I find it interesting how on To Catch a Predator they only ever found one female pedophile in all of their stings. Why do you think that is? Is it because female molesters are exceptionally rare, or is it because they’d be highly unlikely to troll for underaged people on the Internet?
I think we can all agree that more than half of pedophiles are men, but would you wager the female percentage is closer to 2% (the lowest I’ve heard) or 40% (the highest I’ve heard)? Have you ever known of someone who was molested by a woman?
Real quickly you’re going to get into the debate about what’s a pedophile and what a child molester.
We mostly agree that diddling a 6yo, a 15yo, and a 17 year 364 day old are three different things in reality. Especially in the last case if you’re 18 years and a couple months old yourself.
Though they’re all (mostly) the same legally.
So which scenarios are you interested in the MF split for?
I have no stats, but I could easily believe there’s a 60/40 MF split on the just over 18 / just under 18 couplings. And at the same time I could easily believe a 98/2 MF split on 30-somethings diddling 6yos.
I would say any adult having sexual relations with someone under 14 would count as a “child molester”, as well as anyone over 25 having relations with a 15-16 year old.
This is hard for me to answer with certainty. In one sense I was “molested” as a male child from an older female acquaintance (I was about 6, she was about 13), but the thing is…I don’t feel like I was a victim, or violated, or should be told it wasn’t my fault or internalize that it was bad.
It just wasn’t that big of a deal to me. So my point with female on male sex activity is that it may be under reported simply because it hasn’t been recognized as something terrible and life debilitating that needs counselling to be healed from. I certainly don’t feel damaged or victimized.
I’ve held the obviously controversial view that the feelings of sexual violations are often times the product of society telling someone they should feel victimized. If I were repeatedly told that the sexual encounters I had as a 6 year old were terrible and life changing/debilitating, then I might have actually believed that and acknowledged that I was a ‘victim’ and needed counseling.
Just google something like “female teacher sex with student” and you’ll find plenty of examples of women going after boys 10, 15 or more years younger.
No need for them to troll the internet. In fact, they can choose from a new inventory every year.
The only way we know “how rare” it is is by counting arrests, prosecutions and convictions. There is no hard data on the incidence of events that go unreported and uninvestigated.
It can be looked up in uniform crime stats. As I recall, very few women have ever been formally charged with this, and even them, most are the accomplices of male actors.
Most that one hears about seem to be school teachers-with-benefits. None of them seem to have had to try very hard to entice boys to get into their windowless vans.
Interesting. I wonder if molestation by females is often viewed as less harmful by the victim and possibly some cases are even forgotten about for that reason. There was a thread here asking if men had ever been groped before and many of them said being groped by a woman did not upset them much.
Maybe because there is a power differential between men and women? I’ve been groped by a woman before and I didn’t take it personally because I’m much larger physically than she was and I knew it couldn’t escalate into anything worse. Even children see women as being less threatening.
Anecdote: When I was in college in the early 1990s, I worked with a woman who also worked at a group home for teenage boys who had been in various kinds of trouble with the law. She had never encountered one who didn’t have a history of sexual abuse, and to her complete shock, she said the most common perpetrator was a teenage female babysitter. :eek: (Former Miss America Marilyn Atler, an incest survivor who has researched, written, and spoken extensively on this subject, has said something comparable, and that the most common age for this kind of thing, for girls, is about 14.) Not far behind was best friend’s mom, mom’s best friend, older sister’s friend, etc. Of course, these boys thought it was cool to “lose their virginity” under these circumstances when they were 10, 11, 12 years old, that kind of thing, but it messed with them in ways people who haven’t experienced this don’t understand.
She also said that if she ever had kids, she would NEVER hire teenage girls to watch them, and would also be less concerned at the idea of her daughters being molested than she would have with her sons.
In other words, they’re more common than most people realize.
I also believe that women getting caught in “To Catch a Predator”-esque stings isn’t as common as it is for men because women are less likely to seek out anonymous sex partners, which is a whole separate aspect of human sexuality.
Now see, right here is the problem highlighted in the first response. You’ve redefined the term, in a manner consistent with your opinion. Unless someone else has the exact same opinion, and is a sociologist, and got a grant for a double-blind anonymous study, how will you get statistics on the concept?
Oh, and once protoboard:'s statistics arrive, I’ve decided that “as well as anyone over 19 having relations with a 15-16 year old” is pedophilia, so get cracking on my statistics, if you please.
Until you have rigidly defined terms, you’ll always lack hard evidence.
Anecdotally and borne out by some of the comments above, it seems obvious that women and girls have far more opportunities than men and boys.
Not many people would use a 14yo boy as a babysitter. There is a worrying shortage of male teachers in junior schools. The extreme feminist view is that all men are potential rapists. This means that any female who wants to molest children will have a pretty easy time getting access to them.
I’ve prosecuted, or seen the prosecution of, many hundreds of child molesters (in Australia, a country culturally similar to the US, UK, etc).
Maybe a dozen were women.
But a significant number among that dozen were women in disfunctional, manipulated relationships with men who were the primary predators. Doesn’t excuse it, but explains and mitigates it.
Of course this rough ratio only captures the cases that actually got to prosecution. I can’t comment on why, or how many, cases occur that never get that far, perhaps for want of complaint.
I haven’t seen as many female schoolteachers as you might think, and one of them molested girls.
The rest were typically lonely, past the bloom of youth and hopefulness, and often substance abusers, who preyed on victims of opportunity rather than actively sought out targets. They rationalised their offending in a variety of ways. It was “educational”, it was “love”, and so on.
A very weird one was a high school age boy/girl couple who were sexually active with each other, and each also molested the girl’s 9-10 yo sister. Each of the older children had plausible psych reports that the other was the instigator. Ick to the power of hell no.
For one summer and following semester of college my brother worked as an intern at the local county prosecutor’s office. I asked him what was his main takeaway from that job. My brother is as pithy as I am long-winded.
“Statistically speaking, incest is normal human behavior”.
I think the answer is quite obvious…It’s the same reason male prostitution towards females is rare, They don’t need to chat online, drive 200km and have sex. Women are seen as more desirable sexually, romantically, and in any type of non platonic intimacy by a good number of people. An average looking young woman who isn’t completely ‘off’ has ‘exclusive’ societal access to interactions with anyone. They are seen as harmless, friendly, and nurturing.
In the cases of pedophilia or ephebophilia, I would say that women in positions of authority can ‘groom’ a child without arousing (no pun intended) any suspicion from other adults or children compared to men. I don’t really think any male teacher no matter how good looking can go up to a young male/female student and ask them to stay back after class for extra Chemistry help without the majority of people raising an eyebrow. For women, It’s simply much different.
@femmejean: The incest he was dealing with at the prosecutor’s office was pretty much the typical thing: 6 to 12 yo girl molested for years by uncle, dad, mom’s current BF, etc. IOW, neither consensual nor both of age. That’s pretty icky.
OTOH, I don’t happen to have any hot cousins I know of. But now that we’re all of age I wouldn’t get much bent out of shape over me lusting for one such nor her lusting for me. Other than the whole “I’m married” thing.
My input is based on listening to a podcast that I’ve heard for the past few years called “The Mental Illness Happy Hour”. From what I gather, when women offend it isn’t necessarily as overt as men. Often women seem to find people in their care and abuse them, and even then it may not always look as obvious as one would expect. Often it can even be bathing kids that are way too old for such, dwelling on cleaning certain parts, and getting off on that. It seems to be more low key, but still abusive, in many circumstances.
I’ll also say that “you can’t rape the willing” is a pretty awful thing to say. There’s a perception that young males are just waiting to boink their female teachers, and the reality is that your body may function biologically while your mind is going through trauma. When a girl is raped by a man nobody assumes that she was willing, but when a boy does it he must have been simply because his body responded. Those young men may go through with something or even brag to their friends, but often they’re caught in a power dynamic where they feel helpless and a culture where they’re expected to be “willing”. There’s a tremendously f@!ked up view of who and what young men are supposed to be and it probably results in way less reporting of abuse than there should be. Guys would feel ashamed to complain because they’re “supposed” to like it. Much like men that are physically abused by women. There is shame in that they aren’t fitting into the cultural view of what the norm is because some loudmouth dude is always out there shooting off his mouth and bowing up like he’s some tough macho guy to hide the messed up things underneath.
I don’t know, I’d be pretty grossed out if she was unattractive and uncomfortable even if she was and I partially enjoyed it.
That’s interesting how one poster said only a dozen out of “many hundreds” were women. If many hundreds means about 1,000, that’s an 80:1 ratio of male molesters, making female molesters quite rare indeed. Unless they’re much, much more likely to get away with it than men.
(Can’t rape the willing as they say.)