BBC - female sex offenders report

[UppityPuppity]

Please help me understand my disquiet about this BBC report about female sex offenders. The reflections in the report of abuse inflicted by the mother on the daughter is heartbreaking. A cruel betrayal of trust.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55338745

The piece underlines the need to have accurate stats and language of sex of perpetrators/victims in the criminal justice system and crime reporting.

It also underlines to me how far the BBC has fallen in my estimation with their determined inability to provide clear reporting of the perpetrators male sex in so many other sexual offences contexts.

Instead of immediately thinking that this is an issue that needs to be raised - AND IT DOES these victims deserve support and justice - the BBC is so contaminated in my estimation, that my first thought was the BBC are yet again trying to push the narrative that merges male and femaleness as they do in so many other contexts. This reaction is unfair to the victims of female sex abusers who have my sympathy.

Is it their blatant hypocrisy? They are rightly clear on the sex of perpetrators in this article but not in so many contexts where they state blatant untruths and ignore the male sex of perpetrators. The BBC let down victims of female sex abusers and their distinct experiences, harms and needs, because they fail to report incidence of male sex abusers accurately.

Stats in report-

In 2018-19, 3.8% of all child sexual abusers were female, based on police reports, Office of National Statistics data shows

How do we know the sex - we don’t. As far as I can see - this is increased from previous stats - ONS figures show in 2015 only 1.34% of prisoners sentenced for child sexual abuse as the first main offence were women. The BBCs stats double this.

Is the increase due to different metrics being measured/ die to a greater understanding of the crime/greater reporting of the crime or more male sex offenders identifying as women?

The BBC obfuscation of facts are part of the problem - they have lost their credibility and actively let down victims like this in the report.

Certainly doesn't help with hooey like this:

www.glaad.org/publications/consistent-respect-reporting-transgender-crime-suspects

I heard this report also and wondered too how much the increase might be down to recording gender identity rather than sex. This is the problem when statistics become unreliable (and yes loss of trust in the BBC doesn't help).

Between 2015 and 2019, the numbers of reported cases of female-perpetrated child sexual abuse to police in England and Wales rose from 1,249 to 2,297 - an increase of 84%.

I made the same immediate assumption OP. Seems I was wrong in this instance but recording and reporting male crimes as female crimes - merely on the say-so of the perpetrator - will result in false stats and a loss of trust. And yet the bandwagon roles on.

What a heartbreaking area to work in.

But you're right, OP, this is a mess. We just don't know what stats or words mean anymore. Researcher has written a report on female perpetrators of CSA, but we don't know if that is including males.

BBC uses 'female' in headline, but 'gender' further down. So the word becomes utterly meaningless.

'In 2018-19, 3.8% of all child sexual abusers were female, based on police reports, Office of National Statistics data shows'

We know that police record sex according to how the perpetrator identifies. And there are definitely cases of abusers who are male but identify as female - we've seen them reported in the news.

The majority of perpetrators of sexual abuse before the age of 16 years were males

'Around 9 in 10 adults (92%) experienced sexual abuse committed by males only. A further 4% experienced sexual abuse committed by both males and females, and 4% experienced sexual abuse by females only.'

Again, though, these are taken from police records, which are based on self identified 'gender', not sex, as I understand it.

It would be very useful to hear from the researcher how she deals with this issue.

ONS stats mentioned in the report: www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/childsexualabuseinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2019#what-do-we-know-about-perpetrators-of-sexual-abuse-before-the-age-of-16-years

No one will know what it means if we don't capture data accurately. But there are female sex abusers for sure. Look at Ghislane Maxwell.

Ghislane Maxwell, has not been convicted and as far as I'm aware she is accused of grooming and not sex abuse. If you want to quote a female sex abuser, there are some around. Be accurate, we have enough crap on twitter

How do we know the sex - we don’t. As far as I can see - this is increased from previous stats - ONS figures show in 2015 only 1.34% of prisoners sentenced for child sexual abuse as the first main offence were women. The BBCs stats double this.

this is extra interesting because combining the 1.34/3.8 percentages from 2015 and 2019 with the absolute numbers in the BBC article, it looks like the absolute numbers of (reported) child sexual abuse cases are going down. Substantially.

Unless I've calculated it wrong (extremely possible ), the total numbers have gone down from 93K to 60K. Even if I have calculated it wrong you can see the trends by just eyeballing those numbers. Hmm. Exactly how is it possible for the number of female-perpetrated crimes to have gone up 84% when total reported crimes in that category have declined substantially?

I guess the thing that never happens is happening a LOT.

Its quite unclear from the report if they are including men in those stats or not. They do use the word female rather than women so maybe it means only women? but who can be sure nowadays? The word female is very much next on the list for appropriation and you often see it used for and by men, so who can be sure with the super woke BBC (if only someone could have seen that problem coming eh).

But in general I think the article is disengenous. They are conflating two compleatly different things. Women teachers having relationships with students is utterly reprehensible and they should be punished, but the power dynamics and mental and physical harm is not the same of a man abusing a child.

The narative that women are privilaged oppressors is destroyed by the stastics on abuse, rape and murder, and some people will do anything to muddy those waters.

I forget the exact figures but the ratio of "women sex offenders" held in the female estate to "women sex offenders" (self-identifying) held in the male estate is about 3:2, IIRC. And women (held in the female estate) comprise somewhere between 1 and 2% of the total of incarcerated sex offenders.

We know that women's sex offending is under-reported - partly because sometimes their victims are pre-verbal children, sometimes it's within the family with all the coerced secrecy that involves, sometimes (where it's an adult man or teen boy) because the victim is too embarrassed to come forward.

But - and this is a very important but - we also know that male sex offending is massively under-reported, largely because women know they won't be taken seriously unless they are the "perfect victim" (and probably not even then).

So there's no evidence to suggest that there's a higher percentage of undetected female (in the biological sense) sex offenders than there are undetected male sex offenders.

So while I think sex offending by women is an issue, an under-reported one, and is heinous, I'm a bit suspicious of sudden jumps in the number of women committing these offences.

But in general I think the article is disengenous. They are conflating two compleatly different things. Women teachers having relationships with students is utterly reprehensible and they should be punished, but the power dynamics and mental and physical harm is not the same of a man abusing a child.

Yes - I think that is what I was getting at with my concern with the BBC trying to merge male and female abusers in this context.

Thanks OP. I saw this today and felt similarly. Words just do mean what they used to mean and then doubts creep in and then nothing is clear any more.

All sexual abuse is horrific and heartbreaking but if we don't understand who the perpetrators are, where, how, why, when - then how can society begin to put a stop to it?

Very murky. Has this been picked up on Twitter?

In the latest "Mess We're In" with Glinner et al, the guest from Ireland was saying that their number of "female" sex offenders in custody (IIRC) had recently doubled - going from 1 to 2, with the new one being male.

On current trends, very soon if not already, the majority of offenders in such categories described as "female" will be male.

It's conditional probability maths - if X% of sex offenders are male, and Y% of male sex offenders call themselves female, what's the probability that a "female" sex offender is male? Answer is xy/(xy+1-x), ignoring tiny possible effect of female sex offenders calling themselves male.

Plugging in the numbers, assuming 99% male offenders:

If 0.1% of males say they're female, 9% of "females" will be male.

If 0.5% of males say they're female, 33% of "females" will be male.

If 1% of males say they're female, 50% of "females" will be male.

Given the apparent incentives for more lenient sentencing (see Glinner's substack), reaching 1% for female self-ID does not seem implausible, and then half your women are men.

I forget the exact figures but the ratio of "women sex offenders" held in the female estate to "women sex offenders" (self-identifying) held in the male estate is about 3:2, IIRC. And women (held in the female estate) comprise somewhere between 1 and 2% of the total of incarcerated sex offenders.

I recall there being a lot more "women sex offenders" who are male than "women sex offenders" who are female. Although I think the numbers depend on whether they've just declared their womanhood on
a survey, or in a case review.

Quite possibly, allmy. The figures I was thinking of were the ones from Fair Play for Women who were deliberately extremely conservative in their methodology so they couldn't be accused of scare-mongering/have their figures disputed. Even the BBC, when they fact-checked FPW's report (reluctantly, and with obvious disappointment at discovering this) said that FPW's estimates were probably an underestimate.

The bottom line is we can't ever have any confidence in data like this again unless someone puts a stop to inaccurate, politically based recording.

Even if they stopped it tomorrow it could take years to start getting reliable data again unless a mammoth effort was embarked on to comb back through years of data since this nonsense began.

This is covered by File on 4 tonight:

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000rcq5

It also has the opposite effect to taking it seriously. My default position now when I hear about a female sex offender is to assume it's actually a male person unless there's obvious evidence to the contrary. Eventually that will be the position most people take which does nothing to help in the understanding of female sex offending or offer any comfort to their victims.

It’s this smug little line that gets me

based on police reports

they know full well that police reports based on sex are totally untrustworthy because police have allowed self id of sex for 10 years so I don’t believe that jump is actual females for one second. Have they even considered the similar situation in Norway where ‘female’ sex offences have leapt by 4000% (or thereabouts) since self id?

I am beyond hacked off with the BBC. And they can hide behind their smug little line of ‘well that’s what the police reports say...’

The saying lies, damn lies and statistics gets even worse when you can no longer trust the meaning of the words used.

How many of the victims of those "female" sexual offenders are being gaslit into talking about their abusers using preferred pronouns I wonder?

One of the biggest problems facing the Police is maintaining the trust of the public. Surely there are people in the Police who can see that they are corrupting a set of their crime statistics and this will undermine the trust the public. After all, a bunch of mere women who are not involved in the Police or the criminal justice system can see this clear as day.

Assuming that this is known in the Police, and they're willing to pay the cost of losing the trust on the public to some degree, then the grip of the institutional capture must be incredibly strong.

Grooming puts you on the sex offenders register. It is not clear from media reports whether grooming was counted in that report. I agree Ghislane Maxwell has not been convicted.

It’s this smug little line that gets me

Yep - no reference in the article to the distortion of police reports. Nice get out for the ‘nation’s broadcaster’ to stop the need for proper investigative journalism.

How about the BBC doing a really good piece on female sex offenders and the distinct needs and harms experienced by the victims plus the lack of public understanding, and why if sex is not accurately reported all victims are harmed.

But no - the BBC couldn’t do that could they.

I've just watched an interview on bbc news about this, it.was.awful

Interviewee was all on about "we have to dispel the misconception that its majority of males abusing children, and that women are normally safer people to be around, because as these figures from 2015-2019 prove, it's not"

no questioning as why there was an 84% jump! in any other situation jumps like that would definitely raise suspicion that somethings going on!

Just a hunch, but the person providing a quote within this - and the org they work for - might be quite comfortable when it comes to conflating sex and gender. www.survivorsuk.org/about-us/meet-the-team/