How often were you traumatized? Reconceptualizing adverse childhood experiences for sexual and gender minorities

The Relationship Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Utilization of Different HIV Testing Strategies Among Young Men Who Have Sex with Men in Texas

“…Data from this paper come from a larger, multistage project called [BLINDED] focused on understanding childhood adversity, resilience, and health in sexual and gender minority people living in South Texas, primarily in living in [BLINDED] County. [ 23 – 25 , 39 , 40 ] [BLINDED] is grounded in the principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR) [ 41 , 42 ] incorporating input from a community advisory board (CAB) regarding all aspects of the study. We used a multimodal recruitment strategy that included distribution of palm cards containing brief study information, inclusion criteria, and a link to an online survey, as well as a QR code.…”

“…In addition, individuals with greater ACEs exposure also have greater HIV risk profiles [ 19 , 20 ]. The body of research on the topic shows that sexual minority (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer) adults, including MSM [ 15 ] have greater overall ACEs exposure, [ 21 , 22 ] are more likely to report specific ACEs compared to heterosexuals, [ 18 , 23 , 24 ] and report frequent exposure to ACEs [ 25 ], all of which are linked to increased HIV risk behavior. [ 26 – 28 ].…”

Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth’s Experiences of Gender-Related Adversity

“…Non-gender-related adversities comprised four themes corresponding to the four factors of the Expanded ACEs Scale (Karatekin & Hill, 2019): (1) child maltreatment, (2) family dysfunction, (3) community dysfunction, and (4) peer/sibling dysfunction and property victimization. Such adversities are increasingly well documented among TGD people (for examples, see Bond et al, 2021;Craig et al, 2020;Schnarrs et al, 2019) and fall beyond the primary aim of our paper. As such, these findings are detailed extensively (e.g., themes, subthemes, quotes) in Table 4.…”

“…For example, a measure including community-level ACEs (e.g., community violence, foster care involvement) better identified inequities in adversity exposure across several demographic characteristics (e.g., race, income) than the original measure (Cronholm et al, 2015). Likewise, a modified scale measuring ACE frequency outperformed the traditional dichotomous scale (i.e., asking whether respondents experienced a given ACE) in predicting mental health outcomes for a large LGB and TGD sample (Bond et al, 2021). Taken together, these findings suggest that a more nuanced ACE framework might be more appropriate for minoritized groups (i.e., people who are placed into a "minority" status reflecting historical and structural marginalization, rather than statistical underrepresentation; Benitez, 2010;Sotto-Santiago, 2019).…”

Trauma-informed forensic mental health assessment: Practical implications, ethical tensions, and alignment with therapeutic jurisprudence principles.

“…The research on ACEs among CJI individuals has provided important data that point to the profound consequences of early life adversity; however, as a stand-alone measure of trauma exposure, the original ACE questionnaire has limitations (Lacey & Minnis, 2020). For example, the ACE Questionnaire fails to account for the frequency, severity, or duration of potentially traumatic events (Bond et al, 2021; Mendel et al, 2021) and does not factor in protective influences that may promote childhood resilience (Ellis & Dietz, 2017), and could potentially moderate the effects of adversity on biopsychosocial outcomes over the life span (Finkelhor, 2018; Goldenson et al, 2020). Finally, ACEs have been critiqued for being limited in scope and examining only the household and family units and missing other potentially traumatizing factors outside the home such as sexual and dating violence (Koita et al, 2018; Pepler et al, 2006), and community violence (Baskin & Sommers, 2014; Lacey & Minnis, 2020).…”