Being sexually abused definitely does not cause someone to be an abuser. My three closest friends were sexually abused and they have broken that cycle. The statistic that interests me is that, with rare exception, abusers were abused.
Men abuse sexually more because of the nature of testosterone. Men turn to sex (however they can get it - "normally", prostitutes, abusing, by being situationally homosexual in prison, apple pies, pornography) and violence more than women because men have more testosterone. IMHO.
Then you mix that testosterone with so many environmental things - addiction, abuse by caretakers, mental illness, etc..etc..etc.. and you have people who make these criminal choices because they have never learned any impulse control.
There is another thread here discussing law enforcement's definition of two different types of child sex offenders. The first type is a pedophile - someone who as an orientation is sexually aroused by children. The second type is the situational offender - someone who is not necessarily aroused by just children but who will take advantage of them given the opportunity (ie - a drunk stepfather babysitting his wife's daughter, etc...)
I don't know if the teenager in this case is actually a pedophile or is a situational offender. There's not enough information to know.
I consider pedophelia to be a bizarre sexual orientation (like bestiality) - in psychologists terms, it's called a paraphilia. Some pedophiles seem to have had the orientation since childhood. Some are abused and develop the orientation. We need to study pedophelia more to understand more. Like other sexual orientations, pedophelia is not curable.
