Learning From Violent Pasts and Presents�A Future Where We Don’t Hate Children
Ryan Collis OCT BA BScH BEd BScH MA
PhD Student
Faculty of Education, York University
A Note on Language
https://www.patreon.com/posts/politically-47007907
The purpose of this paper is to challenge the traditional way classroom teachers interact with their autistic students. Much of the current best practice assumes that Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) is an evidence-based approach and should be used with autistic pupils.
Provincial regulations, such as in Ontario where the Ministry of Education’s Policy/Program Memorandum No. 140 (PPM 140) states that programs for autistic students “must incorporate relevant ABA methods, where appropriate” (Government of Ontario, 2007), reinforce this belief that ABA is beneficial (and is, conversely, not harmful).
This paper seeks to suggest that in the interest of liberatory education (Rhodes, 1995; Strimple, 2013) we must disrupt this acceptance of a harmful practice pushed by a powerful and wealthy lobby (Broderick & Roscigno, 2021; Keenan & Dillenburger, 2018; Ontario Autism Coalition, 2019; Summers, 2021; The Ontario Association for Behaviour Analysis, Inc., 2020), and act in the best interests of our students.
Imagine you went out to eat at your usual restaurant.
You place an order for a meal you enjoy and wait to be served.
When the waiter returns, he is carrying a dish whose appearance turns your stomach. The smell makes you want to gag.
You try to explain that this was not what you wanted, but the waiter ignores you and hold a spoon-full to your mouth. You tell them, “No! I don’t want to eat that!” but you are ignored.
You try to move away, but he takes your jaw in his hand and gently pries it open, forcing the spoon inside.
You spit out the chunk of food, though you cannot get the taste and texture out of your mouth. The waiter scoops the expelled food up with the spoon and presents it to you again.
There is no escape. Eventually you give in and, mouthful by mouthful, the plate is cleaned.
The waiter smiles at the successful feeding.
The scenario above is considered a successful way to “teach” picky eaters to eat food to which they are “strongly aversive to the taste” (McHugh, 2019, p. 26).
It is based on the description of the work done for a Masters of Arts in Applied Disability Studies from Brock University, done by a certified ABA practitioner, and that received clearance from the Brock Ethics Review Board. The author describes two ways to make a child eat and prevent any attempt to resist (“escape extinction”): nonremoval of the spoon (NRS) and physical guidance.
NRS “involves continuously holding the nonpreferred food to the child's lips until he or she opens his or her mouth to accept” (McHugh, 2019, p. 7) while “[p]hysical guidance involves gently opening the child's mouth by applying pressure to his or her jaw contingent on refusal” (McHugh, 2019, p. 7).
During NRS it was only considered “correct food presentation when the therapist … left food touching the child's lips if the child vomited, coughed, or gagged while the therapist held food at the child's lips.” (McHugh, 2019, p. 23). If the child did spit out the food the therapist “scooped up expelled food within 3 s of expulsion and placed the food back to the child's lips” (McHugh, 2019, p. 23).
Any attempt to behave inappropriately, such as saying “no” (McHugh, 2019, p. 21), was ignored and it was scored as “incorrect attention” if the therapist “comforted or reprimanded the child within 5 s following” such a reaction (McHugh, 2019, p. 23).�
The general view of autism is one of fear and loathing, and much of this can be traced to the way autism was presented by organizations that had a vested interest in creating this impression in the public consciousness.
The infamous “I am Autism” television advertisement by Autism Speaks (I Am Autism Commercial by Autism Speaks, n.d.) posited autism as a malicious force that was holding parent’s otherwise “normal” child hostage – one who could only be defeated through financial support of their organization.
Researchers focus on the impending doom of the Autism Tsunami (Blaxill et al., 2021), where a failure to prevent the birth of autistics will bankrupt the nation.
Recent research has shown that “perceived and actual ASD knowledge are theoretically distinct constructs” and that “individuals with low ASD knowledge are often not aware of their own ignorance” (McMahon et al., 2020, p. 1). The result: people who think they know about autism most likely don’t, and if they do, they are likely to have a highly negative opinion of both autism and autistics.
ABA’s only purpose is to make those uncomfortable non-autistics feel better by training autistics to hide their differences and to “act normal” – success in ABA is when the child is “indistinguishable from their normal friends” (Lovaas, 1987, p. 8).
Often “treatments” meant to help people overcome “difficult” traits ignore the fact that those traits serve a purpose, such as when a therapist treats the fears of someone with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as irrational – despite them having been exposed to that fear in the first place – such that “[w]hat is not pleasant becomes a symptom and, as such, pathologized.” (Burstow, 2005, p. 432).
This is where ABA comes in. Created by Ole Ivar Lovaas, who was also involved in the creation of the now banned “gay conversion therapy” (Gibson & Douglas, 2018; Rekers & Lovaas, 1974), ABA’s evidentiary base is that he was able to “cure” 47% of his research subject of their autism (Lovaas, 1987).
Enraged bellows at the boy, then a sharp slap in the face. This deliberate, calculated harshness is part of an extraordinary new treatment for mentally crippled children. It is based on the old-fashioned idea that the way to bring up children is to reward them when they're good, punish them when they're bad. At the University of California in Los Angeles, a team of researchers is applying this precept to extreme cases.
- Image and text from a May 1965 Life Magazine article, “Screams, Slaps & Love: A surprising, shocking treatment helps far-gone mental cripples”, archived at https://neurodiversity.com/library_screams_1965.html
The methodology of this ground-breaking study leaves much to be desired: to stop the “little monsters” from biting he would “[s]pank them, and spank them good” to the point that with one patient he “let her know that there was no question in my mind that I was going to kill her if she hit herself once more” (Lovaas, 1974).
His conclusions were challenged at the time: Schopler et al. (1989) wrote that “[i]nconsistencies between [the 1987 paper] and other publications on this project raise further questions. Based on these issues, the most conservative conclusion to be drawn is that it is not possible to determine the effects of this intervention.” (p. 164).
More recent scholarship has found ABA research is riddled with conflicts of interest (Bottema‐Beutel et al., 2021; Bottema-Beutel & Crowley, 2021), ignores adverse affects (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2021; Kupferstein, 2018), and is fundamentally unreliable (Rodgers et al., 2020).
One of the largest individual funders of ABA is the United States Department of Defense (DoD), which spent $1,752,010,979 (USD) over 69 months on ABA (The Department of Defense Comprehensive Autism Care Demonstration Annual Report, 2021). After a review of the cost/benefit the DoD “remain[ed] concerned about these results”, wondered if it was “appropriate characterization of ABA services as a medical treatment” and questioned if “ABA services specifically, [are] providing the most appropriate and/or effective services to our beneficiaries diagnosed with ASD.” (The Department of Defense Comprehensive Autism Care Demonstration Annual Report, 2020, p. 31).
The research described above was done in 2019, by an ABA practitioner, for a Masters of Arts degree in Applied Disability Studies from Brock University, having been deemed ethically appropriate by an Institutional Review Board.
The stated purpose of the experiment was to break the “problematic” monopoly that Occupational Therapists have on provincially funded feeding clinics because “there are no government funded feeding clinics that offer ABA feeding interventions.” (McHugh, 2019, p. 18).
Success in this experiment was not based on if the child was willing to consume the food, but that they complied: “The primary dependent variable was consumption” (McHugh, 2019, p. 21), teaching the child that they cannot say no, and that the only way forward is compliance, regardless of the cost.
This is a critique of a single example of recent “research” in ABA, but it is not an outlier. Autism research has looked at how people respond to non-autistic people acting autistic (Lipson et al., 2020), studied worms, fish, and flies to understand autistic people (Sarah DeWeerdt, 2021), and evaluated the merits of cutting out sections of people’s brain as a cure for disruptive behaviour (Torres et al., 2021).
It is critical that educators understand the problematic nature of ABA procedures: they deny the autistic person autonomy over their body, their movements, their entire existence. Often this is more to make them acceptable to those around them then to benefit them in any way. This unquestioning use of ABA methods is something that needs to be left in the past so that we can work with our autistic students instead of on them.
https://twitter.com/teesy738/status/1308692926747144192
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