Causal Models of Sexual Abuse

by Child Welfare Information Gateway

(Page 3 of 11)

Before developing a treatment plan, it is important to have an understanding of why the sexual abuse occurs, both generally and in the particular case under consideration.

It is useful to briefly examine the history of causal theories of sexual abuse before a discussion of the current level of professional understanding. Historically there have been two rather separate efforts to understand the phenomenon of sexual abuse, its causes, and its resolution. These can be conceptualized as the family-focused perspective and the offender-focused perspective.

The Family-Focused Perspective

Those taking a family perspective focused their attention on incest and developed hypotheses that family dynamics are at the root of sexual abuse. Specifically, clinicians taking this perspective described the collusive mother, who has estranged herself from the father, as the "cornerstone" of the incestuous triad and the victim as a parental child who has replaced her mother as sexual partner to the father.

The implications of this model in terms of treatment are that the mother and the daughter must change, but the offender is not necessarily required to take responsibility for his behavior and develop strategies to control it. Most professionals working in the sexual abuse field recognize the limitations of a perspective that focuses purely on family dynamics.

This perspective does not help very much in explaining extrafamilial sexual victimization and, taken to its extreme, represents the offender as the hapless victim of family dynamics. Moreover, recent research, which finds that a substantial proportion of incest offenders begin their sexual victimization as adolescents and experience arousal to children before they become fathers, calls into question assumptions about the pivotal role of family dynamics in incest.

The Offender-Focused Perspective

Those who work primarily with perpetrators have historically been located in institutions for adjudicated offenders. Most of these clinicians/researchers appreciate that their clientele do not represent the full spectrum of sex offenders. Their focus has been on understanding the etiology of sexual abuse by examining the physiological and psychological functioning of offenders. They typically do not have access to families to understand any role they might have played in the victimization, nor its impact on the families. Moreover, as these clinicians develop and implement treatment strategies, they may have to do so in a vacuum and in an artificial environment. There are frequently both problems translating what is learned in treatment in the institution to the offender's normal environment and failure to continue needed treatment when the offender returns to the community.

An Integrated Model

Efforts to integrate the family and offender perspectives to the causes of sexual abuse began in the mid-1980's. Finkelhor examined the spectrum of clinical literature and research into the causes of sexual abuse and developed a model of causation that incorporates both the family-, and offender-focused perspectives. He posits four preconditions that must obtain for sexual abuse to occur: factors related to the offender's motivation to sexually abuse; factors predisposing the offender to overcoming internal inhibitors; factors predisposing to overcoming external inhibitors (e.g., absence of environmental obstacles); and factors predisposing to overcoming child's resistance (e.g., a vulnerable child or the use of coercion). Finkelhor applied this model on both the individual (case) level and the sociocultural level.

The model presented here is somewhat different and more practice-focused. It proposes that there are some causal factors that are prerequisites for sexual abuse and there are others that play a contributing role. Prerequisite factors - sexual arousal to children and a propensity to act on arousal - are to be found within the offender, whereas contributing factors may come from the culture, from the family system (including the marital relationship), from his current life situation, from his personality, or from his past life experience.

The presence of the two prerequisite factors (sexual arousal to children and propensity to act on arousal) is both necessary and sufficient to result in sexual abuse. This is not the case for the contributing factors. For example, a man does not sexually abuse his daughter because his marriage is unhappy. More than half of American marriages end in divorce, suggesting that a substantial number of marriages are unhappy. But only a very small number of men in unhappy marriages sexually abuse their children.

Contributing factors may enhance the prerequisite factors or they may, independent of an effect on the prerequisites, increase risk. An example of the former dynamics is found in the role of alcohol abuse. It usually leads to diminished capacity to control behavior, which may increase the propensity to act on sexual arousal to children. (Chemicals are also used by some offenders to cope with guilt related to their abuse behavior.) An example of the latter dynamic is that found in situations of unsupervised access to children. It may enhance risk because it provides opportunity for an offender who is aroused to children and prone to act on that arousal. This model will be referred to again in the discussion of treatment issues.

About the Author

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