Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
Child Abuse Negl. 2017 Oct;72:446-455. doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.09.003. Epub 2017 Sep 26.
When women encounter the criminal justice system, it is typically as victims rather than as offenders. Consequently, there is limited empirical research on women who have sexually offended against children, but there is a clinically-significant group of victims who have experienced female-perpetrated child sexual abuse (CSA). In a database of 4237 CSA cases that were heard in criminal courts between 1986 and 2012, we found 70 cases that involved female accused. We compared female-accused cases against a randomly selected sample of 70 male-accused cases from the same database. We investigated associations between gender of the accused and characteristics of the victim, offense, and criminal proceeding. Several important differences between female- and male-accused cases were found: proportionally more male complainants were in female-accused cases; female-accused offenses were longer in duration; and despite offenses being similarly intrusive, female perpetrators received shorter sentences. This research indicates that there are potentially unique pathways to abuse for women and men, and unique experiences in the criminal justice system. Although female perpetrators are involved in a small proportion of CSA offenses, the cases that we describe herein are important to consider when developing appropriate support and intervention programs for offenders and victims of CSA.
当女性遇到刑事司法系统时，她们通常是作为受害者而不是犯罪者。因此，针对对儿童进行性侵犯的女性犯罪者的实证研究非常有限，但有一类具有重要临床意义的受害者群体，她们遭受了女性实施的儿童性虐待（CSA）。在 1986 年至 2012 年间在刑事法庭审理的 4237 起 CSA 案件数据库中，我们发现了 70 起涉及女性被告的案件。我们将女性被告案件与来自同一数据库的随机选择的 70 名男性被告案件进行了比较。我们调查了被告的性别与受害者、犯罪行为和刑事诉讼特征之间的关联。在女性被告和男性被告案件之间发现了几个重要的差异：在女性被告案件中，男性投诉者的比例更高；女性被告的犯罪行为持续时间更长；尽管犯罪行为同样具有侵犯性，但女性犯罪者的刑期更短。这项研究表明，女性和男性可能存在独特的虐待途径，以及在刑事司法系统中可能存在独特的经历。尽管女性犯罪者在 CSA 犯罪中只占很小的比例，但我们在此描述的案件在为 CSA 的犯罪者和受害者制定适当的支持和干预计划时非常重要。
