It is true that in the end, what people choose to do as adults is their own responsibility. It is also true that a fucked up childhood with years of sexual abuse and likely other violence will set you up to become a terrible person.
It’s not an inevitability, but I view it the same as I view for example perpetuated racism by children of racist parents. Of course you are always free to find your own way but it’s very hard to do when your whole world view, shaped by the people you love and trust for many years, tells you otherwise.
Although much more subtle and not criminal, I have rather late in my life recognised ways in which my parents have imbued me with some strange and distorted ideology and self-conception, which I always took as a normal way of thinking.
And I can see how, already at the age of two or three, some children we meet on the playground are showing crystal clear signs of internalised and externally exhibited aggressive behaviour as a result of parental neglect or abuse. I shudder to think what they will be like in ten or twenty years.
At that point it will be their responsibility how they deal with their past, but it will be their parent‘s fault as well if they fail to deal with it in an acceptable way.
