I almost didn't join this thread until you said that. I was a shitty kid, mostly because of things that happened to me, but that's not the point. After what happened to me, I was faced with a choice, at seven years old, of how to handle trauma. Obviously I had no idea how to deal with real horror at that age, so I believed what (I felt) others thought about me - that I was a "little monster".

Holy fuck, did I act the part.

I could write a book on how shitty I was, just because I believed that one thing. I was almost twenty when I finally realized how much of the mess had been my own choosing, but in the meantime, nobody had understood me well enough to know what my problem was, despite hundreds, literally hundreds of different people having not only the opportunity, but being paid to find out what my problem was. Group home staff, doctors, therapists, psychiatrists, etc.

I had to figure it out on my own, and the loss of personal potential, the loss of so many friends, the fact that I missed out on so much - all those rotten consequences boiling down to a kid being sexually abused and then left to find his own way out.

You say a shitty home life isn't an excuse - that word, "excuse", is the problem. Reasons always exist for why people do shitty things, and they don't need to be called "excuses". Not everyone with a shitty home life uses their home life (reasons) as an "excuse" to continue doing shitty things. Besides, what do you know about a shitty home life? Obviously not enough to know how many assholes become that way through plain victimization. Do you expect a seven year old with no recourse or outside instruction to just magically "know what is right" when being raped is part of his normal day?