Childhood maltreatment is a pervasive social problem with wide ranging adverse effects for many persons who survive it. A fairly consistent finding is that adults who have been hurt as children often find themselves revictimized as adults. A small proportion of adults who were hurt as children go on to harm others. Some are both revictimized and engage in perpetration. We do not know why this occurs; however, various theories have been proposed, ranging from learning theories to complex psychoanalytic ones. Empirical findings are inconsistent, and this variation may be due to differences in...