Call for volunteers to fill ‘massive gap’ in support for autistic survivors of sexual violence

A new disabled-led organisation is appealing for volunteers to help it fill the “massive gap” in support for autistic survivors of sexual violence and abuse, and allow their voices to be heard more loudly and enable them to influence change.

Lotus Collaborations was founded by Dr Susy Ridout, herself an autistic survivor, who says her “dream” is for autistic volunteers to use the roles as a path towards a new career.

Although there are no reliable statistics to show how many autistic people have experienced sexual violence or abuse, she believes they are at a much higher risk than non-disabled people.

This can be because of their dependence on care workers or family members, the threat of losing support if they disclose the abuse, their social isolation, and the lack of any meaningful sex education.

She said: “So if you talk to autistic people about whether they’ve experienced abuse, most autistic people will say, yes, they have.”

It was her own experience of sexual violence – and being one of the few autistic survivors to secure a prison sentence for the perpetrator – that inspired her to set up Lotus.

She realised that mainstream services for survivors of sexual violence often do not understand the different needs of autistic people.

She said: “Our different ways of communicating, our different ways of processing information, our sensory differences, all of those factors are not necessarily understood.”

Her own “monotropic” way of thinking meant she was “very focused on the trauma” after the violence she experienced, and she found it “very difficult to shift that focus onto recovery”, a situation she believes many other autistic survivors share.

There is, she said, a “massive gap” in the availability of suitable services.

The language used by services can be “victim blaming, and autistic people very much feel blamed a lot of the time.

“It’s all very, very much as though everything’s our fault, that the world’s sort of not designed for us.

“So when we go to services, we’re faced with someone who is using, to put it mildly, profoundly disabling language, that can actually make us not able to talk.

“It takes away our agency, it can gaslight our narrative, and it gets in the way of us explaining our needs to the people who we need to support us.”

At a police station, for example, autistic people can be confronted with “bright lights, lots of noise, lots of sudden movements, all the things that aggravate autistic people, all the things that if you’ve been exposed to a huge amount of trauma will be very, very triggering.

“When autistic people present, we present very, very differently in that sort of setup. And that’s a real challenge for the police.”

These barriers, she said, are heightened by intersectionality, with the autistic person’s other identities – as a black or gay person, for example – often being “ignored”.

The four new volunteer roles Lotus is seeking to fill are all at director level: as treasurer, ambassador, website developer, and ambassador with responsibility for improving the visibility of the website and social media.

The roles will provide a unique opportunity and a safe space for autistic survivors “to be heard and to be involved” in training and other projects.

Although the roles are open to other disabled people and allies, autistic applicants will be given priority if they have the required skills.

Ridout – who paid tribute to the work of company secretary Sanya Bhasin, who joined Lotus in December 2023, and is also disabled – said she hopes the volunteer roles will eventually develop into paid positions, which she said would “absolutely be my dream”.

Lotus, a community interest company, offers education, training and consultancy services around the issues facing autistic survivors of sexual violence and abuse, such as wellbeing, heathy relationships, coercive control and consent, while it also aims to work with survivors to allow them to explore their own unique routes to recovery.

Ridout said: “What I’m absolutely passionate about is that the people who deliver this training are autistic, disabled, neurodivergent themselves.”

She has written widely on the violence experienced by autistic people, and is currently helping to train police to respond to neurodivergent survivors of sexual violence as part of the Home Office-funded Operation Soteria Bluestone.

Anyone interested in applying for one of the volunteer positions can email [email protected]

Picture: Sanya Bhasin (left) and Dr Susy Ridout

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