Adversity consists of a wide range of experiences or conditions that threaten the health and well-being of children, families, and communities. Like resilience, adversity occurs across all levels of the social-ecological model. The understanding of adversity and its impacts on health and well-being continue to grow.
The acronym ‘ACE’ can be defined in four primary ways
Adverse Childhood Experiences: Impact individual & interpersonal conditions. Examples include parental mental illness, substance abuse, interpersonal violence, homelessness, incarceration, divorce, death, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, caregiver separation, and medical crisis.- Adverse Community Experiences: Impact population conditions. Examples include poverty, structural racism, community disinvestment, police violence, lack of affordable housing, lack of opportunity and economic mobility, discrimination, disconnected relationships, unemployment, and deteriorating built environments.
- Adverse Climate Experiences: Impact community conditions. Examples include COVID-19, climate change, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, environmental injustice, and pollution.
- Atrocious Cultural Experiences: Impact macro and socio-historical conditions. Examples include slavery, genocide, colonization, segregation, forced family separation, removal of property, and other harmful social norms such as low sense of political and social efficacy
and mistrust.
Adversity consists of a wide range of experiences or conditions that threaten
the health and well-being of children, families, and communities. Everyone is at risk for adversity. Historical, social, environmental and economic environments can contribute to inequities in exposure to adverse childhood experiences.12 Without the presence of protective factors and resilience strategies, both individual and multiple ACEs contribute to chronic stress and trauma for both individuals and communities across generations.
