engleski

Parent´s attitudes towards sexuality of females with autism spectrum disorders

About ten years ago, autism spectrum disorders became popular among experts. Many researches were conducted, but mostly reffering to boys, since. Many people think that those with autism spectrum disorders don´t understand many from world around them. When children are young caretakers, experts provide support of inclusion mechanisms, but as they age, support needs to be adopted. Transition into adulthood can be very challenging. Sexuality represents a certain taboo in society, especially for persons who need special care and help to mandate basic everyday needs. These needs are not met as primary. One of three human biological needs is sexuality, also one of human rights. Satisfying every need, most importantly primary needs have positive affects on emotional wellbeing. Caretakers, parents have negative attitudes towards sexuality regarding typically developing children, but when it comes to children and adults with disabilities, those attitudes stay hidden. Main reason is that mostly persons with disabilities they are not thought to be sexual. Therefor, our goal is to rise awareness towards one of the basic biological need, sexuality and to examine attitudes towards sexuality of parents or caretakers of girls and women with autism spectrum disorders. Therefor we hypothesis that caretaker´s attitudes towards sexuality are more positive in those who have younger children. Because still they do not face these challenges. Research was conducted using Attitudes to sexuality Questionnaire (Cuskelly and Gilmore, 2007) that was translated and adopted. Only sixteen participants fulfilled online questionnaire. Despite small number of participants, we considered to publish the results because of awareness raising of providing support for challenging situations and to provide information that sexuality in persons with disability in general is not taboo, rather normal part of their life.

sexuality, females, autism spectrum disorders, parent attitudes

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