Abstract
Maltreatment is often experienced in adverse environments during childhood. Children who survive maltreatment demonstrate protective and risk factors that impact the developmental pathway to lifelong outcomes. The purpose of this systematic review was to identify the factors that impact the pathway between surviving childhood sexual abuse and committing a sexual offense. A survivor of childhood sexual abuse may possess protective factors that are important towards their ability to function and have positive lifelong outcomes. For survivors of childhood sexual abuse, it is important to identify the protective factors essential to positive lifelong outcomes and resilience. Educating professionals on important protective factors for survivors of childhood sexual abuse can improve screening tools and interventions. This would be to provide effective treatment that supports the protective factors to decrease the likelihood of lifelong negative outcomes. Without interventions and screening tools effectively supporting protective factors, risk factors can overcome and impact the pathway to committing a sexual offense. With this in mind, educating professionals on identifying the risk factors is important in order to provide them on screening tools and in interventions for effective treatment. A systematic review research design was used to analyze 19 articles that met inclusion criteria. The articles were analyzed in the results section to identify the protective factors that survivors of sexual abuse experience, and the risk factors that could potentially impact the pathway to an outcome of committing a sexual offense. The discussion demonstrates assumptions in which factors impact the pathway between surviving childhood sexual abuse and committing a sexual offense. The need for future research is suggested to further understand the factors between the pathway of surviving childhood sexual abuse and committing sexual offenses.