Reply #6: Child abuse covers such a wide range of things. [View All]

[rebel with a cause]

There is physical, emotional, mental, verbal, and sexual that I can remember and there are different degrees in each of these. Then there are different types and degrees of neglect. I was abused as a child and I am not a criminal, and I have known people much more abused than myself and they are not criminals. So then the question has to be what kind of abuse has been shown to cause criminal tendency in their victim and how severe was that abuse. I believe it has to be much more complicated than just "child abuse causes crime". One answer may be that child abuse often creates two types of personalities. One personality is an aggressive one, the future abuser. The second personality is the submissive one, the continuing victim. But in sexual cases there could be some who are somewhere in between these two.

I worked with male child predators, and this is how they were for the most part. Some of the boys were the aggressors, they preyed on others. Others were more the victim. Letting themselves be the preyed upon. If encouraged by the other boys, they could become the aggressor. Both groups are capable of being predators, but the one is much less violent. These boys were all from the age of ten to thirteen, and several of them had been preying on younger children from the age of five. Now imagine when their abuse began. Only a couple of the boys there were not sexual predators (this was not really a home for predators), and were victims only. They were the only ones that I thought had a chance of not being criminal/abusers.

Now my abuse was never sexual, unless you consider having puritan parents abusive. My abuse was more physical, verbal, and emotional. What I have come to terms with is that because this was in my early socialization, I have basically set myself up to be abused throughout my life. I am too open, while being too defensive at times and too submissive at other times. My sister tells me she has never met anyone else as complicated to understand as I am. And I agree. But she loves me, and so do my kids. I guess that is enough. Others I have known have followed in their parents footsteps and abused others in the same way they were abused.

So what do we do with children that have been badly abused? What do we do with boys like those in the facility? They also had been socialized to this behavior. They were taught that it was wrong by facility staff, but they still had the behaviors. And some of them were sent back to the same homes that had created them in the first place. It is a sick old world out there, and the children caught up in it are in danger now, and have a good chance of being dangerous in the future. I know there were special treatment facilities set up for child/youth predators, but I really don't know that they worked that well. I am not an expert on this, and should not try to sound like one. These are just my opinions based on my experiences.