#not mad at you anon i'm speaking angrily on this bc i am simply angry

[librarycards]

Hello! Hope you are doing well! I'm just wondering if you could point me to some resources on how ABA hurts low support autistic people? I know it's not good when it's forced, but I just wanted to know if its good at all? I feel like whenever I talk to allistic people about my problem with ABA they point to high support autistic people who have benefited from it and I've just not been able to articulate the problem well enough. 

ABA is irredeemable. M. Remi Yergeau, in their book Authoring Autism, describes & cites in detail the relationship between ABA, anti-gay conversion abuse, Naziism/eugenics, etc. i.e., systems that would prefer autistic people - especially those marked as high support - not exist at all.

the violence inherent to ABA isn't a matter of individual harm, though it does plenty of that, too. the violence of ABA is rooted in its ethos: it is practiced with the express intent to eradicate particular "problem" behaviors, defined as such not because they cause uniform material harm but because they are deviant. it does this through systems of intentional neglect and punishment, up to and including starvation.

might ABA "fix" a given "problem behavior" in an autistic person? well, i don't know about you, but if i learned i'd be denied food if i flapped my hands, i'd try to stop pretty fast myself. the question is, to return to your ask, what do your allistic askers mean when they say "benefit"? what, to them, is "effective"? is it that ABA is evidence-based, meaning that the evidence points to some success in eroding a child's bodily autonomy such that they no longer move their bodies in ways that feel comfortable for them? is effectiveness = to the destruction of a child's impulse to say "no", or the ability to shut them up?

typically, the most visible benefits people refer to when they talk about ABA and high support people is the disappearance of meltdowns (or lowering in frequency), perhaps the absence of stims like head-banging or hand-waving. in the former case, the disappearance of meltdowns without material, environmental transformation is incredibly worrying, because it means that a child's only mode of reliable communication has been shut down. it is the equivalent of someone being denied words so long that they lose the will to speak. in the latter case, I ask: of all the stims in the world, most are not materially harmful to a child's well-being. why spend 40 hours a week torturing a child for flapping their hands? and, if a stim does indeed cause material harm, why are we not first looking to environmental accommodations? after all, I wear goggles when i swim underwater. they help me see without burning my eyes. you can't simply abuse my eyes into not burning in a chlorinated pool.

when in these conversations, i urge you to ask others to critically interrogate what they mean by "success," "benefit," and "effectiveness" in terms of autistic people –– and how much of it is grounded in the idea that youth, and especially neurodivergent youth, are problems to be managed and ultimately subdued, rather than persons for whom the fundamental right to autonomy & access to consent has been suspended in a project of dehumanization.

#not mad at you anon i'm speaking angrily on this bc i am simply angry #ask #anonymous #ableism #saneism #abuse #child abuse #psychiatric abuse #starvation m #eugenics