Revisiting "The School"

For various reasons, I've found myself thinking about ABA. For the past decade I've tried to avoid the subject, but I think any ABA-critical person gets sucked into arguments about it sometimes.

What particularly strikes me is that when ABA proponents defend ABA, they're always moving the goalposts so that abusive and harmful ABA practices don't "count."

"That doesn't happen anymore."-->"Okay, maybe it happened recently, but not that much."-->"Okay, maybe it happens a lot, but not at good centers." "Maybe it happens a lot, and it's called ABA, but it's not real ABA." Etc.

The summer I spent interning at an ABA school in 2009 had such a big effect on my life. I don't think any experience could shown me more plainly the depth of disrespect and contempt that this world has for disabled people, and the extent to which "helpers" can be confident in doing harm.

I wrote many blog posts processing what I saw at the school. One of my posts--They hate you. Yes, you--was shared around in a few places. I never named the school. In my experience, while lots of people write and talk about their experience seeing abuse in an ABA setting (or working in an abusive ABA setting) they usually don't name the school or center.

I don't know about everyone else but in my case, I didn't want the school to find out I'd written about them because I wanted to use them as a reference. Even though it was an awful place, I didn't have much work experience and wanted to list as many things as possible on a resumé. I was 20/21/22 and always worried I wouldn't be hired. From I'm a Juggling Robot, the brilliant ethnography of ABA therapists by Julia Gruson-Wood, I know that it's pretty common for people who work in autism services to hide their critical opinions about ABA to avoid damaging their professional life. Obviously, I didn't hide my critical opinion altogether, but I did protect the school.

Now I am 35 and don't need to list summer internships on a resumé, so it seems worth saying that "The School" was the New York Center for Autism Charter School in Harlem. When I interned there the school was only 3 years old. Now it has been around for 17 years and they have expanded to two schools.

Every few years, I would go on their website and see who was still working there. It's not possible to see school staff, but I did see that some of the staff moved up to leadership roles--including specific people whose abusive actions I described in my post.

They are still working in the field, they have moved up in their jobs, and they have more kids now. They're doing better than they were then. The school doesn't appear to have any self-advocates on their board. Even if they stopped abusing kids, which I highly doubt, they have never apologized or been held accountable.

Why can't people admit that this isn't over? Why do I feel so nervous as I type this, like I'm still, somehow, going to get in trouble?