It’s Complicated: Teaching Relationship Safety That Reflects Real Life

In this session, Patricia Lund, BCBA, and Carolyn Broner, BCBA, examine why traditional rule-based safety programs fall short for individuals with autism and intellectual and developmental disabilities, and what a developmentally grounded, relationship-based alternative looks like across the lifespan. Broner opens with early childhood, reviewing the shared content model behind most child safety curricula (body ownership, touch and secret discrimination, refusal, disclosure) and the evidence base, including a Cochrane review of 24 trials. She identifies core limitations: prevention burden placed on the child, the assumption that danger is recognizable, binary safe/unsafe sorting, rules taught without developmental prerequisites, and no demonstrated abuse prevention. She then presents a Notice-Interpret-Respond framework built on teachable interoception, a spectrum-based model of felt safety, emotional safety language for private events, flexible response repertoires (pause, scan, decide), and the BCBA's role across universal, family, and child-directed tiers. Lund extends the discussion to teens and adults, arguing that sex education is abuse prevention: it builds disclosure language, models of healthy relationships, decision-making skills, and sexual self-esteem. She reviews relevant BACB ethics codes, walks through the SSKAAT-R and the free TALK-SC assessments, and covers consent procedures, guardian review, private settings, trauma effects on results, the knowledge-versus-behavior distinction, and using scores to program goals rather than restrict relationships.

1. 1Learning Objectives
2. 2By the end of this CEU, participants will be able to:
3. 3Identify at least two limitations of existing relationship safety frameworks, including the Circles program, as they apply to individuals with IDD.
4. 4Explain why a binary safe/unsafe categorization of relationships may be insufficient for abuse prevention in individuals with IDD.
5. 5Describe the key components of a relationship-based approach to safety skills training that reflects the actual perpetrator population.