bullying at school

longman said:

The bystanders are the "silent majority" who go along with the bullies and laugh on cue for fear that if they didn't, or if they showed sympathy for the victim, they'd become victims themselves. Understandably some of those bystanders would have been victims anyway if there were'nt the candidates already on the receiving end.

I've quoted this because this is exactly what happened to me. I had a 'friend' (term used loosely) at school who was a bully. She bullied so many people including me but it was so much subtler towards me. She would belittle and threaten me in so many ways and when she was bullying other kids in the traditional sense (i.e shouting horrible things/hitting) I was too frightened to speak up and tell her to stop for fear of her turning on me. I was stuck with her from the age of 8 up until I moved away from my hometown, too frightened to tell her to leave me alone because I had witnessed just how nasty she could be so I put up with all of her jibes about me so that it wouldn't get any worse, particularly physical abuse I was so terrified that she'd hit me if I said I didn't want to be her 'friend' anymore.

Even now when my mother tells me she's seen her around and she's asked how I am it sends shivers down my spine just thinking about her and I haven't seen her in over 8 years.

I was also picked out as the target for humiliation/blackmail in primary school (particularly in infants) because I was so naieve and trusting, so kids would pretend to want to be my friend 'dare' me to do something (which I would do because I so desperately wanted real friends) and then blackmail /humiliate me about it for months afterwards. Example being a girl who dared me to stick 2 fingers up at a dinner lady when she wasn't looking because "it would be funny"...I dind't understand why it would be funny but did it anyway to please her. Everyday after that for months she would say things like "can I share your pudding with you(by share she meant eat it all)" if I hesitated she would then remind me of what I did and how naughty it was and that she would tell on me if I didn't. Of course because she was my 'friend' I thought she was doing me a great favour by keeping my naughty secret and it was only right that she should be rewarded for that. There were lots of incidents like that with different kids before the bully/friend honed in on me.

I remember once a girl from my class saw me talking to my mum in a supermarket...what's the problem with that your probably thinking. The humiliation part here was that I didn't speak in primary school, I'd taken the term 'here to learn not to talk' when I first started literally and from that point on just dind't speak (eventually I started to whisper) but ONLY in school. Anyway that girl didn't ask anything of me but for months after she would remind me now and again in a taunting sort of "I heard you speaking normally! Why do you pretend you can't talk, I'm going to tell the teacher on you, I'm going to tell everyone your a liar". I would panic every time I saw her and everytime I was in public for years after I would look around to make sure nobody from school was about to hear me. Even when we went on holiday I would check there was nobody I knew from school before I could relax I was so ashamed/afraid.

Perhaps then I need to ask what may now seem to be a silly question.....

How do we support young people on the spectrum to minimise the damage caused by bullying? Or is it an inevitability of having autism that we will always be victims of bullying?

Is there anything we could do to educate teachers and school support staff so they are better able to identify when someone is being bullied through exploitation of their disability?

I initiated this dialogue after reading the article in Communication which seemed to be defining bullying in conventional terms such that the only reason for greater impact on people on the spectrum was that they were very sensitive.

My reasoning was that perhaps not enough is being done to make teachers aware of how the vulnerabilities of people on the spectrum can be manipulated by their peers often quite subtly to cause great damage.

Or do we just let this carry on as a fact of life?

One thing that might help is that parents of young people currently being bullied post their perceptions/experiences of what goes on. Also those of us who've been through it discuss our memories of bullying. Perhaps from that exchange we build up a more accurate picture of the problems facing people on the spectrum in relation to their peers.  And from that we may be able to improve things a little.

And, therein, lies the core of the problem, longman - we, human beings, are, to generalise, bullies by nature - it's part and parcel of being competetive creatures.

Some forms of bullying are socially acceptable, and some are not.

Thankfully the list of those forms that fall into the former category is shrinking, and of those that fall into latter is growing.

One day we may get there, as a species, and all forms of bullying will be unacceptable, but I wouldn't expect it to happen within our lifetimes.

But how do you stop it?  One argument is to get the bystanders to stop aquiescing and speak out - but that's very difficult. The bystanders are the "silent majority" who go along with the bullies and laugh on cue for fear that if they didn't, or if they showed sympathy for the victim, they'd become victims themselves. Understandably some of those bystanders would have been victims anyway if there were'nt the candidates already on the receiving end.

Civilised society is partly defined by whether the silent majority acquiesces or protests. It has to be a response by a significant number. Lone voices have a tough time. Weak societies allow themselves to be bullied, which is how dictators get established. But it isn't easy to break the pattern.

A modern analogy is the finance industry - all those bankers getting huge bonuses while we are all scrimping and saving. Why? Well if we don't let them have their huge bonuses they'll go to another country, and all kinds of terrible things will happen to Britain. So most of us aquiesce and we make fun of anyone who protests too loudly. And we forget this is just the same tyranny that went on in the playground.

On Sky morning news earlier this week there was an interview with a representative of the NAS which covered  the subject of bullying.  I missed the lead-in, which concerned Charlie, a 16 year-old autistic boy who had been the subject of bullying at school.  I gather that explaining Charlie's problems to the rest of his year did help matters as far as he is concerned but there was no mention of the fact that autism is a spectrum disorder and people vary widely in the way it affects them so that while there might be understanding of Charlie this might not happen with another child who appears to be quite different from him.

The fact is  that bullying is unacceptable at any level and I think it's probably worse now because there is more opportunity for it to flourish without teachers noticing.  Also, a great deal seems to take place outside the school premises in a kind of "no man's land" where neither the school, nor the parents have any control.

No worries Longman, and it is really great to have your view on this subject :)

Sorry Jim V mod, you got me on full flow pedantic there....

The one source I've found that I can relate to is Nick Dubin's Asperger Syndrome & Bullying Strategies and Solutions (Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2007).

All the same, the strategies and solutions are sometimes too dependant on general bullying procedures, which is strange because he addresses his own experiences and the experiences of others. This is why I think it needs more in-depth research.

I wonder for example, to what extent books on living with As quoting individuals' experiences of bullying have been qualified by the writer's own perceptions of conventional bullying. We need to look at bullying in the context of AS vulnerabilities.

p62 of Dubin covers some of these issues - exploiting weakness and fear magnified for individuals on the spectrum, in particular that we are "black and white thinkers". He takes a view of bullying as an "imbalance of power" which is a good way of looking at it. People on the spectrum aren't well equipped to counteract power - a point well made on your video by the individual who found himself pushed into master-slave type situations.  He also addresses the use of mentors and roll models.

He has an interesting personal story about being tricked into being handcuffed to a swing and left there. The bullies played on his gullibility.

He also gives examples of teacher bullying, which I suffered from gravely, particularly one rooky teacher who thought picking on me ingratiated himself with my peers. Wasn't he just cool - egging on the others to have a go at me, in the classroom......

Hi Einfallspinsel.  How to make people stronger to cope with this sort of bullying is something I wish I could address. The problem is I cannot get to grips with any substantive resources around which to confirm my own experiences.

My view is partly informed by my own experiences of being bullied at school, when I didn't have any "excuse", being diagnosed many years later mid-fifties. But before and since diagnosis I have been a disability coordinator in a university, including helping people on the spectrum, and twenty years a lecturer. I've observed the ways a cohort of students picks on the oddball, whether identifiably AS or otherwise.

My parents reckoned it was my fault. I must be doing something to attract attention. They tried to condition me out of flapping my hands or any other behaviours. I ended up trying to be as unnoticeable and invisible as possible, but it only meant for example that I walked with my hands pinned to my sides and an odd gait. The trouble is the efforts needed to avoid attention only create more oddity, because the one thing you cannot achieve is a behaviour pattern that conforms and integrates, because you cannot read those signals.

If the reasons why young people on the spectrum get bullied were better understood, teachers would know what situations to look for. At the moment it all seems to be standard bullying advice. Unfortunately, to reiterate, the problem for the person with AS is integrating their behaviour. That's not easily achieved.

At school it was perceived that I was over-sensitive to normal everyday ribbing and hi-jinks. My reactions were after all hopelessly excessive in response to what seemed very little stimulus. But my peers learned that it was very easy to wind me up doing little more than making sudden movements or loud noises and crowding in on me, when the teacher was out of sight, and then watching the often explosive outcome they had created.

This really needs in depth research and a much greater exploration of what people on the spectrum have experienced. The danger is that people on the spectrum are seen as over-sensitive - it misses the point.

Hi Longman, 

Please let me make it clear. I don't feel indignant, I really just wanted to highlight that some areas within the NAS have tried to address the concerns you've raised here in previous campaigns. I felt the work put in there meant they deserved to be shared. 

As to the other links - what I'd love to hear more of is how people would like to improve what we're doing and what content people would like to see. We can only improve through feedback and over the years that may take highlighting issues in more detail is a great way to push certain topics higher up the priority list. 

We work with very small teams on things like the website and advice provision online, so the more help we have to push things forward the better a case we can make for those team's time. 

So yeah, really sorry if feel I was curt there, that's my mistake when trying to do too much at once. Your criticism is one I agree with and I'm sure the teams involved would love to improve it as well, ao any feedback can help to try and make that case.

Sorry for any confusion there - what you're saying right now is gold for us to push this as one issue that needs to be addressed. 

If so Jim V mod, why is it so hard to find on the website, and why the article in "Communication"?

The only route to bullying I can find on the website, and there are other locations I'd expect to find it, like "understanding behaviour", is via "Education". There is a section there headed "Bullying - a guide for younger people". The subsections under this address conventional bullying. There's no appreciation of people taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of people on the spectrum. 

It is all very well giving me links, such as the video - if you have to give them to me, I cannot readily find them for myself. The web pages aren't that logical as a way into things people actually want to know.

If you understand what's going on in the video clip, why does this not manifest in the section "Bullying - a guide for young people"?

The video hinges on the communication difficulties and the misunderstandings, and the way people on the spectrum can be taken advantage of and abused. But its no use if that's not something readily accessible, and it doesn't inform the accessible bits of the website.

I have had an email exchange with the Anti-Bullying Alliance, because other than mentioning it as a disability, they seem to have no grasp of autism as a factor. They have responded saying they will look into it and discuss in more depth with NAS. Having seen the article in "Communication", written largely by Kidscape who seem similarly unaware of autism related bullying, I'm not so sure that NAS will be much help to the Anti-Bullying Alliance.

I appreciate you feel indignant at my criticism of NAS but while you can show me evidence, I'm not seeing that evidence in readily accessible pages of the website.

I think it may be a little unfair to say we don't see bullying as serious issue. It was one of the main concerns of the Think Different campaign. It's also something that features regularly in the advice provide by our parent to parent service, the helpline and of course with the advice provided by the Education Rights Service.

For people who are concerned you may want to read through our advice on bullying in schools - and please, feel free to suggest improvements or changes that we can pass on to the information team responsible for the content. 

It's also really interesting to hear how you describe bullying Longman, because it relates to a lot of what's mentioned in the video for the Think Differently campaign - if you'd like to take a look here's a link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tB4J00xkC4

This was also raised yesterday in the coverage of the latest information from our soon to be published report 'The Way We Are' -
http://www.autism.org.uk/news-and-events/news-from-the-nas/isolation-and-bullying-50th-report.aspx

This section looked at the bullying and isolation faced by children and young people. 

Just wanted to point out where this had been mentioned, it's an incredibly troubling issue that I think we all would like to see movement on.

Sadly, in an organisation this size with heavy demands on limited resources, there may be times where things are said that don't seem to reflect the full complexity of the situation people face and it's always a shame when that happens.

Be yeah, be great if people could make possible suggestions - any thread on this discussion is likely to be read by lots of people and if information takes time to update at least they would have already benefitted from the experiences in the community.

longman said:

I rather felt, from reading the Communication article, that it was as if people on the spectrum were just overly sensitive to conventional bullying and just needed to hear the conventional advice. But for someone with communication difficulties "fogging" and saying "No" can just add to the entertainment value as this would come over differently.

[...] this needs research, not platitudes.

Good point. Do you have any advice from your experience? Maybe role-playing such situations with children, and teaching appropriate responses...? Most "entertainment value" is generated if the "victim" is caught off guard and doesn't keep cool. But if typical bullying situations were introduced in a playful way, would you think that would help?

I also don't always notice whether someone is laughing with me or at me. Or why people are sometimes "suspiciously" friendly. ("Favor" means "I need an idiot to do my menial work". People who deserve reasonable favors just ask and don't use the word.) In a few cases ignorance was bliss, and the wanna-be bullies stopped because I didn't respond at all to their seemingly unrelated nonsense. If you can teach children to fake that, they might save their day.

Bullying can be very subtle. Exclusion is one kind, and, as  Longman mentions, usually involves the whole class. People tease in ways that may not look like teasing. I was excluded by my peers at school, and they laughed at me, but I thought they were laughing with me. I did not understand the distinction.