Quote:
The abused-abuser theory offers another model of pedophilic motivation. This suggests that a pedophile’s own history of childhood sexual abuse predisposes him or her to pedophilic tendencies. Indeed this is the one proposed etiological factor that has received robust support in the literature. Estimates of the incidence of childhood sexual abuse in pedophiles’ histories range from 40% up to 100%.15,16 Female offenders might have an even higher incidence of childhood sexual abuse.17 Moreover, pedophilic offenders have a higher incidence of childhood sexual abuse than do sexual offenders against older age-groups and nonsexual offenders.15,18 Finally, in a randomly selected sample of men living in the community, men who had reported multiple events of sexual contact in their own childhood were almost 40 times more likely to report having sexual contact with children 13 years and younger than men who reported no sexual abuse in childhood (0.2% vs 7.7%)
Thus, childhood sexual abuse appears to play an important role in the development of pedophilic tendencies. The underlying mechanism for this is not clear. Psychological processes, such as identification with the aggressor and normalization of adult-child sexual activity have been proposed.19 We have suggested that abuse sustained during early childhood may result in neurodevelopmental abnormalities that predispose to pedophilic sexual desire.