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The girl who pretended to be 3 boys

Hope

There was a TV programme recently about a girl called Gemma who pretended to be 3 boys. She seduced her two friends as they believed she was a boy, and she created 3 different personas on facebook and successfully deceived her friends and the police. She allegedly was worried that one of her friends would stop being friends with her and would go off with her other friend, leaving Gemma with no friends. By being a boy, Gemma could ensnare the two girls by preventing them from leaving her, as they fell in love with Gemma.

Gemma was eventually imprisoned for both fraud and sexual assault. She was accused of 'lies upon lies upon lies'. She was also diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum and as having a mild learning disability . A personality disorder was ruled out.

What I find baffling is how she could have been diagnosed with autism when people with ASC are supposed to find it so difficult to lie, manipulate and deceive people? Theory of mind difficulties would suggest an inability in these areas, yet Gemma was manipulative and lived a lie. Your thoughts please

Parents

  • This is a tricky area, not least because understanding of autistic spectrum behaviours isn't still sufficiently understood in relation to other factors.

    Tony Attwood in The Complete Guide to Aperger's Syndrome, has a section at the back about criminality p334-340. He identifies one response to the alienation experienced as the "little dictator" which some parents writing on this site have identified, using violence or emotional blackmail to coerce the family to put them at the centre. Another factor he identifies is that some people on the spectrum, trying to understand the behaviour expected of them "experiment" with human response, doing and saying cruel things. I've encountered someone who did experiments like locking people in rooms to see how they reacted.

    While these are possibly minority responses, people who are unable to get the normal social feedback that NTs expect will try to find ways round this, and I guess it is likely some will find a way of progressing their own world by being underhand.

    He also discusses this in respect of sexual confusion and experimentation. Unfortunately, though sexual confusion is common with people on the spectrum, and significantly affected by it, there remains an extraordinary reluctance to discuss it.

    Also, while in most cases people on the spectrum are the victims of bullies, some are themselves the perpetrators of bullying.

    Perhaps it is better to say that a cross section of behaviours is found in the general population, and that must be represented, perhaps in very different ways, across the range of personalities impacted by autism.

    The difficulty with lying has to take into account that if you find it difficult to read social responses, or to correctly interface, you are likely to be fairly basic in your approach, and find it difficult to engage in more subtle social behaviours. So lying and deception might be quite hard. I also agree people on the spectrum seem more afraid of the consequences or of being seen to do wrong. I don't think either of those factors actually prevents dishonesty or deception.

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  • This is a tricky area, not least because understanding of autistic spectrum behaviours isn't still sufficiently understood in relation to other factors.

    Tony Attwood in The Complete Guide to Aperger's Syndrome, has a section at the back about criminality p334-340. He identifies one response to the alienation experienced as the "little dictator" which some parents writing on this site have identified, using violence or emotional blackmail to coerce the family to put them at the centre. Another factor he identifies is that some people on the spectrum, trying to understand the behaviour expected of them "experiment" with human response, doing and saying cruel things. I've encountered someone who did experiments like locking people in rooms to see how they reacted.

    While these are possibly minority responses, people who are unable to get the normal social feedback that NTs expect will try to find ways round this, and I guess it is likely some will find a way of progressing their own world by being underhand.

    He also discusses this in respect of sexual confusion and experimentation. Unfortunately, though sexual confusion is common with people on the spectrum, and significantly affected by it, there remains an extraordinary reluctance to discuss it.

    Also, while in most cases people on the spectrum are the victims of bullies, some are themselves the perpetrators of bullying.

    Perhaps it is better to say that a cross section of behaviours is found in the general population, and that must be represented, perhaps in very different ways, across the range of personalities impacted by autism.

    The difficulty with lying has to take into account that if you find it difficult to read social responses, or to correctly interface, you are likely to be fairly basic in your approach, and find it difficult to engage in more subtle social behaviours. So lying and deception might be quite hard. I also agree people on the spectrum seem more afraid of the consequences or of being seen to do wrong. I don't think either of those factors actually prevents dishonesty or deception.

Children
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