Sexual offenses against children as the abusive exploitation of conventional adult-child relationships

A study was conducted to determine whether the relationship processes underlying offender-child interactions in child sexual abuse could be considered as abusive and manipulative variants of more conventional relationship processes that exist between adults and children. To explore this possibility, it was proposed that a circular order of behaviors (i.e., a circumplex) would exist in offender-child interactions that relates to circular models found in more conventional adult-child interactions. Furthermore, just as biases are found in conventional adult-child interactions towards particular relationship patterns, it was proposed that a bias would exist in offender-child interactions reflecting the predominant way in which child sex offenses are carried out. Using a multivariate statistical analysis that geometrically represents the co-occurrence of individual actions, the behaviors from 97 British child sex offenses were analyzed. The results provide preliminary support for the idea that the coercive nature of offender-child interactions in child sexual abuse relies on the offender gaining and abusing the trust of the victim by exploiting a range of conventional adult-child relationship patterns.