I don’t think this is particularly an autism issue. When there is no bullying, autistics will not be bullied either. And, in case anyone is thinking that near-zero bullying would not be possible for their school system because of culture or whatever, I will point out that I went to school in the same system and was mercilessly bullied (sometimes being beaten up by ten or more kids at once). The only policy the school had at the time was something called a Fighting Field. That is, we were encouraged to limit fist fights to one particular field. That and the general belief that kids need to fight their own battles. That changed because parents and teachers wanted it to change. If you want to stop autistic kids from being bullied, stop everyone from being bullied. By helping your neighbor’s kid, you’ll be helping your own.

Back in the early 80’s in middle school I remember my class had some workshops where we were supposed to get out of our usual cliques and get to know the other classmates better, eliminate prejudices, etc. Teaching tolerance and friendship goes a long way. You can’t eliminate bullying completely but you can reduce the incidence and try to foster important values in children.

Other than that, I take issue with the suggestions in the article in regards to solving the problem:

Dr. Elizabeth Caronna, who directs an autism center at Boston Medical Center, said social skills should be addressed because so many autistic children don’t even know they’re being bullied.

“The first thing is teaching a lot of these kids to identify when it’s happening before it spins out of control,” Caronna said. “It’s such a big problem. It’s so prevalent.”

Shouldn’t the first thing involve trying to determine why some children are bullies, and identifying bullies as the “problem” children?

http://www.nas.org.uk/content/.....report.pdf

Only 56%?

What about bullying of adults? It doesn’t automatically stop when a child reaches 16/18

As clearly demonstrated by some of the autism blogs and, even, some of the commenters on this blog.

And yes, the victim absolutely carries the blame. With one exception, my dozens (you think I exaggerate. Ha.)of bullies were never punished or counseled. The emphasis was always on getting me to appear more normal. Lovely.

About every kid from the age of 3-18 has been the target of bullying, neurotypical kids and autists alike. Autistic children get harassed just as much as any kid with a noticable disability. I will also add something else.

Autistic people also do the bullying too.

Maybe not in the classic manner but I know I enabled quiet a few people. It’s defense mechianism. We try to mimic what they see. If indiviual is tormenting someone we do the same(group-harassment). Or like mostly bullies do, we lash at people, out of our own abuse and frustration. More often than not, bullies especially children are targets of abuse and bullying themselvess. The react but dumping their frustrations onto people, including easy targets like autists and down symdrome kids. Autistic kids depending how high fuctioning might do the same thing. They might have different symptoms of abuse like not sleeping or eatings or they may too feed the cycle and terrorize others out of pain.

We need to start treating bullies like victims too, and figure out why are they attacking and hurting people and ask if they need to talk to an older peer for mediation or a consuler. Also we need to step a chart of occurances to see when intervention is needed. Name calling isn’t as bad as oh say sexual harassment. So we need have a list of “instances” that bullies exbit on a particular victim and record them. We can find patterns of abuse better and find solutions.

Also. Teachers need to be held freaking accountable! If a kid from your class badgers another class member or your own. It’s your responsiblity. Don’t dump it on to the admistration or the parents. Take charge of it.

I think that the only way that there is to minimize bullying is to start teaching about it very early, and across every school in a board, and have a no-tolerance bullying policy that includes psychological and sexual bullying as well as physical. But that’s only going to happen if people demand it, and vote in school board representatives etc. who will make it a priority.