• Mental health problems: anxiety, fear, depression as also masked depression, isolation, suicide, self-injury, poor self-esteem, alcohol or cigarette or drug abuse, self-annihilation.
• Traumatic sexualization: in which a child’s sexuality—including both, sexual feelings and sexual attitudes—is shaped in a developmentally inappropriate and interpersonally dysfunctional fashion. Such as prostitution, aversion to sexual contact, confusion about sexual identity, confusion of sex with love and care-getting or care-giving, aggressive sexual behaviour, promiscuity, difficulty in arousal and orgasm, inappropriate sexualization of parenting, re-victimization.
• Child-rearing difficulties: repeat cycle of abuse in same or differently non-sexual format, over-protectiveness, fertility control.
• Stigmatization: the negative connotations—for example, badness, shame and guilt—that are communicated to the child about the experiences and that then become incorporated into the child’s self-image.
• Social dysfunction: delinquency, criminal behaviour, acts of violence to self or others, victim role.
• Feeling of powerlessness: the process in which the child’s will, desires, and sense of efficacy are continually contravened. Leading from the inability to stop the abuse, the child grows to feel anxious, inefficient and develops a tendency to run away from problems. Other long-term effects include nightmares, phobias, eating and sleeping disorders, disassociation, employment problems, vulnerability to subsequent victimization and becoming a sexual abuser too.
• Feeling of betrayal: children discover that someone on whom they are vitally dependent has caused them harm. Mostly the abuser is a known person and even if it is not the parent, the child experiences a loss of trust of the parents and begins a search for a person who could be trusted. This leads to vulnerability to subsequent abuse and exploitation, allows for own children to be victimized by oneself or others, leads to discomfort in intimate relationships, marital problems, aggressive behaviour and impairs ability to judge people which, in turn, leads to choosing wrong friends and disastrous marriages.

Child Sexual Abuse is a self-perpetuating phenomenon and cases suggest that adult males and females who have been victims of Child Sexual Abuse turn promiscuous and enter into unhealthy relationships. Females are more likely to choose husbands who abuse them and their children. As mothers they often show poor parenting skills, neglecting or abusing their own children.

There are several highly-rated international studies to prove some of these points.

R. Summit and J. Kryso in 1978, followed by J. Goodwin, T. McCarthy and P. Divasto in 1981, presented papers which showed that many mothers who sexually abused their own children had been victims themselves of Child Sexual Abuse.

L. Pincus and C. Dare in 1978, followed by L. P. Cammaert in 1988, had studies which showed mothers selecting emotionally inadequate partners if they had been sexually abused in childhood.

N. Groth, in 1982, stunned the international psychiatric community by pointing out that women who are sexually abused in childhood are open to selection by sex offenders who seek partners who are passive, emotionally vulnerable and dependant. These women put up no resistance at all as the male—intent on abuse of the children in his extended family—as easily distances his own child from the mother; his power over the woman allows him to operate as effectively even if she protests by using physical or emotional threats. Groth adds that the potential perpetrator does not, however, have to particularly sense out a woman who has been sexually abused in childhood. Since women in most societies all over the world are socialized to depend on others—mostly male—and to be obedient within the family, it is not very surprising to find many mothers of sexually abused children playing a passive role in the family. They are often dominated by their partner and see him as more capable, powerful and intellectually superior, more so if they have been victims themselves of Child Sexual Abuse.