Content area
Full text
The overwhelming majority of research on sexual abusers focuses on male perpetrators. Research on female perpetrators has only begun to emerge (for early reviews, see Grayston and De Luca, 1999; Gannon and Cortoni, 2010). In part, this massive discrepancy is due to the fact that male perpetrators commit the vast majority of sexual abuse, while sexual abuse committed by female perpetrators is assumed by most – but not all – to be exceedingly rare (Widanaralalage et al., 2022; DiMarco et al., 2023). A growing body of research on female perpetrators casts doubt on this assumption, and it suggests that female sexual abusers differ from male sexual abusers in relevant ways (Fisher and Pina, 2013). The present study adds to the limited research base on female perpetrators of child sexual abuse by using a relatively recent (i.e. collected in the year 2019) and comprehensive data set that overcomes several of the methodological difficulties of studying female perpetrators.
The majority of research conducted to date has focused on estimating the prevalence of female perpetrators. The studies use a variety of different methods and find somewhat different results. Generally speaking, the studies suggest that between 5% and 20% of child sexual abuse is committed by female perpetrators (Augarde and Rydon-Grange, 2022). The percentages are lower when studies rely on criminal justice data and higher when they rely on self-report data (Tozdan et al., 2019). The percentages also vary across jurisdictions (Cortoni et al., 2017).
Cortoni et al. (2017) conducted a meta-analysis of 17 samples from 12 countries and found that 2% of officially detected sexual offenses were committed by females, which increased to 12% when victimization surveys were used to measure sexual abuse. Cortoni et al. (2017) noted that the inclusion of data from Ireland and Belgium pulled the overall mean down to 2% from approximately 5% for official crime data. Furthermore, Cortoni et al. (2017) concluded that “the meta-analysis underscores that sexual offending by females is underreported. This is not surprising given that we have known for a long time that sexual offending by males has been and continues to be underreported” (p. 156). It should be noted that the analysis by Cortoni et al. (2017) did not focus exclusively on child victims.