Who are the autistic children?

It has been calculated that there are approaching 5000 autistic children in England and Wales, slightly more than the number of blind and partially sighted children and slightly less than the number of deaf children. The sex ratio, male to female, increases with increased ability. At the lowest levels, the ratio is 2 : 1. At the highest ability levels the ratio rises remarkably to 15 : 1. About three fifths of autistic individuals remain severely handicapped, with only about one in six likely to make a sufficiently good social adjustment to live independently. These 'shell-type children' are as alike as peas in a pod both in their appearance, the kind of parents they have and their early developmental history (Tustin, 1980: 28), remarkably similar even if they come from different countries and communities. Often they belong to families of superior socio-economic status
Besides descriptions of autistic children by psychologists and other professionals, there have been some accounts of the autistic experience by parents and by the sufferers themselves. One at age 31 recorded his recollection of autistic childhood as continual confusion and terror; everything was unpredictable and strange. A very recent account by someone who eventually was diagnosed as autistic, and later, remarkably, took a degree in psychology while still remaining autistic, shows close agreement with the general picture of autistic children's behaviour and experience. A few extracts:
When people didn't touch me I never experienced this as neglect. I experienced it as respect and understanding. Love and kindness, affection and sympathy were my greatest fears.
Staring into space ... spinning ... A means of losing awareness of self...Hurting oneself ... To test as to whether one is actually real.
Head banging To fight tension and provide a thudding rhythm in my head when my mind was screaming too loud ...Staring past things ... Looking at things directly often robbed them of all their impact and meaning.
I heard speech as only patterns of sound ... As an echolalic child, I did not understand the use of words.
any one or combination of the senses can become extremely sharp. For me this made some high-pitched sounds intolerable, bright light became either intolerable or mesmerising, and touch was always intolerable.
From the earliest age I can remember I found my only dependable security in losing all awareness of the things usually considered real. I rejected all contact because this robbed me of the security I found in my ability to lose myself through colour, sound, pattern and rhythm. I learned eventually to lose myself in anything I desired- the patterns on the wallpaper or the carpet, the sound of something over and over again, the repetitive hollow sound I'd get from tapping my chin. Even people became no problem. Their words became a mumbling jumble, their voices a pattern of sounds.
For language to have any meaning one must be able to relate to it. For me, when the directness of relating is too great, the walls go up. ... the comprehension of the meaning of words drops away leaving the listener lost as to both concepts and significance. At worst, the stress of direct emotionally loaded communication blocks the brain's ability to retrieve all or any of the words for speaking a fluent sentence, or won't allow the articulation process to get into action, leaving the words echoing within the speaker's head. (Williams, 1992: 186-188)
The most systematic and comprehensive account by a parent of the progress (or lack of progress) of an autistic child is Clara Claiborne Park's book The Siege about her autistic daughter, Elly, from which the following extracts are taken::
She could look right through a person. She usually did. It was impossible by gesture to get her to look at an thing at a distance. ... her imperviousness to visual stimuli of all sorts. A car would draw up within three feet of where she was playing. She would not look at it. A dog ran past. She seemed to register nothing. She was over three before she looked up and saw a bird. But there were things she did not ignore:- colours, abstract shapes. The abstract meaningless, shapes seemed to have an intrinsic importance for her. That Elly wanted nothing was worst of all ... the child in the glass ball ... her overwhelming unwillingness to affect the environment. "Elly's signal lack of interest in future experience.For her out of sight is out of mind". (Park, 1972: 257)