Finkelhor and Browne (1985) examined how traumagenic dynamics play a role in how sexual abuse traumatizes children. Traumagenic dynamics are defined by four trauma-causing factors that include traumatic sexualization, betrayal, powerlessness, and stigmatization. The first type is traumatic sexualization which can be summarized as the molding of child’s attitudes and feelings about sexual …show more content…
Children who suffer from sexual abuse have significantly more negative psychological symptoms than non-abused children. These children have more reported fears, experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and exhibit behavior problems, unusually sexualized behaviors and poor self-esteem (Kendall-Tackett et al., 1991). They specifically point out that no one symptom is found in the majority of child victims of abuse, but some symptoms are characteristics of certain ages and about 33% of victims show no symptoms. They found that symptoms can vary in intensity and number based on factors of the sexual abuse such as severity, duration, frequency, and what relationship the child had with the abuser (Kendall-Tackett et al., 1991). They could not identify what exactly about abuse causes criminality because they did not eliminate certain variables in question. The authors discussed how they would like to use more complex analysis in the future in order to control for more variables that could instead be the underlying causes of criminality. The evidence that fuels the notion that emotional abuse cripples children is that early emotional abuse can damage a child during their important developmental stages (Maguire, Williams, Naughton, Cowley, Tempest, Mann, & Kemp, 2015). If children do not receive the proper emotional support during their early development it can cause major setbacks for the child later in life, especially manifested in antisocial and even delinquent behavior (Maguire et al.,