We’ll have a good deal to say about female sex offenders in our election manifesto, with respect to their sexual abuse of men, women, and children. Given all that’s known about female sex offenders – including that a majority of incarcerated (male) rapists were sexually abused when they were children, by one or more women (Petrovich & Templar, 1984) – the continuing failure of the criminal justice system to hold large numbers of women to account is a long-running scandal.
Men under-report being sexually abused by women to the police. There are a number of reasons. We’re brought up and live in a gynocentric world in which men simply don’t consider themselves as potential victims of sexual abuse by women, so they will be inclined to rationalise that abuse – ‘She was drunk, I was drunk…’. In the same circumstances, but with the genders switched, the woman will regard herself as a victim, and the police will regard the encounter as sexual assault.
They have no choice but to do so. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 explicitly states that drunkenness isn’t a mitigating circumstance for a sexual offender, and only men can rape, by the definition of rape in the Act. The CPS will have no hesitation in pressing charges against the man in question, regarding it as a matter of considerable public interest to do so. The police pass details of few suspected female sex offenders to the CPS for charging decisions, even when the victims are children.
We recently received a response from the Ministry of Justice to our FoI request on the differential treatment of suspected male and female sex offenders. Their letter is here and their Tables on the treatment of suspected male sex offenders here and suspected female sex offenders here.
We’ve previously linked to a CPS report showing that in a six-month period in 2012, the CPS pressed charges against only 29% of the women put forward to them by the police as being strongly suspected of having made false rape allegations (or known to have made them).
The following information from the MoJ Tables speaks for itself, and the Tables also show the situation was very similar 20 years ago:
MEN
4,125 – proceeded against
2,362 – found guilty
1,210 – immediate custodial sentence
WOMEN
49 – proceeded against
28 – found guilty
11 – immediate custodial sentence
