For today’s post I want to talk about how bullying affect children with ASD and how to prevent it. First of all, it is necessary to know that the prevalence of bullying is higher for students with ASD than for other students, but also that students with ASD are uniquely vulnerable to bullying.
For this reason, I think that the preventive part is very important. From my point of view, talking with children and their families to know what they think and need, would be very useful in order to help them better. Following with the importance of prevention, I found two web page that recommend some strategies for doing it.
In the first web page (Bullying and Autism Spectrum Disorder: How to help your child), most of them are related to the importance of the student with ASD being able to express how he/she feels and tell what happens, since they usually show an inability to communicate certain thoughts and feelings. At schools, some strategies for teachers are:
Encourage the bullied student to talk about what happened. It helps to let the student know you believe them and are concerned.
If the student cannot verbalize what happened, use writing, journaling or drawing methods.
The web page also provides strategies and methods for parents to help prevent bullying. Following with this topic, the second web page (Bullying) points out the importance of realize if your child is being bullied as maybe they don’t notice it. This may be because they have difficulty understanding the intentions of others and, as mentioned before, their difficulties to communicate that something is happening to parents or school staff.
To solve the problem, the web page recommends to parents to talk to their child and once they had done that, talk to school staff. They also suggest some approaches to help the children:
Using maps: make a map of the child’s world and identify the areas where they feel most and least vulnerable. This could also help identify areas that the school needs to be aware of.
Social skills and communication training: children may benefit of that to help them to recognize when someone is being nice or nasty. Also if they are using sarcasm or irony to communicate their thoughts. For doing that, it could be helpful to use a favorite television program or ask the child to help you sort out pictures and photographs of people into nice and nasty piles.
Teaching your child what to do: You may also need to teach children what to do if they are upset by an incident at school, write a social story or a list of rules to follow.
Break times and lunchtimes: this type of unstructured periods of time may be found as difficult for children with ASD as they are not sure what is expected of them. So it could be useful to bring some structure to these periods. E.g: provide lunch time clubs, set up structured playgrounds activities for the children and a couple of their peers...
Buddies, befriending and friendship: A buddy or befriending scheme in the playground may also help to reduce bullying. School could identify some buddies for children in the playground so they can widen their friendship group.
Raising awareness of autism through lessons.
Bullying box: Schools need to be aware that children with autism don’t always want to tell a teacher face-to-face about bullying. A bullying box enables pupils to report incidents of bullying secretly.
I find these mesures very interesting and I also think that they should be accompanied by the monitoring and advice of other professionals such as psychologists. Can you think of other ideas that could be useful to prevent bullying?
Web pages:
Fun on the Spectrum, Autistic Aspergers, Inc. Bullying. [Consulta: 16 de novembre de 2020]. https://www.autisticaspergers.com/bullying/
Gloria Verret. Bullying and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): How to Help Your Child. [Consulta: 05 de noviembre de 2020]. https://www.chla.org/blog/rn-remedies/bullying-and-autism-spectrum-disorder-asd-how-help-your-child
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