Social Learning Theory and Sexual Aggression

Social learning theory, the theory that human behavior is learned from observing others, is one basis for understanding the etiology of some forms of interpersonal violence: having seen trauma and then subsequently being aggressive. For example, one of the predictors of committing domestic violence (for males) is having witnessed violence at home as a child. Having been beaten as a child is almost equally predictive of being a spouse abuser for males. Although these are clear findings, witnessing or experiencing trauma only accounts for about 20% of the variance in outcomes of domestic violence in most studies.

What about the aggression of sexually abusive individuals? Is that a learned behavior? Is there a cycle of intergenerational transmission? If sexually abusive individuals learned their behavior in a social context, then several principles should be true. This entry reviews those principles and salient research with data from adult, adolescents, and children with sexual behavior problems and offenses.

In 1990, Randall Garland and Michael Dougher hypothesized differences between sexually abusive adolescents and non–sexually abusive adolescents—all of whom had been sexually abused. Garland and Dougher basically proposed that those who were sexually abusive would have more severe victimization histories. David Burton and colleagues (2002) researched these propositions with a sample of roughly 16-year-old young men composed of 272 sexually abusive youth and 199 nonsexually abusive but delinquent youth. Seventy-nine percent of the abusive youth said they had been sexually victimized, and 46.7% of the nonsexually abusive youth said they had been sexually victimized. Burton et al. (2002) found that Garland and Dougher's ideas held some merit—the sexually abusive youth did have more severe victimization characteristics, as can be seen in Table 1, in which Burton and colleagues outline the results from that project.

Some of these youth learned from their victimization—there may be some intergenerational transmission of trauma. Some victims may become offenders, possibly those who were most severely victimized. But if this were so, then male adolescent sexual abusers who have been sexually abused should repeat what was done to them. In 2000, Carol Veneziano, Louis Veneziano, and Scott LeGrand found support for a “victim to victimizer” approach to the etiology of sexual aggression with a sample of 79 youth. In 2003, with a sample of 179 youth, Burton hypothesized that learning from one's victimizer would be indicated if sexually abusive youths' gender of offender and victim, relationship to offender and victim, level of force used by their offender, and the amount of force they used on their victim and the severity of acts they experienced [Page 633]in their victimization and they perpetrated on others were significantly related. In most cases, these hypotheses were supported (all but the age of victimization). Finally, Burton found that these characteristics of their victimization significantly predicted the level of severity of their sexual abuse of others.

Another way to examine the possibility of inter-generational transmission of trauma is to simply look at trauma rates in the childhoods of sexually abusive individuals. As can be seen in Table 2 in a group of somewhat randomly but representative studies of different age groups and the genders of sexually abusive individuals, trauma rates are shared and in concert with Burton's clinical observations. Four things are evident.

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