The risk factor in child sexual abuse that we cannot afford to ignore

When I was young, the child molester was an old man in a trench coat tempting kids with boiled lollies. After the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, priests became targets of suspicion, but my kids would still come home from primary school with rumours about “a man in a white van”.

The truth about child sex offenders is far more mundane. Nearly all child sexual abuse perpetrators are male, but they’re a highly varied group, often seamlessly integrated into ordinary life – parents, partners, professionals, adolescents and community leaders. Most are not fixated paedophiles (a diagnostic term for those attracted exclusively to children), but opportunistic offenders.

A 2023 Australian perpetration study – the largest of its kind globally – found that almost one in 10 Australian men admitted to sexually offending against a child, either offline or online. If almost one in 10 men has offended, and only a fraction of those are ever detected, prevention cannot rely on the criminal justice system alone. It requires understanding how offending trajectories develop – and how they might be interrupted.

The research is revealing. Compared with men who had never offended and reported no sexual interest in children, those who had offended were significantly more likely to have experienced adverse childhood experiences – including being six times more likely to have been sexually abused as children.

In a 2012 study, 2750 children with substantiated sexual abuse reports were tracked over 30 years, comparing them with a random group drawn from the electoral roll. The known child sexual abuse victims were 11 times more likely to later receive a sexual offence charge. Five per cent of male victims of child sexual abuse later committed a sexual offence, compared with 0.6 per cent of non-victims.

This finding needs to be handled carefully. Most victims of child sexual abuse never become perpetrators. But childhood trauma, particularly prior child sexual abuse, is a risk factor we can’t afford to ignore.

Professor Michael Salter, director of Childlight UNSW and lead investigator on the 2023 study, stresses that it’s not abuse alone, but abuse combined with other adversities – neglect, domestic violence and instability – that most increases the likelihood of later offending. Nevertheless, he says, “acknowledging that being sexually abused as a child can have an impact on sexual development is something we need to be open and honest about”.

The research linking childhood trauma, in particular child sexual abuse, with later perpetration of child sexual abuse is abundant. But Christabel Chamarette reached the same conclusion long before the data existed.

In 1971, newly qualified as a clinical psychologist, Chamarette started at Fremantle Prison, working with “the worst of the worst” – mostly murderers, many on death row. She realised almost immediately that her training had taught her “nothing”, so she did the only thing she could: she met with the men and she listened.