When I was young, the child molester was an old man in a trench coat tempting kids with boiled lollies. After the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, priests became targets of suspicion, but my kids would still come home from primary school with rumours about “a man in a white van”.The truth about child sex offenders is far more mundane. Nearly all child sexual abuse perpetrators are male, but they’re a highly varied group, often seamlessly integrated into ordinary life – parents, partners, professionals, adolescents and community leaders. Most are not fixated paedophiles (a diagnostic term for those attracted exclusively to children), but opportunistic offenders.A 2023 Australian perpetration study – the largest of its kind globally – found that almost one in 10 Australian men admitted to sexually offending against a child, either offline or online. If almost one in 10 men has offended, and only a fraction of those are ever detected, prevention cannot rely on the criminal justice system alone. It requires understanding how offending trajectories develop – and how they might be interrupted.The research is revealing. Compared with men who had never offended and reported no sexual interest in children, those who had offended were significantly more likely to have experienced adverse childhood experiences – including being six times more likely to have been sexually abused as children.In a 2012 study, 2750 children with substantiated sexual abuse reports were tracked over 30 years, comparing them with a random group drawn from the electoral roll. The known child sexual abuse victims were 11 times more likely to later receive a sexual offence charge. Five per cent of male victims of child sexual abuse later committed a sexual offence, compared with 0.6 per cent of non-victims.This finding needs to be handled carefully. Most victims of child sexual abuse never become perpetrators. But childhood trauma, particularly prior child sexual abuse, is a risk factor we can’tafford to ignore.Professor Michael Salter, director of Childlight UNSW and lead investigator on the 2023 study, stresses that it’s not abuse alone, but abuse combined with other adversities – neglect, domestic violence and instability – that most increases the likelihood of later offending. Nevertheless, he says, “acknowledging that being sexually abused as a child can have an impact on sexual development is something we need to be open and honest about”.The research linking childhood trauma, in particular child sexual abuse, with later perpetration of child sexual abuse is abundant. But Christabel Chamarette reached the same conclusion long before the data existed.In 1971, newly qualified as a clinical psychologist, Chamarette started at Fremantle Prison, working with “the worst of the worst” – mostly murderers, many on death row. She realised almost immediately that her training had taught her “nothing”, so she did the only thing she could: she met with the men and she listened. A familiar pattern started emerging from their childhood stories, something she called the “trifecta”: sexual violence, physical violence (experienced or witnessed) and neglect.Often, she says, the men dismissed any connection between their offending and their childhood. “Nothing wrong with my childhood,” one insisted. “I’m just evil.” Only later did fragments emerge from this man’s past: removal from his family, an orphanage, sexual abuse. After two years of therapy he remembered being abused by his father at the age of four.Chamarette is emphatic that most victims of child sexual abuse do not go on to offend. But in the minority who do, untreated trauma appears again and again. Trauma, particularly when unresolved, can arrest development. A child who survives sexual abuse through dissociation or denial may grow into adulthood with that injured part unhealed, “stuck” at the age of the trauma.Chamarette found the men at greatest risk of offending were those who denied or reinterpreted their abuse. Some had blocked it out; others remembered it but had reframed it as intimacy or privilege, or as completely normal because “everybody was doing it”. In moments of stress, abandonment, sexual arousal or proximity to children the same age they once were, that “stuck” part can resurface, Chamarette says. “We’re little webcams when we’re born, and everything that we see, we take in, and we bury it. It’s not classified or categorised. And then when we’re in a similar situation later on, out it pops…”Trigger points can include adolescence, first relationships, parenthood, or a child reaching the age they were when abused. “We ignore it at our peril. Because it’s a buried time bomb that goes off opportunistically.”When someone fully faces what happened to them – names it as abuse, grieves it, understands its impact – Chamarette believes the compulsion can weaken. “They become a bigger person, and they can’t go there any more.”None of this is absolution. Adults who harm children must be held responsible for the harm they cause. Chamarette’s work is not about excusing offending, but understanding and treating the factors that contribute to the behaviour so that another child is not harmed.It also highlights the lack of services upstream when these abused children most needed them. Salter says: “We regularly hear reports that children known to have been sexually abused are unable to access specialist counselling or therapy for a year or 18 months. We have not invested in children. What we know is that if we support kids following abuse, their outcomes are really good.”In 1989, Chamarette co-founded the Sexual Assault in Families program, later SafeCare. Over the next 20 years, working with more than 700 offenders and their families, the clinic recorded only seven known recidivists. The clinic was defunded in 2009 and has run a modified full-fee program since, which continues to have a recidivism rate below 1 per cent. Those figures have not been independently evaluated through formal linkage studies, and participants were self-selecting. But Chamarette believes the program challenges the assumption that people who sexually offend cannot change.Treatment began with cognitive behavioural work addressing denial, minimisation and justification, before participants shared their childhood histories. Chamarette says an offender will be unable to fully empathise with the experience of the child he has harmed while denying the pain of his own childhood. That’s why the module on empathy was always the most powerful.Participants watched a short film about two children being sexually abused by their uncle, then role-played the characters – including the children and the offender – while being filmed. Afterwards, facilitators played the footage back and discussed it with them.Chamarette tells me it’s often at that point in the treatment that participants feel suicidal. “They recognise that what they’ve done to a child is what was done to them. And that’s devastating for them.”The reason Chamarette believes the treatment is so effective is because it works with “the part of the man that doesn’t want to offend and is appalled by the offending”. The men who don’t want to do it, don’t know why they do it, don’t know how to stop. “If you grow the person to be the true adult, it becomes as unacceptable to them to do it as it is to us. They can no longer do it. It does happen. I’ve seen it hundreds of times.”The existence of SafeCare puts paid to the belief that people at risk of offending don’t want help to change. When the program began, posters appeared around Perth carrying a blunt message: “If your child isn’t safe from you, ring this number.”Sonia Orchard’s essay.In its first year, 80 men called. Most had already harmed a child and were unknown to authorities. They came because they feared hurting their own children. The 2023 Australian perpetration study similarly found that one-third of men reporting sexual feelings towards children – 4.5 per cent of Australian men – said they would seek professional help if it were available.The National Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse now includes Stop It Now! Australia, a confidential helpline for adults concerned about their thoughts or behaviour. It marks a significant policy shift: an acknowledgement that preventing CSA must include reaching the thousands of people, hidden in society, who want help not to offend against children.Within its first months – with limited promotion and operating hours – the helpline received more than 800 calls, while thousands accessed its online modules. This is not a therapeutic service, however; it provides brief intervention and referral only. The catch is there are currently no publicly funded specialist therapeutic clinics in Australia for this adult cohort to be referred to. “It’s really sad that the federal government will fund a helpline,” Chamarette says, “but the state governments that have to provide the services aren’t providing the services.”Criminologist Dr Hayley Boxall says this remains one of prevention’s greatest barriers. “We’re perfectly comfortable talking about desistance when we’re talking about drug use. But when you’re talking about interpersonal violence offenders, we have no appetite or services in response to deal with that. ”It’s confronting to acknowledge that we already know ways to reduce the risk of child sexual abuse offending, yet have repeatedly failed to invest adequately in them.As Natalie Siegel-Brown, Inspector-General for Aged Care and a longstanding expert in child sexual abuse prevention, puts it: “The public response is … all about punishing the perpetrators – which is great, important, critical. But why aren’t we also asking how we prevent people from becoming perpetrators in the first place?”An edited extract from Before the Harm: Preventing Abuse, Protecting Children by Sonia Orchard, published by Monash University Publishing as part of the “In the National Interest” series, available now.Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.