About once a month, I see a teacher or a para injured by an autistic child. Usually bite wounds.
Ping
My brother had some memorably violent episodes. Of course, according to the experts that had nothing to do with his being autistic and being violently opposed to any kinds of changes in his environment (like changing the sheets on his bed.)
I would prefer that this statement wasn't worded this way.
The linkage is not specific to Autistic people (or Autism in general). It is specific to individuals who suffer from Autism.
Saying it is linked to Autism, infers that anyone with Autism is prone to be violent. That is clearly not the case.
Years ago I found an interesting theory that people mostly function on one of three “bandwidths”: at an emotional level, and intellectual level, or a physical level. Though people need all three to get by, they tend to mostly stay in just one of them, for their input/output, and how they communicate with others.
When two people meet, they “fine tune” their “frequencies” to try and get as close to the other person as possible. Importantly, the closer they can get, the better they can communicate with each other. If they can’t get very close, they can try to communicate all day but won’t have much luck. How much you can tune is based on how much energy you have.
While culturally we are educated to believe that communication involves the accurate transfer of intellectual data, this is really only important to those with an intellectual bent.
Emotional people are far less concerned with accurate data than with accurate emotional content. So if they are trying to convey an emotional lesson, they often twist the facts to make the emotional lesson clearer.
Physical people communicate with physical contact, be it hugging, grabbing, pinching, slapping, whatever. They try to communicate physically with others. Unfortunately, since most people are not physically oriented, they think of this as assault.
I had a friend with a physically oriented roommate, and my friend said that this behavior was very annoying, and he wished the roommate would stop touching him, punching his arm, etc. Instead I suggested that his roommate was trying to communicate with him, in a physical language, and that he should respond in kind, physically.
He did so, and quite unexpectedly the roommate suddenly saw him as his best friend in the world.
He described it as if his roommate was in a foreign country for years, and didn’t speak the language, then he met someone who spoke English. No matter who that person is, he is their new best friend, because he can communicate with them.
With this as background, it got me to thinking about the “violence” of some with autism. What if they are trying to physically communicate?