Is it true that all perpetrators were victims

[scout86]

I had just got done sharing how angry I was at my abusers--this was one of the first times I was able to openly express this anger-

Good for you for starting to express that anger. It's totally legitimate and you have every right to feel angry.

She used self disclosure and made it about her.

Sometimes self disclosure can be helpful. This time? Not so much, maybe. Therapists are people, which means they aren't perfect and they don't always make the right call. If she just recently found this out about her father, she's not doubt still processing it in her own mind and, like @Movingforward10 said, she brought it up for reasons of her own that weren't helpful to you. It's not your job to sort out, or worry about, why people who hurt you did it. That's THEIR job, should they chose to do it. One way I can see to continue the conversation and explore the issue a little more with her would be to mention this forum and tell her how people here reacted. If her take on this was a one off because she's human and she's a good T otherwise, I'd give her a pass. If she turns out to be someone who's really into the idea of making excuses for offenders and thinks that's the thing to do, she's probably going to do you more harm than good.

 

[Loveann]

My therapist recently told me that all pedophiles and perpetrators of SA or grooming against children or teenagers were victims of CSA themselves when they were kids.
I’m just wondering what everyone thinks of this take. Is it true?

Not all of them were as children themselves victims.

 

[Friday]

I don’t think it’s true. It is my understanding that dark personality traits arise spontaneously in individuals, from birth and/or due to some environmental conditioning. An individual with dark personality traits may abuse others and lead to a sort of chain or domino effect of abuse,

Not just dark triad but also…

- Autistic
- BPD (as one of the punishments they think their focus “deserves” -nearly always their focus’s children, the idea that raping their children will evoke some sort of empathy towards themselves; IE a complicated mess of “you’ll be sorry” supposed to translate from seeing their childrens pain, to understanding the BPD person’s pain, and then loving/forgiving them, now that they “know”)
- Brain Damaged (in too many ways to even begin to enumerate)
- Brain-Compromised (nearly always the result of neurotrophic substances, often hallucinatory/delusional).
- Et Cetera

But, again, from what I learned in school? All of these “other” causes (without any history of being victims of sexual assault) make up less than 1% of sexual predators.

 

[Rose White]

from what I learned in school? All of these “other” causes (without any history of being victims of sexual assault) make up less than 1% of sexual predators.

Do you find any reason to doubt this statistic?

 

[scout86]

I've been looking for some good, and readable, articles on this topic. Hard to find! Here's a link to a pretty good article that talks about why they're hard to find, among other things.

Collecting data on pedophilia is difficult. Collecting data on child sexual abuse is difficult too. In both cases, the pool of subjects is limited by who gets caught and who reports what, etc. The article I linked mentioned one thing in particular I found interesting. They asked a group of pedophiles if they'd been abused as kids and got a fairly high number of yeses. When a lie detector was used, the numbers changed, a lot. Not something I'd thought of. (Silly me!) Apparently when you ask a pedophile whether or not they were abused as a kid, they might say "yes" because that answers makes them a little more acceptable as a human being.