Female Sex Offenders – Raising awareness and providing education about them.
May 17th, 2012 by Rhiannon/Blogger
We are currently taking a slight vacation and will be posting on the site and blog again soon. We are also looking for someone who would like to help with the blog. Help could be anything ranging from posting news articles, posting new studies or just helping to delete all the spam that comes in 
If you are interested in helping please let us know.
May 7th, 2012 by Rhiannon/Blogger
We continue to add more and more studies to the bibliography pages. We are now over 600+ entries and have more to add. Please pass along the Bibliography page information as many people think that there is very little research on female sex offenders and are surprised when they find a place that has over 600+ entries, most of which are hyper linked for ease use.
The latest entry is :
Turton, J. (2010). Female sexual abusers: Assessing the risk. International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 38(4), 279-293.
Successful risk management within child protection is problematic and in many cases is a delicate balancing act between parental and children’s rights. Reversing the expected gender roles creates a dynamic that may increase the difficulties of risk assessment even further. This paper focuses on women who sexually abuse children and discusses the particular problems relating to the assessment of risk in professional practice. The data was gathered in the UK and drawn from a series of qualitative interviews with child protection professionals, including 3 police officers, 2 lawyers, 15 social workers, 6 probation officers, 8 health workers and 11 counsellors. The interview data have identified some links between the gendered assumptions and the rationales used by professionals to explain the abusive behaviour.
Tags: bibliography pages, female sex offenders, female sexual abusers, gender roles
Apr 24th, 2012 by Rhiannon/Blogger
Repost: This is another post that we received a request to have reposted for this month:
I was talking with someone about abuse and they said something that I wanted to talk about here. I have known this person and the family for years.
When he was 13 years old, his mother, a widow, had fallen in love with a man and planned to marry him. The relationship turned abusive with much of the abuse initially being directed at his mother. His sister and he were eventually abused. He successfully convinced his mother and sister to go to a shelter, by shielding his family from the physical violence, taking blows for them so they could escape.
When he arrived at the shelter with his family, he was told he was too old to stay there (over age 11), thus forcing his mother to send him into foster care.
What struck me is he is not bitter about the initial abuse, but he still feels resentment at the betrayal he felt when the DV shelter forced him to leave his mother.
He was the one that tried, as much as a boy can, to protect her, and get her help. He was polite, respectful, and helpful. In short he was a wonderful child and a model of what all the domestic violence prevention programs say a young man should be.
He was also a victim of abuse just like his mother and sister, but simply because of his gender he was forced to be apart from them. He felt loved and safe with his mother, and it seemed unfair that he was separated from his family, when his sister was not.
To this day he is still a kind, humble, caring, soft spoken and respectful person who has raised wonderful children. He donates time, and money to many charities, but refuses to support domestic violence/sexual assault organizations because of what happened to him as a boy. His extended family does the same.
The pain and bitterness that still haunts him, still happens to people every day. It is telling that he was able to recover from the abuse he suffered at the hands of the mother’s boyfriend, and while in foster care, but the incident at the shelter stays with him. The damage done to him is inexcusable.
This man, his family, and many others like him are all people that could be wonderful supporters and volunteers for these agencies but because of how they were victimized by them, they refuse to fund a system that bases it’s beliefs on stereotyping and discriminating against one gender.
His trust was damaged by the gender discrimination he got to experience with his first interaction with “helping professionals.”
Another thing this brings to my mind is that all forms of abuse can be equally harmful. Many a person has commented to me that the physical abuse they suffered was not as hard to recover from as the psychological abuse. Some have never recovered from the psychological abuse and struggle with it until they die. The psychological piece is where the wounds are on the inside and are hard to see so they often are minimized or ignored.
This is why every “helping professional” and organization should always keep in mind that even if they can’t help someone they can make sure they do not harm them either. “Do No Harm” is a motto that should be applied and taken seriously because even the unintended consequences of some ill-conceived policy can have life long and wide reaching effects.
(note: Thank you LL)
Tags: betrayal, domestic violence, domestic violence prevention, physical abuse, psychological abuse, sexual assault
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