Imagine for a moment that you have a seven-year-old son who broke his leg falling off a trampoline a little while ago.
As far as your doctor can tell, the fracture healed just fine, but your son is continuing to limp. Reasonably, the doctor thinks that physical therapy would be good for your son.
You sign your son up for therapy. It's done when you're not in the room on the therapist's request. The therapist says that having you in the room would be too distracting for your son.
After a couple of months of this therapy, you notice something odd. Your son's limp is gone in public, but gets worse at home. Not only that, but he will outright lie if anyone asks him about his previous injury. "It was only a pulled muscle," he says. "It didn't hurt that much." "It's completely better now." "I was never on a trampoline." You also notice that when he's in public, he never seems physically uncomfortable, but at home he frequently needs to ice his injury.
After asking your son some very pointed questions, you learn that his "physical therapy" hasn't been working on making his leg stronger at all. The therapist had been teaching your son how to hide the limp, and rewarding him with candy for hiding the limp well. They were also coaching him on how to lie about the injury, because they had realized that you felt embarrassed and guilty that the injury had happened in the first place.
Your son hadn't wanted to lie, but he was denied snacks, bathroom breaks, and water in those long therapy sessions until he promised he would lie on the therapist's command.
The reason why your son was hiding his limp in public but not at home was he feared that other adults would scold him for limping, because the therapist had told him that people don't like children who limp. Home felt safer, so it became the only place your son allowed himself to behave as if he was in pain.
If all this happened, you'd be furious. This entire situation was incredibly abusive! Your son was taught to hide his pain - at his own expense - just to make the adults more comfortable. And to what end? Some other people around him got to swallow a comforting lie that he was doing okay. According to the therapist, that made everything they put your son through worth it.
This is exactly what ABA does. It trains children to hide their own discomfort - and whatever they're doing to manage that discomfort - from other people. For no better reason than to make those people somewhat more comfortable. It's not a child's fault if his autistic traits annoy other people any more than it would be his fault if someone became irritated by seeing him limp.
It amazes me that even though most people wouldn't be okay with a "typical" kid being trained like a dog to hide his discomfort, they continue to subject autistic children to ABA and similar practices. If something's abusive to do to a "typical" child, it's abusive to do to a disabled one. If anything, behaving that way to a disabled child is even crueler.
