Unbelievable article - increase in mothers being sexually abused by their own sons

[Jane379]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/14/taboo-parents-sexually-abused-by-their-children

What is causing this?? The article mentions some possibilities. Increase in matricide by sons also very disturbing.

This is quite terrible, but you know in a way I am not surprised. I am surprised that so many girls are apparently represented. I'd have expected a negligible number but it's not negligible at all.

Incest is one of the most popular porn categories for men. It's also become more of a thematic element in popular media, as with GoT. It's meant to be edgy of course but at a certain point, edgy stops being edgy.

But I also think isolation and lack of real connection and sexual partners has to be part of this as well. When you have an adult males with no "normal" sexual outlets, no friends even, no meaningful activity in their lives, access to nasty pornography, a culture that sees sexual activity as a kind of right and makes it look like everybody is doing all kinds of crazy shit, and then the only actual female people they see regularly and who shows them affection are their mothers, yeah, is it shocking that the mothers become the objects of a sexual obsession?

I think this has been happening for a long time. It's just now women are speaking out.😕

There is huge stigma around those of us who experience abuse or violence from our children, so most people don't share widely the fact of its existence.

I have an ND teen who verbally abuses me, physically assaults me and damages our house during meltdowns. He's never engaged in any physical sexual abuse, but I am subjected to pretty horrible verbal sexual comments during meltdowns.

In our case, exposure to porn has been the biggest factor. We thought we were doing okay as he only used the internet in family rooms where I was present, but he was watching things with the sound off and his screen facing away from me.

Our first indicator that he has been accessing porn is that he starts engaging in misogynistic and verbal sexual abuse, which is usually accompanied by physical attacks. This has been so much better since really tightening up our parental controls on devices.

I can only imagine how horrific it must be to be on the receiving end of physical sexual abuse from your child.

In our case, a lot of what you describe is really accurate. Seeing sexual activity as a right and believing everyone is at it has been a big factor. We have struggled to help my son understand that what is depicted in porn is not normal life.

It says that it is 2/3 males sexually assaulting their parent(s), and 1/3 females. Why does the title only mention "sons"?

I just do not believe that are 1/3 of these child to parent abusers are female.

...why? I wouldnt believe they are 2/3 female to 1/3 male but this seems about right.

Do you think girls don't do nasty things to other people?

There have been so many ‘women’ criminals reported on that turn out to be male, that the Guardian (and most other publications) have rendered statements like this meaningless/untrustworthy.

As PPs have said (I'm so sorry to hear your experiences) - the answer may well be porn. Pornhub publishes it's (astonishing) statistics and research is done on statistics they don't. 50% of videos are incest themed - I think it's termed 'soft incest' because it legally has to be step- themed. The second most searched in 2025 was 'MILF'. 1/3 of videos are violent. That's a horrible combination of trends for sexual violence against women in the family

Edit - typos

"but I am subjected to pretty horrible verbal sexual comments"

That is along the lines of SA according to the study:

"Parents reported their children making sexual noises and simulating sex acts, making sexual threats, being physically violent including touching, grabbing and thrusting, and also carrying out non-contact behaviour such as voyeurism and exposure"

When I was in jail, I was shocked at how many "noncey" women there are in there. Women who have been proven to be involbed in the sexual abuse and/or exploitation of minors. What I found out is that we often don't see when mothers are convicted of such crimes to protect the privacy of their victims. If you know Mary Smith from Camden was convicted of sexually abusing her 5 kids, then you know that all of the Smith kids from your estate have been sexually abused.

Also, sometimes they cannot prove that the mother was in on it to a degree that would get her convicted, but they are aware it was going on with men attached to the home who the mother welcomed in. If you ask the kids, they will tell you that their mother was very much into what was happening to them for one reason or the other.

You learn a lot about women as a female prisoner.

How terrible!
So sorry for your situation @StrugglingTeenager. I can well believe there is stigma.

It’s always a shock to me when girls are involved but I’m not going to disbelieve it. I would prefer it if they broke down the sex pattern further (260 parents experiencing this, mostly female, but exactly how many children? Of the sexual behaviours, what is the male/female split there? I’d predict that the rape and exposure is done by males, with the sexual name calling etc much more likely to be heavily female, but is that right? Of the abuse of the small number of male parents, how much of it is done by females?

I wish there was a link to the detailed report.

Yep, came here to say this, its being reported more, not that its happening more. There needs to be less rights for people to be accommodated in the community, in their families and needing to look at secure accommodation being set up in the ways it was years ago, people dont like that idea as they wanted to move away from that concept but Im in favour of it.

Of course girls do nasty things to other people, but it is definitely surprising to read that 1/3 statistic. I suspect that if we had details of the range of the "harmful sexual behaviour" that the survey was tracking it might start to make more sense.
Even though the attempted sexual assault of a parent is likely to be overwhelmingly perpetrated by males, there may be other forms of sexually inappropriate behaviour that could be less heavily gendered, particularly when you take into account that some of the parents who suffer are caring for children with significant learning disabilities. I wondered whether behaviours such as masturbating in the presence of a parent could have been counted as abusive in the survey.

This is purely speculative on my part, but it may also be that the results were affected by the fact that society is overly policing of female displays of sexuality. Imagine you are a father whose learning disabled daughter is disinhibited about touching herself sexually in the presence of a parent, or being naked in front of her father. Would it be possible that you might experience that as abusive on her part - applying the male idea that it is females' duty to help you manage your own internal sexual economy?

I do wonder what possibility there is of putting the porn genie back in the bottle. It seems none. Though the age restriction legislation was at least an attempt, a line in the sand.

Yes, that is a good point about sexual name calling. And also a good point about small numbers in the survey. Whenever there are small numbers, just one or two atypical cases can have a big impact on percentages.

https://irp.cdn-website.com/fa6ebd65/files/uploaded/CPA%20Parent%20Survey%20Results.pdf

Pretty sure this is the survey.

Guess what it says?

Gender of child:
Female – 81 | Male – 140 | Non-binary – 2 | Transgender – 1

The only hope with porn is men themselves - speaking up that it's abusive, and that it'll ruin your sex life and relationships with women.

So far, my eldest finds the idea of porn horrific, but he's a non-swearing, non-drinking outlier - I hope he doesn't get pulled in, and explains to his mates why it's awful stuff, but it's not something I have more than a passing influence over by now.

I wasn't implying that the news story had lied about the numbers, I was just interrogating the range of behaviours that might have been covered by the survey.

And in any case, the numbers you quote seem to represent the total number of children recorded in the survey as abusing their parents, not the statistics about sexual abuse, which is what the guardian article claims. So I'm not sure what point you are making here?

In fact, your link does look as though the guardian article has misquoted the survey, by misidentifying percentages related to overall abuse rather than sexual abuse? Or have I missed something? EDIT: Actually I think the guardian must have had access to more of the survey's numbers, because 81/140 is nowhere neear 33%/66%

Right, so of the abusive behaviours in that report, 39 children are reported as showing sexualised behaviour, and there’s no breakdown by sex there. (Absolutely not wanting to minimise the other behaviours; just trying to understand the prevalence and sex breakdown of the sexual element).

What it shows is that there was a place for the parents to indicate the child in question is trans but only one did. 80 of the kids in question were female and not trans. So even if the one trans kid is a trans girl AND they committed SA, that is only one result that one could argue was a boy recorded as female. The rest recorded as girls were natal females.

But we know 1/3 of them were female from other reporting.

Yes I agree with you about the apparent mistakes in how the stats are reported @MyThreeWords.

Actually I dont think that study i posted is the study as the dates are a bit wrong. Maybe the survey was done in 2021 and went towards research published in 2023. I will check properly later