It’s not even where we’ve come as a society, it’s where we’ve already been for a long time: I punched a boy who was groping me in summer camp back in 1990. It was the only way to make him stop. I had already given him several verbal warnings and shouted at him to stop. I finally didn’t know what else to do and hit him. He instantly played the victim and was babied by the female camp counsellors (the irony!) given an ice pack that he held to his face for the rest of the day (even though you couldn’t even see a mark). I thought I was going to be in sooo much trouble and going to be sent home, butluckily a male (!) camp counsellor saved me. He walked onto the scene and simply said in a very authoritative way: “Did he grope you?” Me: “yes” Him: “Well done for defending yourself, serves him right.” And luckily that was it, but I still often think about the incident to this day and of how extremely lucky I was and how easily this could have resulted in very bad consequences for me.

Societies the world over are more than happy to excuse men for sexually assaulting women; "he couldn't help himself" because of how she was dressed, how she behaved or what she said, whether or not she was drinking, the list is f*****g ENDLESS, yet nowhere on the list is the reason "because a man chose to sexually assault her".

I don't care if I get downvoted for this, but if someone can't/won't learn how to behave in society, then they have no place in society unsupervised.

I completely agree. I can't upvote this enough. I'm disgusted by all of the authority figures in this story. Someone should have been protecting this child. These abhorrent behaviors should have never been allowed to happen to her. I'm just furious over it and she's not even my child. I truly hope that there are some lawsuits pursued in her case and I hope she gets the help that she needs to feel better. I do realize that they failed him as well and now his parents have a horrid situation resulting from that, that will likely not be corrected before adulthood. It's a shame. There's just so much wrong with this, it's insane.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I’m autistic and if he’s functional enough to be able to speak and act independently, he fυcking knows better - if he doesn’t, there’s something else seriously wrong with him. I’ve never, EVER heard anything remotely like this, autistic people are NOT prone to behaviour like this and we do NOT get let off anything. This pile of rancid shít gets the exact same punishment as anyone else would and he gets cut ZERO slack. Of all the outlandish craziness… Please, people; don’t think it’s a common occurrence that we’re sexual predators and don’t think we get off the hook when we do bad things - unless we have insane parents or something, that’s just not true, not where I live at least. Absolutely not. This lunatic isn’t safe to walk around human beings unsupervised, he needs to be locked up or otherwise stopped from interacting with others, he apparently can’t be trusted around other people. The autism thing is nothing but a shítty excuse and if he hadn’t been autistic, they’d have come up with something else.

It happens all the time. Look at the way a ton of people reacted to the DeShawn Watson situation. "The women are just gold diggers" and all that c**p.

Umm ... No? Let's not send the mentally handicapped to prison? The only thing worse than someone being dumb enough to say this is that there are more than fifty people dumb enough to agree. So, I can't believe I actually need to explain this, but here we go. Why we shouldn't send the mentally handicapped to prison. Well, first off, prison doesn't work. It is a stupid vindictive malicious process that accomplishes nothing more than making angry people feel better. Among neurotypical people the general prison recidivism rate is about 50% within the first year and almost 80 overall. Again, this is among neurotypical populations who are even capable of associating the act with the punishment. But for someone who is very autistic (I wouldn't call him severely, he seems to be on the lower end of "high functioning") the punishment would not even be neurologically associated with the wrongdoing. This idea is pure insanity. Possibly the single dumbest thing I've ever heard. Congratulations, you found a way to cost tax payers hundreds of thousands of dollars, destroy a handicapped persons entire chance at a normal life, literally torture a mentally handicapped guy, and all for an exactly 0% chance of actually helping the problem. In reality what the OP did was pretty much the best course of action. He is perfectly capable of understanding cause and effect, and by issuing an immediate punishment to the inappropriate action, he will very likely learn REAL FAST not to do that. Or we can listen to braindead potatoes like this embarrassment to the gene pool and imprison them. Hey, we have a bunch of guys with Alzheimer's in nursing homes who keep doing this. Maybe we should imprison them, too?