Perpetration of sexual abuse of children

Abstract

This thesis has examined the general topic of child sexual abuse to identify the social characteristics of those who sexually abuse children. Three major perspectives have been identified, the historical perspective, the feminist perspective and the perspective of ritualistic abuse. The historical perspective establishes the long-standing nature of child sexual abuse, the feminist perspective describes how a male dominated patriarchal society has allowed child sexual abuse to continue. The ritualistic abuse perspective reveals an extreme and highly organized form of sexual abuse in the community. According to the psychological explanations of child sexual abuse, the perpetrators are immature and have an "arrested psychosexual development" and strong dependency needs. They suffer loneliness, self-doubt, low self-esteem, anxiety and have an arousal preference for children. Social psychological explanations describe how perpetrators of child sexual abuse are locked into an addiction cycle, which causes the continuing and deepening cyclical nature of their behavior. In another model the perpetrator is described as both abused and abusing. Adult males generally have not been treated for their own childhood abuse. Sociological explanations are multifactorial and relate family functioning to the perpetration of child sexual abuse. Most perpetrators grow up in violent and generally neglectful families where there is considerable physical sexual and emotional abuse. Childhood socialization, sociocultural factors, situational factors and cultural features of society, are all significant in the etiology of the perpetration of child sexual abuse. Family process theory suggests that confusion between sexual and emotional problems in the family causes perpetrators to be locked into family patterns which maintain long-term abuse. Age and gender are significant factors in the perpetration of child sexual abuse. Adult male perpetrators form the largest group of child sexual abuse perpetrators. Men usually abuse girls in approximately 95% of cases, and abuse boys in about 20% of cases. Women are perpetrators of child sexual abuse but the reported cases are small in proportion to the known population of perpetrators. Male adolescent perpetrators are a significant group whose abusive behavior is often violent and reflects a pattern where aggression is fused with sex. The largest proportion of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by those whose ages range between twenty and forty years. This research reveals that there is little known about the socioeconomic, religious and ethnic backgrounds of perpetrators of child sexual abuse.