Comment by elzbardico
4 years ago
Not to mention that boys, small boys in particular are frequent targets of abuse. At certain ages even more than girls.
And an abused boy could well become an abuser in the future. Sad but true
4 years ago
Not to mention that boys, small boys in particular are frequent targets of abuse. At certain ages even more than girls.
And an abused boy could well become an abuser in the future. Sad but true
And an abused boy could well become an abuser in the future. Sad but true
Are you talking sexual abuse? If so, then references please.
There are a lot of ways that abuse goes down the generations. For example girls who were abused are more likely to get together with abusive men as adults. But I've encountered zero evidence that victims of pedophiles are particularly likely to become pedophiles themselves when they grow up.
I have personal reasons to be interested in the topic, so I spent a lot of time at one point looking for evidence that sexually abused boys were likely to become sexual abusers as adults. I have concluded that such evidence both doesn't exist, and it isn't true. Had I known that when I was younger, I could have avoided a whole lot of guilt and self-hatred.
I just did some research. To me I always hear pedophiles themselves admitting that they were abused when they were children.
for example here https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/72050039.pdf https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2082860/
but both of the studies says that the self reports are questionable.
Yes, those self-reports are very highly questionable.
First of all, we all rework our childhood memories to better fit our adult personas. Depressed people talk about all of the terrible things that happened to them as kids which make them depressed now. Happy people, all of the happy things that happened that make them happy now. A gay man might talk about wearing dresses and playing with dolls that made him gay.
But attempts to corroborate current stories with past events (the gold standard being longitudinal studies) find that none of that is true. Happy and depressed people have the usual mix of happy and sad childhood events, they just remember them selectively. The gay man's twin brother says maybe he wore a dress once, and has made a mountain out of a molehill. And so on.
Pedophiles are even worse. Pedophiles have the problem that they fall in love with children, and have to gaslight themselves into believing that they do no harm by having sex with the child. Under this pressure, pedophiles make up memories out of whole cloth.
However in general, we have not found any correlation between what actually happened to you before puberty, and who you wind up sexually attracted to after. We can't predict whether you'll be straight. Whether you'll be gay. Or whether you'll be a pedophile. Which means that if you were the unfortunate target of a pedophile, there is no particular reason to believe that have anything other than the 1% risk that every boy does of growing up into one.
This isn't true and looks to be a statistical issue. And the myth that you'll become an abuser is terrible one that haunts many abused individuals to this day.
To expand on this the two reasons for this myth are abusers tend to lie about their childhoods to gain sympathy. And basically there are a bunch of confounds that both increase the likelihood you will be abused and that you will be an abuser but there's no real causation.