99% of sex offenders are male. The reason the news reports women offenders is because that's so exceptionally rare it is newsworthy.
And before someone tries to argue that men just get caught more: that statistic holds when you look at online child abuse imagery offending, where the police don't know who is responsible for streaming it until they knock at the door. 99% of those offenders are male, too. So for every woman doing this crap, you will have more than 99 men. Women are very low risk. Men are not.
No, women are not always innocent. But there are barely over 100 women sex offenders in prison at any given time, and over 13500 men. The chances a woman will do this to your child are not zero, but they're a damn sight closer to it.
Obviously the vast majority of men are not sex offenders, but it's not a tiny number, either. Estimates range between 5 and 20% which means between 1 in 20 and 1 in 5. And we know that at least 7.5% of the population will experience child sexual abuse - and most of the victims will be girls. That means that 1 in 15 kids are abused. 2 in every standard-sized state school primary classroom.
Most child sexual abuse happens at the hands of trusted men in the child and family's lives. We have lovely male friends involved in our kids's lives, but not one of them will be taking our kids swimming alone when they're little. Why expose your child to a completely avoidable risk in that way? Just get a parent to go along, too.
Admittedly both mine are disabled, so they're very vulnerable, but the simple reality is that if you exclude opportunity for a male person to perform unsupervised intimate care for your child, then you reduce their risks of abuse to almost nothing.
Lots of posters reading this and thinking it's paranoid will have a child who is, or will be, abused. That's the statistical reality. Of course my kids would probably be perfectly safe, cared for by the men we know, but it's not like it's a lightning strike level risk, either. It's really pretty common. And the safeguarding against that abuse is so simple - don't allow your child to be in situations of vulnerability when that's easy to avoid - that I struggle to understand the mindset that says this thinking is paranoid.
I've never been in a car crash in my life, and nor have my kids. But I still got them excellent car seats. Meningitis is exceptionally rare. Yet we still vaccinate. I see safeguarding them against the far more likely scenario of abuse as along the same sorts of lines.
But I mean, if other people think trying to reduce a risk of 1 in 15 that your child will be sexually abused is paranoid, then that's absolutely their prerogative.