Understanding Autism: Why Autistic Children (and Adults) Cannot Tolerate Injustice

“It’s not fair!”

It’s a phrase that every parent hears many times, usually with a sense of despair and resignation in my experience. How do you respond when your child makes this complaint? Do you use the stock answer of “life isn’t fair”, which I know I have done a lot, or do you take a more nuanced approach?

If your child is autistic, you may hear this complaint more than most. Autistic people often have a fierce sense of justice, and a dismissive platitude seldom deters us in response! Of course, life isn’t fair; we get that, but that is not the same as saying that we should just accept unfairness and injustice wherever we find it. It is often not the fact that the unfairness exists that is the issue that bothers me; it is the lack of effort by anyone to rectify the situation or even the conscious decision by someone in authority to allow the injustice to continue or even to encourage it.

We are all different, which inevitably means that we are all better than others at some things and worse at others. I could say it is unfair that I cannot run as fast as Usain Bolt. But neither can anyone else. There will always be the fastest runner in the world unless we all run at the same pace. If we were all the same, humanity would be in deep trouble, as our fantastic diversity enables us to keep adapting and evolving to progress and overcome obstacles.

While my lack of athletic ability compared with others has often frustrated me greatly, especially at school, I never viewed this as intrinsic unfairness. I knew that I had strengths in other areas, and while maths was not nearly as cool as football when I was 10, I somehow understood the idea of diversity of strengths.

The injustice and unfairness that rankles many autistic people, sometimes from a very early age, is that which we can sense comes from a choice, and that does not have to be this way. Sadly, a great deal of the unfairness and injustice in our society is of that kind, and it is likely to get worse before (hopefully) it gets better.

When your autistic child complains that something is unfair, they may instinctively sense that things are not right and that they do not need to be this way. Of course, a child often lacks the full understanding of a situation, but maybe we could all do with a bit more of that approach. It is all too easy to be convinced that things have to stay as unfair as they are because life is complicated, change takes time, and all sorts of other excuses. We have been conditioned to accept institutionalised unfairness in all areas of our society.

Because many autistic people find much of the world bewildering and have to think through things that neurotypicals take for granted consciously, we may not automatically accept these everyday injustices. Couple that with a highly developed sense of the importance of fairness, and is it any wonder that we cannot keep our mouths shut, even from an early age?

Our sense of injustice may be just as pervasive as physical pain. The deep upset I feel when I encounter a situation where it seems that someone is choosing injustice over fairness causes me as much, if not more, distress as an injury. Moreover, I know that I have experienced this for as long as I can remember, all the way back to early childhood.

Of course, we cannot rectify every injustice that we encounter as individuals. The world is unfair in just about every aspect of life. But that does not mean that we should not try or that we should tacitly accept that things have to stay as they are.

I know that speaking up about unfairness and injustice often gets me labelled as a troublemaker and causes me problems even as a child. I have written before about the distress I caused my mother by repeatedly challenging an unfair and incompetent referee in a football match when I was very young. But surely what we need to make the world a better place is more people challenging the things that are wrong. What if the few voices became many voices?

The quickest and easiest answers of those who choose to maintain unfairness, often because it is good for them, is to try to suppress dissent by persecuting those who voice it, to deny that there is even a problem, and to sweep concerns under the carpet. All of these are much more difficult when multiple people are speaking up. That is how change happens.

You are unlikely to be able to persuade an autistic child to stop challenging unfairness, however inconvenient and uncomfortable it sometimes is. It is in our DNA in the same way as crying out in pain when we hurt ourselves. What you can do is listen to them properly, help them develop their thinking, understanding, and arguments, and assist them in finding a positive way to address the situation. This can take all sorts of forms, from helping them to structure and write down their thoughts, enabling them to come up with solutions as well as identifying problems, and, as they grow older, showing them the channels where they can make their voice heard, such as contacting elected representatives and senior leaders.

Autistic people do not keep raising injustice and unfairness where we find it because we have nothing better to do. It is because it becomes very difficult to live with ourselves if we just let it go. It feels like a burning inside that has to find an outlet. If we just stand by and watch injustice continue when we could at least point it out, even if we cannot change it, we feel complicit in the problem.

I know that I will never be able to stop protesting unfairness and injustice, and chances are, your autistic child will not be able to stop either. It is a sorry situation when our world prefers to suppress challenges rather than try to improve, but that seems to be where we are. So rather than telling us to be quiet, please try to work with us on this one. It may even make things better in some small way.

?

?