Asperger and Bullying project

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We Catriona Tyrrell (B Soc. Sci and aspie) and Chris Szaday (B. Psych) are involved in a project to promote awareness and prevention of bullying and Asperger's Syndrome. It will be a book and DVD combined. We are looking to get contributions for it from people with Asperger's Syndrome (aged 10+) who have been bullied in the workplace, school or society in general.

We would like to get their/your story, how they dealt with the bullying, how they think AS contributed, strategies for dealing with bullying and promoting a safe and secure society for those with AS. Just first names are fine or a fake name if you feel more comfortable. If you know anyone or would like to be involved.

Please send them to [email protected] as an attachment

How long a story are you looking for? I could give you anything from a paragraph to several pages, depending.

Is there a chance you could post an example of the type of thing you're looking for?

Do contributors need to be officially diagnosed?

What if you never found an effective way to deal with the bullying? The way I made it stop was to remove myself permanently from the situation, but I'm not sure that's the kind of coping strategy you're looking to promote

A good way to avoid bullying in general is to figure out if there's anything Aspies can avoid saying/doing to draw the bully's ire. If some of it is untentional provocation, this should be addressed. If something I said or did made someone else angry, with no regard given to right or wrong, I need to know what it was.

As a kid my parents forced me to realize how my words & deeds could affect others. They scolded me if the fault was actually mine and not another's. It was not easy, but it was worth it. Social skills can make all the difference. I know because that's how I grew up.

But what about random bullying? you ask. Again, it's all about how the Aspie kid can interact and move withikn an existing social network. The herd is help. The herd is safety. Human beings' status as social creatures is crucial to survival.

This was back in the 1970s, but my old man who was a cop came down hard on anyone who bullied me. He made it clear to their parents that he had the power to take minors out of the home and would use that power if push came to shove. There wasn't much bullying, but lots of whispering.

i just needed someone to tell me what i was doing wrong. my parents never knew i was bullied. the gym teacher must have known, but did nothing. other teachers must have seen it, but also said nothing, either to the kids or to me. the kids that weren't bullied just stood by and watched.

i think aspie kids need to be told the rules they don't know instinctively.
teachers need to realize that these kids don't like being bullied, don't like sitting by themselves and having no friends, and don't mean to be arrogant a****, so give the poor kids a heads up.

Hmmm.. There are a lot of myths about bullies that are being corrected over time. The prime one is that something in the behaviour of the victim causes it. Not true. Evidence now is that at least the worst bullies have low empathy (like psycopaths) and a delusional high opinion of themselves. These people are driven to cause misery around them as a result of there own sickness. They will do it even if there is no AS person around.

Broadly, I'd be looking at a twofold approach. 1) is to identify and remove the bullies from school and the workplace. If the victim is removed, the bully will find another...and another. If the bully is removed, another bully will NOT magically step into their shoes. Perhaps big funding should go to find the bullying gene and terminate them before birth? Thus providing a safer society for everyone, not just those with AS.

2) Until such means of "bully identification" is perfected, I guess those with AS who are being bullied should be allowed to more easily "opt-out" of the environment where the bullying is taking place. At current rates, every major town or city could have a small school for AS (and others who are bullied) children. It would probably out-perform every other school in the city!

The bullying gene?!

Find the bullying gene and weed it out of the population. But if we tried that with the gay-gene, the blue eyes-gene, or God forbid the aspie-gene, people would call us monsters. And they'd be right.

How is eugenics better than bullying? How is it gentler and more humane? There are those who pick on others because it's a pathological thing and they can't help themselves.

But some are duly provoked. Some really are.

And if no one ever set these people straight, they lose out.

No, there's a big difference. None of the conditions you list are directly responsible for hurt to others.



You may well be right. What do you suggest we do with those who pathalogically cannot help but bully others? Do human beings have a right to bully, hurt, maim and even kill others just because they can't help it? I think not. But I do believe the innocent have a right to defend themselves in any way possible from the predators.

I'm being slightly sarcastic about weeding about the bullying gene. But I really do believe that attention needs to be focussed on dealing with the bullies and making it clear that it's their behavioural problem and the bullies that should be 'dealt with' somehow, not the victims.

You were doing NOTHING wrong. You may have been doing something differently, but that's no justification to suffer the contempt of others. Most people have little problem with difference, it's the few who do and those who are driven by a pathological lack of empathy who are doing something wrong



This is a common experience. The kids are mostly just terrified themselves. I remember the occasional day when the a bully would by off school sick and the whole class atmosphere would be 500% better. Surely the teachers would have seen a difference?

I really wonder why the teachers don't "step in and sort it out". I guess that with teenage boys, the teacher is physically afraid too. The typical school bully can also make the teachers life hell, too. With younger children, I think part of it may be that the parents of the bully can be psycho, too.

As a total guess, I wonder if NT traits are really, really high in school teachers. So they believe compliance, conformity and 'fitting in' to be paramount, making them dislike the 'different' children and unwittingly supporting the bullies?

Bullying and peer harassment are tools of conformity. Children with AS,especially teenagers, usually do not conform to fads, behavior, or interests of the mainstream school community.

When I was at middle school, almost the entire school made fun of me because I wore a pikachu bookbag. The name 'pikachu' stuck and followed me. My mere presence driven the middle school and my high school peers to harass me for three straight years.

Apperantly pokemon at the time was kids stuff when I was at middle school. I just could not conform to whatever was 'cool' in middle school at the time. Nor did I want to, because it would involve spending money which I did not had, and I did not want to beg my father for cool clothes. I wasn't able to conform to what ever was cool in high school either because they rejected me in middle school.

Anyway the school administration basically did not care at all and I ended up tranffering to specialized school in Baltimore for the 10th through 12th grades.

(At one time I was harassed into buying a Xbox at high school, because I disliked it's big controller at the time it was launched. I eventually bought one for another reason: Jet Set Radio Future, a Sega game, was going to be discontnued. But either way buying one shut these brats up.)

A little conformity isn't such a horrible thing.

Didn't friends or family tell you the pikachu bookbag was a little funny-looking? Sounds to me like you could have preventing all that bullying before it began by using a different bookbag.

I don't mean to poke fun here or trivialize your hardships, but much of life's woes are pre-emptable.

In my case (in elementary school), it was supposedly because it went against their philosophy (though laziness was probably a large part of it as well). They thought that bullying was a normal part of childhood, and that it was my job, as the victim, to figure out how to ignore them and/or make them stop. (The phrase "Just ignore them and they'll stop" still makes me want to throw things. First of all, it's less true than they think it is. Second, I was just barely past the point where school itself was causing me frequent meltdowns; I simply didn't have the capacity to not react yet.)



Indeed. When my mom tried to get the school to do something about my fourth-grade stalker, the kid's mom somehow hunted down her work number and called her there. She proceeded to rant for half an hour about how her child was just misunderstood and my mother had no right to persecute him like this. (A few years later I heard, though I don't know if it's true, that this kid got expelled from middle school for trying to set the school on fire.)

My dad did not mind. Mostly of the fact that dad came from Nigeria and does not know any American teenager trends at the period of harassment. Even though I changed bookbags while at middle school, they still called me "pikachu".

They in another middle school they called me "14" because I accidentally said I was 14 when my real age at the time was 13.
The brats at middle school also called me "Shriek" because I did not like the movie and was not interested in it at all. And that also followed me into high school

[A little conformity isn't such a horrible thing.

Didn't friends or family tell you the pikachu bookbag was a little funny-looking? Sounds to me like you could have preventing all that bullying before it began by using a different bookbag.

I don't mean to poke fun here or trivialize your hardships, but much of life's woes are pre-emptable.]

As the Mother of a 12 year old Aspie I am trying to help him sort through appropriate behaviors and dress and all sorts of things to help him fit in better but at times I feel like such a hypocrite because I personally think that he is such an awesome kid and God knows I don't want to change him but I find that in order to make his life tolerable that I have to help him conform to the norm that is accepted by everyday society. I feel like I'm giving him a mixed message because we always tell him how special he really is because he is different but then he has to try to be cookie cutter same almost to not be picked on.

I understand. Striking a balance between those interests is very difficult yet also very necessary. Your boy shouldn't be made to think he must conform at the cost of his individuality, but at the same time he should learn about the importance of social convention.

I am 29, and I think my parents did a pretty good job of that.

Oh, I'm aware of that and so is he, but it just pisses me off that society can't just accept us all for the differences that we all have. but I can understand...I sure look at people as a whole, alot differently now because of the difficulties that he faces everyday. Personal hardships do make you alot more aware and make you think differently when you see others who are a little different too.