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The contemporary Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) movement grew out of the ACE Study (Felitti et al., 1998) initiated by Drs Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda around 19951. As my article published in Attachment, June 2019, showed, the term “adverse childhood experiences” was not coined by Dr Felitti, but was first used by Dr John Bowlby in a lecture given in the spring of 1981 in New York at the invitation of the American Orthopsychiatric Association. It was then published in their journal in October 1982. When I wrote to Dr Felitti in November 2020 and pointed this out I received this response: “The term ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences Study’ has indeed caught on around the world, Mr Partridge. When I chose the title around 1995 or 1996, I had no idea that something about the phrase would be so engaging.”2
It appears that Felitti had no prior knowledge of Bowlby's use of the term. He had invented the same term in the light of his empirical observations while working as a paediatrician and specialist in preventive health at the non-profit Kaiser Permanente (KP) health maintenance organisation in San Diego, California.
The origins of the ACE Study lie in observations that the astute and vigilant Felitti made of many of the patients whom he was treating for obesity (there are strong parallels here with Bowlby's intuitive, pre-WWII recognition of a connect between delinquency and maternal deprivation). The connection with childhood experiences of sexual abuse became too numerous to ignore, and then were confirmed by some of his colleagues (see note 1). There was a fortuitous crossing of paths at an obesity conference in 1990 with a staff member, an expert in epidemiology, at the federal public health Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the equivalent of Public Health England). By 1995 this had led to the field research work for the study among some 17,000 patients on the books of Kaiser Permanente (KP). This selected for study the effects of the ten most common