Teaching Autistic Children Self-Protection Skills for Bullying Situations

Did you know that children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may be more likely to be bullied compared to children with an intellectual disability or neurotypical children (Zeedyk et al., 2014)? Fallon et al. (2025) explored teaching 5 autistic children self-protection skills for two types of bullying (threats and unkind remarks) using behavioral skills training (BST) and textual prompts. Keep reading for a summary of their work. 

Self-Protection Skills, BST, and Textual Prompts

In this study, examples of self-protection skills were walking away and reporting to an adult, statement of disapproval, and walk away and occupy self. During BST trials, the experimenter would describe the bullying situation and the target skill, then explain why this skill is appropriate for this situation. Next, one experimenter would role play as the victim of bullying and the other experimenter as the bully. After each role-play, the experimenter would ask the child if they thought the “victim’s” response was correct or incorrect. If the child was correct, the experimenter described why (e.g., “you’re right, I did get it right. I walked out to the hallway and told an adult what happened when [the bully] said they would hurt me”. If the child was incorrect, the experimenter would describe the correct performance of the self-protection skill (e.g., “this situation was dangerous because they said they were going to punch me. I should have walked away and told an adult what happened”). 

Next, one experimenter would become “the bully” by modifying their appearance (e.g., put on a hat and sunglasses) and the child would play the “victim”. When the child would correctly perform the skill, the experimenter would remove their costume and provide descriptive praise for the skill. If the child responded incorrectly, the experimenter would silently hold up a textual prompt until the child performed the target skill. 

What did they find?

All five of the children learned the situation-specific self-protection skills and showed improvements compared to baseline. However, the authors emphasized the following limitations in their study

• The BST approach required modifications for some children to fully eliminate discrimination errors. That is to say, the experimenters still observed instances of some children using the incorrect response to the type of “bullying” experienced (e.g., responding with disapproval instead of seeking the help of an adult after a physical threat of violence).

• A review of safety skills instruction across dangerous situations (e.g., firearm safety, abduction prevention, sexual abuse prevention (Baruni & Miltenberger, 2022)) concluded that in-situ assessments are the only valid method to achieve generalization in the natural environment. Fallon et al. (2025) did not perform in situ assessments due to concerns about maintaining trust and safety between the children and the experimenters. 

Did you find this summary useful? We encourage you to read the full article for free using the link here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jaba.2938. Are you a parent or teacher who is interested in learning more about topics like this? Become a member of QcABA to see more article summaries and blog posts on various topics of Applied Behaviour Analysis every month.

References

Baruni, R. R., & Miltenberger, R. G. (2022). Teaching safety skills to children: A discussion of critical features and practice recommendations. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 15(3), 938–950. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-021-00667-4

Fallon, M. J., Luczynski, K. C., Rodriguez, N. M., Felty, C., & Rahaman, J. A. (2025). A preliminary analysis of teaching children with autism spectrum disorder self-protection skills for bullying situations. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 58(2), 287–302. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.2938

Zeedyk, S. M., Rodriguez, G., Tipton, L. A., Baker, B. L., & Blacher, J. (2014). Bullying of youth with autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, or typical development: Victim and parent perspectives. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 8(9),1173–1183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2014.06.001