Why Would Someone Abuse a Child?

Child Abuse Bibliography

I am researching child abuse, and more specifically asking the question of what motivates abusers. For many people child abuse seems to us quite literally unthinkable: the sexual abuse of children seems impossible to anyone who is not a paedophile, and the physical abuse of a child by an adult seems contrary to human nature. I would like to know if the medical and social sciences have done any research into the motivations of abusers, to help provide an answer to something that so many people find impossible to understand.

Barth, Richard and Blythe, Betty J. "The Contribution of Stress to Child Abuse." The Social Service Review 57.3 (1983): 477-489. Print.

The authors note that it is almost universal to agree that stress contributes in some way to child abuse, no-one has done sufficient research into the precise connection. They do basic research on issues relating to both stress and child abuse, and they reject the various models offered for the mechanism whereby stress leads to child abuse -- which they term the "phenomenological," "life change," and "social" models -- as having limited applicability. Authors note that there is a real diversity among abusers, making the ability to generalize in any broad way more difficult.

2. Baumrind, Diana. "The Social Context of Child Maltreatment." Family Relations 43.4 (1994): 360-368. Print.

Baumrind uses Bronfenbrenner's "ecological model" to examine the various economic and cultural factors which underlie child abuse. They find that maltreatment is often caused by factors such as the immaturity of young parents, fighting and marital strife between parents, issues related to adopted children, and finally aspects of child behavior which might in some way be problematic.

3. Giles-Sims, Jean and Finkelhor, David. "Child Abuse in Stepfamilies." Family Relations 33.3 (1984): 407- 413. Print.

The authors approach the widespread belief, derived from wicked stepmothers in fairy tales, that somehow children in stepfamilies are at a greater risk for abuse at the hands of a stepparent. They find that stepparents are overrepresented statistically among reported abusers, but concede that the data are unable to tell us very much about whether or not family structure may distort these statistics. Abuse in stepfamilies is considered from five separate perspectives, which they describe as the "social-evolutionary, normative, stress, selection and resource theory."

4. Horley, James. "Cognitions of Child Sexual Abusers." The Journal of Sex Research 25.4 (1988): 542-545. Print.

Horley concedes the need for theories to explain adult sexual interest in children. However he attempts to replicate an earlier 1979 study on the thoughts of child sex abusers, regarding their victims and other persons. Horley finds that the only element which seems to be replicatable is a tendency to think of females (but not other males) purely in terms of sexual or physical attributes, objectifying them. Other conclusions about thought patterns (such as an obsession with dominance and submission) from the 1979 study are deubunked, and Horley concludes more research is needed.

5. Kugler, Karen E. And Hansson, Robert O. "Relational Competence and Social Support among Parents at Risk of Child Abuse." Family Relations 37.3 (1988): 328-332. Print.

Surveying parents at risk of child abuse, the authors discover that factors which increase the propensity to abuse (which they describe in terms of loss of control over their ability not to do so) are isolation and also lack of feedback about the quality of their parenting. However, the authors find that personality traits of at-risk parents are more useful in predicting abuse than situational factors. Authors warn that potential child abusers are "an immensely heterogeneous population" and "as a group they cannot all be characterized in terms of psychiatric disorder or personality type."