Female paedophilia vastly underreported - up to 64,000 female paedophiles in the UK

[SomeGuy]

www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/04/uk-female-child-sex-offenders

'Child sex abuse by women is significantly more widespread than previously realised, with experts estimating that there could be up to 64,000 female offenders in Britain.

Researchers from the Lucy Faithfull Foundation (LFF), a child protection charity that deals with British female sex offenders, said its studies confirmed that a "fair proportion" of child abusers were women. Donald Findlater, director of research and development, said results indicated that up to 20% of a conservative estimate of 320,000 suspected UK paedophiles were women.

Findlater said: "There was some suggestion it was only blokes that sexually abused children. Over time those arguments have fallen aside and people have had to wake up to the fact that actually, sadly, there is a fair proportion of women abusing as well."

Steve Lowe, director of Phoenix Forensic Consultants, which treats and assesses child sex abusers, said the true number of female paedophiles has remained hidden for too long.

"As a society, we find women sex offenders difficult to acknowledge. But those of us who work with paedophiles have seen evidence that women are capable of terrible crimes against children ? just as bad as men." He said some female abusers remained hidden because they appeared before the family courts, where their cases were not publicised because of reporting restrictions.'

To put this in to context, recall policies like that of British Airways, which considers all men to be paedophiles, and bans children from sitting next to male strangers.

SomeGuy - is this issue somehow personal to you? Sorry - have to ask

I'd read a little about it before this thread and was vaguely aware that it was rather discredited, but nothing more than that.

I looked it up more fully in response to dittany's comment, as official technostupidity tends to wind me up, due to my CompSci background.

That was rather an unacceptable insinuation of mine - I retract it ...(bit stressed atm and had 3 large glasses of wine, thus impairing judgement)

Lenin, they had evidence - they would have credit card numbers, names, addresses, etc.

So they could prove that people had paid money to Landslide (although in many cases this was done through credit card fraud - see this report from The Guardian, which suggests that there were fraud gangs setting up Landslide-secured websites as a means of getting money from stolen credit cards the 'Rare Nude Celebs website' 'in just three days had charged more than $14,000 to stolen cards.'), and they had the assertion that Landslide was an illegal child pornography website.

The user may well recall paying to join a site, and with the police asserting that the site was illegal (which the great majority of Landslide-secured sites were not), and holding the smoking gun in the form of the credit card payment for porn (which is already a source of shame and embarrassment, legal or not), things would look pretty bad.

Rather than asking for logs & indexes, they would then have to enter into a debate with the police saying "yes I looked at porn, but it was legal, honest", at which point the police could pull out this "click here child porn" banner and say that they had proof otherwise.

A banner ad on the bottom of the page that most users probably never saw was never very good evidence, but to dispute this you start getting into complicated legal battles with the police, and I doubt most people would have the resources to do so - considering that this dodgy banner ad was a central part of the evidence against numerous people, it clearly worked.

I think this has reached the point of:

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/duty_calls.png