Female sex offenders: a critical review of the literature

Abstract

The official statistics regarding sexual abuse on minors show that the crime perpetrator is mainly a male subject. In Italy, women commit roughly 1% of all sexual crimes and don’t reach the 2% of the sentences. The studies in literature identify as risk factors of sexual crime for the woman: the role of the mother, the young age, the low education level, a past characterized by sexual abuses and intra-family violence. More or less pronounced psychiatric disorders are widespread. They often tend to act with an accomplice and they don’t have a criminal career linked to sexual abuses; they are first offenders at the moment of their arrest. Victims are very small children from newborns to adolescents. The small amount of samples (often taken from subjects already in contact with clinical or social support facilities), the overestimated validity of self-report and interviews, the low number of studies that compare sex-offender and non-sex offender women and the impossibility of comparing the characteristics of emerged cases to those of submersed ones constitute de facto a significant limit that doesn’t allow for a complete and consistent picture of the phenomenon, though. Distorted data on the base of these premises would bring to conceive and support treatment programs based on fallacious elements, and would therefore be inevitably ineffective. Thus, the necessity of carrying out more research emerges, in particular with regards to the analysis of deviation actions, in order to recognize in a methodologically apt way intention and self-regulation, responsibility and moral disengagement processes, and to apply principles and practices that are female-gender specific aiming to insure affective treatments and recoveries for both the perpetrators and the victims.