Hey, autistic person AND registered ABA therapist here, thanks for the non-sourced direct misinformation and fear mongering!
The requirements for being an ABA therapist are actually as follows:
-have a high school diploma
-undergo 40-60 hours of trainings and exams including trainings on human rights and ethical treatment of clients
-pass an 80 question exam on ABA practice, child psychology, and the history of people with disabilities (ABA therapists don’t JUST work with people with autism.)
-acquire multiple certifications on ethical standards and mandated reporting of mistreatment
-have hours and hours of work shadowing under experienced therapists
All before you ever begin to interact with a client!
Yeah, there are obviously people who abuse their power and position to “help” in ways that are actually harmful. However, we receive multiple trainings on abuse of power and power dynamics and how to avoid accidentally harming the people we work with and how to spot it happening with coworkers. With every therapeutic and pharmaceutical profession, there is corruption and harm. That’s an issue that needs to be addressed without calling an entire practice abusive or immoral.
Also, sessions consist of anywhere from 30% to 100% NET or natural enviorment training, which is child led and literally consists of letting the child play or relax while trying to help reinforce them for good behaviors and find teaching opportunities in a natural environment with positive associations. It’s different depending on the child and their needs, but those who don’t respond well to routine or structure are accounted for and sometimes given literally 100% of the reigns for how the session goes. So that 20-40 hours a week? A lot of it is the child playing, with a therapist collecting data on behaviors and occasionally trying to guide the child or redirect problem behaviors.
We do NOT teach anyone not to stim. We try to prevent stims that are actively harmful to the client or those around them by reinforcing replacement behaviors. An example of this is providing a client with biting stim behaviors a chew necklace, or just helping them to figure out other distractions or coping mechanisms rather than biting if the stim is out of stress or other negative emotion. I’m literally autistic and have had to do this for myself, and learning how to regulate negative self-stimulatory behaviors was hard as fuck for me and I still struggle with it as an adult! It sucks! It negatively impacts my life! I wish I’d had some form of skills training before the negative stims were cemented into my brain as a coping mechanism! Things like hand flaps, squishing stim toys, finger tapping, ect. are not targeted behaviors for replacement!
ABA therapists CANNOT teach whatever they want, they CANNOT reinforce harmful tactics, they CANNOT withhold food or water from a client, and while there’s a place for critique of some institutions that practice ABA and even for ABA itself, these sort of claims don’t help improve the practice. They just scare people.