Stepping into a Feminist Minefield: Women Sex Offenders

Abstract

This article seeks to initiate discussion on the issue of women, specifically mothers, who perpetrate sexual violence against children and explore some tentative theorisations as to how we can understand this complex form of sexual violence. The analysis and discussion will be located within a feminist contextual framework that draws upon contemporary feminist and postmodern theory. Within this discussion, the article will be drawing on the understanding of such violence from the experiences of victim/survivors, other practitioners and a broad range of theorists. In exploring the issue, the article will endeavor to provide a more complex understanding of the issue of women's agency and capacity for violence, the possible wide ranging impacts of phallocentricism and the consequences of such violence in the lives of children, men and women.