When you hear the word paedophile, what picture pops into your head? It is a creepy middle-aged man, wasn’t it? Probably a priest, too.
It almost certainly isn’t a nice female teacher in her 30s.
But in a growing number of cases – an “epidemic”, according to some researchers – that’s depressingly likely what a paedophile might look like.
When Mary Kay Letourneau was caught having sex with her sixth-grade student in 1996, America was shocked. Now, reports of female teachers sexually abusing the young boys in their charge seem almost routine.
That’s because it has become routine.
According to the Akron Beacon Journal, at least five female educators in the Greater Akron area have faced charges of sexual misconduct with students in the past two year[s] alone. Reporter Amanda Garrett decided to look into what’s going on.
She found that Akron is part of a national trend, which experts said is taking a growing toll on young boys […]
Psychologist Anna Salter, an expert on sexual predators, said these women are typically married moms in their mid-30s.
Pluralist
As Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found – but the media carefully brushed over – more children were abused in schools than by priests. To be sure, the majority of abusers were men, but women are fast catching up.
It’s not just in Australia or the US, either.
Figures from BBC Radio 4’s File on 4 show there were over 10,400 reports of [female child sexual abusers] from 2015 to 2019 – equivalent to an average of 40 a week […]
Between 2015 and 2019, the numbers of reported cases of female-perpetrated child sexual abuse to police in England and Wales rose from 1,249 to 2,297 – an increase of 84 per cent.
One question is whether the increase in reports shows an increasing number of cases, or whether the extent of female paedophiles has long been unreported and unrecognised.
Katherine Cox, services manager with male and non-binary victim support charity Survivors UK, said she believes the File on 4 figures did not reflect an increase in abuse, but an increase in people feeling able to report to the authorities […]
In 2018, 5,547 offenders were found guilty of child sexual abuse in England and Wales, according to the Ministry of Justice. There were 66 convictions of female abusers.
There were a total of 73,260 reports of child sexual abuse offences in England and Wales in the 12 months from March 2018.
BBC
So, there is, first, a massive gap between reports and convictions. This is par for the course in sex offences, where it almost always comes down to one person’s word against another’s. But the gap between female paedophile reports and convictions is even more stark. Alleged female perpetrators make up nearly four per cent of reports, but just one per cent of convictions.
Part of the problem is a double-standard that writes off female abusers as almost positive. Female abuse is widely seen as harmless, and male victims as “wanting it”.
But it doesn’t work like that in reality.
Experts have said that female teachers do just as much harm to the boys they prey on as their male counterparts do to girls.
Such misconceptions can leave boys and men vulnerable, Sandy Parker, director of the Rape Crisis Center of Summit and Medina Counties, told Garrett. Male victims may be less likely to report sex crimes, Parker said, and even when they do, the justice system doesn’t take them seriously.
In one telling case last year, 18-year-old Corbin Madison was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot after being molested by a married teacher who was convicted of having sex with four underage boys.
Pluralist
It’s not just boys who are their victims, either. Some of Britain’s worst female paedophiles assaulted girls. UK government data shows a roughly even gender split between male and female victims.