Bullying and autism: stating the bleedin' obvious...

A short post today to reiterate the 'bleedin' obvious': children diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum are far more likely to be the victim of bullying than perpetrator (see here for a previous blog post on this topic).

This conclusion comes from the paper by Hwang and colleagues [1] based on responses to the Behavior Assessment System for Children: Second Edition (BASC-2) (parental report version). The authors initially reported that "children with ASD [autism spectrum disorder] showed significantly increased risk for bullying involvement compared to community children" potentially indicating that a diagnosis of autism does not somehow shield someone from either being bullied or indeed, participating in bullying behaviour (perpetrator). But... "after controlling for comorbid psychopathology and other demographic factors, increased risks for being perpetrators or victim-perpetrators disappeared while risk for being bullied/teased continued to be significantly elevated." Said 'comorbid psychopathology' included aggression and conduct problems as well as the signs and symptoms of depression potentially accompanying a diagnosis of autism. Indeed, aggression was pretty much linked to every type of bullying behaviour in both autism and control groups...

What's more to say on this topic? Well, further recognition that school in particular, can be a significant source of stress and anxiety for children on the autism spectrum is one thing (and potentially contributory to the stats on school refusal in the context of autism). Indeed, without trying to armchair diagnose nor artificially inflating the seriousness of bullying, I wonder whether quite a few more children on the autism spectrum need to be screened for possible post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the context of how traumatic bullying can be for a person (see here). In relation also to the point made about aggression being a common variable predicting bullying across the Hwang cohort, I wonder whether more needs to be done more generally in relation to reducing aggression in places like school and thus potentially reducing bullying behaviour more generally?

And whilst on the topic of bullying, it appears that some of the longer term effects of bullying for some might be countered by some kind of resilience (whatever 'resilience' might mean)...

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[1] Hwang S. et al. Autism Spectrum Disorder and School Bullying: Who is the Victim? Who is the Perpetrator? J Autism Dev Disord. 2017 Sep 21.

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