I wanted to post some pieces of a study that talk about an issue at the core of female offenders and why their officially reported numbers seem so low compared with their actual numbers. The study is:
Female Sex Offenders: Exploring Issues of Personality, Trauma, and Cognitive Distortions
Susan M. Strickland
Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Apr 2008; vol. 23: pp. 474 - 489.
Cultural resistance has hindered the identification of sexual crimes committed by women. Although cases of female sexual abuse of children have been documented since the 1930s (Bender & Blau, 1937; Chideckel, 1935), women sexual offenders have remained well hidden. In cases of female sexual abuse, either the abuse is not found out for many years, or if discovered, it is dismissed or disbelieved. It has been only since the mid-1980s that a small sample of female sex offenders have been described in the scientific literature and only since the 1990s that this group has been studied more systematically (Hislop, 2001). Historically, these crimes have been underreported and unidentified by victims and easily dismissed by adults (Allen, 1991; Hislop, 1999). Sexual abuse by women tends to be minimized and justified as an extension of the women’s nurturing role, rather than as harmful or assaultive (Denov, 2001).
Traditional sexual scripts, depicting women as incapable of committing sexual offences, are responsible for the lack of recognition of the abuse (Denov, 2003; Dunbar, 1999; Mendel, 1995). These scripts exclude males as victims of sexual coercion, simultaneously excluding women as aggressors of sexual assault (Byers & O’Sullivan, 1998; Denov, 2003; Mendel, 1995).
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