alt Hacker NewsWell, if it gets normalised during childhood, then it frequently occurs during teen years and adulthood.
You can see some discussion of that in the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2017)
* https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/final-report
There is the position, of course, that a sexually abused child that reaches teen years or adulthood is no longer a "decent person" .. which is an interesting transition to dwell on.
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There is also the theory that it serves as a reenactment of one’s own abuse. Trying to find peace and return to safety by replaying the scene, this time not as helpless victim but perpetrator: in control.
Victims of sexual abuse thus often are haunted by “fantasies” of abuse but avoiding the victim position; the trap is to identify with the fantasies. All too often, they’ve been told it is their fault, they wanted it etc, so the imagined replay “proves the original perpetrator right”.
The only way to break the circle seems to be to fully go into the fantasy and process the victim position, with support of a well-meaning presence (typically a therapist but in another reality it could be friends or family).
That makes it more understandable, but he lost a trial that said he was raping a child when he was 38 years old.
Someone abused as a child who does sketchy things in their early 20s is tragic. Someone doing the same when they’re nearly 40 is a whole lot harder to dismiss. Like, you don’t make it to that age without hearing a lot of people along the way saying not to rape children.