Box 5 Characteristic features of Asperger syndrome that predispose to criminal offending
* An innate lack of concern for the outcome can result in, for example, an assault that is disproportionately intense and damaging. Individuals often lack insight and deny responsibility, blaming someone else; this may be part of an inability to see their inappropriate behaviour as others see it.
* An innate lack of awareness of the outcome that allows individuals to embark on actions with unforeseen consequences; for example, fire-setting may result in a building’s destruction, and assault in death.
* Impulsivity, sometimes violent, can be a component of comorbid ADHD or of anxiety turning into panic.
* Social naïvety and the misinterpretation of relationships can leave the individual open to exploitation as a stooge. Their limited emotional knowledge can lead to a childish approach to adult situations and relationships, resulting, for example, in the mistaking of social attraction or friendship for love.
* Misinterpreting rules, particularly social ones, individuals find themselves unwittingly embroiled in offences such as date rape.
* Difficulty in judging the age of others can lead the person into illegal relationships and acts such as sexual advances to somebody under age.
* Overriding obsessions can lead to offences such as stalking or compulsive theft. Admonition can increase anxiety and consequently a ruminative thinking of the unthinkable that increases the likelihood of action.
* In formal interviews, misjudging relationships and consequences can permit an incautious frankness and the disclosure of private fantasies which, although no more lurid than any adolescent’s, are best not revealed.
* Lacking motivation to change, individuals may remain stuck in a risky pattern of behaviour.
http://apt.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/10/5/341
