Children with Autism May Be Especially Suceptible to Bullying

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Do you believe that school should be a safe space for children to learn and socialize with their peers?
What can you do if you discover that school is not a safe space for your child who has a diagnosis of autism?

Children with Autism May Be Especially Susceptible to Bullying.
Ideally, school is a safe space for kids regardless of academic abilities or social skills. Unfortunately, school can sometimes be an atmosphere where children feel unsafe because of how they are treated by their peers. When a child's peers continuously say hurtful things or do things that subject him or her to embarrassment, it's called bullying.[1] A recent study children with autism spectrum disorders are bullied almost five times as often as children without a diagnosis of autism.[2]

What Makes Children with Autism Attractive Targets for Bullies?
Only about a third of children diagnosed with autism are on the severe end of the spectrum, making the children who are higher functioning and who attend mainstream classes easier targets for bullies. Children with autism have characteristics such as repetitive behaviors and/or stimming,[3] failure to understand social cues when interacting with their peers, talking and/or focusing obsessively about particular topics, the inability to communicate smoothly, frustration which typically leads to frequent meltdowns and overly sensitive to changes in routine, rules or environment. These characteristics can make children with autism targets, but the one characteristic which seems to attract bullies to children with autism is when the autistic child has conversational ability.[4] "Children with autism who could speak well, for example, were three times more likely to be bullied than those whose conversational ability...

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...Medicine, Pediatrics: Bullying Involvement and Autism Spectrum Disorders
Prevalence and Correlates of Bullying Involvement Among Adolescents With an Autism Spectrum Disorder, Paul R. Sterzing, PhD, MSSW; Paul T. Shattuck, PhD; Sarah C. Narendorf, PhD, MSW; Mary Wagner, PhD; Benjamin P. Cooper, MPH, Nov 2012
6. Psychology Today: Fending Off Bullies, 2013
7. The fight-or-flight response, also known as the acute stress response, refers to a physiological reaction that occurs in the presence of something that is terrifying, either mentally or physically. The fight-or-flight response was first described in the 1920s by American physiologist Walter Cannon. Cannon realized that a chain of rapidly occurring reactions inside the body help mobilize the body's resources to deal with threatening circumstances.
About.com Psychology: What Is the Fight-or-Flight Response?, 2014

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