The Culture of Denial: Why Society Refuses to See Women as Perpetrators of Violent Sexual Crimes. From the 1920s to today — a century of rates, research, and the psychology of institutional blindness

The Culture of Denial

Why Society Refuses to See Women as Perpetrators of Violent Sexual Crimes

A century of data, a century of denial, and the human cost of both.

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There is a picture in most people’s minds when the phrase sexual perpetrator arrives. The picture is male. It has been male in popular culture, in legal frameworks, in psychological research, in news coverage, and in social consciousness for as long as any of those things have existed in their current forms. The picture is so consistent, so universal, so apparently self-evident, that most people have never paused to examine whether it is accurate.

It is not accurate. Not completely. Not in the way that its consistency suggests.

Female sexual offending is not rare. An estimated 3 to 5 percent of all adult sexual offenders are female based on conviction rates and victimization studies from a variety of countries. The figure from victimization surveys — which ask people directly about their experiences rather than counting criminal justice contacts — is approximately 11.6 percent, six times higher than official police data. (Cortoni et al., 2017, meta-analysis of 17 samples from 12 countries)

The gap between what the data shows and what the culture acknowledges is not a small gap. It is a chasm maintained by a specific and documented set of psychological, cultural, and institutional mechanisms that have operated across an entire century of research. This article traces that century.

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The Historical Record: Rates by Decade

The 1920s – 1940s: Before the Research Began

Formal research on female sexual perpetration did not exist in the 1920s through 1940s. This is not because female perpetration did not occur — it is because the conceptual framework for identifying it did not exist. Sexual crime in this period was legally and culturally defined in ways that made female perpetration invisible by construction. Rape laws required penile penetration. Female sexuality was understood through the lens of passivity and victimhood. The category of female sex offender simply had no institutional existence.

Clinical case reports from this period document instances of women sexually abusing children, primarily in caretaking contexts, but these were not aggregated, studied, or counted in any systematic way. They existed as individual curiosities in the case literature rather than as evidence of a pattern requiring attention.

The 1950s – 1960s: The First Observations

The 1950s and 1960s produced the first tentative clinical observations of female sexual perpetration in the academic literature. These appeared primarily as case studies and clinical anecdotes in psychiatric and psychological journals. The dominant framing positioned female perpetrators as anomalies — disturbed individuals whose behavior was so outside the expected norm as to require individual pathological explanation rather than population-level study.

Alfred Kinsey’s landmark sexuality research in this period documented that a meaningful proportion of male subjects reported childhood sexual contact with adult women, but the research framework of the time did not categorize this as abuse, and Kinsey himself did not treat it as such. The data existed. The interpretive framework to recognize what it documented did not.

The 1970s – 1980s: The Rise of the Field — and Its Blind Spots

The modern field of sexual abuse research was largely built during the 1970s and 1980s, driven significantly by the feminist movement’s work in naming and addressing male violence against women and children. This was critically important work. It also created a research architecture built around a specific directional assumption: male perpetrator, female or child victim. (ScienceDirect, Female Perpetrators Review, 2021)

Research on female perpetration in this period was minimal. The first significant work — Mathews, Matthews, and Speltz’s 1989 study “Female Sexual Offenders: An Exploratory Study” — was explicitly framed as exploratory precisely because the field did not yet acknowledge this population. The study documented female perpetrators and their typologies for the first time in a systematic way.

Juvenile female perpetration received its first serious attention in the early 1980s but was met with minimization: society denied the significance of sexual acting out behavior by saying adolescents were “just experimenting” or that these sexually aggressive behaviors were part of an “adolescent adjustment reaction.” (ScienceDirect, Review on Female Sexual Offenders, 2011, citing Johnson 1989)

The 1990s: Recognition Begins

The 1990s saw the first sustained research effort into female sexual perpetration. Grayston and DeLuca’s 1999 summary profile of female child sex offenders represented the first attempt to synthesize what was known into a coherent clinical picture. Saradjian and Hanks’s 1996 book “Women Who Sexually Abuse Children: From Research to Clinical Practice” provided the first comprehensive clinical framework. (ScienceDirect, 20-Year Update, 2021)

Denov’s work in this period — including her “culture of denial” study examining professional responses to female perpetration — documented systematic minimization and denial among police and therapists. The research was finding the population. The systems designed to respond to it were still looking away. (Denov, 2001, Canadian Journal of Criminology)

The 2000s: The Gap Becomes Measurable

The 2000s produced the first large-scale attempts to measure the gap between official statistics and actual prevalence. Cortoni and Hanson’s 2005 international review established the 4 to 5 percent figure for adult female offenders in official data. Victimization surveys in the same period consistently produced figures two to three times higher. The gap was now quantifiable and documented rather than merely suspected. (Springer Nature, Female Sex Offenders: Gender and Risk Perception)

The US Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention data in this period found approximately 7 percent of all juvenile sexual offences were committed by females — a figure higher than the adult rate, consistent with findings that female sexual offending is proportionally more common among juveniles than adults. Florida Department of Juvenile Justice data found females constituting 5 to 10 percent of all juvenile sex offenders. (Springer Nature; ScienceDirect, 2011)

The 2010s: The Definitive Meta-Analysis

Cortoni, Babchishin, and Rat’s 2017 meta-analysis of 17 samples from 12 countries produced the most robust estimates available. Police data: 2.2 percent of sexual offences are committed by females. Victimization surveys: 11.6 percent. The ratio is 1 to 5.3 — victimization surveys identify more than five times as many female perpetrators as official data. (Cortoni et al., 2017, Criminal Justice and Behavior)

The same meta-analysis found that female sexual offenders are more common among juvenile offenders than adult offenders, with approximately 2 percentage points more female juvenile sex offenders than female adult sex offenders. Males were much more likely to self-report being victimized by female sex offenders compared with females: 40 percent versus 4 percent. (Cortoni et al., 2017)

The most recent review found approximately 5 to 20 percent of all child sexual abuse is committed by females, with those affected significantly more often being male: approximately 14 to 17 percent of all males with experiences of child sexual abuse report female perpetrators. (ScienceDirect, 20-Year Update, 2021, citing Augarde & Rydon-Grange 2022)

The 2020s: Online Offending and Juvenile Female Perpetrators

Australian data covering 37,864 sexual offences between 2012 and 2021 found females responsible for 12.2 percent of all offences, with juvenile females aged 10 to 17 implicated in 10.2 percent of all offences. A striking finding: juvenile females were responsible for the majority of assaultive child sexual abuse material offences online, while juvenile males mostly perpetrated offline child sexual abuse. Odds of perpetrating an online assaultive CSAM offence were 20 times higher for juvenile females compared to both adult males and adult females, and 7.69 times higher compared to juvenile males. (PMC, Females’ Engagement in Offline and Online Sexual Offending, 2025)

Despite these figures, juvenile females were least likely to have any serious law enforcement action taken against them for the same offence types. The enforcement disparity confirmed what the research had been documenting for decades: the system does not respond to female perpetration with equivalent seriousness, regardless of what the data shows. (PMC, 2025)

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Female Juvenile Perpetrators: A Specific Profile

Female juvenile sex offenders represent a particularly understudied subpopulation. The lack of attention to young female perpetrators mirrors the response in the early 1980s when adolescent perpetration in general was being dismissed as experimentation. The research that exists finds that female juvenile perpetrators tend to offend against younger children, often in babysitting or caretaking contexts, and tend to have higher rates of prior sexual victimization than male juvenile perpetrators. (ScienceDirect, 2011; Springer Nature)

The caretaking context is particularly significant. Female juvenile perpetrators have access to young children through the normalized and socially trusted role of older girl as babysitter, childcare assistant, or family member. The caretaking behavior masks the offending in precisely the same way that adult female caretaking behavior masks adult female offending. The institutional response to juvenile female perpetrators is correspondingly less serious: lower arrest rates, lower referral to court rates, lower prosecution rates, for the same offence types.

Although reports have shown that female sex offenders make up two percent of the whole sex offender population in official data, the true rate is remarkably higher because the caretaking behavior of women masks their sexual offenses. (Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 2023)

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The Myth of Innocence: Gendered Sexual Scripts

Forensic psychologist Myriam Denov’s concept of the myth of innocence documents how gendered sexual scripts shape how society perceives female perpetration, how victims experience and report their own abuse, and how professionals respond when they do. Women are primarily normalized as the gatekeepers of sexuality. In terms of anatomy, some have argued that women are receivers of sexuality which makes it difficult to imagine a woman as someone who sexually abuses others. This anatomical argument is telling because it demonstrates how deeply the denial operates — not as a reasoned position but as something that feels self-evidently true before any evidence is examined. (PMC, Uncovering Female Child Sexual Offenders, 2019; Denov, 2003)

Gendered sexual scripts hinder the disclosure of the abuse by those affected as well as the prosecution and conviction of female sex offenders. The implicit denial of women’s potential for sexual aggression contributes directly to the fact that sexual abuse by women is underrecognized. (ScienceDirect, 2023)

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A Culture of Denial: The Professional Dimension

Denov’s 2001 study examined professional perspectives on female sex offending among police officers and therapists. Both groups demonstrated significant minimization and denial of female perpetration even when presented with clear evidence of it. Professionals described female sexual abuse in less serious terms than male sexual abuse, were less likely to refer cases for prosecution, and showed systematic bias in assessing the credibility of victims who named female perpetrators. (Denov, 2001)

Survivors of female-perpetrated abuse face, compared to survivors of male-perpetrated abuse: less belief and support, more psychological sequelae, and disturbed relationships with women as a specific long-term consequence. (ScienceDirect, 2023)

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Anna Motz and the Psychology of Female Violence

Consultant Clinical and Forensic Psychologist Anna Motz spent her career working with women as perpetrators of violence and with the staff teams who work alongside them. Her book “The Psychology of Female Violence: Crimes Against the Body” explores the causes of violence in women, what can be done to help them and their victims, and specifically investigates why society denies the fact of female violence. (Wikipedia, Anna Motz)

Motz’s psychodynamic framework understands female violence not as an aberration but as a response to specific developmental and relational histories that the culture’s idealization of women makes it nearly impossible to address honestly. The refusal to engage with this honestly does not protect women. It abandons women who commit violence to systems that cannot understand or treat them, and it abandons their victims to systems that cannot recognize or support them.

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The Criminal Justice Failure

Female perpetration of sexual abuse remains a concept that is often misconceptualized by both the criminal justice system and wider society in general. Social media responses to female-perpetrated sexual assault against men show consistent minimization, disbelief, humor, and explicit approval. The legal frameworks of many jurisdictions have historically defined rape in ways that exclude female perpetrators by definition. The definitional exclusion produces statistical exclusion which produces the perception that female perpetration of serious sexual crimes is impossible — a circular logic the data consistently contradicts. (Springer Nature; PMC, Pretty Women and Lucky Blokes, 2024)

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The Takeaway

A century of data tells a consistent story. Female perpetrators of sexual violence have always existed. The research that was designed to find them arrived late, was initially resisted, and continues to be underfunded relative to the population it documents. The gap between what victimization surveys find and what official statistics record has been measured across dozens of studies in a dozen countries and produces the same result every time: the true rate is somewhere between three and ten times the reported rate.

The culture of denial does not protect women. It protects the image of women while abandoning actual women and men and children in situations that the culture has decided cannot exist. One hundred years of data have not changed that. The data continues to accumulate. The denial continues to adapt.

What has changed is that the denial is now documented. The mechanism is named. The harm is measured. That is the beginning of something, even if it is not yet enough.

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Sources

Cortoni, F., Babchishin, K.M., & Rat, C. (2017). The Proportion of Sexual Offenders Who Are Female Is Higher Than Thought: A Meta-Analysis. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 44(2), 145–162.

Denov, M.S. (2001). A Culture of Denial: Exploring Professional Perspectives on Female Sex Offending. Canadian Journal of Criminology, 43, 303–329.

Denov, M.S. (2003). The Myth of Innocence: Sexual Scripts and the Recognition of Child Sexual Abuse by Female Perpetrators. Journal of Sex Research, 40, 303–314.

Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. (2023). Insights on Female Sex Offenders from the Missouri Registry. JAAPL.

Mathews, R., Matthews, J.K., & Speltz, K. (1989). Female Sexual Offenders: An Exploratory Study. Safer Society Press.

Motz, A. (2008). The Psychology of Female Violence: Crimes Against the Body. Routledge.

PMC. (2019). Uncovering Female Child Sexual Offenders — Needs and Challenges for Practice and Research. PMC6463078.

PMC. (2024). Pretty Women and Lucky Blokes: Unpacking Australian Social Media Responses to Female-Perpetrated Sexual Assault Against Men. PMC11462778.

PMC. (2025). Females’ Engagement in Offline and Online Sexual Offending and Their Interactions With the Criminal Justice System. PMC12504777.

ScienceDirect. (2011). Review on Female Sexual Offenders: Findings About Profile and Personality. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry.

ScienceDirect. (2021). Female Perpetrators of Child Sexual Abuse: A Review of the Clinical and Empirical Literature — A 20-Year Update. Child Abuse and Neglect.

ScienceDirect. (2023). Comparing Female to Male Perpetrated Child Sexual Abuse as Presumed by Survivors. Child Abuse and Neglect.

ScienceDirect. (2017). Sexual Victimization Perpetrated by Women: Federal Data Reveal Surprising Prevalence. Stemple & Meyer.

Springer Nature. (2013). Female Sex Offenders: Gender and Risk Perception. Gannon & Cortoni.

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