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| A shy child hides behind their parent. Image source. |
Part 1: Strangers
Part 2: Touch
Part 3: Doctors
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I've been thinking about the things I was taught as a little kid, by adults who wanted to protect me from kidnappers, sex abusers, etc, and the ways that being autistic meant I couldn't actually follow that safety advice.
Thinking about it now, I think I was more vulnerable than the average kid. I can't really say definitively, though- and fortunately, I was never sexually abused or anything; the things that the adults wanted to protect me from didn't happen to me. So that's good.
But, even though those specific things didn't happen, I was violated in other ways, because of being autistic and undiagnosed. Good, well-meaning people who loved me, who told me that my sensory pain wasn't real and I was "over-reacting"... and I internalized the idea that I'm weak and I'm not good enough and it's my fault.
I definitely don't want to claim that one kind of trauma is worse than another; I can only speak for my own experiences. But I feel like there was so much focus on protecting kids from being sexually abused by creepy strangers, that it meant my trauma didn't "count" because it had nothing to do with anything sexual at all. It's only been in the past few years, as an adult, that I've begun to realize these things happened to me that were not okay.
I don't have an answer for what adults should tell kids, in order to solve this... Maybe it just necessarily is true that autistic kids are more vulnerable, and there's not really a way to reframe the "how to be safe from sexual predators" advice to make it work for autistic kids. Maybe sexual predators are clever enough anyway and it's not really reasonable to expect that any kid- autistic or not- can be "safe" if we just give them the right set of "safety tips." (At the very least, though, I wish I had been taught that my sensory needs mattered... but that's a completely separate thing from what I'm talking about here.)
Anyway, here's part 1, about strangers.
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I remember that the lessons about "stranger danger" always had two parts: First, don't talk to a stranger, don't accept candy from a stranger, don't get in a car with a stranger, even if they give you some sad story about how they're looking for their lost dog or whatever. And second, when you think of "stranger" you may imagine some old creepy-looking man in a trench coat, standing in the shadows of a dark alley, but oh that's not what "stranger" really means. ANYONE that you don't know is a stranger, even if they look nice and friendly.
I remember being a bit puzzled by the "never talk to strangers" rule, because I reasoned that if everyone really followed it, then how would anyone ever meet anyone? How did the first civilization start, back in ancient times? I asked my mom about this, and she said yeah actually "never talk to strangers" makes no sense. (Like, the "don't go off somewhere alone with a stranger" makes sense. But just talking? Uhh... Like, I remember when we moved into a new house and my mom went over to meet the neighbors- strangers!- and introduce herself, because she saw they had kids my age.) And she herself NEVER advised me to "never talk to strangers" because she knew I was so shy and was never talking to anyone anyway, and she wished I would make friends with the other kids at preschool. In fact, she told me the exact opposite- she told me I should talk to people.
(It is BEYOND ME how the same adults who told me "never talk to strangers, and a stranger is anyone you don't know, regardless of whether or not they look creepy" were then CONFUSED about why I didn't really talk to other kids at school.)
So... let's switch gears and talk about autism a little bit. Let's talk about things that actually did happen to me, rather than these hypothetical situations with these hypothetical dangerous "strangers."
There were times we met some adult, and my mom would be like, "It's Mrs. So-and-so, you remember Mrs. So-and-so, right?" and NOPE I did NOT remember. "But she drove you to preschool so many times! She drove you to preschool just last week!" Like, yeah, I remember some adult woman who was a friend of my mom drove me to preschool, but I hadn't realized I was expected to actually look at her face and remember what she looked like. I hadn't realized I would be quizzed on it later.
Like, I guess for non-autistic people they just do that naturally? They look at someone's face when that person is talking to them, apparently? I mean, at this point in my life, as an adult, I understand intellectually why it's important (because if you don't look at people when they talk to you, they think you're not listening or you don't care about them; because if you're going to be interacting with the same person multiple times then you need some way to identify them and typically we do that by remembering what their face looks like, and so on). And as a child, I was taught about these rules for social interaction, about how I need to look at people and make eye contact and smile and nod to indicate that I care about them and I'm listening. I was explicitly taught all of that because none of it came naturally. And once I was taught those rules, I followed them and generally didn't have problems with eye contact and remembering people's faces and things like that. But when I was preschool-age, I hadn't been taught those "rules of social interaction" yet. And so I didn't really pay attention at all to other people, besides my family members.
So I was often caught off guard, when my parents would be like "oh here is Mrs. So-and-so" and I was expected to recognize her. And I was committing some kind of rude breach of social protocol if I said I didn't remember her. I really hadn't realized that I was supposed to be looking at people's faces and remembering them. But you KNOW that if the seat belts in her car had some kind of mechanical feature that worked slightly differently than the seat belts in my mom's car, I would have been ALL OVER THAT and I could tell you all the details. Now that's INTERESTING.
So as a little kid I would often find myself in these situations where my brain classified someone as a "stranger" and then adults would be astonished or even offended that I claimed not to know this person. Coming from that kind of background, it wouldn't have been possible for me to actually follow the teaching about "stranger danger."
Imagine if my mom told me "today Mrs. So-and-so is going to pick you up from preschool." Then I go to preschool, and at the end, some woman comes to pick me up, and suddenly I realize I literally have no idea what Mrs. So-and-so looks like. I have no way to verify if this really is Mrs. So-and-so. I mean, it probably is? Like what are the odds that some creepy person would happen to show up and try to take me on the one day that my mom's not available to pick me up? So I would go with her. Is that the "right" thing to do, according to what we're teaching kids about "stranger danger"?
Even if I had been taught I should try to get more information to verify a potential "stranger's" identity, in reality, could I actually do that? Could I actually do that, as an undiagnosed autistic child who often got in trouble for claiming to not know people that I had technically met many times before? (By "in trouble" I mean I felt like adults were unhappy with me and I had done something wrong- I wasn't punished or anything.)
Statistically, the vast majority of child abuse comes from someone the child knows, not a stranger. So maybe all this "stranger danger" stuff didn't matter anyway. Maybe it was never a real risk. Maybe it's totally fine that being autistic meant that these rules couldn't really work for me.
I don't know. My point, though, is that whatever they were trying to do, whatever the well-meaning adults were trying to teach preschool-age me when they talked about "stranger danger", it didn't work at all.
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