Thank you for stopping by this blog. This article is written for survivors of childhood abuse. If this is your first time here, please read the introductory notes about this site first.
“People who grew up being abused will go on to abuse their own children.” This received belief has caused suffering for many abuse survivors. But the most recent research shows that this idea of “intergenerational transmission” has been seriously misunderstood.
In the previous article, we walked through the history of cycle-of-abuse research and saw that the rate once put at 70 to 90 percent is, in fact, around 30 percent (25–35%)※1. This article goes one step further into the heart of the misunderstanding.
Chapter 1: Judith Herman’s Words
Judith Lewis Herman, a pioneering researcher of child abuse, has left an important observation on this question※2. In summary:
In very extreme cases, abuse survivors do sometimes attack their own children or fail to protect them.
But the overwhelming majority of survivors neither abuse nor neglect their own children.
Rather, many survivors are deeply afraid that their child might suffer the same fate, and they pour their energy into preventing it.
This blog stands behind that view. Being abused does not turn a person into an abusive parent.
What is far more common is the opposite — a deep, ongoing anxiety about one’s own parenting.
Chapter 2: What the “30 Percent” Actually Is
As we saw in the previous article, the most recent research data put the abuse transmission rate at about 30 percent (25–35%)※1. So what does this 30 percent actually represent?
Some clinicians have pointed out that the “intergenerational cycle of abuse” arising at this stable rate of around 30 percent (25–35%) lines up with the heritability rate of one particular condition.
That condition is mild intellectual disability (IQ 50–70), or borderline intellectual functioning (IQ 70–85).
When a parent has mild intellectual disability or borderline intellectual functioning, the trait is passed on to a child at a rate of roughly 20 percent※3. When both parents share that intellectual weakness, the rate climbs higher. The 25–35 percent range for abuse transmission does not match exactly, but the two figures are of the same order, and that overlap is one of the grounds clinicians give for suspecting a link.
Psychiatrist Kazumi Takahashi and colleagues put forward the following hypothesis:
It is not that the past experience of being abused causes the abuse you see today. In most cases, it is the inherited mild intellectual disability or borderline intellectual functioning that produces the abuse.
In other words, what looks like “the experience of abuse” being passed from parent to child is, on closer look, the inheritance of an intellectual profile.
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