Thanks for the reply. You prove my point about the best answer to speech being more speech by your powerful post What is so great about ABA?, This is the exactly the kind of engagement that the system of freedom of expression is all about. Thanks for taking the time to comment here, and for putting up that post on your own blog.

Eoin.

Actually, I will concede to you that banning the ad is not the best way to counter it. And I certainly didn’t intend to infer in my previous comment, that I think ABA should be banned.

I’m just rather fed up with the negative portrayal of autistic children in the media recently. I’m just going to check out the news now, and see how the IAA march in Dublin today went. I expect to find yet again, the story of how awful a burden these children are.

Thanks for the comment, and for the link to your blog; which I really like.

However, let us assume for the moment that I thought your site is horrible, and that your arguments for your son Duncan’s speech and occupational therapy programme depicted the life of children with different regimens as bleak and hopeless. I would not for that reason want to ban it. If we could all ban things simply becuase we thought they were horrible, there would be no speech left. Rather, the best answer to horrible speech is to argue against it. You are eloquent in your views against ABA – the best answer to an ad like that of Irish Autism Action is to argue against it, not to ban it. That way, we can all become aware of the arguments on both sides, and make up our own minds without the coercion towards one side entailed in banning the arguments of the other side.

I’m afraid I don’t know enough about autism, ABA, and so on, to be able to make an informed comment on the substance of your points. But I don’t need that to be able to say that you should have the right to make your point, that IAA should have the right to make theirs, and that you should all be able to debate the merits of your points, without being banned from doing so!

Eoin.

The ad is uses derogatory language, depicts the life of autistic children as bleak and hopeless, unless the ‘glimmer of hope’ the ‘light of learning ‘ of ABA is funded. You are encouraged to ‘Imagine he grew older and started running into walls. And there was nothing you could do.’

ABA is NOT all it’s cracked up to be. Autistic children need extra money to be spent on their education, that much I agree with wholeheartedly. But there is no evidence, in spite of what the ABA action group (IAA) say that this has to be in the form of a behaviourist programme.

There is plenty you can do, my own son has never had a minute of ABA. Instead he has benefited from speech and occupational therapy, and an education system focused on his own needs and interests.

I also object to the line ‘And might stop him being put into care.’ This is the often-used-ploy of ‘pay now, save later’ used by ABA proponents. There is, again, no evidence for this. Are we supposed to think that dealing with autistic children is so awful, that without lots of ABA, they should be put into care?