Intact America Proposes Adding Circumcision and Genital Cutting to List of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)

Press release here. Excerpt:

'Intact America announces the launch of AdverseChildhoodExperiences.net, a new website designed to encourage researchers and public health agencies to include child genital cutting in the standard ACEs questionnaire. Together with the simultaneous release of an auto-scoring ACEs quiz mobile app (in Android and iOS), this new tool expands resources available for practitioners who treat victims of childhood trauma.

This initiative was inspired when Dan Bollinger, an independent men’s issues researcher, and Georganne Chapin, Executive Director of Intact America, separately observed that the widely deployed and reputable ACEs 10-item questionnaire included a question about sexual abuse but excluded forcible genital cutting. Subsequently, they collaborated on the website and app, and have published a white paper titled "Child Genital Cutting as an Adverse Childhood Experience" supporting the modification of the standard ACEs questionnaire to include child genital cutting (CGC).

The current ACE questionnaire addresses sexual abuse by asking: “Did an adult or person at least 5 years older than you ever: Touch or fondle you or have you touch their body in a sexual way? Or attempt or actually have oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you?” Chapin and Bollinger propose adding “…or surgically alter your genitals or circumcise you at birth or later?”'