Can sexual abuse as a child cause ASD?

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Or sensory processing difficulties? I've always wondered because I shut down (went nonverbal for 9 months to a year) and developed my allergies that destroyed my development shortly after I was sexually abused at age 4.

Or I'm not even sure. I have dreams about it sometime. And when I told my Mom, she said she "strongly suspected it." So it could well be true. I certainly have the feeling of it, but it's hard to distinguish memories from dreams at that age, and I have no memories at all of the subsequent two years.

I'm just wondering if this could have to do with the development of autistic symptoms or at least SPD.

No, sexual abuse is not related to ASD's at all. However, it does make sense that you would have shut down after such a thing. Even non-autistic small children would experience something similar if they went through something like that.

So you think losing language for nearly a year could have been related? Maybe I would just have been BAP like my mother, and instead developed something more severe?

Lots of children go mute after sexual abuse. Maya Angelou wrote about going mute due to abuse in "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

You should have somebody do that voodoo hypnosis on you. I can understand why somebody would shut down after an experience like that, but not at the age of four. I thought the parent was a how a child could tell right from wrong until age seven.

This hits on something I have thought about off and on for many years.

It started with a quote from Goethe, a smart guy during the inquisition. Known to be an intellectual the church ask him straight out about god.

"It is good there is a god or else man would have to invent him" got him off the hook with the church but it did make me wonder about my own belief.
"It is good I am autistic or I would not have survived my childhood" is the belief allowing me to embrace my autism.

Now I have to wonder if going autistic was a way to handle the abuse and live.
Would I have been autistic without the abuse?
Am I really autistic or am I just stuck in a childhood protective mode?

At 60 years old it does not really matter as far as how I live, habits are habits, but is there any way to tell the difference?

Please don't do this. Hypnosis is really good for creating false memories and not much else.

It's related, in the opposite direction. At least 1 in 3 females with an ASD and 1 in 10 males with an ASD are sexually abused by the time they are 18. Those are the rates reported, and sexual abuse rates are known to be higher than reported rates.

It's not because of being sexually abused that they are autistic, but being autistic means that they are more likely to be sexually abused.

And yes, these people are autistic before the abuse.





No, sexual abuse does not make you autistic.



Yes, trauma often makes people hypervigalent which leads to sensory hypersensitivities or more severe sensory hypersensitivities.

Yeah. We're easy targets. It makes me so mad sometimes that the most vulnerable kids are victimized so often.

But we're tough, you know? We fight hard. I wish we wouldn't have to... but that's the way it is.

I wonder if maybe ASD kids find it easier to dissociate during extremely stressful situations like abuse or danger, because we often dissociate just due to sensory overload. Maybe it helps us survive, even as it makes us more vulnerable to PTSD symptoms later on.

An autistic child is probably more likely than an NT child to lose speech or regress developmentally after an attack. For us these skills are more tenuously held, and when exposed to extreme stress, we may drop them until we have the mental energy to deal with them again. Even NT children in abusive situations may regress or acquire selective mutism. They don't become autistic, though those who have survived early, severe neglect may acquire reactive attachment disorder, which shares a few symptoms with autism but is otherwise unrelated.

I knew a boy that lived near us who (we figured out) was having sexual abuse at a very young age. He knew everything about sex at the age of 6, and he always used to run up and down laughing quite manically when he saw anything to do with sex, like a condom thrown on the ground or something, and his friends (like my brother) didn't even know about condoms and all of that sort of stuff yet. Also this boy kept on having panic attacks when he got to about 11, and when he was 13 he got a dirty obsession with women's underwear and was breaking into houses just to steal women's underwear (no money or expensive stuff or anything). The police soon got involved, and he had to have loads of time off school to go to special therapists.

I don't know if this was caused by sexual abuse at home or not, but all this behaviour was a little strange, and his parents were quite weird.

My doctor told me that having AS, the response to the child sexual abuse can manifest differently - this is not verbatim, but the gist of it - do you understand what I am saying? It is not causal, but the way we experience it is as persons with AS brains. I hope this makes sense.

Yeah, that makes sense. A person's personality changes how they respond to a traumatic event like that, so having AS would change it too. It's harder to communicate, harder to understand social norms. Maybe you don't know how to find help, or don't know that finding help is a thing you can do, or even that it was abuse at all. The communication difficulty is part of why ASD people are in danger from abuse like that.

I would think more the social niavety would be why, the communication might make it harder to articulate to someone that it was going on.

No it does not cause ASD however those on the spectrum tend to be easy targets for sexual abuse due to our curiosity and gullibility. I was molested by a neighbor across the street an years later at a house party had a woman spike my drink and she had her way with me as I was passing out.

Two problems with that.

Firstly, the research shows pretty clearly that 4 year olds have a sense of right from wrong, and it does not depend on parental rules. Research has found that children as young as 3 or 4 (basically as soon as they can understand the questions) describe a difference between things that are against the rules (but the rules could change) and things that are wrong regardless of rules, and consider things that harm others to be wrong regardless of rules. Research into autistic kids has also demonstrated that this moral/conventional distinction has no relationship with theory of mind performance.

Secondly, a kid doesn't have to know something is wrong to be hurt by it. Abusers often convince kids that the abuse is justified in some way, telling them they brought it on themselves, or it's an expression of love, or something like that. And many kids believe this, and don't realize what happened to them was actually abuse. However, they still show the exact same cluster of psychological problems associated with abuse - low self-esteem, acting out, body image/eating disorders, anxiety and depression, dissociative disorders and so forth. In fact, if anything, it hurts worse for these kids, because they blame themselves and have no framework to explain their problems.

So is it possible that I actually have Asperger's, then, and losing my ability to speak was related to the abuse but not the ASD? The main reason I got a PDD-NOS diagnosis was because of the fact that I lost and had to relearn verbal communication skills. I guess they counted that as a "language delay."

Also, current lack of stims, though they only mentioned hand-flapping and rocking, which I haven't done since childhood, and totally ignored other possible stims, like hair-pulling and pinching, which I still do in public.

So possible I actually have Asperger's and not PDD-NOS?