ABA, Conversion, and Welfare Violence: Forced Neurotypical Identity Work as Structural Violence

The ethical critique of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and conversion therapies has, in recent years, led to a fundamental reassessment of institutional interventions into legitimate forms of human existence. Increasingly, the central question is no longer the legitimacy of particular methods, but the legitimacy of interventions whose aim is to adapt a minority to the identity norms of a societal majority. The present paper extends this debate to modern welfare systems. It advances the thesis that the same underlying mechanism is also found within welfare-state institutions whenever material existence is made contingent upon the continuous reproduction of neurotypical behavioural, communicative, and work-related norms. To describe this mechanism, the paper introduces the concept of Forced Identity Work, distinguishing it as an institutional mechanism from masking as an individual psychological coping strategy. While masking describes the response of neurodivergent people to social pressures to conform, Forced Identity Work refers to the institutional structure that produces this pressure in the first place. On this basis, the paper develops the concept of Welfare Violence. It refers to a form of structural violence in which access to material existence, social participation, and social security is made contingent upon the continuous production of a socially expected neurotypical identity. The paper brings together insights from the critique of ABA, the debate on conversion therapies, research on masking, and the international literature on welfare conditionality, reconstructing their shared normative core. Finally, the paper argues that Welfare Violence cannot be understood solely as a matter of social policy or administrative law. Rather, it constitutes a human rights issue and a form of institutional violence whose harmful health consequences for neurodivergent people must, in light of current scientific knowledge, be regarded as foreseeable. The paper thereby proposes a new theoretical framework for analysing processes of state-led normalization directed at neurodivergent minorities.