Understanding Female-Perpetrated Child Sexual Abuse in Organisational Contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Organisational child sexual abuse has received unprecedented attention over recent years with numerous local, national and international inquiries taking place. At the same time interest in female sex offenders has increased, however, despite this focus in both areas there is an almost total lack of research examining the phenomenon of female-perpetrated child sexual abuse in organisational contexts. This thesis combines these fields of inquiry and addresses this gap. Situational crime prevention theory framed the mixed methods approach examining 136 cases of sexual abuse perpetrated by women against children they worked with in organisational contexts. The sample originates from the UK, USA and Canada between 2000 and 2016. Freedom of Information request data from the Ministry of Justice and professional regulators was used to examine the current context of this abuse. Qualitative and quantitative content analysis of court reports, professional regulator decisions and media articles then examined 92 variables addressing: perpetrator and victim characteristics; offence processes and modus operandi and situational and environmental factors. The responses of organisations and criminal justice and child protection systems were also investigated, as well as the short- and long-term impacts upon victims. The findings show most women offend alone against a single, post-pubescent male victim, often with particular vulnerabilities. Abuse occurs predominantly outside the organisational environment and the use of electronic communication is common. The findings indicate these women were not pre-disposed offenders but rather their behaviour was influenced by socio-cultural, situational and contextual factors. This highlights the significant influence organisations can have in preventing this abuse and wider implications for policy and practice are also discussed. This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by being the first systematic investigation specifically examining female-perpetrated child sexual abuse in a range of organisational contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".