Unseen and Unprotected
Autism, Abuse, and the Cost of Being Misunderstood
This essay discusses sexual abuse. Please read with care.
If I came up to you and told you in a very matter of fact tone that my arm hurt so much I thought it might be broken but I wasn’t crying or appearing distressed, would you believe me? Would my lack of visible emotion make you doubt my pain? What if it were something harder to objectively measure, like a migraine. And it’s lights or fragrance that is causing my migraine due to my sensory sensitivities, but you don’t perceive them as bothersome. Would you believe me? Now imagine that instead of physical pain we are talking about emotional pain or abuse.
People often ask what is the point of an autism diagnosis. I cannot answer this for you, but I can tell you how understanding my brain has helped me and how it has helped others I know with similar wiring. For most of my life I was pathologized. I was told that something was wrong with me and that if I did some kind of therapy or took some kind of medication I could fix the thing. I was wrongly labeled, wrongly medicated and traumatized by the professionals I went to for help. Had I been taught earlier about how my brain worked, my life would have been profoundly different. The result could have been a more protective, less traumatizing path. This is true for many autistic people.
I want to speak specifically about why autism can be important to understand in the context of abusive relationship dynamics. Almost 90% of autistic women have reported experiencing sexual violence. NINETY PERCENT. This statistic should give every parent, every teacher, every professional bound by mandatory reporting laws, and every human who cares pause. There are many factors that I believe contribute to this. Below I want to name a few significant ones and explain how understanding autism at a systemic level can be protective, or even lifesaving.
Communication Barriers and Masking
Autism is a developmental disability. Many of us who are female presenting with high IQ are not identified as autistic until much later in life (if at all). This means that we go through much of our life using our intelligence to compensate, to mask or camouflage. This takes an enormous amount of energy and comes at a great cost. It is almost impossible for me to articulate what this feels like from the inside. You don’t see “developmental disability” on the outside, you may see “quirky” or “slow” or someone who looks tired. However, this is not what we are experiencing on the inside. We may experience great distress. We may be many years behind our peers as far as understanding subtle social cues or nuance. We may not be able to name or regulate emotions well. But we aren’t identified or supported properly because we get straight As. Instead we are shamed and told to try harder. Over time, we internalize the belief that something is fundamentally wrong with us.
Bullying and Social Isolation
We may become isolated from our peers and picked on because we feel different. Still, we keep trying to figure it out. We want so desperately to belong. This can make us particularly vulnerable to abuse. We are often so misunderstood, but we spend a lot of our time trying so hard to understand everyone around us. Many of us are hyper empathetic. We are not only overly sensitive to lights, smells, and sounds, we are also overly sensitive to emotions. Not just ours. Yours too.
For some of us, that desire to belong can become a very intense attachment around one person that feels intense, consuming, and hard to regulate. When you consider all of these factors together, it is not difficult to understand how autistic people can end up in abusive relationship dynamics. We see a wounded person, animal, a noble cause, and we want to help. Often at our own expense. We typically aren’t taught proper boundaries or how to prioritize our own needs and safety. Without that education, our empathy can become a liability rather than a strength. It can be exploited.
Better Professional Training and Earlier Identification
Autistic people need to understand how our brain works, and we need others to understand it too. Professionals, especially, must learn how to support us properly so we stop being mislabeled, misidentified, misunderstood, and retraumatized.
Professionals need better training on how to identify and support autism even in the absence of a formal diagnosis. Professionals need to understand that not everyone can identify feelings, rate pain on a scale of 1-10, and that flat affect does not mean lack of distress. Professionals need to learn how to honor and accommodate sensory needs (not minimize or dismiss them) and not automatically pathologize someone who experiences the world differently. Teach professionals about delayed processing. Normalize that we need time to understand things. Circling back to add information or ask clarifying questions isn’t a defect, it’s just how our brain works.
Sex Education for the Autistic Brain
We need sex education specific for the autistic brain. We are literal thinkers, we are generally honest and we expect others to be honest too. When that assumption is violated, the consequences can be devastating, especially in sexual contexts.
Neurotypical sexual education is vague. Autistic people don’t do well with vagueness or metaphors. We need clarity and detail. What is consent? What is coercion? When can I say no? What if I change my mind? How do I get out of a situation? We need concrete and specific examples. Give us scripts to use. Teach us about subtle manipulation tactics (love bombing, blame shifting, gaslighting, silent treatment) so we can recognize abuse when it is happening and not after the fact, often decades later.
Real Inclusion and Acceptance
Real inclusion is not kindness weeks or token gestures. It is year-round understanding that reduces isolation and vulnerability. When autistic people are genuinely included and respected for who we are, we are less likely to become targets in the first place.
Actual Accountability for Abusers
Finally, Believe Autistic Survivors. When we are believed, abusers can be held accountable. Include our lived experiences in research. Let us help guide policy and best practices. This is the most basic step, and it is often the most violated. Listen to us. Believe us. Stop gaslighting and dismissing us. We are here. Our stories and our lives matter.
Wow, Samia! There is so much I don’t understand. It all makes sense but I’ve just never thought about this. Thank you!!