What would you do?

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers.

Setting up the activity

• Mark out opposite sides of the room with signs that read ‘misbehaving’ and ‘not misbehaving’.
• Consider any young people who may find this session more challenging and talk to parents/carers to explore what support you could provide.

Run the activity

1. Explain to everyone that you’re going to think about how we judge people without knowing any context for their behaviour or actions. There aren’t any wrong or right answers today. We should all listen, respect and care for everyone in the group.
2. A volunteer or young leader to read out one of the situations which describes what could be seen as challenging behaviour:

• • Situation 1: A young girl is at a shopping centre. She's crying and screaming. She lays down on the floor and refuses to move.
  • Situation 2: A boy in your class at school won’t leave the classroom. He has his hands over his ears, as he rocks back and forth, yelling.

3. Everyone stands on one side of the room if they feel this behaviour is the person ‘misbehaving’, or on the other side of the room if they feel like it’s not.
4. Ask a couple of young people why they’ve chosen where they're standing.
5. The volunteer or young leader should read out the first context point, which are listed below, and ask if anyone wishes to change their position.
6. If anyone changes their position ask if they’d like to explain why.
7. Continue reading out each context point. Make sure all the context points are read out.

Learning about sensory differences and how we can help

1. When everyone's finished doing the activity, gather everyone in a circle.
2. Explain that without knowing about the context points, a lot of people may have said the person in that activity was misbehaving. However, when you heard the context points you changed your mind and could see the reasons the person was overwhelmed.
3. Tell everyone that sometimes people have sensory differences, meaning of their senses may be over- or under-sensitive, or both, at different times, which may make them become overwhelmed. A person who finds it difficult to process everyday sensory information can experience sensory overload, or information overload. Sensory differences might not always be obvious, so we might not be able to see or know that a person has them.
4. Explain that too much information can cause stress, anxiety, and possibly physical pain. This can result in withdrawal, distressed behaviour or meltdowns. It happens when someone becomes completely overwhelmed by their current situation and temporarily loses control of their behaviour. It can sometimes be known as a meltdown.
5. Tell everyone that a meltdown's an intense response to an overwhelming situation. This loss of control can be expressed verbally, such as shouting, screaming or crying, or physically, such as kicking, lashing out or biting, or in both ways. A meltdown's not the same as a temper tantrum. It's not bad or naughty behaviour. When a person's completely overwhelmed, and their condition means it's difficult to express that in another way, it's understandable that the result is a meltdown.
6. Explain that some autistic people may have meltdowns. Without knowing about the person or the reasons, the public or bystanders often finds it hard to tell autism meltdowns and temper tantrums apart, but they're very different things. Meltdowns aren't the only way an autistic person may express feeling overwhelmed. They may also refuse to interact, withdraw from situations they find challenging or avoiding them altogether. 
7. Tell everyone that if someone's having a meltdown, or not responding to you, don’t judge them. It can make a world of difference to an autistic person and their parents or carers. 
8. Ask everyone to think of a few ideas of how we can help or what to do if someone's having a meltdown. Some suggestions might be giving them some time - it can take a while to recover from information or sensory overload. You could make space and try to create a quiet, safe space as best you can, or politely ask people to move along and not to stare. You could also turn off loud music and turn down bright lights – whatever you can think of to reduce the information overload, you can try it.

This activity helps contribute towards some of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Find out more about the SDGs, and how Scouts across the world are getting involved.