The Future of Children, Princeton - Brookings: Providing research and analysis to promote effective policies and programs for children.

People make significant assumptions about themselves, others, the environment, and the future based upon childhood learning. Because the experiences of children who are abused are often negative, these assumptions and self-perceptions typically reflect an overestimation of the amount of danger or adversity in the world and an underestimation of the abuse survivor's self-efficacy and self-worth. A variety of studies document chronic self-perceptions of helplessness and hopelessness, impaired trust, self-blame, and low self-esteem in abused children.¹⁷ These cognitive alterations often continue on into adolescence and adulthood.¹⁸

Such negative thoughts probably arise from multiple sources, including psychological reactions to abuse-specific events, stigmatization of the victim by the abuser and society, and the victim's attempt to make sense of his or her maltreatment.^9,19 Chronic perceptions of helplessness and danger are thought to result from the fact that the child abuse occurred when the victim was physically and psychologically unable to resist or defend against the abuser. This expectation of injury may lead to hyperreactivity or "overreaction" to real, potential, or imagined threats. The most predictable impact of this dynamic is the victim's growing assumption that he or she is without recourse or options under a widening variety of circumstances. Because such experiences are often chronic and ongoing, feelings of hopelessness regarding the future are also likely. Similarly, the child may make assumptions about his or her inherent badness, based on misinterpretation of maltreatment as, in fact, punishment for unknown transgressions.⁹

As would be predicted from the above, the study of cognition in the adjustment of victims of sexual molestation has linked such abuse to subsequent guilt, low self-esteem, self-blame, and other dysfunctional or inaccurate attributions.²⁰ Gold found that women with a history of child sexual abuse were more likely to attribute the cause of negative events to internal, stable, and global factors, as well as to their character and to their behavior (that is, "this negative event occurred because I am an inherently bad person and I will never change").²¹ These same women tended to attribute the cause of good events to external factors. Such cognitive distortions may contribute to or, alternatively, act as mediators of the emotional distress evident among many adult survivors of child sexual abuse.²²