Sexual offending by women is surprisingly common, claims US study

“Attention to female sexual perpetration serves important feminist goals,” the researchers said (image is a stock photo of assorted women unrelated to the study) By Christian Jarrett A team of US researchers led by Lara Stemple at the UCLA School of Law has analysed data from several large federal crime victimisation surveys and they say their findings show that sexual offences by women against male and female victims are surprisingly common. Writing in Aggression and Violent Behaviour the researchers stress that they are in no way intending to minimise the human cost of sexual violence perpetrated by men. But they say their results are “sufficiently robust so as to compel a rethinking of long-held stereotypes about sexual victimisation and gender”. Stemple’s team begin by pointing to data from the Center For Disease Control’s Survey of thousands of people for the “National Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Violence”. In 2011, for example, this survey showed that equal numbers of men and women reported being forced into non-consensual sex (either raped themselves or forced to penetrate someone else). Extrapolated to the US as a whole, this would represent 1.9 million victims among each sex during the preceding 12 months. There are similar findings for sex of victim in the 2010 survey, the researchers said, and that year, the survey also included detail on the sex of offender. To illustrate the prevalence of female offending,...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Forensic Gender Sex Source Type: blogs