Blog Post #5: Female Sex Offenders

When you think of a sex offender, what do you think of? More likely than not, you are thinking of a male offender. Information suggests, however, that women and adolescent girls are sex offenders, although they represent the minority of sex offenders. There has been question as to whether this data really reflects an under-occurrence of female offenders, or if female sex offending is simply under-recognized. Studies show that both may be true, with various contributing external factors.

Much like all crime in general, males comprise the vast majority of all arrests, according to an FBI statistic from 2006. Because males are arrested and charged with crimes at a far higher number than women, there is little reason to believe that females would necessarily be responsible for a greater proportion of sex crimes. On the other hand, however, there is evidence that sex offenses initiated by women is likely to be under-identified, even more so than male perpetrated sex offenses. There are several reasons for this, including: societal and cultural stereotypes, professional biases, problems with research methods, among other influences.

Women arrests for sex crimes account for less than 10% of all sex crime cases, out of all adults and juveniles who come to the attention of the authorities (FBI, 2006). More specifically, arrests of women represent only 1% of all adult arrests for forcible rape, and 6% of all arrests for other sex offenses. For juvenile female offenders, females are responsible for 3% of forcible rape cases, and 5% of other violent sex offenses (19% for non violent sex offenses). While the number of arrests for adult women sex offenses has decreased in recent years, the number of adolescent girls coming to the attention for sex crimes has increased significantly. More specifically, between 1997 and 2002, juvenile cases involving female-perpetrated forcible rapes, other violent sex offenses, and non-violent sex offenses rose by 6%, 62%, and 42% respectively.

Sex offending has always been viewed as a male-only crime. This is in part due to society’s gender role stereotypes. Women are viewed at nurturing, caretaking individuals, not violent sex offenders. Women by nature, are seen as unlikely to engage in aggressive or harmful behaviors towards others. There are also sexist beliefs that depict males as controlling sexual encounters, and females as passive and submissive recipients. Misperceptions also exist about the ability of women to sexually victimize males. Because of the huge imbalance of cases between female and male offenders that are brought to attention, society remains unaware of the increasing numbers of female sex offenders.

References:
Center for Sex Offender Management.-Female Sex Offenders http://www.csom.org/pubs/female_sex_offenders_brief.pdf