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"Not Men Only - Sandra Barwick examines alarming evidence of the extent of women's involvement in sexual assaults on children."

"IT IS, in its way, a comforting thought that sexual assaults on children are almost exclusively carried out by men. Women, at least, can still be trusted with the care of children, for nature or upbringing has produced a female personality almost wholly free from the dreadful urge to abuse children sexually. The very few exceptions to this rule are generally acting under the influence of men. These are consoling thoughts indeed: that half the world's population can still be unreservedly trusted to provide a sanctuary for childish innocence. The trouble is that they may be too consoling to be true.

Over the past few years some of those who work with sexually abuse children and adults have begun to hear more and more disturbing stories, ones that challenge this fundamental axiom about the nature of sexual crime. Not only are there more stories of females carrying out sexual assaults on children, but cruel assaults, sometimes alone. They say that they have come to believe, some of them unwillingly, that women, may make up a substantial proportion of sexual offenders against children And they say that not only the general public, but in some cases their colleagues, find this difficult to believe or even consider.

'I've had some feminists walk out of a talk when I have suggested that women also sexually abuse children,' said one female therapist, who asked not to be named, 'or I may never be allowed in another support group.'

The belief that sexual assault on children is an overwhelmingly male crime is still widely accepted. One NSPCC worker who had been involved in or two cases where women were suspects refused to talk to me about them because, as the representative of the charity said, "She takes the feminist view that it's such a tiny problem compared with the much larger problem of men that talking about it would only distort the real picture.

Her view, and the general public belief that this is a male crime, are backed by the only statistics available, which tell quite extraordinary tale of difference between the sexes. The NSPCC's figures for 1982 to 1987 shows that only in 2 percent of casts of sexual assaults were women the suspects. Home Office figures show that 3 percent of those convicted for this offence are female, and that half of those women are charged together with a man.

But many of those who work with children and adults who say they have been abused are now wondering whether the figure is not nearer 20 or 30 per cent. Sue Hutchinson, who runs Safe, telephone counselling line, is one of the very few to put it even higher: "At least half of my callers say that the female abuser was more violent and humiliating. The problem is that very few people with a normal upbringing can handle the idea that a woman, who is supposed to be a nurturer can do this.'

Queen Victoria, famously, could not believe that women could be homosexual. The disbelief today that women may be sexual criminals is just as strong, and may be as misplaced.

Tilman Furniss, Professor of Child Psychiatry, at Munster University and author of "The Multiple Professional Handbook of Child Sexual Abuse, believes that general assumptions about the nature of women and men may be the reason why the reality of child abuse has been so slow to emerge.

'At first it was though sexual abuse was all by men against girls. Older children were thought to be the main victims. Now we are finding that up to half the children who had been assaulted were aged less than five, and now between 30 and 50 percent of the victims coming to our attention are boys. The slow awareness of what is happening is partly to do with professional readiness to accept what seems to be increasingly unbelievable information.'

Professor Furniss believes that the reason why boy victims of abuse were overlooked at first was that girls and women were stereotyped as victims.

'We have increasing knowledge of female abusers assaulting children for the same reason as men - for sexual relief - though my feeling is that the total will turn out to be less than 50 per cent of all abusers.' This guess of 'less than 50 percent' is a long way from the received wisdom of 2 percent.

Do women really assault small children? Yes. Several of those counsellors I talked to had been involved in such cases, including one involving a boy of six being used by his mother for her sexual gratification by means of oral sex. Boys and girls? Yes Vera Diamond, a Harley Street psychotherapist in this field for 20 years told me she had counselled a woman who said that at the age of four she was repeatedly anally assaulted by a woman doctor in whom her family, naturally, had complete trust. Childline instanced a case where a man wrote to say he had been plagued by guilt, depression, broken marriages and strong feelings of worthlessness, which he traced back to sexual assault by his female Sunday school teacher when he was a boy of ten. Another therapist said she had counselled a girl who, years after she had been held down by her mother while her father inserted objects, including scissors, inside her, said that her mother had directly participated. Do women ever assault children in large number? Yes, the NSPCC representative said, directing me to Nap Time, an American book by Lisa Manshel, which recounts a case in New Jersey where a pretty 23-year-old nursery teacher was found guilty on 115 counts of sexual and other assaults; she appeared to have involved most of her class of preschool infants, boys and girls, in a series of extremely degrading and frightening acts. It would be wrong to imagine that his is a uniquely American phenomenon.

'When I started to work as a therapist in this field four years ago, the first child I worked with had been abused by his mother, said Pauline Flavin, a therapist who works in Saccs, a counselling centre in Shrewsbury. 'About 25 per cent of the hundreds of children I have worked with since that time have said a woman sexually assaulted them. They find it very hard to admit. If your mother is doing this to you, you feel you must be absolutely worthless. It is no longer a surprise to me when children mention a woman as the assailant, but what is a surprise is this figure of 2 percent. If that's true, the whole 2 percent workload of the country is somehow ending up on my casebook.

If the statistics and assumptions are wrong - the evidence so far that they are wrong is, of course, only impressionistic and anecdotal - there must be several important consequences. One is that many women perpetrators may remain entirely unsuspected. Even where sexual assaults have take place, and there is strong evidence that women are involved, they may be acquitted by juries who are under the impression that this is male crime, and if a woman did anything - like holding down child to be buggered - she was under male domination at the time. Lord Longford seems to hold that opinion of Myra Hindley's participation in child torture and murder, and it is possible that her role in the death of Lesley Ann Downey would not have been believed by the jury, had she and Brady not kept tapes which recorded her voice along with the child's screams. The image of the innocent, indeed, the holy relationship between mother and child has been strongly imprinted on the public consciousness for many centuries. It is not surprising that some feminists are not the only ones who see women, particularly mothers, in a special, almost sacrosanct light.

it would be unfair, thinks Steven Wolf, a therapist in the United States for 15 years, to say that feminists alone, or particularly, resist the idea of the female perpetrator. 'The feminists I know would say that women must take responsibility for their acts. Those with very traditional views can also have a reluctance to see women as offenders. It is a general prejudice.'

The second main consequence is that children, or adults, may be disbelieved when they try to tell their stories. Michele Elliot of the charity Kidscape, who used to believe female sexual assault was rare and has now changed her mind, says that men and boys who talk of childhood assaults by women, leading to depression, broken marriages, feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness are now facing the same disbelief which used to be the lot of girls who told of assaults by their fathers.

'One man said to his therapist that his mother had used him for sexual gratification when he was a small boy, and his female therapist told him not to have such dirty thoughts, 'she says. Hereward Harrison, of Childline, says that he had case where a boy ringing the switchboard in distress to talk of similar abuse shouted down the phone, 'Won't anyone believe me?' The woman who had first answered the call had been unable to accept the story and had transferred the call.

It is exhausting to keep an open mind on topics of this painful kind and judge each case afresh. Much easier to resort to extreme positions: the child alleging sexual abuse is always telling the truth, or never telling the truth, or men are almost exclusively the perpetrators, or that social workers are all naive, or all blessed with insight. But it is essential at least to attempt to keep an open mind. If it turns out in the end to be undoubtedly the case that women form a significant part of the sad ranks of those who assault children, it may, in a strange way, help to remove some of the polarization and conflict from the topic of child sex abuse. The subject of sexual assault on children has sometimes been presented, or anyway interpreted, as an attack on men n general, and that has partly obscured the debate. If that conflict is a little dissolved by the discovery that sexual assault on children is a human sin, rather than a male one, it may be possible to concentrate more coolly on the truly crucial and wholly unresolved questions: what course best helps child victims, and what can be done to break the pattern of the crime - whatever the sex of the criminal."

In Article an631@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Darren Spratt) writes: Warning: may contain some material deemed offensive to some.

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Taken from the British magazine, New Woman (Jan 1992), titled: "Women Who Abuse - If you thought that men where the only ones to abuse children sexually, think again. Report by Richard Pendry.

"The sudden rash of bogus social workers which began in February 1990 and continued all summer was notable for one barely believable fact. Most were women.

As reports came in of incidents across the country where both women and men knocked on doors to ask to examine children and then tried to undress and touch them, many police and social workers found it impossible to believe the women were paedophiles.

Some senior police officers speculated that they were in fact 'vigilant' groups of concerned parents who were highlighting social worker's powers to intervene in families' private lives. Another theory had it that women had been coerced by men. Others even suggested the women were actually men in disguise.

It was almost as if no-one wanted to admit that women abusers could exist. The assumption was that women could not possibly be capable of sexual abuse of children.

Once the dust had settled, and the reality that there are indeed women paedophiles sunk in, the issue began, at last, to be talked about. And now some professionals are speaking out about a problem which is much larger than anyone thought possible.

Michele Elliott, of the charity Kidscape, which campaigns for children's safety, had for years assumed that sex abusers were always men. It was only when she took part in a local radio phone-in and happened to mention the issue of abuse by women that she began to realize that maybe women sex abusers were not so uncommon. Within 24 hours of her being on air more than 30 men and women had called in to say that they had been abused by their female relatives.

It was hard for her to believe the evidence that was coming to light. 'I felt very uneasy. I wanted to find a reason round it. I didn't want to accept it, for the same reason that men are sickened to be part of a gender that could do that to children. For a long time, as a woman you could feel, "Well at least we don't do that".'

The accepted statistic is that of all sexual abuse of children (about one child in 2000 is registered as suffering sexual abuse), women are responsible for two to three per cent. The assumption is that women are almost always coerced into it by man.

But Michele Elliott and NSPCC research fellow Corinne Wattam of Lancaster University are adamant that the extent of the problem has been grossly underestimated. They are trying to get across the message that women are quite capable of being abusers in their own right.

Corinne Wattam estimates from studies she has carried out that, overall, nine to ten percent of all sexual abuse of children is carried out by women. Michele Elliott says that of boys who are sexually abused, 20-30 per cent are abused by women, and for girls the figure is about five per cent.

Although both stress they are still convinced that the majority of sexual abuse is carried out by men (men usually abuse girls), they state that women are at least three to four times more likely to be abusers than has been assumed until now.

many cases appear to go undetected because police, doctors, social workers and psychologists are not asking the right questions. Dr Robert Wilkins, a consultant in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Paxton house Family and Young Person's Unit in Reading, deals with an increasing number of children who have been abused by women. He says that people who should know better even claim that women are not physically capable of abusing children.

'It's anathema to most professionals. I know of a very experienced child psychiatrist who has been saying for many years that it's physically impossible for a ten-year-old boy to have sexual intercourse with his mother. So if an expert witness in court says that, it makes people in the profession think, "Well, if a child psychiatrist says it's impossible, it must be".'

This is also Michele Elliott's experience. She says that all too often there's a failure to believe children when they try to tell someone outside the family that they are being sexually abused. 'People assume children misread what their mothers have done to them. So if a child says, "My mum was fingering my vagina," then the professionals' reaction has been that all the mother was doing was washing her and that it's the child's fantasies which led her to say, "My mother was abusing me".'

Shocking Reality

Most disturbingly, it seems clear that women are capable of duplicating many horrific aspects of violent male sexual abuse.

'The reality,' says Michele Elliott, 'is stark. We're talking about violent sexual abuse, and it's not pleasant. I have cases of women who have shoved broken bottles into their children; one woman put bulldog clips on her daughter's breasts because she was jealous of their shape. In other cases, women have used objects like hair brushes and broom handles and prised their daughter's legs apart and stuck them in.'

Another complex issue is how abuse is defined. Mothers who are non-violent, and so-called 'seductive' abusers, can get away with more than male relatives, and the abuse may not be immediately distinguished from normal maternal behaviour.

In the past it was common for mothers or nannies to soothe male children to sleep by stroking or sucking their penis, in much the same way that children these days are given a bottle. Though such actions would raise eyebrows today, there is still grey area of maternal behaviour which may mask abuse, says Dr Wilkins.

'It's not unusual for a woman, through sheer joy of having a son, to delight in the boy to such an extent that she will kiss him all over and suck his penis. This can be thought of as on the margins of motherhood, but if a father was so delighted in the birth of a girl that he kissed her vulva, he'd immediately be labelled as a sex abuser.'

DON'T TOUCH? Corinne Wattam is quick to point out that women who are worried that behaviour that is normal and affectionate between mother and child might be misinterpreted by outsiders, don't understand the degree of evidence needed before allegations of sexual abuse are acted on. 'People don't know the severity of some of the stuff that comes up, so they think, "Oh God, if I touch my child there, will I be labelled an abuser?"' she says. 'They think it's just social workers jumping up and down, but what they don't understand is that nobody acts on people just touching their children.'

There is also a problem of cultural stereotyping when society tries to deal with women who abuse young boys. The boy may be seen as a 'lucky devil', according to Dr Wilkins, who recalls one case where a woman had been having sexual intercourse with 12-year-old boy. The judge put as much responsibility on the boy as the women, and dismissed the case, saying, 'Least said, soonest mended.'

The whole issue of consent in cases where boys are sexually 'used' by older women is extremely complex, agrees Corinne Wattam. 'Child sexual abuse is partly a social construction. There are cultural stereotypes to do with whether women can be seen to be abusing young boys or whether it might be perceived as a mutual attraction.'

What women sex abusers almost invariably have in common is, like many male abusers, a background of abuse in their own lives (though by no means all sexual abuse sufferers go on to re-enact their abuser's behaviour when they grow up). What this mens is that the boundaries of what is sexually acceptable and what isn't become blurred - the distinction between cuddles for affection and cuddles for sex may be non- existent.

Often, the abused child will perceive other children as sexual objects. So girls who are abused might play sex games with other children of their own age, go on to abuse younger children they are supposed to be babysitting, and eventually, as adults, end up abusing their own children.

There are many complex reasons why women abuse children, but essentially it is an abuse of power, says Corinne Wattam. One person can force another into doing something they wouldn't have done by choice, which is what makes it radically different from the usual sex games children play among themselves while they're growing up. 'Adults can convince children that they like it, or that it's the right thing, or that it's good,' she says.

To those who claim that women will only ever make up a small proportion of sexual abusers, and that to concentrate on the women abusers distracts attention from the main issue - male offenders and female victims - Michele Elliott is blunt. 'It isn't going to be easy for anyone to deal with because we thought we had it neatly packaged but we haven't. It's doing an injustice to all those victims by turning out backs on it. We've got to deal with it. It's there.'"

***

skipped two survivors, women, stories on their ordeal at the hands of their female abusers.