Danequa L. Forrest, Rhiannon A. Kroeger, and Samuel Stroope have an article at the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders titled "Autism Spectrum Disorder Symptoms and Bullying Victimization Among Children with Autism in the United States."
The abstract:
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience more frequent bullying victimization compared to their neurotypical peers. This study used the 2011 Survey of Pathways to Diagnosis and Services to examine associations between six Children’s Social Behavior Questionnaire (CSBQ) subscales and bullying victimization among 1057 children with ASD. Bivariate results showed significant correlations between each CSBQ subscale and more frequent bullying victimization. Yet results from multinomial logistic regression models indicated that after adjusting for all CSBQ subscales and covariates, two of the CSBQ subscales remained significantly associated with greater risk of bullying victimization: not being optimally tuned to the social situation, and resistance to changes. Implications for future research and efforts toward reducing bullying victimization among children with ASD are discussed.
From the article:
Interventions for school bullying may be especially effective to reduce and prevent bullying victimization. In addition to the safety, health, and academic impacts of bullying on children who may already face significant life challenges, school districts receive funding based on student attendance, which can be low in schools where bullying is common due to children feeling unsafe in their environment. For example, California school districts lose roughly $276 million a year due to students not feeling safe and staying home (Baams et al. 2017). Schools have an economic responsibility to address bullying. Research has found that parents and teachers generally support the idea of bullying prevention programs, and they are more likely to approve such programs if they have witnessed a child being bullied (Gradinger et al. 2017). The effectiveness of anti-bullying programs on reducing victimization is directly related to teacher involvement (Li et al. 2017), suggesting that reducing bullying goes beyond initiating programs and extends to supporting teachers as they implement programs. Interventions on average decrease bullying by 20–23% and victimization by 17–20% (Ttof and Farrington 2011). If effective, interventions could ultimately help decrease violent offending and drug use in perpetrators of bullying (Farrington and Ttof 2011) and prevent health problems such as depression associated with bullying victimization (Farrington et al. 2011), with implications for individual, school, and community well-being
