Social moralities and discursive constructions of female sex offenders

Discursive constructions of the sex offender

It could be argued that all crimes have a general moral basis, condemned as ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ in the society in which they are proscribed, however, there is a specific group of offences in modern democratic nations that bear the brunt of the label, crimes against morality. Included within this group are offences related to prostitution and pornography, homosexuality and incest, as well as child sexual abuse. While the places where sex and morality meet have shifted over time, these two concepts continue to form the basis of much criminal legislation and associated criminal justice responses. Offenders of sexual mores are positioned as the reviled corruptors of innocent children, the purveyors of disease, an indictment on the breakdown of the family and/or the secularization of society, and a corruptive force (Davidson, 2008; Kincaid, 1998). Other types of offending may divide public and political opinion, but the consensus on sex crimes appears constant.

Certainly the spectre of the sex offender grips the popular imagination, and since the media’s ‘discovery’ of the paedophile in the 1990s, sex abuse against children has been ‘big news’. In fact the media have gone from simply reporting the news, to instigating crowd reactions when they have published the whereabouts and the identity of known sex offenders (Thomas, 2005). In the USA, community notification of known sex offenders is now legally mandatory through the well known Megan’s Law, which came into force in 1996 and remains popular despite a lack of evaluation of its effectiveness and a suggestion that it is more likely to increase offending as it drives sexual offenders underground and removes them from professional and government scrutiny (Hebenton and Seddon, 2009). Moreover, the resultant vigilantism when sex offenders are identified, and their subsequent loss of civil liberties is supported by a commonly held belief that sex offenders are ‘beyond the pale’ especially when childhood innocence has been transgressed by adult aggressors. As Hebenton and Seddon (2009) note, the more sacred and pure the victim, the more profane the assault, and in western society there is no more pure victim than a child. We follow Stanley Cohen (1973) in labelling this phenomenon a culturally and historically specific moral panic, and will discuss its implications later in the article.

What is most important for this discussion however, is the overwhelming popular belief that the sex offender is exclusively male. According to Landor (2009), given that the vast majority of research on sex offenders fails to even contemplate the female sex offender, it is reasonable to conclude that in the public psyche as well as in the knowledge domains of the academic community, the sex offender is a male. Moreover, while most child sexual abuse is familial, media constructions tend to highlight the dangers of the male stranger, contributing to moral panics surrounding ‘stranger danger’ and the male pervert (Jenkins, 1992, 1998; Kitzinger, 1999, 2004). Of course, there are good reasons for most, if not all, research to be conducted on male sex offenders, since official statistics confirm that they are in the majority. Gleb (2007: 16), for example, reports that, of the 853 sex offenders adjudicated in Magistrates Courts across Australia in 2004–2005, 841 were men. Such statistics are supported in all other western nations (Thomas, 2005; Vandiver and Walker, 2002).

While there are problems with official statistics, based as they are on the victim reporting the crime and that crime being taken seriously, such problems have generally been used to suggest that many more female children are the subject of sexual abuse from men than has previously been recognized (Kelly, 1988). This occurs because feminism has been able to identify and theorize the gendered nature of sex crimes through a recognition that such men are not aberrant monsters but rather that their behaviour can be located on a continuum of normative masculinity (Bass and Davis, 1995; Hall and Lloyd, 1988; Kelly, 1988). Sex offending is taken out of the sphere of the monstrous and plonked squarely and firmly in the domestic and the everyday. Such a position has been supported by those on the ground. As one social worker in the UK noted ‘What is a paedophile anyway? As far as we can see on this project, he’s over 30, drives a nice car and has a wife and kids’ (cited in Thomas, 2005: 36).

However, the articulation of the normative frame of masculinity as a way of understanding and explaining male sexual abuse of children also essentializes women within a normative frame of femininity. Such a perception draws on an understanding of women as naturally caring, nurturing, sexually passive, non-aggressive and innocent (Brabeck, 1989; Denov, 2004; Noddings, 1992) That there is some ambivalence regarding offending by mothers and caretakers highlights the very fine line between what is perceived as motherly love and caring on the one hand, and child abuse on the other (Turton, 2010). The care of the child requires much intimate attention – such attention is natural and loving, never intentionally abusive. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995: 102) suggest that ‘mother-love’ is something akin to a ‘being in love’ with one’s child, a romanticizing of the feelings associated with motherly love that has dominated since the 19th century. Such love is regarded as an ‘eternal and natural bond’ that cannot be broken (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 102).

In fact in the 1970s and 1980s female sexual offending was considered so rare as to be ‘of little significance’; an approach which has become ‘paradigmatic’ within the field of child sexual abuse (Denov, 2004: 303).

The discovery of female sexual offending in the 1990s in a small number of psychological studies in the USA, Canada and the UK, struggled with issues of prevalence, positioning it as a rare phenomenon. Many of these studies concluded that female sexual offending is ‘an aberration which has little or no significance for professionals working with child sexual abuse’ (Denov, 2004: 303) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th Edition concludes that acts of paraphilia (which include pedophilia) ‘are almost never diagnosed in females’ (Denov, 2004: 303).

If female sexual abuse of children is not positioned as an aberrant case and ignored, it is understood to be the outcome of coercion or emotional dependence on a male partner. In these cases, the simple presence of a male co-offender is explanation enough for her offending and ‘another illustration of the unfortunate effects of male dominance’ (Faller, 1987: 247, cited in Matravers, 2008: 301). When women offend alone, their histories of previous victimization at the hands of men is utilized to explain their aberrant female behaviour and return them to a socially acceptable version of femininity.

Women abused in childhood internalise negative models of themselves and others, models that lead them to associate abusing behaviours with the fulfilment of key biological and social needs. (Saradijan, 1996, cited in Matravers, 2008: 302)

However, the recent perception that female-perpetrated sexual abuse is on the increase (Davidson, 2008) may be challenging the position that women don’t offend or that if they do they are not responsible. In the UK, for example, The Observer newspaper recently reported that ‘up to 64,000 women in the UK are child sex offenders’ (Townsend and Syal, 2009) and in a story that draws on research conducted in 2009 by the Lucy Faithful Foundation (a ‘Child Protection Charity’), The Observer stated that women make ‘up to 20% of a reported 320,000 paedophiles’ in the UK. While the validity of these statistics has yet to be verified, academic interest and research on the issue is increasing. As Nathan and Ward (2002) identify, women do commit sexual crimes against children at the official rate of 5% of all sexual offences against children, though the true number is thought to be considerably higher. From her review of the literature, Peter (2009) estimates a ‘prevalence range’ between 1% and 20% for female perpetrated sex abuse. This range is influenced by the source of the data in the research, with self reports exhibiting higher prevalence rates than official statistics. Bunting (2007: 1), however, is adamant in stating that ‘the research literature highlights that females can, and do, perpetrate sexual offences and are responsible for up to 5 percent of all sexual offences against children’. The increasing numbers of female sex offenders in research and media may mean that feminist dominated approaches are no longer capable of fully explaining either the relationship between sex offender and victim, or the social impacts of that relationship. This is especially the case when the predator is a young woman, and the victim an adolescent boy.

Childhood and sexuality

We suggest that an exploration of shifts in the age-line between child and adult will go some way towards unpacking these contradictions. The temporality of childhood has extended considerably over the past several centuries, at least in western industrialized countries. According to historians such as Phillipe Aries (1973) childhood only came to be regarded as a distinct developmental phase in the 16th century. Prior to that, children were regarded as small adults. Newman and Smith (1999) note that depictions of children in art during that period generally characterized children as ‘shrunken replicas of their parents,’ with similar bodily proportions and dress. Children were also expected to act like adults, minding their manners, doing their fair share of work in the family, and generally acting independently in many ways. ‘The notion that children deserve special protection and treatment did not exist at this time. Children could be punished, and frequently were, for social transgressions with the same severity that adults were’ (Newman and Smith, 1999).

This treatment of children was based in part, on economic and social necessity. Infant and child mortality rates were high at this time, with plagues and diseases of all varieties running rampant in Europe. Emotional attachment to children was not a viable option, and parents tended to have as many children as possible to ‘hedge their bets’ (Newman and Smith, 1999). The idea that children were vulnerable and needed protection didn’t become popular until much later; indeed, child labour was extensive in the latter half of the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries.

It wasn’t until industrialization took a firm hold, making child labour an anachronism, that children began to be seen as objects of affection and care, rather than as objects of labour and economic benefit. People began having children for personal satisfaction, and by the 20th century, childhood had become a time in which children were nurtured and loved for themselves, rather than for what they could return economically (Newman and Smith, 1999). At the same time, children came to be seen as completely different to adults, as innocent and essentially uncorrupted. Children became something to be cherished and protected from harm in order to grow and develop into responsible and productive adults. The emotional and intellectual naiveté of children was recognized as central to this attitude, and by the latter decades of the 20th century, children had achieved a status of vulnerability unrivalled in any other era.

This notion of the child as susceptible extends beyond mere physical protection to encompass sexual vulnerability as well. The heteronormative governing of families and individuals depends in part upon the capacity of the family and other institutions to keep children naïve. Children are stripped of their sexuality to such an extent that they have become constructed as altogether asexual, as emotionally precious and vulnerable, and therefore in need of protection from the sexual realm (Hayes et al., 2012: 25). Indeed, the association of sex with children is regarded as obscene, dangerous and taboo. Children are viewed as incapable of understanding and consenting to sexual activity and so are removed from sexuality altogether. Moreover, childhood has now extended into the teenage years via the concept of adolescence. The construction of adolescence as a transitional period has extended, over the past several decades, to later and later ages. In the 1970s, for example, it was common for young people in Australia to leave school and seek paid work at the age of 15. Only a select few stayed on to finish high school and even fewer moved into tertiary education. By the 1990s, however, almost all young people were completing year 12 at high school and an increasing number were moving onto higher education (Carrington and Pereira, 2010).

There are several related reasons for this extension of adolescence. The exponential development of technology has meant that young people are required to have higher levels of education than ever before in order to be able to participate in the work force. It also means that young people are offered more opportunities for travel and other educational experiences that extend their knowledge and understanding of how the world works. Work and occupations have taken on much more formality over the past two decades, with the burgeoning of technical and further education colleges providing courses for almost every imaginable occupation, including even lower level employment such as retail assistance and hospitality – occupations that were previously learned on-the-job (EIU, 2008). The construction of adolescence as a transitional period has therefore been extended to coexist with the period of compulsory and higher education. The increased intellectualization of occupations has created a market for itself, making it difficult for young people to compete in the job market unless they have the relevant ‘qualifications’, requiring more and more that they move into post-compulsory education and further delaying their entry into the workforce and adulthood (EIU, 2008).

This extension of adolescence into the third decade of life is accompanied by a reconfiguring of sex and sexuality for young people in that generation. Whereas in previous centuries, young women often married in their teens, today they are expected to get an education and move into the workforce before committing to a life partnership and children. Sex and sexuality, then, have become topics of controversy, especially concerning the age at which a young person is considered mature enough to engage in a sexual relationship. In most western countries, the age of consent has been set at 16 for heterosexual intercourse and between 16 and 18 for homosexual anal intercourse (AVERT, 2009) supposedly based upon the incapacity of younger people to make an informed choice about entering into sexual activity. But these temporal delineations are not meant to apply to sexual activity between young people of the same age. Sexual activity between children and between adolescents of similar age may be frowned upon, and considered precocious, but it is not criminalized (Waites, 2005). Sex between the ‘underaged’, while the subject of much preventative activity (in the form of sex education and institutionalized moral sanctions), is seen as folly, excusable and even understandable. Young people are ‘risk-takers’ who cannot be held accountable for their actions, because they are unable to give informed consent. They must, therefore, be objects of paternalistic intervention (Bennett, 2007).

The enactment of age-of-consent legislation defined for the first time appropriate inter-generational sexual relations both inside and outside the home. In England it was not until 1861 that the Offences Against the Persons Act established 12 years as the age of consent for young women as a means of protecting them against the harm of sexual exploitation (Smart, 1992: 25). Interestingly, boys were specifically excluded from this act even though they too might have been defined as children and open to the harm of exploitation under the age of 12 (Smart, 1992: 26). Further changes were made to increase the age of consent to 16 through the Criminal law Amendment Act of 1885. Colonial Australia followed a similar pattern and in New South Wales, for example, the Criminal law Amendment Act of 1883, raised the age of consent to 14 while the Crimes (Girls Protection) Bill was passed in 1910, further raising the age of consent to 16. However, this later Act specifically excluded girls of 14 or 15 from its protection if they looked over 16 (Allen, 1990: 63, 79). In South Australia, the Criminal Law Consolidation Act raised the age of consent to 13 and an amendment to that act in 1885 raised it to16.In Victoria, the Crimes Act of 1891 raised the age of consent from 12 to 16. In Queensland and Western Australia, the Criminal law Amendment Acts raised the age of consent from 12 to 14 in 1891 and 1892 respectively. Tasmania raised the age of consent to 18 in 1924 through the Criminal Code Act (Bavin Mizzi, 1995: 20).

As Finch (1991: 20) identifies, these laws emerged as the direct result of a desire to demarcate the social age barriers at which a person could be considered and treated as a child, as well as demarcating a line between the sexual and non-sexual person, with the non-sexual child being ‘out of bounds’ as a sexual partner. In such a cultural and social context, all representations that acknowledge children’s sexuality are subject to legal sanctions. However, such a demarcation also serves as a boundary separating childhood from adulthood. The belief that sex under the age of 16 is morally damaging, unnatural and psychologically harmful, makes a number of modern assumptions, not only about the sexual innocence of children, but also about the incapacity of the family to protect the child, based on a failure of the parent, normally the father, to have internalized this social taboo (Finch, 1991: 28). Such a clear demarcation also serves to deny any discussion of children’s rights or needs as sexual beings. Sexually innocent (read unknowing) children can only be traumatized by exposure to sex prior to the age of consent.

It is for this reason that, while sex between young people might be tolerated, though sanctioned, sex between the underaged and adults is taboo of the highest order. Sex between children (of relatively similar age) is acceptable because it is regarded as innocent exploration, possibly based on a lack of knowledge and understanding, and focused on curiosity and sheer desire. Sex between adults and children is seen as a power imbalance that necessarily disadvantages and exploits the child. The younger participant is regarded as incapable of reasonably consenting to the interaction, and is therefore vulnerable, a victim. The older, adult participant is seen as wielding all the power in the interaction and is therefore cast as predator (Kinnear, 2007). The issue of whether a child under 16 is capable of giving informed consent is a difficult one. Consent is differentially defined temporally and geographically. In some jurisdictions, for example Japan, the age of consent is 13 (AVERT, 2009). Clearly the Japanese adolescent is considered capable of giving informed consent, where the Australian teenager is not. This difference in cultural values and beliefs about sex gives us some indication of the relative arbitrariness of the age-lines drawn between childhood and adulthood, especially where sexual activity across generations is concerned. While it helps us to understand the historical context of our current moral panic about sex and children, it does not really explain why we understand the victim of sexual abuse differently, depending on the gender of the predator.

Body functionality and sexual performance

The relationship between child victim and adult predator in the previous discussion, exists to a large degree because of the role of feminism in identifying the problem of sexual abuse in society. In their formulation, as we have already discussed, the issue of power and victimization was premised on the predator/abuser being a male and the victim being a female. How useful is this understanding of intergenerational sex when the offender is a young woman and the victim an adolescent boy?

Gendered sexual performances are embedded in cultural norms about sexuality and reflect gendered stereotypes and behavioural expectations. Traditional masculine roles prioritize independence, assertiveness, and sexual exploration, as well as a ‘bodily centred set of sexual scripts’ which see sexual activity as directed toward ‘self pleasure and tension release’ rather than relationship affirmation (Wiederman, 2005: 497). Men are perceived as naturally more aggressive and have the active role in sexual relationships. It is difficult to perceive men as sexually reluctant or as victims of sexual coercion or assault (Denov, 2003). In contrast to the traditional masculine script, the traditional feminine script is one that emphasizes idealism, passivity and virtue. Feminine gender roles are based more on behavioural restraint and personal control. Historically, the current notions of femininity arose during the 18th century when middle-class women chose to take on the habitus of the upper class: ease, restraint, calm and luxurious decoration. Passive and dependent, physically frail and asexual, they display ‘divine composure’: silent, static, invisible and composed (Skeggs, 1997). There was in fact a division between the feminine and the sexual. This has implications for feminine sexual scripts. She is sexually passive and innocent, sexually harmless and neither sexually aggressive nor an initiator of sex (Weiderman, 2005). Her role is to influence men to avoid sex – she is the sexual gatekeeper.

Prior to the 17th century however, such understandings of the body functionality of women and men were unknown. From the 2nd century, all people were believed to be on a gradient from male to female characteristics, depending on the amount of ‘humoral life essence’ within each individual. Sex, while good for both men and women, was more important to women’s good health than to men’s. Excessive loss of heat through sex for men could be debilitating, while for women the reverse was true, with ‘the green sickness, hysteria and a range of debilitating conditions cured by heterosexual sex or masturbation’ (Hitchcock, 1997: 43). Women were believed to be more lustful and physically desirous of sex than men, from whom they gained the hot and dry essence of male semen. It was only with the decline of humoural understandings of medicine and body functionality, between 1670 and 1820, that the idea of a natural sexual differentiation between men and women was conceived. In fact, only from the late 18th century would it be normal for men and women to find each other ‘naturally attractive’ (Hitchcock, 1997: 5). Indeed it wasn’t until the 19th century that medical practitioners documented for the first time the ‘anomaly’ that women need not experience orgasm to procreate and conceive (Laqueur, 1990). This gave rise to a new understanding of sex devoid of female orgasm, and discourses about sex at that time reorganized around the knowledge that male sperm was the ‘active’ factor in the procreative process (Hitchcock, 2002: 190). This understanding of procreative sex as not necessarily a vehicle for women’s pleasure was ossified in Victorian understandings of femininity from the 19th century (Rosenman, 2003: 7). In the space of a century, women went from being lustful and full of a barely controlled desire, to sexually numb and passive. In contrast, men, who had begun the century thinking that they could easily control their sexual desires, ‘due to their greater rationality and mental strength’, and that they had a duty to do so, ‘ended the period being told that their sexual desires were largely beyond their control’ (Hitchcock, 1997: 100).

Here, too, we see notions of women as ‘doubly damned’ (Lloyd, 1995), where women are perceived as either Madonnas or whores, depending on context. While this ambivalence about women’s sexual subjectivity has been the subject of much feminist exploration and debate, it is only recently that women as violent and sexual offenders have been included in the scholarly literature (see e.g. Renzetti, 1999: 50–52, Worrall, 2002). Contemporary feminist scholars such as Renzetti (1999) and Worrall (2002) have offered a more critical and nuanced approach to women who sexually abuse, suggesting that gender expectations and disparities have a major role to play in women’s offending. However, while it is clear that social expectations of femininity and masculinity lie at the centre of the moralizing agenda surrounding sexual offending, there has been little acknowledgement in the scholarly literature of women offenders’ subjectivities as anything other than mitigating.

In terms of victims, there has been a shift in the body functionality of children in the past 300 years: from sexual knower, to sexual danger to sexual innocent; and this has demonstrated a change in the ways in which the relationship between children and sex have been understood. In the court of Henry IV, the innocence of children was their protection from the corruption of sex. Children were assumed to be interested in sexual pleasure and to have sexual knowledge but not to be harmed by it (Aries, 1973). In Victorian England, the innocence of children was a battle with the sexual instinct, which was always on the verge of erupting. Children were innocent until they had sexual knowledge, then they were a threat to be managed (Egan and Hawkes, 2009). In modern society, any relation between children and sex is regarded as a problem. According to current social mores, healthy children should be asexual. Thus, it follows from this thinking that children with sexual knowledge are therefore regarded as victims. Healthy asexual children are afforded the protection of the innocence of childhood. Children with sexual knowledge are seen as damaged goods. There is no place, in this new configuration, for a discussion of the body functionality of children in sexual terms (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Kaye, 2005).

These recent and modern ways of understanding the body functionality of children and of men and women are played out in the case of Karen Ellis and the successful appeal against her sentence, discussed earlier. Angelides (2007) suggests that this debate and the subsequent appeal infantalized the young male participant – that it took away his active masculine performance and attributed a childishness to his relationship with Ellis that was not warranted (Angelides, 2007). In contrast, the initial court hearing appeared to infantilize the female perpetrator; represented to the court as a passive receptacle of the young man’s desire, she was positioned as someone who was pressured into the union against her better judgement. This view of Ellis allowed the presiding judge to conclude that she was not a predator and to sentence her accordingly. But child abuse prevention spokespersons – and some media, including A Current Affair – found that characterization difficult to stomach, insisting that the underage participant is always the victim, and that anyone who has sex with a young person is a predator (Angelides, 2007). These competing explanations for inter-generational sex between a young woman and an adolescent boy are based on very different conceptualizations of sexual performance in our society, a performance linked with current medical understandings of body functionality and gendered notions of subjectivity. On the one hand, the victim is a child, under the age of sexual consent and she is a married woman, with a duty of care. On the other, we have a child who is sexually mature and experienced, and who admits to initiating the sexual relationship. If the genders were reversed, we would be unlikely to contemplate the ambivalence of the harm. Perhaps it is the case, as Nelson and Oliver (1995) noted that the gender of the participants is always central to the experience.

Harm, subjectivity and gender

The way bodies are governed in western society tells us a lot about what is expected of individuals. Bodies function to normalize (Grosz,1994) and they are normalized through the consumption of clothing and related products such as beauty services, sports gear, gyms, fashion. Young people become aware of the impulse to normalize and the disciplinary control required to achieve normality at a very young age through socialization from parents, peers and the media. Perhaps most confusingly, in the same era when children’s sexuality has been obliterated and sexual activity with children criminalized, the production and marketing of consumer goods aimed at children – especially clothing, music, video clips and cinema – have both sexualized children’s bodies and exposed them to overt displays of adult sexuality. Dressed as imitation adults and engaged in a highly sexualized popular culture, children’s bodies – especially girls’ – function as objects of desire while at the same time being objects of taboo. This same ambiguity is revealed when women pop stars cultivate ‘a schoolgirl look’ or when adult models wear children’s clothes as the ‘latest fashion’ (Thomas, 2005). When young women reach puberty, and their adult bodies are revealed, the line between child and adult becomes more blurred but also more heavily policed as the taboo between adult and adolescent sex is strengthened. Pubescent young women are suggestive of sex and all that it accompanies, and must therefore be protected from it at all costs.

It is certainly the case that young women have been regarded as particularly vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancies as well as the emotional trauma and psychological harm that comes from unwanted sexual intercourse (Carrington and Pereira, 2010). In contrast, as the commentators on the female paedophiles forum discussed earlier certainly make clear, boys are not harmed in the same way by sexual contact with adult females. In fact, boys should seek out such alliances. We suggest that this discrepancy has less to do with girls being more vulnerable than it has to do with subjective experiences of masculine sexual performance. Boys are alerted to the need to conform to this performance from an early age; indeed, the act of the male paedophile is characterized as masculine performance taken to the extreme, particularly with respect to ‘predatory sexuality’. It may be this reason why boys who are sexually abused by a male offender will be assumed to have been harmed, possibly irrevocably, while the boy who is sexually assaulted by a pretty woman is not. The young female teacher is not regarded as a predator because predatory proclivities are not a characteristic of femininity – rather, it is her feminine bodily performance that requires the young male student to succumb, lest he be thought of as less than masculine. The same does not apply to young female students because, no matter how attractive her male assailant, his masculine sexual performance enables him to inhabit the role of sexual predator. In fact it is the only role available to him. We suggest it is this attribution of masculine body functionality and performance that ascribes the personae of victim and assailant.

In fact research into girls’ sexuality has noted a focus on sex education via discussions of pregnancy and contraception and a subsequent silencing of any discussions about sexual pleasure and/or desire. Tolman (2004: 88) argues that despite the real gains by feminism in reproductive rights and sexual liberation, ‘the tactics of silencing and denigrating women’s sexual desire are deeply entrenched’. In fact, according to Tolman (2004) sex education curricula name male adolescent desire and teach girls to ‘recognise and keep a lid on the sexual desire of boys’ while failing to acknowledge or even recognize the sexual feelings of the girls. Similarly, Fine (1988) noted that adolescent girls’ sexuality was acknowledged by adults in schools but in terms that denied the sexual subjectivity of the girls. There was, according to Fine (1988) ‘a missing discourse of desire’. Thorne and Luria (2004: 81) recognize that sexuality is differently learned for adolescent boys and girls. ‘Girls emphasise and learn about the emotional and romantic before the explicitly sexual.’ For boys the sequence occurs in reverse. ‘Commitment to sexual acts precedes commitment to emotion laden, intimate relationships and the rhetoric of romantic love.’ Moreover, the focus on appearance in pre-adolescent girls, where girls remark on their own and others’ looks long before they talk about the appearance of boys, has been linked with ‘the pattern of performing and being watched’ in later female sexual expression (Thorne and Luria, 2004: 81).

Adolescent female sexuality mixes in desire and sexual feelings with fear and risk, particularly a fear of pregnancy and a loss of reputation. According to Tolman (2004) our current society denigrates and suppresses female sexual feelings but also heightens the dangers of girls’ sexuality. This feminizing process continues through adolescence and into adulthood to such an extent that it has become unclear where adolescence stops and adulthood begins. Popular culture lauds youthful beauty. Thus, the pretty young female teacher – far from being a predator – is still an adolescent in the eyes of the world, and when she engages in sexual acts with adolescent boys, she is merely engaging in what is perceived as a peer relationship. As Kimmel and Plante (2004) identified in their research on the sexual fantasies of men and women, whether or not they were active or passive in their fantasy, women always experienced the fantasy as passive while men always experienced the fantasy as active. Such measures of activity and passivity seem to speak to measures of interpersonal sexual power. ‘By casting themselves as fantasy objects of desire, with less visible sexual agency, women may ultimately be less able to exert sexual desires’ (Kimmell and Plante, 2004: 133).

The feminization and sexualization process achieves two results – it infantalizes her to the extent that she remains vulnerable even into adulthood; second, it relegates her to passivity, specifically sexual passivity, which in turn absolves her from both intent and even, we might argue, from desire itself. The fact of her youth and beauty outweighs the fact of her position of power over the student. She embodies all that is truly powerful in our society – youth, beauty, health – and that power reigns to such an extent that it overrides any obligations she might have as a teacher and mentor. To condemn her as a predator would be to ascribe masculine characteristics to a figure that is clearly the paradigm of successful femininity. The feminine nurtures, is placid and giving. She ‘succumbs’ to the advances of her male student, her reluctance just one more admirable characteristic of her femininity. But her femininity is not used to entice – rather it is evidence that even as an adult she must be the victim in the encounter. The man-child must be the initiator, never the victim.

While not so subject to sexualization, young men are suggestive of sex in other ways, including the adolescent (and pre-adolescent) push for boys to embrace masculinity and all that entails. The primary manifestation and demonstration of masculinity is an overt attraction to girls and women, with little differentiation being made between the two. Recent media attention to the ‘cougar’ – the older female sexual partner of a younger man – demonstrates this nicely. Here we are presented with positive images of older women as assertive sexual beings, capable of being sexually coveted by much younger men, who perceive their experience and maturity as a plus in the sexual stakes. Adolescents and young men are given the message that having sex with an older woman is something to be prized; it is unsurprising, then, that the cougar has been adopted as one of the ultimate prizes of successful masculinity. The contradiction between these discourses on intergenerational sex and the discourses of child abuse are sharp, while the delineation of what has become taboo for the adolescent male is becoming more and more blurred.

This tension between desire and taboo creates an undercurrent of distrust surrounding young girls while at the same time blurring the line for boys. The mistrust surrounding girls speaks to their sexual potential as well as to the perceived inability of adults – particularly male adults – to regard young bodies as anything but sexual. That men may recognize young girls as potential sexual partners suggests that there is still some currency to the conflicting perception of females as either Madonnas or whores. Young girls who dress provocatively, who adopt the mannerisms and attitudes of their much older counterparts, are seen as fodder for sexual desire, regardless of their age and the social moralities surrounding that (Hayes et al., 2012).

Thus, the condemnation of child sex offences, including the post-custodial regulation of paedophiles, is based on three assumptions – that all children are naïve and sexually vulnerable, that adults always desire young nubile bodies, regardless of age, sex, or context, and that men in particular cannot be trusted to contain that desire. The resulting legal moralism that criminalizes sex between adults and children is designed to ensure that adult desire is controlled and sanctioned where necessary, and that children will remain innocent of sex and sexuality for as long as possible. The fact that most of this legal moralism focuses on male perpetrators, however, suggests that the adult female is not essentially predatory or even inclined to be so; rather, she is also subject to the same sexualization and feminization imposed upon girls and young women. Indeed, she cannot escape these essentializing functions.