About 20 years ago, I was the victim of clerical sexual abuse. This fact has been a recurrent theme within much of my writing on this site, and I don't suspect that will change; it is difficult, if impossible, to abandon the effects of that kind of abuse, no matter how much one might desire to. The result of the importance this event has had on my life, is that I have had a long time to consider the abuse, and my relation to it, as well as my feelings regarding those who commit abuse. In this contemplation, I continually return to a question that invades my thoughts every chance I allow it to: How could you? Not to my rapist, I know how little he must have cared about me, and anyone else he very likely hurt in the decades he was an actively practicing priest, rather, I want to know how those who have experienced childhood sexual abuse can be perpetrators themselves. It is a pervasive trope within the zeitgeist of the United States that those who have been sexually abused end up becoming sexual abusers themselves. Although it should be known that the vast majority of those who are victimized do not go on to victimize people later in life (Baril, 2012), it is a clear and distinct trend of those who do abuse children of having been abused themselves (Jaspersen, et al., 2009; Glasser, et al., 2001; Krahé, et al., 2023; Thornberry & Henry, 2013). The reasons underlying the purpose behind victims going on to victimize is incredibly complex and multifaceted, so I won't go into substantial depth on any singular potential cause, but rather provide an overview for some of the explanations that have been suggested to account for this trend. More than that, however, this document is something of a scream into the void. I am not producing new knowledge, but rather forming an aggregate of knowledge for my own selfish purposes, and whatever benefit you derive from this, if any, is secondary in my mind. I am angry, and in my anger I must understand. If you wish to understand also, you may read and learn alongside me.
The paper Intergenerational Continuity in Maltreatment by Terence Thornberry and Kimberly Henry explores a key consideration in abuse: intergenerational mistreatment and trauma. In their paper, Thornberry and Henry (2013) found a clear and distinct pattern of abuse, particularly abuse in adolescence. In interviewing parents who have victimized their children (although not necessarily sexually), it was found that there was a substantial correlation between those that were abused in their adolescence and those who ultimately went on to abuse others in the future, and a much more modest correlation with regard to those who were just abused as children (Thornberry & Henry, 2013). What this could suggest is that there is a familial component to abuse, i.e., if one is abused by a parent, particularly at an age under which that abuse might be better understood, the probability of ultimately becoming an abuser increases. Although this is speculative on my part, this suggests that in a sense, the victimization of these individual's children is a form of revenge-by-proxy, wherein they view the abuse of their children as an act of vengeance, or perhaps entitlement, from their parents. Since they were hurt by their parents, perhaps they view it as unjust, or unfair, for their children to avoid this abuse. I believe this as opposed to an alternative belief that they abuse because abuse is all they know due to the prevalence of future abuse increasing if the abuse occurred in adolesence; a period in time in which the child has developed to the point of being able to understand that their parents are not the ultimate sources of goodness and morality. If these rates of vicimtization were equal or greater for those who were abused as children, I would be more inclined to believe this view, as there would be a clear logical path from life-long abuse to abuse being all that is known by the abused. Instead, the abuse occuring during a period of cognizance suggests that the abuse is not a function of childhood conditioning, but instead of conscious or unconscious motivation against past parental action. Once again, everything past the explicit description of the contents of the study itself are pure speculation, and should be taken lightly, however, I can't help but speculate in the face of the unknown if the alternative is to accept that some people are evil without cause. Still, perhaps the cause cannot be found in parents, but in a particular gender.
In the paper titled "Cycle of Child Sexual Abuse: Links Between Being a Victim and Becoming a Perpetrator", by Glasser, et al. (2001), 843 individuals within a therapeutic program had their case notes retroactively evaluated for their experience of sexual assault as well as their history of perpetrating this assault. In this study, the researchers found that very few female victims went on to be perpetrators of sexual assault, whereas 35% of males who were victims did ultimately go on to perpetrate sexual assault. What this suggests, as the researchers themselves stated, women were far less likely to commit sexual abuse following their own experience of sexual assault than men, particularly as compared to men who were victimized by women. Although I may be inclined to believe this interpretation of the study, I believe there are some clear flaws in the methodology of this study that put its conclusions into question, as well as later contradictory evidence suggesting that the study might not report what it seems. First and foremost, the study was grossly overrepresented by men, with 747 compared to only 96 women, and of those 96 women, only one was described as being a perpetrator of sexual violence/assault. What this shows is a clear potential for sampling bias for a number of reasons: 1) there are remarkably few women within the study, and remarkably few of those women who were perpetrators. 2) Every single individual within the study was attending the same forensic psychology center, and thus they were not randomly sampled, which is a substantial sampling error. 3) As these are based off of case notes, rather than direct interview, or victim reports, there is a substantial risk for bias on the part of the clinicians who took the notes, and there does not seem to be a means of preventing this bias from affecting the results of the study. Furthermore, another far more recent study by Krahé, et al. (2023) disputes the findings of the paper by finding no correlation between gender and both revictimization as well as future perpetration. Although women were far more likely to be victimized (60.9% of participants as compared to 39.2% for men), and were less likely to be perpetrators (10.3% as compared to 18.8%), the actual rates of victimization leading to perpetration between men and women were roughly equal (Krahé, et al., 2023). Therefore, I see no reason to suggest that men are uniquely vulnerable to becoming perpetrators if they are themselves victims. But maybe in this search for why people who commit sexual assault are more likely to have themselves been victims, I failed to consider that sexual assault is not unique.
In the paper Sexual Victimization in the History of Sexual Abusers: A Review by Hanson and Slater (1988), the the rate and history of sexual abuse and other forms of abuse were assessed as compared to the rates of future perpetration. In this study, the researchers found that other forms of abuse and trauma also incurred future perpetration in similar rates to sexual abuse. What this might suggest is that there is some faculty to the experience of being abused or experiencing trauma that causes one to recreate that trauma in others, and that sexual abuse is not substantially different than other forms of abuse in respect to future perpetration. There is a problem with this conclusion, however, a problem not directly related to the paper itself: it doesn't answer why perpetrators were often victims. Instead, it suggests that those who abuse people in any form were likely themselves abused, so I am left without a satisfying answer. As I had said at the start of this post, I am not doing this to help anyone but myself. I want to know why that bastard hurt me, and I want to know how people who have been hurt can do so much harm.
When I imagine myself as a child, being hovered over by the looming figure of my abuser, I see every single other child who was harmed by an adult with too much power. Each time a child is assaulted by an adult, that adult decided that their transitory desires superseded the wellbeing of that child, but more than that, they were allowed to commit this assault because of the power they held over the child. I am not suggesting that the power is what unilaterally causes rapists to rape, but instead, it is this power differential that facilitates the assault itself. Thus, assault is not just an adult taking advantage of a child, but the exacting of a power imbalance that should never have been allowed to exist. The priest that hurt me should never have had the authority to take me out of CCD and bring me into his office. Someone should have stopped him. Why didn't anyone stop him? Power does not exist because those in power have a divine right to it, but because we have collectively allowed them to be in power. If any single person in the chain that led me from the CCD classroom to his office had chosen to defy his power, I would not have been raped. If the Catholic Church had not been granted the authority that it has over billions of people, perhaps the priest would never have had the opportunity in the first place. But this doesn't answer the question I keep returning to: how can someone who went through what I did decide to inflict that upon another child? How can they remember all the anguish they experienced and choose to inflict that upon another innocent child? Is it revenge against their abuser? Their gender? Nothing? I don't know. It eats me up inside that I don't know. Every single day I am tormented by the selfishness of a single man, and I know that there are thousands, if not millions, of other people who are now creating those nightmares in millions of children's lives despite living a nightmare of their own. How could they do it? If one of you is reading this: How could you do it?
Jespersen, A. F., Lalumière, M. L., & Seto, M. C. (2009). Sexual abuse history among adult sex offenders and non-sex offenders: a meta-analysis. Child abuse & neglect, 33(3), 179–192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2008.07.004
Glasser, M., Kolvin, I., Campbell, D., Glasser, A., Leitch, I., & Farrelly, S. (2001). Cycle of child sexual abuse: Links between being a victim and becoming a perpetrator. British Journal of Psychiatry, 179(6), 482–494. doi:10.1192/bjp.179.6.482
Lambie, I., Seymour, F., Lee, A., & Adams, P. (2002). Resiliency in the victim-offender cycle in male sexual abuse. Sexual abuse : a journal of research and treatment, 14(1), 31–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/107906320201400103
Thornberry, T. P., & Henry, K. L. (2013). Intergenerational continuity in maltreatment. Journal of abnormal child psychology, 41(4), 555–569. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-012-9697-5
Krahé, B., Schuster, I., & Tomaszewska, P. (2023). Pathways from childhood sexual abuse to sexual aggression victimization and perpetration in adolescence and young adulthood: a three-wave longitudinal study. European journal of psychotraumatology, 14(2), 2263321. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008066.2023.2263321
Hanson, R. K., & Slater, S. (1988). Sexual Victimization in the History of Sexual Abusers: A Review. Annals of Sex Research, 1(4), 485-499. https://doi.org/10.1177/107906328800100402
Baril, K. (2012). Sexual abuse in the childhood of perpetrators [Fact sheet]. Institut national de santé publique du Québec.
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