This is the final of a two-part series on female child sexual abusers.
As was stated last week, cases of boys being sexually abused by older females hardly generally reach any law court, even though this is not an uncommon form of abuse.
The difference between women abusing young boys and men abusing young girls, is that those cases involving girls and older men are those, which usually go before the courts, although many do not, mostly in instances when parents decide not to cooperate with the police or other authorities.
However, the law makes it clear that sexual activity of any kind between a child 16 years and under and an adult, is sexual abuse.
In Britain, there are many cases of women abusing both girls and boys.
We will look at those figures a little later.
According to a report of a study carried out across the Eastern Caribbean during the period October 2008 to June 2009, authored by Adele E. Jones and Ena Trotman, and supported by Action for Children, Unicef and the University of Hudderfield, while most victims of sexual abuse are girls, the abuse of boys seems to have been largely overlooked by researchers. They noted there was evidence that the abuse of boys was a serious problem, and that, in the public perception, is an increasing problem.”
They also revealed that “the study was unable to provide any definite evidence on the numbers of children and adults who are affected by child sexual abuse.’
The study confirmed that most children are sexually abused by adult men – both heterosexual and homosexual of all ages and across all levels of social class, education, background and professional status.
The study also stated that while women abuse children too, the major contribution that women make to the problem is in failing to protect children even when they are aware that abuse is going on, thus minimising the harm that abuse does, physically abusing children, and in some cases, permitting or actively encouraging abuse to take place for material gain.
There are said to be three forms of sexual abuse; Intra-family; non-family, and transactional sexual abuse.
The study revealed that “listed among the latter are “isolated examples of women targeting both young girls and boys, in exchange for money, goods and favours.
Sexual aggression by girls was said to be increasing in several countries, where groups of girls engaging in aggressive sexual behaviour gang up on boys and sexually abuse them.
Most children who are abused do not tell their family members, and this is true in the case of boys being abused by females.
According to Hilary Aldridge, chief executive of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a British organisation which works solely with female abusers, the large majority of all cases of sexual abuse are not reported – as many as 90 per cent, she says – let alone put before a judge. In the unlikely event that a case of sexual abuse is reported, there is still a long and arduous process to go through in order to get it to court.
Aldridge works on a daily basis with offenders in cases referred to her organisation by the family and criminal courts. She explains how tricky it can be to get a case of child abuse to court. “In the first instance, a child has to first come forward and tell someone what is happening, which is often extremely difficult for them to do,” she explains. “Or someone else needs to notice that something is wrong, and then pick up on what that is.
“They then have to make the police take the allegation seriously and if they are able to do that, which is often difficult, then the child protection services will become involved and someone there has to take it seriously, too.”
One British writer wrote, “All things considered, we might do better to look somewhere other than the Government data for an idea of the prevalence of cases of child abuse involving female offenders in the UK – and the most widely respected sources for this are the independent studies from ChildLine and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,(NSPCC) which are believed to provide a much more accurate picture.
Suddenly, the issue of female sexual abuse doesn’t look quite as uncommon as we might otherwise have believed.
In 2004, ChildLine asked each of those callers who were ringing their helpline about sexual abuse to tell them the gender of their abuser. It revealed that over the period of one year, 11 per cent of callers said they were being abused by a woman: a total of 8,637 children, of whom 6,538 were girls and 2,099 boys.
The NSPCC also conducted its own research in 2005, the results of which suggest that around five per cent of children who suffer sexual abuse in Britain do so at the hands of a woman, which is the number regularly cited by other experts in the field. But as Zoe Hilton, the charity’s policy advisor for child protection, suggests: “The true extent of female sexual abuse is still a hidden picture.” Furthermore, it is not a picture that many seem in any hurry to clarify.
One of the biggest problems, is that the idea that women can and do sexually abuse children is highly provocative in itself – a fact confirmed by a spokeswoman for the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Services (CEOP), a government taskforce charged with “eradicating the sexual abuse of children” in Britain.
“Women are perceived as the nurturers, those who are there to look after our young people,” she explains, adding that female sexual abuse is often even more threatening than male sexual abuse as it undermines what we understand about the way women relate to children
“In order for us to recognise it”she continues, “we have to set our preconceptions aside. Otherwise, children will continue to suffer in silence: “How can a child be expected to understand they are being abused and that what they are enduring is wrong if we as a society cannot recognise women as abusers?” she asks.
There are no statistics in Barbados to show how many women actually sexually abuse children- particularly boys, so seemingly the involvement of women in cases of child molestation is as one writer stated, an enduring taboo, unless of course, parents take more interest in their children’s welfare and those who generally are responsible for the welfare of children, seek to ensure that each child is properly informed and educated on what is sexual abuse.
