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Female Sexual Offenders And Female Sex Offenders

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Just like most crimes, the number of female sexual offenders is much lower than the number of male sexual offenders. This is especially true about sex offenses. For a while, most people didn’t believe that woman could even commit a sex related crime; besides prostitution. There is still a stigma around the topic; woman are the victims, not the offenders. This is not true though. Female sex offenders have their own category. This is because their motives and actions are different than a man’s. The research done on female offenders can be bias because it is such a small amount compared to the male population of sex offenders.
Woman are thought to make up less than 5% of all sexual offences (Harris, 1979). This is very small compared to the…show more content…
That is almost half of the offenders with a drug problem and one third of them with an alcohol problem.
The victims of a female’s sex offender are generally younger than a man’s victim. An investigation was held in Arkansas in 1999 “and reported that 50% of their victims were categorized as 11-16 and 24% were in the 4-10 age range” (Tewksbury, 2004, p 368). Solis and Benedek mention a study that found 60% of males who reported sexual abuse had identified a female as the offender (1993). The female offenders who abuse young boys are suggested that they have a difficult time associating with adult males and they use the boys as a substitution (Solis and Benedek, 2012). This could be because of their own trauma as a child, they do not have healthy relationships with any adult male in their life. So, they go after children. It is also pointed out that females are more likely to victimize other females. One thought on why females victimize other females is because they have a male counterpart, who is attracted to females. According to Tewksbury (2004), the female offender knew the victim:
In Fromuth and Conn (1997)’s study of self-reported sexual perpetrators in a college population, 68% of the victims were identified as family members. Faller (1995) reported that in the sample of 40 clinically-referred perpetrators, 85% were mothers and 55% abused only their own children, whereas 30% abused both their own and other’s children.
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