The BBC News magazine had an article back in the end of April that asked the question Are there women pedophiles? It is good to see more articles being posted about this subject. I wanted to look at a few parts of the article:
Colin never knew innocence as a child. His earliest memories are of his mother sexually abusing him. In the bath, in his bed and in the night. Until he was 13.
Twenty years later, after a young life derailed by truancy, drugs and violence, he is still deeply affected by what he says happened.
"It's only now that I realise the impact it has had on me. From the age of 14, as soon as it got dark I would have panic attacks and that fuelled my drug-taking because doing it, I felt safe again.
"I couldn't sleep at night and I'd get flashbacks of my mum on top of me. I couldn't hold down a job and I was scared of girls."
The fact the perpetrator was the person who gave birth to him made it harder for him to identify and accept it as abuse, he believes.
"I found it hard to even say it was sexual abuse because of the way society views mothers, and quite rightly - 99% are loving but I was just unlucky to get one that wasn't.
"That's what stopped me from getting help for a long time. I couldn't even acknowledge it myself and there was a worry about being believed and speaking out against my mother. I felt like I was doing something wrong."
If you speak to men and women who have been sexually abused by a woman you will hear stories that are similar to this. Sadly there are many people who have had their lives destroyed and have not survived their abuse to speak out.
Yet Colin is not alone in experiencing this particular kind of trauma, says Steve Bevan, who for nearly two decades has run a support group for male victims of all forms of sexual abuse. Out of 18 men currently getting individual and group support, five say they were abused by women, three of them exclusively so.
"Over the years we've had lots of men abused by mothers, sisters, aunties and baby sitters," says Mr Bevan.
Women can commit a wide range of sexual offences, he says, including rape. And their victims commonly experience sexual confusion and a fear of intimacy. Anger can manifest itself as violence towards a wife or girlfriend in later life.
Sexual abuse by women is much more common than some people think.
In 2005, the NSPCC raised concerns about how disbelief of female paedophiles was hindering detection. Its report said child protection professionals too often met allegations of abuse by females with incredulity, dismissing them as fabrication and allowing women to continue to offend.
It also said that victims suffered a peculiar sense of isolation and stigma because this form of abuse was not so widely recognised.
The stories that some victims have related as to the reactions of people and how they were treated when they tried to speak up is truly awful. Many victims of female sexual abuse report being disbelieved (at best) when they tried to speak of what had or was happening to them. This just caused more pain and suffering.
Eight-hundred victims of female sexual abuse have contacted Michele Elliott, founder of children's charity Kidscape, since she wrote her controversial book, Female Sexual Abuse of Children, in 1992. Three-quarters of the cases feature women acting alone.
"One of the issues of controversy is the thinking that if women do this, it's because men made them do it," says Ms Elliot.
"I disagree with that. I think there's no difference in the motivation between men and women, which is sexual gratification and power over a child. It's very selfish."
I agree with her. Male or female both are human beings. Now this next part is a bit more disturbing:
Like male paedophiles, many female offenders convince themselves they are not harming children, says psychologist Sharon Lambert who this month presented her research on the subject to the British Psychological Society's annual conference.
She contacted a number of people through a website specifically aimed at women. There were no indecent images posted but there were stories and poems about their sexual fantasies with children and a forum for women to discuss their feelings and how they could avoid detection.
"They would say they're not as bad as men because they're more loving with their impulses, and a male involved with a child is more abusive." - Read the entire article here
To discuss how they could avoid detection? That right there speaks volumes.
Monday, June 1, 2009
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