Conference Program

Autistic students experience peer victimization at dramatically higher rates than neurotypical peers, with prevalence reaching 73% versus 10% (Fisher & Taylor, 2016). Yet this disparity conceals a further layer of invisibility shaped by the intersection of gender and neurodivergence: autistic girls, who engage in social camouflaging more extensively and at greater personal cost, are systematically overlooked by detection systems and anti-bullying interventions too often built upon neurotypical and androcentric norms.

Camouflaging is positively correlated with victimization (Trundle et al., 2023), producing a paradoxical cycle: autistic girls suppress neurodivergent traits precisely to avoid bullying (Cage & Troxell-Whitman, 2019), but the resulting appearance of competence leads educators to underestimate their vulnerability and withdraw support. Indeed, 65.9% of parents report that camouflaging directly reduced school assistance (Zhuang et al., 2023). Later diagnosis, more common among girls, is associated with both greater camouflaging and more severe costs (Goscicki et al., 2025). Online, autistic girls face elevated risks of sexual harassment, while cyberbullying prevention programs rarely address the unique online safety needs of autistic young people (Triantafyllopoulou et al., 2022).

This paper frames such dynamics as a form of what Fricker (2007) terms epistemic injustice, both testimonial, in that autistic girls’ accounts of suffering are discredited when their behavior appears “typical,” and hermeneutical, in that educational systems lack the interpretive resources to recognize camouflaging as distress rather than adaptation. As Fisher et al. (2025) argue, neuro-normative epistemic injustice operates systemically within education, so that struggling neurodivergent children are treated as pathological outliers rather than as indicators of environmental failure. Drawing on critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), we argue that standard anti-bullying frameworks operate as what Freire would call a “banking” approach to safety: they deposit universal protocols (peer reporting, behavioral markers, social-emotional curricula) into contexts presumed to be neutral, ignoring the power asymmetries that shape whose vulnerability is legible and whose remains structurally erased. We further argue that gendered expectations of social conformity compound neurotypical ones, producing a double bind in which autistic girls must perform both femininity and neurotypicality to access belonging.

From the perspective of neurodiversity pedagogy (Cadavero & Salerni, 2022), which proposes to recognize neurological variability as a central variable for educational sciences alongside cross-cultural and gender pedagogies, camouflaging should be read not as evidence of successful inclusion but as a systemic signal of environmental failure. This requires a shift from remediation of individual deficits to what we term neurodiversity-informed critical prevention: anti-bullying approaches that move beyond universal programs, which, even with general populations, prove effective only when tailored to specific risk profiles (Formella & Cavalli, 2018), and incorporate multi-informant assessment not reliant on neurotypical expressions of distress; that involve neurodivergent voices in program design, following the participatory epistemology central to both Freirean and disability-rights traditions; and that integrate school-based identity support, such as group interventions fostering autistic identity construction among adolescent girls (Travaglione, Cavalli, & Vagni, 2021), aimed at reducing the perceived necessity of camouflaging by creating contexts where neurological difference constitutes a legitimate form of participation in democratic school life.