Sora wrote:
AlMightyAl wrote:
There is no link to Autism and Violence. I am not violent nor have I ever been. Its just certain people.
That's not a valid conclusion.
You don't have every form of autism there is. You just have your form of autism. Others forms of autism are different from your autism.
Other people with autism are sometimes violent or prone to violence due to their autistic symptoms.
Yes, but some NTs are violent due to their NT brains. You know who the most violent people on the planet are? They're not serial killers; they're NT two-year-olds. The only reason two year olds don't kill each other is that we don't give them guns.
I don't remember the exact numbers, but I remember reading up on a large-scale survey of violent acts committed by autistic people; all the numbers came out actually below the NT average--slightly below for Aspies, even lower for auties, and extremely low for profound autism (the kind where you need 24 hour care).
It's silly to say autistics are non-violent. We're human beings; and some human beings will be violent. The only way you can be non-violent is to be in a coma; and even then, you could still accidentally hit somebody while having a seizure or something.
We might be violent for different reasons. A NT teen might be violent because someone has been sleeping with his girlfriend; an autistic teen might be violent because someone has just poked him for the forty-seventh time and he can't take it anymore.
But to say autistics are more violent doesn't make any sense, because while we do have a great many more meltdowns, most of these aren't violent in an anti-social way--only a minority of them involve hitting another human being, and often because said human being is attempting to restrain us. Those meltdowns are outnumbered slightly or even significantly by the acts of violence that NTs commit.
We're not saints--and we can be downright evil. But so can NTs. (I don't think, incidentally, that decreased rates of violence by autistic people are due to any sort of moral superiority. I think we just have less opportunity, since we have less contact with other people.)
It's a fallacy to think that because an autistic person is capable of violence, it must be because he is autistic; it's even worse to focus on autistic violence and ignore the fact that NTs are violent, too.
I think you're absolutely right - all people are violent to some degree. The difference being and most people can't understand what triggers violent reactions in autistic people, because they can handle those situations just fine. Hence the the impression that if someone snapped because you crossed his path he must be a monster or extremely aggressive. In a similar way, sometimes autistic people handle very well things that create panic in others.
29 Mar 2009, 6:16 pm
