"I grew up with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE's) and I turned out fine"

"I grew up with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE's) and I turned out fine"

This is often the response within the discussion around the link between childhood adversity and those children and young people that enter our Young Offenders Institutions (YOI's). So, is that a fair point? 

We have long since had a wealth of knowledge of the childhood experience and how during early developmental stages, abuse or neglect and disrupted attachment with primary carers is bad for children’s health and well-being. We have recently made significant progress in understanding how adversity can cause biological problems for humans as we develop into adolescence and beyond. The findings of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE's) study (Felliti et al, 1998) was ground breaking in the sense that it found a dose response relationship between the level of adversity experienced as a child to lifelong health issues such as hepatitis, depression, high blood pressure and lung cancer among others.

Many dispute the findings or find reasons to ignore the research and point to the fact they too experienced adversity as children but were resilient enough to manage. This in my view seems to affect their understanding of what we were told by the science. It seems to me to be a privilege of sorts and we can find examples in other areas of social issues. The Black Lives Matter movement for instance has returned the US and UK to the question of whether 'White Privilege' is a myth, or a unearned advantage. Many dispute the notion that being white is a privilege due to many white people facing hardship every day, whether disadvantaged or not. However, just because someone faces hardship, stress or life challenges, doesn't mean they cannot be privileged in other areas of social life. 

People can often miss or fail to recognize their advantage because that particular disadvantage or issue is not, or has never been prevalent in their lives. Hence the concept of this being a privilege. An example would be being white and being in prison. This would mean when you walk onto the prison landing for the first time, you don't have to worry about how prisoners or officers will respond to your skin colour. Especially when it is often based on negative past experiences of racial prejudice or discrimination found in Lammy's report 2017. This doesn't negate the fact that you are in prison and have various other issues to worry about, just that skin colour is not one of them. So someone can face hardship and still experience some level of privilege. 

Returning to childhood adversity, the first thing to recognise when it comes to ACE's is that the English ACEs study undertaken by (Bellis et al, 2014) found that almost half (46%) of the adult population in England had at least 1 ACE, while 8% had 4 or more. As in the US, there was a strong relationship between the number of ACEs and poor health outcomes. Interestingly for this blog, individuals with 4 or more ACEs were 3 times more likely to smoke, 7 times more likely to have been involved in violence in the past year and 11 times more likely to have ever been in prison. Of course, if you are raised in poverty, you are more likely to make poor life choices one may suggest, but the science tells us just as much about the environment that buffers the adversity as it does about the adversity itself. After all, as the findings suggest, almost half of the children in England face adversity but do not have poor life outcomes. Also, most children definitely don't come into contact with the Youth Justice System, so it is unlikely to be simply down to adversity. 

Just like White Privilege, being provided with the relational adults that develops regulation via serve and return, or financial stability that reduces socio-economic hardship is often a privilege that many lose sight of when discussing childhood adversity. The science behind the study is that exposure to chronic levels of toxic stress, not positive or tolerable stress, but toxic stress triggers an internal biological reaction. Chronic exposure to stress results in the overreaction of the stress response system, releasing excessive amounts of stress hormones causing internal harm to the child. Therefore, if a child has relational wealth or financial stability or both, they are still likely to face adversity, however their environment in one way or another will mitigate the adversity, making the stress tolerable or at least manageable. This has little to do with choices made by the child or young person and everything to do with relationships, environment and community created by us as adults. 

From 14 years working within the Youth Justice field, I have found that it is often the children and young people that have least amount of relational wealth, or what I believe to be relational poverty while simultaneously experiencing financial instability that often experience most ACE's. Importantly, when this is coupled with their identity being significantly shaped by family members or close relationships and community members being involved in deviant behaviour, criminality and substance misuse, it increases their likelihood of serious and prolific offending. In short, the privilege that many overlook, as with white privilege is that those least likely to develop resilience through relationships to manage adversity are the exact same children that experiences the most adverse environments. 

Therefore, they often don't lack resilience, they lack the platform that nurtures and develops the essence of where resilience comes from, which is caring nurturing adult relationships. The following window visually explains the concept of how inequality plays a role and why we need to rethink the billions we pour into our prison system every year. Preventing the developmental harm and the creation of criminal identities being constructed in the first place will always be more effective than trying to change identities during adolescence or adulthood. Yet, here we are after 10 years of cutting services aimed at doing so and building 10,000 more prison beds when the evidence is overwhelming that this is ineffective at reducing crime over all, as outlined by the Prison Reform Trust 2019. 

So, ACE's in my professional and personal (see below) experience leave children at risk of youth crime. However, when it comes to most children we incarcerate, it is often alongside being exposed to criminal relationships which constructs the child's identity, adding to the experience of adversity. According to a 2016 Ministry of Justice report, 25% of the adult prison population had experienced Local Authority care and 42% had been excluded from school highlighting services knew who they were, way before they became adult prisoners. One thing this clearly demonstrates is that if we create relationally supportive environments for all children to help them navigate childhood adversity, we will reduce crime whilst creating safer communities for them, breaking the cycle of abuse. It is not an excuse for the behaviour of prisoners, just context of the root causes of what sits behind the behaviour of those we incarcerate, particularly young people. Before we blame, shame or further marginsalise and withdraw opportunity through criminal record checks (DBS), let us remember, we should never assume that we have walked another person's walk, even if our own path was challenging. 

My views and experiences have been shaped by my own personal journey from prisoner to Youth Justice Specialist and do not represent my employer in anyway. Both my book 'Your Honor Can I Tell You My Story' and my Tedx talk 'How Love Defeats Adversity' explain how my lens and perspective was constructed throughout my journey.

Andi Brierley

Lived Experienced Youth Justice Specialist