Our thanks to Steven for pointing us to this story and for his reflections on the matter. Let’s start our critique with the headline:
Deal mother’s betrayal by former friend Karen Ackland who seduced son of 14 three decades her junior
Firstly, note the prime area of concern here is gynocentric – the betrayal of the mother. And note the term ‘seduced’. Would we use the term to describe the actions of a 44yo man who’d sexually assaulted a 14yo girl? Of course we wouldn’t. Yet it’s frequently used by journalists to describe sexual assaults of boys by women.
How many more articles must we read along the lines of this one, before the justice system starts to punish female sex offenders in the manner it punishes male sex offenders? From the article:
Ackland pounced on the boy as he got ready for bed and used him as her “sex object” – only to be rumbled when his older brother heard her making sex noises…
The youngster’s distraught mother called for harsher sentences for female sex offenders.
She said: “I never expected her to do this, you trust your friends. And he was just a child. She was always a party animal and when she had too many drinks she completely loses all self-respect and embarrasses herself. She used to always say ‘I’m a nightmare when I’ve had a drink’ and she’d always have a few men on the go.
“But I was a great friend to her and I stood by her. I never expected this. When my son was interviewed I was welling up. He looked exhausted, he was emotionally drained. It was absolutely harrowing to hear. She was very domineering and my son said as soon as it happened that he’d wished he’d never done it.”
She added: “I think women should have as long sentences as men. It’s exactly the same sexual act. It shouldn’t be any different for men and women and if she had been a man I think she would have had a jail sentence.”…
Ackland, of Cavell Square, changed her plea to guilty just before the victim was due to give evidence – admitting three charges of sexual activity with a child. After the boy’s brother burst into the room, Ackland ran out the family’s home and kept what she had done from his mother. The boy later told a friend: “I went to get into my trackies and she stripped naked in front of me. “Yeah we had sex but it was really weird. She kept asking me to spit on her and all these weird things.”
Mr Espley said within days, the incident was the talk of the school and teachers were forced to report the incident to police.
Teachers were ‘forced’ to report the incident to the police? What might we infer from that? Their preference would have been not to inform the police, to protect a female sex offender?
The end of the article:
Director of children’s charity Kidscape Claude Knights yesterday said the sentence “sends out a very weak message”. She said: “The suspended nine month custodial sentence does not reflect the severity of this crime and sends out a very weak message. Despite many advances in our understanding the true extent of female sexual abuse remains a hidden picture. One has to ask how this crime would have been perceived had it been committed by a man.
“The response to such despicable crimes against children should be very robust regardless of the gender of the perpetrator.”
While we’re pleased to see Claude Knights’s comments, she’s demonstrably when she says ‘the true extent of female sexual abuse remains a hidden picture’. One of our blog posts on the matter is here. Among the referenced studies is an American one from 1984, in which it was reported that:
59% of incarcerated (male) rapists were sexually abused as children by one or more women.
Women and girls, as well as men and boys, pay a high price for the sexual abuse of boys by women. The problem continues to attract minimal interest in our ideologically-driven justice system.
