Because we always have a spike of ‘hits’ on this blog after media appearances, I thought it timely (before my appearance on tomorrow’s Sunday Morning Live) to point to some materials on female sex offenders.
The longest section on the 20 topics covered by our last election manifesto related to sexual abuse (pp.31-7). It starts with a link to an important site, Female Sex Offenders. We’ve just archived it here. From the first of the seven pages in our manifesto:
This culture leads to inequalities. Few women are held accountable for sex offences, including those women who sexually abuse children. It’s known from a major American survey (details below) that slightly over 25% of sex offences are committed by women against men (with no male accomplices). We would therefore expect the male/female ratio of people charged with sex offences to be a little under 3:1. In the UK, in 2013, the ratio was 146:1.
Women as well as men suffer from this failure to hold female sex offenders to account. Michele Elliott is the founder and director of Kidscape, a British charity. Her book Female Sexual Abuse of Children – The Ultimate Taboo was published in 1993. In 1984 two American researchers, Petrovich & Templer, reported that of a sample of 89 incarcerated (male) rapists, 49 (59%) had been sexually abused as children by one or more women. There is, therefore, a de facto correlation between female sex offences and male sex offending.
