Although child sexual abuse has been studied extensively, minimal attention has been paid to sexual abuse by females. This paper explores the prevalence of female sex offending and reveals the paradoxes that exist within the available data. Moreover, it highlights the role of traditional sexual scripts in impending the official recognition of the problem. Traditional Sexual scripts, particularly the perception of females as sexually passive harmless, and innocent, appear not only to have influenced broader societal views concerning sexuality and sexual abuse but also to have permeated the criminal law, victim reporting practices, and professional responses to female sex offending. The implicit denial of women's potential for sexual aggression within these three domains may ultimately contribute to the underrecognition of the problem in official sources. The last fifty years have seen a series of shifts in attitudes and beliefs regarding the prevalence of adult-child sexual exploitation. For example, early writers believed incest was a very rare occurrence. Authors such as Weinberg (1955) and Freedman, Kaplan, and Sadock (1975) suggested that the incidence of father-daughter incest was one in a million. However, between 1976 and 1986, reports of sexual abuse against children in the U.S. rose 22-fold. In 1976, only 6,000 cases of sexual abuse were referred to U.S. protective services agencies. In 1986, however, 132,000 cases of sexual abuse were identified (American Association for the Protection of Children, 1988). This trend has continued, and in 1992 almost 500,000 sexual abuse cases were reported in the U.S. (Mendel, 1995). As a result of (be large increase in the number of cases reported, child sexual abuse is now considered a significant social problem and has gained wide-spread attention.
