Child sexual abuse: A spur for criminal behaviour development

Pages: 556-559
Ameen Abdulla and Baby Shari (Department of Psychology, University of Calicut, Kerala)

Crime has been taking place since time immemorial. The most common definition about “Criminal Behaviour” is that it portrays any behaviour that goes against or violates law, whether the offender is caught or not. Likewise a criminal is an individual who commits an act that violates the strict rules and regulations of the society, thereby harming or not harming another individual, property and so on intentionally or unintentionally. The various causes that lead to a crime to take place are neurological deformities, genetic trait, situational factors, and uncomfortable bad experiences undergone in childhood such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, and emotional abuse and so on. These are nothing but various forms of child abuse that violate a child’s right to live a happy life. All the victims may not experience in the same way. It is usually seen that majority of these individuals take along these experiences to their adulthood in a complex manner. Sexual abuse is studied in depth in the present study. This paper attempts to find out whether these nightmare experiences make the victim become an offender himself. On conducting regular semi structured interviews with prisoners housed in various prisons of Kerala, mainly focusing on rape offenders, paedophiles and child abusers the investigators were able to see that most of the offenders had gone through sexual abuse in their childhood, being un-intervened and that had changed their lives drastically. Most of the offenders kept coming back for the same type of offense, time and again. Some psychological factors like rejection sensitivity and attachment patterns are identified as intervening variables. The details are discussed in the paper.