The article below talks about female sexual abusers not being as rare as some might think. One of the sad things about this is that research has been going on for decades on this issue and it has been known that they are not so rare:
WINDSOR, Ont. — She gave him life and was the only parent he ever knew. In the way she snapped photos of him sleeping and playing happily, she was like any other adoring mother. But she also committed unspeakable acts to his little body, turning him into a human sex toy in her pornographic broadcasts.
The set of facts involving the Windsor-area mother who sexually abused her two-year-old son horrified both those involved in the case and those who'd only heard about it.
"Society expects the mother of a toddler would do everything in her power to make sure her child is protected from harm," said the judge who Friday handed the 24-year-old woman a 3 1/2-year prison sentence.
He called her crimes "appalling" and "abhorrent."
While female sexual abusers are rare in the court system, those who deal with child sexual abuse know the woman is not unique. She may be the first Ontario woman to be jailed for making child pornography featuring her own offspring, but she's not the first mother to sexually abuse a child.
This next piece hits it on the head:
The instance is probably higher, since researchers are certain that many cases of child sexual abuse never come to light. "A lot of people have difficulty believing women are capable of sexually abusing children," said social worker Angela Hovey, whose doctoral thesis deals with a topic related to this theme.
Even victims of such abuse, looking back at it as adults, have a hard time talking about it.
In her past employment in federal prisons, she would ask inmates about any sexual abuse in their past. "Many men had been abused by women." The problem, she said, was "they often had more difficulty identifying it as abuse."
Hovey says it's hard to get accurate data on the prevalence of female sex offenders, much less women who abuse their own children. The best information, she believes, may come from victims themselves.
A 2003 U.S. study questioned a random sample of adults to determine the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse. It found that of the 32 per cent of females and 14 per cent of males who identified themselves as victims, nine per cent of women and 39 per cent of men said they had been abused by at least one female.
"Do I think it happens a lot more than we hear about? Absolutely," said Bill Bevan, executive director of the Windsor-Essex Children's Aid Society — which sees two or three such cases each year.
Most don't end up in prosecutions because the young victims aren't capable of testifying. "It could be a teacher. It could be a sister. It could be a babysitter. It could be a mother with her child."
Society kids that teenage boys abused by women are somehow "lucky" and females, by nature, are too nurturing to commit such an offence. In any case of child sexual abuse, there's "kind of gender bias" that automatically excludes women from suspicion, Bevan said.
"It's not the first place you look. It's the father figure you look at first." - Read the entire article here
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
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