What is the frequency of AS or ASD being bullys?

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Or, is it a contradiction in terms? I can't remember ever encountering such a creature!

It’s possible, but rare. All but one of my school bullies were NT. I think if an Autistic is overstimulated/overwhelmed enough, they could turn into a bully just to try to get the offending stimuli away from them, though there are those of us who are just plain a**es, just like with any given group of people.

I stumbled into bullyland once or twise in my youth.
But I found no satisfaction in being mean to others, so it didn't last for long.

/Mats

Hadn't thought of "abuse corrective force" re "bullying profiles." I can see me counter forcing a bully type for an extended time, but it feels like it would be very situation dependent, and not generic (but that's only a sample of one??), and I don't know what my "extended time" means/is.

New thoughts to plow. Thanks.

I bullied ONCE, to a boy who was bullying me. Him and his friend would sexually harass me on the way home from school, and would also throw things at me. It got to a point where I'd had enough, so one day when I was with my friend we pinned him up against the lockers when he was on his own and threatened him not to harass me on the walk home any more. The little s**t was helpless on his own, and he just ran off without saying anything. But the message got through to him after that because he never bullied me on my way home again.
I was 2 years older than him so obviously I was the one who got into trouble, even though the staff knew about what he was doing to me for the last couple of years.

But sometimes ignoring the bullies doesn't make them stop. Sometimes you've just got to stand up for yourself and give them as good as they gave you. They didn't see me as weak any more.

The idea that folks with ASD can't be bullies is ridiculous.

Among things, the fact that ASD interferes with self-regulation and perceptions of others feelings mean there's a good chance if we are bullying we won't realize it.

The fact that folks with ASD tend to fixate on things means we might engage in behaviours that eventually amount to harassment without realizing it had escalated to that point.

And the fact that many folks with ASD are victims of bullying means we might feel entitled and justified when bullying someone we perceive to have initially bullied us or ones we care about.

This.

I think that if you are a victim of bullying it's easy to get into a "you are either a sheep or a wolf" mentality. I wouldn't say I was ever a bully, but I was very unkind to people, because I was modeling the way people would treat me. It took me a while to stop getting mad at the people I was being unkind to- and to realize that I shouldn't have been treated that way either. I guess you could say that being abused can distort someone's world view.

There have been times in my schooldays I tuned into the general "Bullying culture" of there being one or two individuals the general consensus had singled out as OK to bully, and am grateful for getting caught by a staff member and having that experience put a stop to it.

So yes it is possible, with an added hazard from the tendency in our profiles to fixate and get deeply involved which could make the acts of bullying carried out more severe.

I have a memory of six months in my working life where the working relationship with my supervisor was somewhat "Odd", never being able to do anything right in his eyes etc, lack of any good rapport with shared humour etc. Some years later when doing the training to be a union rep, it occurred to me that that could have been bullying on his part. Later still, researching the autism spectrum it also occurred to me my then supervisor was on the spectrum, and we had the conditions for a most intractable personal case had I had the knowledge then to take it through a grievance procedure - behavour where the recipient feels bullied, which is the trigger for investigation, and where the other person most likely had no actual motivation to bully, much more a fantastic eye for detail (for which I had a great deal of professional respect) and a degree of being clueless in the areas of social stuff, how to feedback etc.

There is a presentation in the NAS 2015 conference on that subject of where an autistic person commits abuse etc.

Sometimes people who have been bullied themselves take it out on other (innocent) people by bullying them. I think people (Aspie or NT or other) tend to have less inclination to bully if they have better compassionate empathy for others. Bullying has never been in my nature.

When I was a kid there was this girl at my school who only had one arm. I didn't know her but I knew who she was, and I was a little afraid of her having one arm because it was unusual to me. But instinctively I didn't bully, the first thing I done was pretend I only had one arm (when I got home) by tucking my other arm in my sleeve, just so I can see what it feels like to have one arm, and it made me less afraid. But I was fascinated. A lot of NT kids would bully someone with a defect they don't understand or are afraid of, instead of trying to put themselves in their shoes. But my instinct was to try to understand what it's like to live with one arm and the last thing I wanted to do was hurt her feelings or make her feel insecure in any way. I knew that she was a human being just like me, just with one arm.
If more people could be like me this world would be a better place.

And that's how I work; I don't have it in me to bully, even though I've always been insecure about myself and have even suffered anger.

Honestly, I'd like to see some research on this sort of thing but I'm not sure where to start. In terms of bullying "statistics" I'm not sure if we can get to the truth of the matter, let alone get some real numbers on NT vs AS/ASD bullying in general.