Thursday, March 28, 2013

ASD and Getting Bullied - ASD VULNERABILITY --> BULLYING: EXAMPLE (Part 4/7)




The Aspie’s initial “empty slate” regarding the facial expressions, tone of voice + body language disadvantages him. Insufficient recognition of such social cues in others, along with other differences (eg statistically reduced verbal fluency) predisposes him to bullying and/or manipulation by others.

Story of me being framed:

I skipped a grade and joined a class whose classmates I’ve seen numerous times, but never interacted with much before. I used to hang around by myself a lot, but I thought I’d feel more comfortable if I could be included. I used to say to the girls in that class, ‘Can I play with you?’, and they’d always say ‘No, you’re not old enough.’

This time though...

‘Ok, you’re in our class so you can join us. Let’s play tag.’

‘Ok.’

‘Ok, you're it. Count one two three before you go.’

‘Ok.’

The girls ran away, but I was relatively fast even though I was still kinda clumsy at the time. I tapped one of the girls on the shoulder.

‘You touched my butt!’

‘No I didn’t , I touched your shoulder.’

‘No, you touched my butt!’

‘No I didn’t, I touched your shoulder over here.’

The other girls who were playing tag, went up to the two of us.

‘Ken just touched me on the butt! Let’s go tell on him!’

I remember seeing the girls having angry/frowny facial expressions. I knew it meant angry/frowny coz I saw it in cartoons multiple times, and managed to associate it with the context. I didn’t understand WHY they were angry, even though I knew it was factually true that I touched her on the shoulder. 

They dobbed on me, and the teacher on recess duty told me that touching a girl’s butt is sexual assault, and for me not to do it again.

The next day, I wanted to play tag with them again, and they said I could join them. They made me ‘it’ at the start again.

I didn’t understand their intentions at the time. They made the game a little different.

‘This time because you run so fast, we’ll make you count to 10.’

‘Ok.’
               
I counted to 10, and ran after one of the girls hiding behind the school hall. I tapped her head.
               
‘I tagged you.’
               
‘You touched my butt! Didn’t Ms. Kogan tell you not to touch girls’ butts?!’
               
‘But I didn’t touch your butt, I touched your head. Your head is not your butt. Your butt is located down here.’
               
‘No, you touched my butt, and I’m telling on you.’

She told the other girls, followed by my class teacher, who already formed a negative impression of me, coz I was apparently smart but immature, and that I didn’t behave like a 5th-grader.

He said to me ‘Ken, follow me into this room.’

The room was pleasantly dark, and he didn’t switch on the lights, but I didn’t know why.

He told me that the girls have reported multiple incidents of me touching their butts when playing tag and that it is illegal to touch that region, because it is sexual harassment, and in the adult world can be punishable by a jail term, and he use to work with juvenile criminals, many of whom have been convicted of sexual assault and rape. He said that what I did was wrong, and that he would give me several detentions, and physically segregated me from the rest of the females in the class for all activities, including computer skills, to think about my wrongdoings.

‘But I didn’t touch their butts.’

‘Yes you did, the girls said so.’

‘But I didn’t, they keep saying that when I touched their shoulder and heads.’

‘The girls have come up with the same story about you, so I’m inclined to believe them. You know what you did is wrong, and you are not going to get away with it.’

‘But I didn’t touch their butts, I didn’t actually touch their butts.’

‘Don’t lie to me Ken, I don’t want to set you up for failure when you become a grown up so you need to learn things now. See me after school at 3 PM.’

‘I really didn’t touch their butts, you don’t believe me.’

‘Stop talking about it. Now go back to Maths.’

All of my persistent claims of innocence were said with my usual flat affect and relatively monotone voice. At the time, I thought that because what occurred was factually true by my accounts, that I would be believable. But this wasn’t the case.

In retrospect, I realized that I was supposed to show facial expressions of anger, and be more vocal and eloquent about my innocence. I didn’t know what he knew, or the cause of incongruence between factual events and false accusations, which is related to the TOM deficit.
               
I didn’t know what sort of body language to show. And yet the girls were trusted coz they showed the typical facial expressions, body language and vocal tones of innocence and indignation. ‘HE TOUCHED ME HERE! HOW DARE HE!’

These girls can further fine-tune their manipulative/framing qualities over time, and could easily target an Aspie’s initial trustworthiness, and get him fired from jobs, arrested, or divorced (if married) with the settlement (+/- child custody) hugely in favour of her due to his apparent “abusive behaviour”.

I didn’t see the BIG PICTURE, that they didn’t want me to play with them, coz I was focusing on the DETAILS, such as counting to 10 instead of 3.

Of course, some Aspies may commit sexual harassment without realizing it, but that wasn’t the case in my situation.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

ASD and Getting Bullied - WAYS OF GETTING BULLIED (Part 3/7)



- Intentionally disrupting one’s non-pathological routines.

- Intentionally disrupting one’s preference for sameness not from therapeutic attempts to improve cognitive flexibility (eg hiding favourite objects, constantly changing their positions).

- Intentionally causing sensory overload by making local environment overstimulating (especially audio/visual), constantly staring, touching* or standing/sitting near them --> impairing their work or study (as if there’s a presence of “Qi” that can be detected by the ASD person).
                * Exceptions are hard hugs/grips.

- Harassment (especially homophobia) based on erroneous assumptions about an ASD person’s physical traits (eg gait, possible hypotonia or motor incoordination, notably in childhood), behaviour or “unusual” special interests.

- Stereotyping an ASD person and penalizing without understanding their scattered cognitive profile of strengths, weaknesses and personal compensatory techniques (many of which are intellectualized, especially algorithms for social situations and piecing details to form general concepts).

- Physical abuse
                - Can easily trigger a meltdown + “violent lashing” from an ASD child/teenager, especially if     
                   ganged-up on.
                - Even worse is when they claim that the ASD person started it.
- Verbal abuse
                - Can also trigger a meltdown.
                - Bullies love to see a reaction, and this is more so the case with Aspies/HFA who have better 
                  verbal comprehension.
                - Difficulty in giving a successful impromptu retort --> frustration, humiliation.

- Sexual harassment, coercion (especially female ASD people, initially reduced street-smarts).
- Getting framed for sexual harassment (especially male ASD people, initially reduced street-smarts, overly trusting of others but this quickly converts to cynicism/caution following adverse events).

- Lying, exploitation, blackmail (ASD person has initially reduced abilities to read people and check for situational red-flags).

- Framing an ASD person when they were led to believe that they were doing something harmless. Often paired with bully appearing to be the “innocent victim/bystander”.

- Passive-aggressiveness, and withholding of relevant information to get an ASD person into trouble. Refusal to give details, and intentionally use vague language to make an ASD person confused or doubt their ability, and then claim that the ASD person is being unreasonable or aggressive.

- Spreading rumours about an ASD person who has more difficulty defending it in a “believable” manner to the others, because they’re more inclined to believe the BS-artist, and also his difficulty in figuring out how to convince them due to his statistically reduced TOM.

- Taking credit for an ASD person’s work and presenting it as if it were his own, often in a more charming, fluent manner.

- Wilfully misinterpreting what an ASD person says and responding negatively (especially in front of others), this is often done by over-generalizing what an ASD person says about a topic or targeting a specific bit and going on a tangent, even though he meant it in relation to that specific situation only.

Monday, March 25, 2013

ASD and Getting Bullied - WHY MANY ASD PEOPLE GET BULLIED (Part 1/7)



My dictionary defines bully (noun) as “A person, esp. a schoolboy or schoolgirl, who hurts or intentionally frightens weaker people.” and bully (verb) as “To act like a bully towards, often with the intention of forcing someone to do something.”

Whilst it’s clear to many that these definitions are rather basic, it’s also important for people to realize that for ASD people, there are additional complexities on top of what already exists for NTs.

Of all of the formally diagnosed ASD people I’ve met in person, pretty much all of them have been bullied at some point, even as adults. The ways they’ve been bullied isn’t particularly different from that of NTs, but the presence of an ASD makes them much more vulnerable and sensitive to such suffering to the point where it becomes a ubiquitous, ie near 100% guaranteed experience.

I’ll try to explain this increased vulnerability as best as I can based on personal experiences, observation, and from speaking to other ASD people. In short, from how I see it, the (increased) vulnerability of ASD people to bullying is essentially a combination of:               
                - NEUROLOGICAL WIRING (NEURODEVELOPMENT)
                - ACQUIRED KNOWLEDGE & SKILLS
                - ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
In this basic model, all 3 categories are inter-related, influencing each other for the positive or negative. Even the factors within a category can affect each other. Significant deficits in any category without sufficient compensation from the others greatly increases the chances of bullying occurring and/or adverse outcomes from it. It’s difficult for me to quantify the impact on a factor from one category on another, but I’ll try to list as many as I can (how Aspie of me), and then explain some relationships.   

NEUROLOGICAL WIRING (NEURODEVELOPMENT)
Given the heterogeneous nature of ASDs, ASD children / adults develop at various rates. What is universal though is the relative developmental delay of various skills, particularly social / linguistic. My impression is that the altered neurological wiring (as with ADHD) results in a relative frontal lobe deficit compared to NTs which underlies several of the symptoms.
                1.  Speech delay, statistically reduced verbal fluency.
                2.  Initially reduced language pragmatics, a tendency to take things literally with difficulty understanding the intended meaning by the speaker due to the context and external cues.
                3. Focusing on details initially, difficulty integrating the information and seeing the big picture.
                4. Initially reduced “TOM” (Theory of Mind towards NTs), ie reduced ability to understand the true intentions of the NT, again influenced by context and external cues.
                5. Initially reduced ability to read social situations and to follow (arbitrary) hierarchies as established by NTs.
                6. Relatively more repetitive behaviours, routines and cognitive rigidity, more difficulty being flexible in (social) situations. More likely to have a preference for narrow interests and orderliness. Tendency to brood/hyperfocus on things (inc. things that made them angry or upset).
                7.  Lower threshold for sensory overload and meltdowns (further exacerbated by any communication issues). More likely to be irritated by direct eye contact.
                8. Strong preference for honesty, dislike of dishonesty, superficial rules/norms, and perceived injustice.
                9. Relatively poorer short-term memory / Executive Dysfunction.
                10. Relatively poorer motor skills (esp. in childhood)

ACQUIRED KNOWLEDGE & SKILLS
                1. Internal algorithms for communication / different Social Situations, Social Scripts. A lot of “polite” or “flowery” phrases (as deemed by NTs) have to be rote memorized because they’re less literal and are often more lengthy.
                2. Intellectualization of socio-emotional (including adult) issues & rules that would more likely be intuitive to NTs. A lot of it is acquired by rote memorization.
                3. Problem solving strategies / Troubleshooting, including those relating to First Principles so they can be generalized to other areas and / or be used in Emergencies.
                4. Pattern-recognition abilities, that are applied to both social and non-social situations, to facilitate the use of learned Internal algorithms and Problem solving strategies. Helps recognize danger too. Helps promote internal comfort due to perceived repetitions of previously seemingly un-related phenomena.
                5. Knowledge of personal strengths and weaknesses (esp. from life experience) and numerous attempts. Understanding why one does the things they do and how to maximize productivity and happiness.
                6. Knowing how to incorporate newly acquired knowledge to internal database and known paradigms.
                7. Coping mechanisms for meltdowns, stress, burnout, knowing when to move on / have a break / seek help.

ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
                1. Parents
                                - Educating the ASD child.
                                - Personal beliefs (may help or irritate ASD child).  
                                - Support, monitoring & feedback.
                                - Implementation of home environment amenable to ASD cognition.
                                - Access to a Specialist (Paediatrician, Psychiatrist, Psychologist etc).
                2. School
                                - Staff (knowledge of ASDs / bullying, supervision of students in classroom and breaks, care factor, student & work-loads, communication with parents, presence of teaching aides).
                                - Students (awareness of ASDs, level of diversity, upbringing, internal disposition).
                                - Anti-Bullying Policies, enforcement of it.
                                - Extracurricular and lunch-time activities.
                                - “School Culture”.
                3. Workplace
                                - Anti-Bullying Policies, Diversity Policies, enforcement of them.
                                                - Willingness to provide workplace accommodations.
                                - HR (care factor, level of bureaucracy).
                                - Staff (awareness of ASDs, upbringing, internal disposition).
                                - “Work Culture”.
                4. Adult Society (extremely basic)
                                - Public awareness of ASDs and care factor.
                                                - The ability to differentiate between aggression and (provoked) meltdowns in ASD adults (esp. by Police and Healthcare Staff).
                                - Laws on Disability Discrimination and implementation.

TBC...