The Shooting of Charles Kinsey
I was a freshly certified BCaBA at FABA for the first time in 2016 when I learned that a behavior technician, named Charles Kinsey, had been shot while protecting a client who had eloped from a group home and had subsequently sat down in the street to play with a toy truck. Officers, searching for an armed, suicidal man, heard Charles Kinsey say,
"All he has is a toy truck. A toy truck. I am a behavior therapist at a group home"
He shot Charles in the leg; his client was physically unhurt.
At FABA that year, they gave Charles a special award and a standing ovation. I stood and cheered in the crowded Fort Lauderdale hotel lobby while a representative of some kind accepted the prize on Charles's behalf as he was convalescing in the hospital.
Part of me felt proud to be in a profession where people show up with that level of courage. Another part of me wondered why we were celebrating that courage instead of interrogating the system that made it necessary.
Working in an ABA Clinic is Exhausting
Around the same time, our BCBA and founder showed up at our clinic carrying balloons shaped like the number "13." We'd recently opened our 13th clinic. She gladly walked around the clinic, announcing to everyone working the floor that day that we'd been able to expand rapidly, could provide high-quality services to kids in more areas, and develop the dissemination of Applied Behavior Analysis to even more families.
A lot of us felt a particular kind of way about those balloons - $13 was the company's hard cap for RBTs at the time in terms of hourly wage. If you wanted more, you'd have to go to school, which, for all of us, meant taking out a student loan. Most of us lived paycheck to paycheck, and the idea of taking on any kind of debt was terrifying. Some of us had worked at the company for half a decade or more, and still weren't sure if we could make ABA a career. I got my BCaBA certification with the mindset that it was a small investment, and I could back out if I had to.
There's a reason for this. Life in an ABA center, on the floor, is vastly different from the glossy, corporate presentation you might experience during a clinic tour or on a company's website. There is daily stress and trauma associated with this job, like any job; however, even the iron-willed and experienced can find it challenging. My BCBA at the time broke down, telling me about how she'd witnessed two of her friends die in Iraq due to mortar fire. Something about work that day triggered her; she had a brief moment of real human pain, and then continued. We all try to leave whatever we're carrying at the door before starting therapy; for some, those things are more challenging to put down than others.
The Mask We Wear to Work
During clinic tours, our founder would prep us in advance and discipline behavior techs who did not present a sufficiently charming image to visiting investors, researchers, auditors, or prospective families. I quickly learned to run maintenance targets when unfamiliar faces were in the building and to hype up my client up for the show. Shamefully, I learned to take recess breaks with clients whose behavior I felt was more unpredictable. I was terrified of losing this job.
There is also the strange slurry of banality and chaos each day in an ABA clinic. Sometimes, this makes the job really exciting - and truthfully, I say this is one of the most rewarding aspects of the profession. There is repetition and consistency, but with any human-facing work, people change, they learn new things, they show up each day in surprising and joy-inspiring ways. However, there are also sudden schedule changes. At first, exciting, but over time, just another grueling aspect of the job. Once you're a veteran (hopefully), companies often won't hesitate to assign you to new clients fairly suddenly. Your hours become unpredictable. You might wake up to an 8:00 - 3:00 shift, only to find out at 2:30 that it's now an 8:00 - 6:00 shift, with no lunch break (just eat at the scheduled group snack with your client).
Be grateful - that's good hours! We chose you for this because you're a rockstar. You're great at this, and we think you're up for this challenge. Hey, so and so called out - can you cover for them so we can ensure continuity of care and prevent Mom from having to lose hours at work?
It's a double bind: setting boundaries in ABA is often framed as hurting client progress or harming a family. Many companies have learned to use this kind of mixture of faux corporate-kindness, we're-a-family ethos alongside Millennial Management strategies to replace authentic workplace camaraderie with a commodified, virulent strain of codependence that puts the company's mission first and the people on some tertiary or quaternary rung. But hey, at least the people are on the ladder!
Loyalty is a one-way street at these organizations.
Letting the Mask Slip
This is not an extraordinary situation for direct care professionals in ABA. On my first day in the field, my shadow technician, sporting a black eye from an errant clicker, told me her experience of repeated sexual harassment at her last company. She'd transitioned to the clinic because in-home work was just too dangerous as a woman, and here, with one eye swollen shut, she felt safer. She went on to serve seven more years at the company as head of its private school program.
These experiences are as routine as DTT or NET. They are the unadvertised, suppressed experience of many professionals entering the field, and a tremendous component of RBT burnout that goes underreported. It is understandable, to a degree, how challenging this problem must be to address at the systems level. The nature of the work is dangerous; companies cannot be held accountable for the behavior of salacious parents.
One step companies can take, however, is to stop pretending that the opportunity to make a difference in a child's life somehow excuses them from providing a living wage for RBTs. There are more and more RBTs joining the field every year - but what these numbers don't show (source: BACB, data as of December 2025) is the number of RBTs who quit out of exhaustion, fear, and financial precarity.
The work is dangerous, skilled, exhausting, and essential, yet the people doing it are paid poverty wages and expected to absorb limitless risk with a smile.
And that arrangement only survives because workers have been conditioned to believe that sacrifice is part of the job.
That's the lie, though - implicitly, explicitly, we've been told that advocating for ourselves steals from client care. Recent research has found the opposite. In fact, the term "vocational awe" or "morally-coded" workplace is a well-studied phenomenon that refers to
Our working conditions are the clients' learning conditions
Studies have repeatedly found that union density leads to better pay, benefits, and access to healthcare. Hospital workers who have unionized report lower rates of post-traumatic stress. Union workers in healthcare have better access to healthcare than unorganized workers (though you'd imagine all healthcare workers should, well, have access to healthcare).
No company is going to come save us - but we, together, have the collective power to change the field. If we can run functional analyses, we can form an organizing committee. If we can talk to parents about a child's rougher session, we can talk to our coworkers about what changes they want to see at work. If we can graph a scatterplot, we can map our workplace and manage a get-out-the-vote campaign.
If we want to see this field survive, we have to make it survivable. We can make that happen, but only if we organize.
Form an Organizing Committee Today
Join us on Discord, to connect with your coworkers, and skill up. Our working conditions might be criminal, but it's not a crime to want more.
