Making an abuser

Beaten to death; molested; deprived of food; tortured – when reading about violence against children, an inevitable question arises: What makes a person do this to a child?

The causes of child abuse are complicated and multi-faceted, according to Layna Lankford, the clinical director at Paluxy River Children’s Advocacy Center.

“Very often child abuse is a cycle within families and encompasses multiple generations,” she said. “Attachment wounds and disorders can become a culture within a family and it can be difficult for that cycle to be broken. Because the pattern has been around so long, they don’t know anything different.”

But the potential reasons for a person becoming an abuser don’t stop there – they are virtually limitless, according to Lankford.

“There’s any number of reasons,” she said. “From a person being abused themselves to it being a learned behavior. Perpetrating child abuse can also be a result of stress, substance use or abuse; it can also be a result of mental health disorders. So, there isn’t really one cause or another. And that is true across all types of abuse – emotional, physical, sexual, and neglect. There can be any number of reasons a person chooses to abuse a child.”

In addition to these factors, the differing perspectives on what child abuse entails present challenges; some parents don’t realize that their behavior is abusive, Lankford said.

“What we know to be abuse – and especially emotional abuse and physical abuse – what we know to be harmful to children, a lot of people don’t necessarily consider abuse. So they don’t even recognize it as being unhealthy, or being harmful parenting or poor treatment of children,” she said.

Lankford has been working with victims of child abuse for over 12 years.

“For me, it changed the way I saw the world,” she said. “Things that you only hear about in movies and TV shows become real. And even though you knew they’re real before, it’s different.”

When she first began working with child abuse survivors, she became jaded by the horrifying treatment of children that she saw.

“I think, initially, how it changed my worldview for the worse is just kind of seeing what people are capable of, and really knowing it – it being a part of my everyday world,” she said. “When I learned how often it happens – it is much more than most people are aware of.”

But over time, her perspective has been modified by experience.

“Because I learned how prevalent child abuse is, the question I ask about people (now) is what happened to them, regardless of what’s going on. Even if it’s somebody with a severe personality disorder, people who abuse children, even psychopaths and sociopaths,” she said. “I see all of that behavior through the lens of what causes a person to do things like that. So, ‘What happened to them?’ rather than, ‘What’s wrong with them?’ Because I know the impact that (child abuse) has on the brain and development.”

This shift in perspective fuels her desire to find solutions for child abuse.

“I think it kind of transitioned from a place of realizing what people are capable of to just realizing that there’s this problem in our society and we gotta find a way to fix it. We gotta find a way to deal with it. Because it’s absolutely fixable. It is,” she said.

“There’s a quote that we use a lot and it’s, ‘Hurt people hurt people.’ And so I tend to see those who hurt people as being hurt. It strengthens my resolve to help hurt people, because that’s really the way that we’re going to end it – to help hurt people heal so they don’t feel the need to pass on their hurt.”

christy@hcnews.com | 817-573-7066, ext. 254