The Controversy Around ABA

There is a lot of controversy around a therapy called ABA. This mainly comes from those in the autistic community. There are other scenarios where ABA is used where people are crying out for those interventions. But in the autistic community, it is seen as a form of conversion therapy. 

 The reason people dislike it, is that it is blamed for being punitive and controlling in a way where identity and idiosyncrasies are not accepted. For example, ABA is famous for the saying "quiet hands," where students are expected hand flapping. However, advocates argue, this is not socially relevant for them because it is actually a self-regulation strategy. Just because it might be uncomfortable for others, doesn't make it wrong. 

 

 There is a misconception around ABA, that it is jsut for kids with autism. This is actually just an applied arm of ABA. There are many other settings where ABA is used without any controversy at all and has been proven to be effective. 

Many people in the ABA world say that the reputation is being ruined by a smaller body of peoplewithout qualifications who are not appropriately regulated and are in fact doing harm with ABA. This is not true ABA. Working with the ethical guidelines put out by the international board states that all ABA must be licenced, regulated and that the therapy is person cantered. A comparison was made to other professional fields. A few bad doctors doesn't make us question the whole field of medicine. 

Furthermore, things have come a long way since the 1960s. It is true that back then, some more negative methods were used punishment based procedures that today would make us wince. However, an analogy was presented that resonted with me – within the field of psychiatry, lobotomies were performed on people. We reject this practice today and yet we don't reject psychiatry as a whole. We understand that it has matured from where it was.

 

One very interesting development in New Zealand is the fact that we no longer can formally train to become an ABA therapist. There has been disccusion about the fact that ABA as we know it today is actually built from a Western scientific bias (another one of its criticisms). ABA researchers in New Zealand are asking the question, 'how do we make things more culturally responsive and reflective and less western centric?' They see this as an opportunity to develop our own standards and programs that are more bicultural.

 

A positive portrayal of ABA is that it aims to give people the skills to try and work with the world and teach the necessary skills that will improve quality of life, their autonomy, dignity and adaptive behaviour. We don't think of teaching skills in a regular class as controlling. But it's true that behaviour change professionals need to be held to a higher standard. 

 

The cool thing about ABA is that you never blame the person. It's always seeking to understand what environmental factors are at play that are causing certain behaviours. The issue comes where we as therapists or educators try to define what is appropriate behaviour. This process needs to be defined by the clients, with the support of their families as much as possible.