Autisme and Crime: Is Prevention Possible?

Background:  In forensic psychiatry there is a growing interest in people with autism. A positive autism diagnosis has consequences for legal accountability, management and treatment, and risk of recidivism. In literature, case histories and incidence searches are present. Until now it has remained unclear whether there is a relation between autism and perpetrated offences or not. There are different papers about this subject but it is still unknown what the chance is that people with autism become criminals and what the underlying causes are.

Objectives:  The first purpose of this study is to investigate whether there are differences between people with autism and neurotypical people who came in contact with the judiciary in (a) type of crime, (b) reason for committing the crime and (c) social demographic features.

Methods:  N=156: 54 persons with autism, 102 without autism. All cases were referred to one of the authors, who acted as expert witnesses in the subjects’ court cases. The different variables of the cases were retrospectively analysed. In the current study, the kind of crime, the situation in which the crime was committed, the age of the offender, intelligence, family situation, age at the time of the autism diagnosis and comorbid disorders were investigated.

Results:  We found no differences in social demographic features. We found significant numerical differences in two types of crime: violence (autism 10% vs neurotypical 38%) and sex involving children (autism 28% vs neurotypical 11%), both “hands on” and “hands off” offences. Furthermore we found that many of the offenders with autism had serious problems at school at an early age and that many of them had mental health care records, but without a correct diagnosis. Most of them had serious problems in social communication, showed a lot of obsessions and were very lonely

Conclusions:  

• The differences in violence crimes and sexual crimes are striking.
• A notable number (29%) of the sex crimes concerning children are “hands-off” crimes e.g. downloading child pornography and websex crimes.
• We found a number of cases in which the offenders suffered from obsessions, but there were too few cases for us to be able to prove a correlation.
• It is important to investigate whether the sex crimes are related to loneliness and/or to insufficient knowledge of sex. If so, certain measures should be developed aiming to forestall at least a number of those crimes.