Sexual Predators

Traumatic Origins and Consequences

The social science literature is replete with articles and books documenting and explaining the etiology of sexual predators, so only a brief overview will be described here. There is general consensus in the field that a traumatic childhood experience predisposes children toward becoming offenders in adulthood. Importantly, this does not mean that all sexual predators were raped as children because early work in the field suggested that no more than a third of sexual predators were molested as children. Rather, the childhood experiences that form sexual predators come from a much broader use of the term trauma. For example, Don Dutton, a clinical psychologist, has written extensively about the development of what he calls an abusive personality. In brief, he argues that a confluence of insecure attachment in childhood, a parenting approach that uses shame as a motivator, and other elements of emotional abuse more broadly leads to a consolidation of an identity in young male children that seeks to exercise power and control over others, which Dutton has termed an abusive personality. In the case of sexual predators, these young men grow into adults who seek to exploit power relationships in all aspects of their interpersonal lives. Some of these young men go on to become batterers in their adult relationships, and some become sexual predators. However, it is an oversimplification of a complicated issue to suggest that all traumatized children grow into abusive adults, and that it not the point here. Rather, the point is to highlight the idea that some traumatized children internalize their sense of powerlessness and it becomes a part of their permanent identity, which manifests itself in adulthood by abusing the power dynamic inherent in adult-child relationships.

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