Content warning: The following blog post contains content related to bullying, trauma, violence, mental health and suicide.
Autistic students are not safe in Australian schools.
This is a key finding from our recent submission to the Australian Government’s Department of Education Anti-Bullying Rapid Review.
The Review aims to create new, national Anti-Bullying Standards for schools across Australia, and our submission makes it clear: for Autistic students, change is urgent and overdue. Given that general levels of bullying in Australia are among the highest in the world, Autistic students in Australia face some of the highest levels of bullying anywhere on the planet.
Coordinated by La Trobe University’s Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre, the submission brings together La Trobe experts across linguistics, education, and psychology. Led by Dr Gerald Roche, an Autistic scholar with lived experience of bullying, our team extensively reviewed the literature, including dozens of published academic articles and reports from both government and non-government agencies, resulting in 14 recommendations.
Our submission aligns closely with Australia’s National Autism Strategy, launched earlier this year. One of the strategy’s key commitments was to “improve the safety and welfare of Autistic people through the reduction of all forms of violence,” including bullying. Our submission reveals just how extensive and serious this problem is.
Bullying: An alarmingly common experience for Autistic students
Although bullying is widely recognised as a challenge for Autistic people, only three studies have so far attempted to assess just how common it is in Australia including our own Longitudinal Study of Australian School Leavers with Autism (SASLA) [1]. These studies suggest that between 58% and 65% of Autistic students have experienced bullying.
These rates suggest that Autistic students face rates of bullying more than double the national average of around 25%. This fits a clear global pattern, with studies from a range of countries showing that Autistic students are two to four times more likely to be bullied than their non-Autistic peers.
Bullying is also typically more severe for Autistic students. They tend to be bullied more frequently, and for longer periods of time, than non-Autistic students. They also tend to be targeted for multiple types of bullying at once, so that they are forced to deal with verbal bullying, physical attacks, and social bullying (including threats and exclusion) all at once.
“The first punch took me by surprise; the rest seemed inevitable. After a couple of hits each they got bored, spat on me a few times, laughed and went on their way. I lay on the grass for a while, wondering what social misstep I had made to earn this retribution.”
— Sandra (Thom-Jones, 2022, pg 138)
“They pushed me to the ground and then when I got up, they took me into the toilets and they locked me in with themselves in the toilets and started saying if I didn’t do this I would, like, be beaten up by someone”
— Tara (Saggers et al., 2017, pg 132)
[1] Funded by the Autism CRC, this study was named in 2014 prior to OTARC’s current language guidelines.
The tragic impacts of bullying on Autistic people
Bullying has serious, lasting impacts on Autistic people. The literature provides stark descriptions of the psychological and emotional impacts it has. Bullied Autistic students report that fear, depression and anxiety increase, while self-esteem, self-confidence, trust, and happiness decrease. Physical impacts include insomnia, vomiting, constipation, and panic attacks, and in some cases, bullying has led to self-harm and suicide attempts.
“I had no self-confidence. Yeah, it was horrible I had no confidence in myself at all”
— Bruce (Saggers et al., 2017, pg 134)
Bullying is also a key factor driving high rates of school absence in Autistic students. This is seen particularly in school refusal, also referred to as ‘school can’t’, which refers to an inability to attend school due to emotional and psychological distress. Although school refusal is generally rising across Australia, it disproportionately impacts Autistics students, who also tend to experience it at a younger age than their peers.
These impacts help explain the negative educational experience that many Autistic people report. Census data from 2022 show that 68.9% of Autistic people face difficulties in their place of learning; 53.4% had trouble fitting in socially in educational settings; and 51.1% face communication difficulties. Given the violence and exclusion that Autistic people face at school, we should not be surprised that only 5.2% of them go on to complete undergraduate studies at university (versus 35.3% of the general population).
Bullying thus has profound impacts on Autistic people. It not only causes immense immediate suffering but also has consequences that stretch out across the lifespan and impact the capacity of Autistic people to live full, rich lives.
“Well, we just took up home schooling it was getting so bad I was barely getting schoolwork due to the bullying. I literally wouldn’t eat lunch. I would eat like an apple; that was it, that was my lunch”
— Mark (Saggers et al., 2017, pg 134)
Our submission: A new approach
We estimate that Australian schools are home to approximately 144,000 Autistic students. Current approaches to bullying do not keep them safe, and the personal consequences are devastating. Our submission promotes three guiding principles to current anti-bullying approaches to meet the distinct needs of Autistic people.
- Alignment with the wider policy and research on autism.
- A commitment to adopting a neurodiversity-affirming approach.
- An emphasis on preventing violence rather than minimising its impact.
The full submission contains a wealth of insights from Autistic people and their supporters, vividly describing the experience of bullying and its disastrous impacts, and suggests a wide range of smaller, targeted actions in addition to these three major changes.
Our first Principle: Prioritise the needs of Autistic students
Given the high risks of bullying faced by Autistic students, and the deep, lasting impacts it can have, our submission recommends that national Anti-Bullying Standards need to prioritise the unique needs of Autistic people.
To do this, we suggest that the national Anti-Bullying Standards be aligned with existing policies for Autistic people. To avoid wasting resources on rediscovering what works best for Autistic people, the national Anti-Bullying Standards should be informed by existing policies such as the National Autism Strategy and the National Roadmap to Improve the Health and Mental Health of Autistic People.
These policies provide two important general principles that national Anti-Bullying Standards need to follow to support Autistic people:
- Social inclusion: ensuring that the fundamental right of Autistic people to participate in society is recognised and protected.
- A trauma-informed approach: recognising that Autistic people are often dealing with ongoing stress and harms of negative life experiences.
Our second Principle: Affirming Autistic difference
The Anti-Bullying standards need to reject deficit-based views of autism. Instead, we recommend a neurodiversity-affirming approach. To adopt a neurodiversity-affirming approach, schools will need to promote genuine acceptance and appreciation of autism, rather than stigmatising and marginalising Autistic people. Teachers, students, administrators, and other stakeholders at schools will need to commit to learning about autism and the distinct and valid ways in which Autistic people communicate and socialise.
This increased understanding will help foster an environment where Autistic people are safe to express themselves authentically, and where they do not need to hide their differences and attempt to conform to mainstream norms. Long experience by Autistic activists and researchers shows that the best way to foster this kind of learning is to engage with Autistic people as partners. Efforts to promote understanding of autism in schools should be co-designed with Autistic people and center their perspectives and experiences.
Our recommendations for a neurodiversity-affirming approach extend beyond the school to include research as well. Much of the current research on bullying and autism adopts a deficits-based approach that comes close to blaming Autistic people for the violence they experience. If our national Anti-Bullying Standards are to be successful in protecting Autistic people, they need to be based on research that has been rigorously audited and reinterpreted to ensure that harmful stereotypes and victim-blaming narratives are not reproduced.
Our third Principle: Focus on prevention
Anti-bullying efforts need to focus on preventing bullying before it occurs. Current research on bullying and autism tends to focus on helping victims cope with bullying. While such research has a vital role in reducing the harmful impacts of bullying, it needs to be accompanied by a greater focus on perpetrators and their motives and changing their behaviour rather than that of Autistic people.
The approach we recommend for preventing bullying of Autistic people was designed and promoted by the World Health Organization. This approach treats violence as a public health problem and provides guidelines for collecting data about violence and testing the impact of interventions. It has been applied in numerous contexts around the world and has proven successful in reducing rates of violence.
Above all, this approach suggests that preventing violence is the most effective way to address the multiple negative impacts that violence has on victims and society more broadly. Band-aid solutions that reduce the harm of bullying on victims are not enough. Only a commitment to preventing bullying will ensure that Autistic students are safe at Australian schools.
Final thoughts
While we hope that our submission will bring long-lasting, widespread benefit by impacting the new national Anti-Bullying Standards, we also hope that it will support people from all walks of life to promote the safety and wellbeing of Autistic people at Australian schools. Please read the full submission here to find out how you can start acting today to help keep Autistic students safe.
By Dr Gerald Roche (pictured left), Lecturer in Linguistics, Department of Languages & Cultures, La Trobe University
Acknowledgement: Thank you to Dr Gerald Roche for leading the submission, and to Alex Haschek, Associate Professor David Armstrong, Dr Rebecca Flower and Associate Professor Darren Hedley for co-authoring the original submission.
References:
- Thom-Jones, S. (2022). Growing in to autism. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press.
- Saggers, B., Campbell, M., Dillon-Wallace, J., Ashburner, J., Hwang, Y. S., Carrington, S., & Tones, M. (2017). Understandings and experiences of bullying: Impact on students on the autism spectrum. Australasian Journal of Special Education, 41(2), 123-140. https://doi.org/10.1017/jse.2017.6
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