Why ABA Therapy is Bad: A Brief Summary

If you’ve been linked here, it’s because you have said something that has prompted us to give you some more education on ABA.

Let’s start with the obvious: The GREAT BIG ABA OPPOSITION RESOURCE LIST

To summarize the evils of ABA shortly and succinctly:

• ABA is child abuse.

• ABA uses aversives such as verbal disapproval, planned ignoring, spanking, withholding of toys/comfort items/food, slaps, restraints, and even electric shocks.

• ABA ignores a child’s consent, which can lead to lifelong issues with comprehending consent- which can lead children to ignore another person’s bodily autonomy, and more importantly can lead them to become victims of sexual or other forms of abuse.

• ABA is conversion therapy, founded on the same principles as gay conversion therapy but with more torturous methods.

• Autistics who have been in ABA are 86% more likely to develop PTSD than their peers that never experienced ABA.

• ABA is usually extremely intensive, most children are forced to participate 25-40 hrs per week, sometimes on top of school and sometimes in place of an education (meaning the child gets no actual education).

• ABA is an expensive scam.

• The creator of ABA intended for children to be afraid of the therapists and their parents, which he actually said in one of his published journal articles.

• The Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI), who oversees the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) endorses torturing autistic children with electric shocks, which have been denounced and called torture tactics by the United Nations (UN) and the US Food Drug Administration (FDA).

• ABA therapy worsens any possible volatility in children and makes them unable to handle stimuli, causing more and more unpredictable meltdowns.

• Behavior Technicians/Analysts/Therapists certified by BACB do not have any training. They are typically hired with only a GED or diploma, no college, and get no formal training of any kind. They are then encouraged to directly harm children and lie to parents about it.

Your child’s ABA does not have to tick all of these boxes to be abusive. If even one of these applies to the care your children are getting (and if they are in ABA, at least one of them does) they are enrolled in an abusive program that will traumatize them.