Evidence suggests that 9 in 10 woman with autism are raped throughout their lives. It is importat to note that this is just a survey done in France and not a proper scientific research. Surveys are a good way to have a sense on what is heppening on a given group on that period of time, but cannot be extended to other groups and times. Ir could be biased if it was spread on a particularly vulnerable population, also it is not hard to imagine that people who chose to respond are the ones who suffered in the past, and the ones who didn’t suffer didn’t have incentives for reporting. Still, we should not ignore such a scary statistic. As the prevalence of rape is estimated in 30% of overall population of woman, this would mean a 3 times bigger risk for autistics.

here are some behavioral traits that could help to explain the difference:

Naivety:

Every autistic knows what I am talking about. The neighbor or cousin that asked you for money, and you might not want to borrow, but you end up borrowing anyways and is never paid. The phenomena is so common that there is even a term for it: emotional extortion. The inability to perceive manipulation and lies is a prevalent sympthom and make autistics particularly vulnerable.

While for a lot of neurotypical entering somebody’s room may imply consent(or even expectation) of a sexual relationship, a lot of autistics are unable to perceive this social cues and contexts and have not realized they were creating this situation for themselves.

Autistics are blunt and honest. if you say “let’s go to my room in order to make out” they might simply reply “no thanks” or “yes please”, a as a lot of typicals say a masked request instead – “don’t you wanna check out my new curtain that I bought in my room” – they probably enter without having a cue.

longer response-time:

Autistics don’t process things at the same speed as NT. Autistics don’t rely on feelings and intuitions, autistics have to process bit of information per bit of information until they can act. Even worse, if they are in an environment with excessive imput, their brains are so busy processing all this junk that it doesn’t have a cue about what is happening in their surroundings. All of this makes an autistic person to have slower pace and longer response time and might freeze for much longer until they can act. (But freeze response is also not uncommon for neurotypicals and this effect should not be ignored).

Lack of self-confidence and anger repression:

I am not convinced that this trait is an autistic trait, instead this is a matter of how autistics are socialized.

Think about it, whenever an autistic child express their anger inappropriately they are punished, with time we just learn that feeling angry is wrong, we disown our anger.

Society doesn’t help with this, as a lot of people still firmly believe some feelings should not be felt and may cause damage to the carrier. The lack of contact with feelings of anger decrease leads to a dangerous passivity. How many times have you heard that ‘anger causes damage to the carrier’ and similar sentences of other bad feelings?

Even for other matters, as people are constantly belittling an autistic point of view, a lot of us end up lacking the confidence to state what is done to us as abuse.

Risky behavior:

Risky behavior is one of the things that appear on several diagnosis on DSM, and it was also one thing my neuro-psychologist evaluated me while assessing me for ADD.

Lack of social support or social skills:

Authistics would be less likely to have the social support that would enable them to talk about those topics. High masking autistics could have a lot of friends but still not able to open up about their real experiences.

How big is the problem?

Estimates that 2 % of all woman are autistic. But this number is highly uncertain and could be much bigger, as the assessment for autistics in females are still under diagnosed, more research is needed. It is very hard to determine for sure how many people are autistic given the challenges to find an specialist and the high costs of diagnose. Even if one is not autistic, one can present many symptoms of autism, and this is often the case for relatives.

But this is not the end. A lot of the behavioral traits described above that correlates to a bigger vulnerability also occur on patients of PTSD and complex PTSD. As it is expected that many victims of sexual abuse will develop PTSD, and as mentioned before, we estimate that 30% of every woman suffer sexual violence , this could mean that the same woman would be more vulnerable to experience the same situation again and again, a phenomena also known as reenaction. Therefore, the prevalence of sexual abuse in the autistic population could point to a problem faced, at least in part, by the PTSD community (or even other atypicals).

Reenaction:

reenaction is the tendency of re-victimization after the first traumatic incident has occurred. In other words, it is the repetition compulsion for many areas of life.

Problems with the law

There are many countries where if the abuser didn’t use force or coercie an unwilling sexual act is not considered rape, unfortunately. Examples are multiple and will not be mentioned as not to cause trigger.

Even with massive research showing that a freeze response is a real phenomena and outside of control of the person who experiences it, it is not accepted by the law of many countries. If you froze, you consented. This is why the assumed consent to be part of the law is such a cruelty with this population.

Fight and flight response is most communly seemd in man, female actual most common responses are “tend and befriend”, even for non-authistic ones. So if you not experiencing a fight response, that is not common on your gender, means you gave your consent, and this is part of the law. Can you grasp now the insanity of it all and how far the invisibilisation of this minority goes ?

what is freeze response ?

The name should be self explanatory. But why do we have it and how common this actually is ?

Well, this is as much as a response as fight and flight and should not be minimized. The prevalence will depend on several factors.

There is an experiment with fishes, in which smaller fishes were puted together with one bigger predator fish. In face of the bigger fish some would try to run, some would try to hide and another group would simply stay there frozen. The frozen group survived at higher rates. Of course we could not generalize a fish story to humans and this story is here just for the pitch.

Still, is it that hard to imagine that a mixture of factors would cause some humans to develop a freeze response propensity?

I would go so far to state that people would experience a bigger freeze response when they are small or relatively powerless or weak in comparison to their agressor, or at least that they perceive themselves that way, and that the bigger this difference is, the hardest it makes to resist a freeze response. (Such as a victim of child abuse who is so much smaller than the rapist, or a lot of woman who are mostly physically weaker and smaller than man).

Your brain functions to preserve your life at all costs, and it is not wired to make you happy nor to have the best rational response in every situation. If humans in the past who resisted sexual violence died even at a slight bigger rate, the ones who develop a mechanism to stop the resistance would have more offspring and this would become a trait of our species.

Freeze response is a real effect and you should have some respect for the people who suffer it, raise your awareness and don’t make them invisible.

Just because a person doesn’t fight back, just because someone does not actively say stop, and just because you don’t “go all the way” doesn’t mean you are not raping another person. -Malcolm and Simone Collins

The problem with rape is not the physical pain, it is not the risk of disease or pregnancy, the problem is the objectification. The culture of minimization tries to use the fact that some people might feel pleasure or orgasm with physical agrgession as a reason to justify and minimize rape. If the perpetrator is nice and gentle they will be arrested for less time, which is a contradiction. If somebory disrespected your will it is not the physical violence that is the problem nor how much they spanked you or if they did, it is a diminishment of humanity in itself. All this dialogs misses the point. Rape is about consent and self determination, not about violence nor pain.

Once you define rape as a break of one’s self determination it is clear how it is a matter of boundary violation, and a boundary can be different for every person, and everyone can impose their own boundaries the way they want, it is your body, you get to set the rules. Don’t we expect that everyone has different rules in their houses, why would we not expect different rules for the body?

Imagine you enter somebody’s house, they request you take out your shoes, you say ‘‘no, i entered 1 hundred houses and no one requested me to take out my shoes.’’ Therefore you having sex with 100 woman in a way and all of them being happy does not mean that the 101st should be willing to want the same. A different person, different boundaries.

This is why assumed consent is such a toxic behaviour. The only way you can know you are not raping someone is asking them.

A lot of people oppose the idea of “enthusiastic consent ”, as they think it “kills the spontanity”, without realizing the impacts of having sex without explicitly consent causes into the population and the extent of the damage, specially to the ones who are most vulnerable to freeze response. Whenever you decide that you don’t need to check for consent you might be raping a person. Whenever you decide you don’t need lights on or to close your eyes, you are literally choosing to become blind to what is the only input about your partners feelings, you are choosing not to know. While “I didn’t know you don’t want” is the favorite excuse on this sort of rape cases, the truth is that you didn’t seek to know, that you chose not to know.

And yet many man are just incapable of accepting any responsibility to avoid those situations, and actually woman too(more on this latter). Everything just part of a culture of minimization and invisibilization that diminishes the pain of a group just for being a minority and being less socially skilled.

What can be done ? responsibilisation.

We still live in a society that blames the victims for everything (at least in Brazil), but I hope that by now you may at least grasp why it is not possible to just teach an autistic how to react quickly or defend themselves, that would mean teaching an autistic how to not be autistic, and it is a genetic disorder. The process of training those skills is inaccessible, and we are talking about a society where less then half of the population even have a diagnose. While when it comes to PTSD the treatment takes years and is expensive. So this is not a problem that we could to solve without help.

Autistics and Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a Form of severe psychological abuse defined by the minimization of somebody else’s reality. Example: “you see abuse in everything ”, “it is all in your head ”, “you changed this memory in your head”. Autistics are particularly vulnerable to gaslighting, because we perceive the world differently and the default is to assume that the autistic perception is wrong. note that there is nothing that says the neurotypical perception is more accurate than the autistic one, it is just a matter of who is the minority here.

For example, for a person that has auditory sensibility, which a lot of autistics does, it is very common for others to say “but there is no sound here”. Which is a form of gaslithing, although a non-intended one.

Another example. I have often heard that I am rude, even in situations where I did not intended to be, and it is a common complain for autistics. Autistics are blunt and have trouble modulating their tone of voice, other times because they can’t grasp on non-verbal cues and misinterpret the situation. I also had the experience to be told that I am screaming, even though I don’t think I am screaming. And my overcompensation leads me to speak too low a lot of other times. Inability to modulate one’s voice is also a common symptom and we are often called out for that.

Once society inflicts you with the fear of being judged, taken by rude and angry all the time, we have to be all the time hyper vigilant, and sometimes too tolerant with situations where we should not be and were a strong reaction would be acceptable. the repression of the anger by the parents is the core of autistic repression, it culminates on the autistic toxic passivity and is a fundamental part of the phenomenon known as masking.

can we change autistic traits that lead to vulnerability ?

I don’t know, but we can try. the first step is to do a soul searching and find out where you might be on the spectrum for all those traits. but always remember, rape, violence and sexual assault is not your fault. even if you do everything right you might not be capable of avoiding it at times, and this is a truth we have to accept.

Teach your autistic children that sometimes it is okay to be angry , and that they should be wise on choosing when and how to express it. Don’t over-repress. show them examples of how anger should be better expressed without violating social norms, while at the same time allowing them to put their feelings out and validating that.

if you know an autistic, take their perspective in consideration, even though it sounds awkward to you. Be aware that 2 people may experience the world differently and just because your perception is more common doesn’t mean you are entitled to diminish somebory elses.

references:

https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2022/04/27/frontiers-behavioral-neuroscience-sexual-abuse-women-with-autism-widespread

https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/nine-out-of-ten-autistic-women-are-victims-of-sexual-assault/134603/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1750946721001410

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40489-023-00426-x

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4784091/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/15248380221093689

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-023-06064-w

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1524838021995975