Flashback: Beaten by Nuns as an autistic child #notjoking
Don't ask me why... I suppose just a part of the usual autistic looking back through your life with the 'tism lens, but today was a flash back to childhood.
For a time frame, this happened to me in around 1982, when I was still a small child, and in the UK the years immediately before high-school. My catholic-zealot of a mother sent me to a private school run by nuns, a convent school. Even though diagnosed only in 2026 in my 50s, I have always been autistic, and at that age before official diagnosis was a thing I probably would have been judged, as a young child, completely differently than I was - this does not in any way excuse the actions of the nuns in question,, adults around me at the time, and their wider religious cult.
So... I couldn't read or write, at that age, my peers could - this is a developmental disorder. I was judged as "bone idle lazy" by said nuns, teachers in the school. What did they do? Took me into an office and beat me with a cane repeatedly on the hands, and legs on multiple occasions during my time in the school.
I wish I could have realised a couple of decades ago what all the cause of this was, and their completely illegal actions which amounted to assault and torture of a minor. It has left me with mental scars more than 40 years later, and I suspect for life.
From a wider human point of view, I can only wonder had they been regular members of society, had actual children and compassion, would they have done the same thing? Had I had a diagnosis of something related to the developmental delay, would they have still taken me into an office and tortured me?
Whatever happens, these sub-human scum are firmly in my rear-view mirror, but I still have the scars. If you're a parent reading this, and anything like this is suspected, do the decent thing and protect your children or risk alienation from them as soon as they become aware. When my mother died... well it's over a decade ago, and I've yet to shed a single tear - the most important relationship in my life before marriage ruined due to abuse by a the catholic-cult, and lack of understanding / protection by wider society.
Right now, flashbacks suck and I'm wishing I could forget!