Invited commentaries on: Cycle of child sexual abuse: Links between being a victim and becoming a perpetrator

Abstract

It is a natural human instinct to seek explanations for the seemingly senseless cruelties that humans inflict on one another, particularly on the young and innocent. However, the recent outcry about paedophiles in the UK demonstrates that there is little public desire to understand or explain such behaviour at present. People who abuse children are viewed as beyond comprehension or redemption – they are ‘wicked, evil and perverted’ and should be ‘locked away’ forever. In the current climate, the paper by Glasser et al is a brave attempt to study the perpetrators of child sexual abuse and look for causal explanations for such behaviour. Many of us would shy away from such a topic or find it difficult to be dispassionate about these perpetrators. The authors propose that they have discovered “links between being a victim and becoming a perpetrator”. Indeed, a casual reading of this paper or a glance at the abstract might seem to indicate that children who are sexually abused are, in turn, likely to become sexual abusers of children in adulthood – what the authors refer to as “the cycle of child sexual abuse”. But blaming the victim is a risky business and this so-called ‘link’ may lead to further stigmatisation and distress for individuals who have been abused in childhood. Therefore, before reaching this conclusion, we should examine carefully the problems associated with establishing causality from the data presented in this paper.