Amanda Baggs is an autistic adult who has very eloquently opened the door to her life at Ballstexistenz writes;
When I was very young, I didn’t perceive the world the same way other people do, but I did not have a terror of people. My terror of people emerged as bullying got worse and worse. The thing I most learned from school was to fear people and to think of myself as stupid and worthless. (High academic ability did not impact on that self-image at all, because it wasn’t about academics. It was about the fact that no matter what I did or how hard I tried I could not prevent these things from happening to me, but others were always acting like it was my fault whenever they did happen to me, so I developed pretty rapidly the idea that I was stupid and worthless because I could not prevent daily assault…
School smarts didn’t even make a blip on my personal radar… …That wasn’t because I was particularly mature, it was just that I didn’t know I had them, and on the occasions where I did compare myself to others, I seemed to come up very lacking…
So from these sort of incidents, I developed a fear of other people, a pretty extreme suppression of emotion and the possibility of connectedness to other people, a hair-trigger fight-flight response to being approached by other people, a large dose of self-hatred and resulting hatred of everyone who resembled me (and of life in general at times), and an ongoing depression that did not lift for almost two decades. And so did a lot of other people I know, in various forms. This is a totally preventable consequence of bullying and other abuse, and the attitudes that too frequently go along with them.
We have all been on one side or the other of bullying – many of us on both sides. That bullying is so commonplace should increase our vigilance in preventing it as Scoutmasters. There are no easy answers or formulas. Resolving the issue requires a lot of listening and talking – it is a complicated web to unravel.