to even learn that if I did something like that, it could still have a bad result for someone else even if I didn't intend it to.

That's an example of lessons that autistic people might have to learn once we are among social equals, in adulthood, rather than learning it in childhood when we are generally too low on the social totem pole to encounter such situations. I couldn't generally intimidate anyone in childhood because I was in no position to do so, so I couldn't learn the lesson about what can intimidate someone until I was among other autistic people and accorded at least equal social status with everyone else.

And then I've acquired somewhat high social status in parts of the autistic community, which has familiarized me with a whole different set of problems socially, that are even more of a surprise than any other social lessons. I learned this when I started getting messages from other autistic people saying "In a position like yours, you ought to be more careful what you say, it can really scare or hurt someone!" And I'd email back "A position like what?" and they'd say "A position of being respected/a leader/etc in the autistic community." And I'd email back "What on earth are you talking about, I didn't choose a position like this" and they'd say "It doesn't matter, you're still in that position", and so forth.

And then I learned that if people perceive me to be in a position of leadership, they give my words more weight, and this makes any social blunders I make towards them, affect them more strongly. And that even if I want to not be considered to be in that position (I don't do hierarchy, don't like hierarchy, don't want hierarchy, etc., these things are against my belief system and even outright against my religion), it doesn't matter because while many people plain don't care and don't do social hierarchies, other people will put me in that position in their heads, and I have to take that into account in interacting with the ones who do put me in that position in their heads.

And I've seen similar things happen to other autistic people. In the autistic community, we can find ourselves at the very least not at the bottom of the social hierarchy anymore, which includes one set of lessons we never learned. And then beyond that we can find ourselves either popular or in leadership positions for the first time, and that includes a whole nother set of lessons we've never learned.

We can also find ourselves forming broad, sometimes conflicting, hierarchies of who is valued in the autistic community, which can be people with better verbal skills, people with worse verbal skills, people who would be considered higher-functioning, people who would be considered lower-functioning, people with Asperger's, people with other forms of autism, people with official diagnoses, and on and on and on. All sorts of things like this can be used to form social hierarchies, which we've also rarely learned anything from before except being at or very near the bottom of all of them.

And our clumsiness in learning all these lessons can lead to many actions that we would greatly regret if we understood their consequences, but we've never had the opportunity to learn what it feels like to do those things, so we don't notice until it's pointed out to us, sometimes repeatedly. We can be so accustomed to being at or near the bottom of the hierarchy that we don't understand the lessons other people learn earlier, from being in the middle or the top.

It's not just the autistic community that does this, it can happen to many other groups of outcasts. And one lesson that every single one of these groups (that I've researched, at any rate) has had to learn at some point, is that failure of a certain group of people to do certain bad things doesn't stem from an innate gentleness or kindness or caringness, not even from empathy from having been at the receiving end of various awful actions... but rather from never having had the opportunity to perform them. On an individual level, people in any group can be caring and kind and have empathy for others based on being shut out or mistreated, and thus not do certain kinds of harm. But there is no group of people who, as a group, always has those qualities.

Women, for instance, have had to learn that, as an example, getting the vote has not infused the voting public with the kindness, gentleness, caringness, etc., that women often supposed themselves to have prior to getting the vote. (And that even when, for instance, they were fighting for the vote in America, much of their propaganda was horribly degrading to black people and disabled people.) And if women being involved in politics was supposed to make politics less dirty (a claim of women suffragists), I think we can look no further than Hillary Clinton (right now, in America -- I'm sure there are equal examples in other countries and times) to disprove that one, given that she seems to not be remotely above the usual slimeball political tactics of other politicians, even more than the usual in some instances. (Hmm, if women often need to work twice as hard to get to the same position as men in the workplace, is her philosophy that she has to be twice as slimy as other politicians if she wants to win the presidency? I don't know, but I'll get off my political digression now.)

I imagine it would be more confusing, though, to a person who has those qualities innately, and assumes the reason that they do is because they have some other trait (like being autistic, or being female, etc) that often shuts people out of positions of enough power to abuse that power.

So have I.

One interesting situation came up at one point, with an AS-diagnosed woman (who isn't online anymore at all) who was bullying other autistic people, but didn't seem to notice she was doing it or the effects of her actions on the other people involved.

Because I did know how others perceived her, and had known her a really long time, I tried to explain. I made it very explicit that I did not perceive her intent to be unkind in any way. I then explained how her actions would look through the eyes of someone who didn't know her, and especially a person with certain life experiences that would form a lens to view her that way through.

Her response was rage, at me, that I would think she was "the kind of monster" who would behave in the way she was being perceived as behaving. And then dissolving into a puddle of self-pity from which any conversation was impossible.

It became a real problem, because she was so used to being the victim that she didn't believe she could victimize anyone else. She thus believed herself to be the victim of my explanation of her behavior, and also the victim of the people she was hurting. She literally could not imagine herself as anything other than a victim, so she turned relationships where she was (without intent) victimizing others, into ones where they were victimizing her by reacting to (or even explaining) her actions towards her.

I never was able to explain it to her. I eventually just settled for engaging only in conversations that didn't involve explaining how she was treating others, because she treated people worse if you pointed out the consequences of her behavior than she did if you just left her alone, and there was no possibility of getting through. She never apologized or anything, it just wasn't in her to admit she could do wrong.

That's a good example of how the belief that autistic people can't bully, can lead to an autistic person bullying and believing that they aren't bullying because they can't bully. That's why I get really nervous when people think they're immune to particular behavior, because quite often what it really translates into, is that when they do engage in that particular behavior, they will resist at all costs any responsibility for that behavior, because they want to maintain a self-image as being incapable of that behavior. And that can be incredibly destructive.

It's the same thing that happens with many staff in institutions, actually. Staff often perceive themselves to be the lowest in the hierarchy. They take out their frustrations on the only people with less power than they have -- the inmates. Then they deny that they have any power, because, see, there's this whole hierarchy above them, so they can't have power, let alone abuse it. They don't see, even refuse to see, what's obvious to any inmate, which is that staff have more power than inmates.

Similarly, autistic people who get into the mindstate of being perpetual victims (and incapable of ever harming anyone) seem to be the most likely to victimize other people without ever taking responsibility or admitting (to themselves or anyone else) that they are the ones doing something wrong this time. Part of being able to change (which is part of responsibility) is being able to admit the possibility that you can do something wrong.

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Last edited by Chimchar on 26 Apr 2008, 9:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

I didn't see any bullying there no offense or did I miss something in that post?

Comments in reply to Anbuend's message in reply to my previous message.

I think of bullying as being deliberate and intentional. If a person hurts another person inadvertently the first person may be at fault if they should have known the other person would be hurt.

Of course there are hierarchies in the autistic community, but as far as I know high social status and leadership in that community are earned through ability, not because of inherited factors like being born upper class or having film star good looks.

anbuend wrote :

The anthology Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, has a section Working for Social Justice: Visions and Strategies for Change. In Developing a Liberatory Consciousness, Barbara J. Love writes:



Racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism and other systems of oppression are so embedded in people's consciousness that it will take more than a few decades, if ever to eradicate them.

anbuend wrote :



Much of the argument of the women's peace movement/anti-nuclear movement, which reached its peak in the 1980s, was that because women are nurturing and empathetic, they are naturally more peace loving than men. That movement drew the links between patriarchy and war and nuclear weapons. A leaflet by the New York City Women's Pentagon Action for the demonstraion in that city on 12 June 1982 stated that:



There were peace groups in Britain in the 1980s called Babies against the Bomb , Families Against the Bomb and [i] Oxford Mothers for Nuclear Disarmament [i/].

Much of the appeal of the Women's Peace Camp at the Greenham Common cruise missile base in southern England in the 1980s and early 1990s, was that it was women only.

Taking the bully by the horns topic

This woman sounds more like a sociopathic personality to me, in that she refused to accept responsibility for her behaviour. Chimchar is stating he is sorry for what he did.

When I was 8 years old I only once bullied a 5 year old NT kid. I called him a mama's boy. I wanted to see him cry, but once he started to cry, softly, I became fascinated by his tears. Is that what I looked like when I cried? I had enough trouble reading my own emotions, let alone others. Once I figured out my own emotions, I felt remorseful and apologized to that kid (much later on. He said he did not remember ).

I became self conscious of my own actions after that, but people bullying me continued, and still continues to this day, albeit in the sneaky adult way.

The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander by Barbara Coloroso (2004) is an excellent book (in my opinion) that links the behaviour of bullying with nazism and genocide.