Welcome to Lost Anchorage,

Lost Anchorage, where crude investigates the mechanisms of crime and violence in Anchorage,

Alaska.

My name is Cody Liska, and I'll be your host.

Through research and interviews with professionals, law enforcement, and those affected by crime,

I hope to build a better understanding of whether or not Anchorage is in fact becoming more dangerous.

By the end of this series, I hope to create a portrait of crime in our city for better or for worse. You're going to be here. My name is Laura Norton Cruz and I am from Anchorage, grew up here and live here, but my work is

statewide at the Alaska Children's Trust. I direct an initiative called the

Alaska Resilience Initiative and it's focused on reducing child maltreatment, which is abuse and neglect, and

trauma in the way that trauma is passed from generation to generation, and looking at changing the systems that help contribute to trauma.

So we were trying to reduce trauma for children and build resilience and healthy communities.

So today I want to talk to you about adverse childhood experiences,

also known as ACEs, and how it affects children

and how it affects them later in life.

So for someone who might not have a frame of reference for Aces,

what is it and how is it used?

Sure.

So the term Aces comes from a study that was done in the 1990s.

It stands for adverse childhood experiences and what they did in that study with

17,000 patients is they were trying to figure out if adult disease actually had an origin in childhood.

And so they asked these patients about 10 different adversities that happened to them when they were children.

So were they physically or sexually or emotionally

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