Investigation And Intervention Studies On Challenging Sexual Behaviors Of Students With Intellectual Disabilities In Special Schools

It was suggested by some studies that challenging sexual behaviors in students with intellectual disabilities and autism not only interfere with the learning of themselves and other peer students, but also influence the teacher's teaching and management of classroom in special schools. Therefore, the teachers are urgent to master some strategies to deal with this kind of challenging sexual behaviors.In this article, which includes two parts, the author studied the performance, function, and intervention strategies of challenging sexual behaviors of students with intellectual disabilities (including autism).In the first part,25 teachers in special schools were interviewed about the performance of challenging sexual behaviors in students with intellectual disabilities and intervention strategies they applied to deal with these behaviors. All the 25 teachers involved in this survey reported that among the 84 students with intellectual disabilities they teach the challenging sexual behaviors were often expressed, and 5 kinds of challenging sexual behaviors were most common:touching the genitals or masturbating publically or in a wrong way, exhibiting body parts like genitals, caressing other persons inappropriately, displaying obscene gestures or movements, and talking obscenely. These challenging behaviors were often appeared in public places of school settings:classrooms, corridors, playground, or bathrooms, etc. Verbal prevention, ignoring, replacement behavior guidance, reinforcing appropriate behaviors, extinction and forfeiture of activities were reported as the strategies most frequently used by teachers to deal with them, but they often don't work very effectively.In the second part, Behavior Functional Assessment and the technique of Positive Behavior Support were used to intervene the challenging sexual behaviors (touching the genitals and masturbating in public) of one student with intellectual disabilities and one student with autism in classroom settings. Through Behavior Functional Assessment, the author found that the behavior of students with intellectual disability has three functions:automatic reinforcement function, positive reinforcement function and negative reinforcement function, and the behavior of students with autism has automatic reinforcement function and negative reinforcement function. Based on the results of Behavior Functional Assessment, techniques of positive behavior support were developed and used to intervene these two students' challenging sexual behaviors, including adjustments of instruction contents and pedagogy before and during teaching and intervention techniques directly aimed at challenging behaviors. Through one-month intervention, the challenging sexual behaviors of two students with intellectual disabilities decreased obviously and effectively.From this study, positive behavior support based on the results of behavior functional assessment is a very effective and efficient intervention technique which can be used to change the challenging sexual behaviors in students with disabilities (including autism), which used a comprehensive intervention strategy mostly from pre-behavior and emphasized the prevention. Meanwhile, in order to enhance the effect of the intervention strategy, teachers need to learn the function of these challenging behaviors in students with intellectual disabilities and know the relation between their teaching and these challenging behaviors, and also their differentiated instruction skill need be improved to meet the diverse needs of students with intellectual disabilities.