It's not a physical prison but you can't get out: how autistic adults make sense of the experience of intimate violence and abuse

Community Brief

Why is this an important issue?
Autistic people are more likely to experience intimate partner violence (IPV) than non-autistic people. Currently we know very little about how autistic people recognize that they are in an abusive relationship and how they make sense out of what has happened to them. Understanding this can help us to find ways to help autistic people recognize abuse and prevent them from entering abusive relationships.

What was the purpose of this study?
The purpose of this study was to explore how autistic people recognize IPV and how they make sense of what has happened to them.

What did the researchers do?
We interviewed 21 autistic adults about their experiences, using semi-structured interviews. We gave people the option to do a spoken interview (n = 16) or to write down their answers (n = 5). We made sure that they felt safe to take part and that we knew what to do if they became upset. We analyzed the data using reflexive thematic analysis, which involved looking for patterns in what people had said and then organizing these patterns to identify common themes across all the participants.

What were the results of the study?
We developed three key themes. Theme 1, “Power,” showed that autistic people felt like they had never been in control of their own lives and that they had to do what other people told them. They said that the abuser took advantage of this. They also did not feel like anyone would believe them if they talked about being abused, so they kept it to themselves for a long time. Theme 2, “Disruptions of self,” showed that autistic people felt like they had always been treated less like a human than other people and this had made them feel like they had to hide their true selves to stay safe. Theme 3, “Now, with hindsight,” showed that it had been really hard to recognize abuse because being treated badly seemed normal. It was hard for people to recognize warning signs from their partners and took a lot of courage to leave the abusive relationship.

What do these findings add to what was already known?
Our findings help us to understand how autistic people recognize abuse and what might make it harder for them to do so.

What are potential weaknesses in the study?
All of the people who took part in this study were White, and most were women. It is likely that autistic people from other groups might experience other things that make it hard to recognize abuse.

How will these findings help autistic adults now or in the future?
Our findings show that we need to address lots of different things (e.g., early life relationships, negative social judgments of autistic people) if we want to prevent abuse and help autistic people to recognize when a relationship might be abusive.



Abstract

Background: Autistic people are more likely to experience intimate partner violence (IPV) than non-autistic peers, but our knowledge about how they recognize abuse and make sense of what has happened to them is sparse. The aim of this study was to explore how autistic people recognize and make meaning after experiencing IPV.

Method: We recruited 21 autistic adults to take part in a semi-structured interview about the experience of IPV. We asked questions about how they had made sense of their experiences and how it had impacted them. We analyzed the data using reflexive thematic analysis. One author coded all data, engaging in reflexive discussion with the whole team. They organized codes into themes in collaboration with a second team member.

Results: We developed three themes from the data, which focused on understanding and sense-making after intimate violence. Theme 1, “Power,” focused on the role that power dynamics had played in sense-making. Theme 2, “Disruptions of self,” explored the feeling of dehumanization, objectification, and stigmatization among participants that led to them feeling like they were worth less than others and that they had to mold themselves to fit perpetrator expectations. Theme 3, “‘Now, with hindsight,” focused on how survivors had struggled to recognize the violence, with a sense that it could “always be worse” and that they needed clearer understanding of what “red flags” look like in a relationship.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that making sense of the experience of intimate violence among autistic adults is shaped by individual, interpersonal, and societal factors, which normalize violence against autistic people, making it difficult to leave abusive relationships. By highlighting the factors that shape understanding, we can explore how to prevent these occurrences in future (e.g., better early education about neurodiversity and relationships).