Our Director for the Centre for Child Wellbeing and Protection, Prof Jane Callaghan, will be talking at the Scottish Child Law Centre’s
9th Annual Roundtable Discussion ‘Critical Reflections on the concept of Adverse Childhood Experiences’ in Parliament tonight.
She will argue that, whilst the ACES model has welcome features, like its focus on prevention, and it’s recognition of the impact of trauma and adversity on children’s lives and outcomes, it offers an account that renders adversity as an individual experience, and that medicalises that experience. In doing so, it fails to attend to the social and political context that produces such adversity. This is present both in the original ACES model, and in the ‘pair of aces’ model that reduces the sociopolitical context to ‘adverse community experiences’.
She considers the implications of this model for our understanding of gender based violence, and argues that as a model it relies on a passive model of childhood that is hostile to a children’s rights based understanding of violence and adversity.
Prof Callaghan’s slides for today’s presentation can be downloaded here: