I think there is a misconception that what drives people to do harm is the experience of harm or abuse. The problem with this is that it assumes that anyone escapes childhood unscathed. It also allows people who do harm in normalized ways to get away with it.
In reality, we all experience substantial harm day to day because of the structure of our society. Some people deal with it by choosing to work for a better world. Some people deal by bullying anyone they have power over, abusing their kids emotionally, or sexually harassing women. An awful lot of people casually hate marginalized groups, like fat people, trans people, or disabled people, and never attribute this hate to their own internal pain, for example.
So the problem with this saying is that it suggests that there is a group of people who are uniquely dangerous because of what we have been through, specifically because we were abused. That is insulting and retraumatizing, but it’s also just plain false. There are all kinds of people who do all kinds of harm in this world. Much of that harm is socially acceptable, and that is typically done by people who have a lot of privilege, not by people who have been abused.

One example is the way that it’s completely normalized for grown men to sexualize and hit on teenage girls, and for men in positions of power to exploit that power to sleep with teenage girls.
That’s not considered pedophilia, it’s considered a biological inevitability, and it’s so much a part of this culture that I can think of 4 tv shows aimed primarily at teenagers that romanticize this type of relationship.
The male perpetrators of this type of abuse, because it is abuse, typically are not survivors of sexual abuse, they’re men with power issues.
Survivors of child sexual abuse, on the other hand, are often assumed to have boundary issues, to be perpetrators of sexual violence, to potentially be child abusers. Yet statistically, less than half of us actually do go on to abuse children. Those who do are often blatantly repeating cycles of trauma done to them, almost like they’re crying out for help.
Yet who is society scared of?
Us.
That’s really the problem with associating harm with abuse survivors to such an extent. It’s a distraction from the fact that child abuse has always been part of our society, through religious institutions, parental abuse, and forced marriage of teenagers.