#i'm readying a rlly good (if dense) book rn about aba and capitalism called the autism industrial complex - highly rec

[uglyfruit]

what’s aba

ABA stands for applied behavior analysis. It’s a super common and pervasive “treatment”/“intervention” for autistic children-- because they're showing "disruptive" distress behaviors, because their autistic traits are seen as needing to be assimilated to fit into capitalist society, because it's just seen as the thing you do with autistic kids

Basically it tries to change someone’s outward behavior using rewards or punishments. When it was first invented (by the guy also involved in creating conversion therapy!), these included slaps and electric shocks. Today, most of the methods have been made much “friendlier”, but still arguably work to make an autistic child’s behavior easier to deal with, more “normal”, more compliant.

While it often /is/ effective in changing outward behaviors, that says nothing of its potential to teach shame, masking of autistic traits, reliance upon prompts/rewards to do things, teaching that you must always obey authority figures, that your internal feelings are unimportant, the trauma of potentially aversive punishments, the fact that kids as young as 2 get recommended to spend up to 40hours a week in intensive ABA, the fact that it rarely addresses (or even worsens) the actual issues underlying distress behaviors…. and ultimately the message is that disabled people must be changed to fit into abled society, rather than abled society changing.

As that post I reblogged said, it's important to nuance to the discussion beyond "ABA=abuse", especially regarding how so many social forces shape the reality and power and experience of ABA, incl the absence of better types of care.