Circumscribed interests and ‘offenders’ with autism spectrum disorders: a case-control study

Abstract

The possibility that circumscribed interests, one of the features of the core clinical phenotype of autism spectrum disorders, may be related to offending and other behaviour bringing individuals into contact with the criminal justice system has not been investigated systematically. We compared the circumscribed interests of a group of 21 intellectually able ‘offenders’ with autism spectrum disorders with those of 23 men and women with no such history. As expected, the ‘offenders’ were significantly (p < 0.05) more likely to report interests rated as having a ‘violent’ content. Moreover, for some (29%) participants, the ‘index offence’ seemed to be related to his or her interest(s); however, the nature of these relationships varied widely. We need to develop (a) an appropriate methodology to collect more detailed information about circumscribed interests, and (b) investigate the impact of treatment and support strategies informed by a more nuanced understanding of the relevance of circumscribed interests.

Keywords:

• autistic spectrum disorders
• Asperger syndrome
• criminal behaviour
• circumscribed interests
• empirical study
• risk factors

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the participants; without them, and the families and staff who supported them, the study would not have been possible. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The work reported here was carried out as part of the first author's Ph.D. in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, and was funded initially by a Wellcome Trust Entry Level Training Fellowship awarded to the first author, and subsequently through a grant from the NHS Executive Eastern Region Research and Development Scheme. We are grateful for their support.

Notes

In order to protect the anonymity of the participants, we have deliberately limited the amount of information about them and have also altered their details in minor ways; these have no substantive impact on the data.