This is an extract from a letter written by Tony, an adult struggling to come to terms with the abuse he suffered at the hands of his aunt from the age of three.'I know that the experts say that female sexual abuse is rare,' he writes. 'Don't believe it. There are many out there like me who were abused and who are now causing more abuse.'I sometimes wonder how different my life might have been had my mother or someone else listened to the pain of a small boy.'

The lurid and highly publicized bust of two female pedophiles in the United Kingdom earlier this year has raised the issue of female sexual abuse of children to an all-time high level there.  Shortly after those revelations, came the report of data collected by the charity Childline that reports by children of sexual abuse by women were up sharply.  Men still do the very large majority of sexual abuse of children, and the incidence of abuse is not itself rising.  What's rising is the number of children reporting their abuse at the hands of women.  Read more about it here (Daily Mail, 11/18/09)

That's corroborated by Detective Chief Inspector, Graham Hill of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre in London, who said,

"ChildLine's findings are very much in line with our own."

As I pointed out in a previous post, that's significant due to the fact that a daunting cultural taboo stands between children and reporting abuse by women.

'Years ago, people were very shocked to hear that children were abused at all,' says child psychotherapist Diana Cant, who works with the victims of female sex abuse.

'The same is now true about female sex abuse. People can hardly bear to think about it or get their minds around it. We want to push it away. It flies in the face of the image of mothers as carers.

Necessarily then, the increase in reporting by children, would  seem to indicate a breaking down of that taboo.  The image of mothers as Madonna, for centuries a vital part of our cultural construct of mothers and motherhood, may be a headed for a crack-up.  The myth of the all-giving, ever-loving mother is slowly giving way under the weight of facts.

And it's not just that cultural taboo that militates against children reporting abuse by a woman; grim reality does too.

This makes reporting such crimes even more difficult for child victims, who know that by doing so they may be kick-starting a process which will ultimate tear apart their family and, in all likelihood, see them being put into the care system.

Child psychotherapist Diana Cant adds,

'They stand to lose everything and they fear that, if they report it, everything they know, their family, will be taken away."

But whatever the reason for the increase in reports, it seems that children are leading the way toward a larger social understanding that women are indeed capable of great harm to children.  That greater understanding should lead to more sensible public policies that reflect known facts instead of accepted myths.  Acceptance that women can be sexual abusers of children should lead to the acceptance of them as physical abusers, which should lead to more effective responses on the parts of law enforcement and those charged with treatment. 

It should also lead to more even-handed treatment of men and fathers in a variety of circumstances.  Understanding and acceptance of the reality of female abuse of children should lead to a decline in bias against men in criminal court and fathers in family court.  It was just a few months ago that a woman was arrested for the murder of a child in California.  She had been an obvious suspect for some time, but police had failed to notice the fact.  When they finally arrested her, they admitted that they had been looking exclusively for a male perpetrator.

But until attitudes change it is also clear that female abusers will continue to hide behind the benign image of mother, aunt or family friend and that this tiny minority of wrongdoers will escape notice.

Thanks to Duncan for the heads-up.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 9:26 am and is filed under Rape/Sexual Assault/Statutory Rape. You can trackback from your own site.