Afifi - What are ACEs?

The ten adverse childhood experiences that most people refer to in the original list include both child maltreatment and also household dysfunction. So there is physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, exposure to intimate partner violence as well as parental substance use, parental mental illness, parental divorce, and parental incarceration. So those are the original ten that most people refer to when we hear the term ACEs. 

But the field has developed quite a bit over the past 25 years. So sometimes the term is used inconsistently. And when someone says ACEs, they might be referring to those ten experiences. They might also be referring to other things that could be considered adverse childhood experiences, and sometimes they don’t include all ten of them. So it’s a term that’s used basically inconsistently. And when we think about adverse childhood experiences, of course, it’s not limited to those ten experiences. We could think of 20 or 100 things that we could fit into that category. So it makes the concept of ACEs a little bit challenging.