I live with a turbulent coexistence — indeed a perfect storm — of autism spectrum disorder, high sensitivity and adverse childhood experience trauma, the latter which is in large part due to the ASD and high sensitivity. It’s one with which I greatly struggle(d) while unaware, until I was a half-century old, that its component parts of dysfunction had formal names.
I really believe that our standard educators should be properly educated on ASD, especially when it comes to preventing the abuse of autistic students by their neurotypical peers and teachers alike. There likely are students who, like me, have ASD but do not exhibit low-functioning-autism disability traits yet nonetheless struggle with other superficially suppressible traits. [While sometimes told "But you're so smart," I know that for every 'gift', I'm afflicted with a corresponding three or four deficits. It is indeed crippling, and on multiple levels.]
Not only should all school teachers receive mandatory ASD training, there should also be an inclusion in standard high school curriculum of child-development science that would also teach students about the often-debilitating condition (without being overly complicated). If nothing else, the curriculum would offer students an idea/clue as to whether they themselves are emotionally/mentally compatible with the immense responsibility and strains of regular, non-ASD-child parenthood.
It would explain to students how, among other aspects of the condition, people with ASD (including those with higher functioning autism) are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent, when in fact such behavior is really not a choice. And how “camouflaging” or “masking,” terms used to describe ASD people pretending to naturally fit into a socially ‘normal’ environment, causes their already high anxiety and depression levels to further increase. Of course, this exacerbation is reflected in the disproportionately high rate of suicide among ASD people. ...
As a ‘difficult’ boy with autism spectrum disorder, ACEs and high sensitivity (thus not always easy to deal with), the first and most formidably abusive authority figure with whom I was terrifyingly trapped was my Grade 2 teacher (Mrs. Carol), in the early 1970s. Although I can’t recall her abuse in its entirety, I’ll nevertheless always remember how she had the immoral audacity — and especially the unethical confidence in avoiding any professional repercussions — to blatantly readily aim and fire her knee towards my groin, as I was backed up against the school hall wall.
Fortunately, though, she missed her mark, instead hitting the top of my left leg. Though there were other terrible teachers, for me she was uniquely traumatizing, especially when she wore her dark sunglasses when dealing with me.
But rather than tell anyone about my ordeal with her and consciously feel victimized, I instead felt some misplaced shame. And as each grade passed, I increasingly noticed how all recipients of corporeal handling/abuse in my school were boys; and I had reasoned thus normalized to myself that it was because men can take care of themselves and boys are basically little men.
[BTW: For some other very young students back then and there, there was Mrs. Carol's sole Grade 2 counterpart, Mrs. Clemens — similarly abusive but with the additional bizarre, scary attribute of her eyes abruptly shifting side to side. Not surprising, the pair were quite friendly with each other. It was rumored the latter teacher had a heroin addiction, though I don’t recall hearing of any solid proof of that. I remember one fellow second-grader’s mother going door to door in my part of town seeking out any other case of a student who, like her son, had been assaulted by that teacher.]
