Source: Women are Human
The short answer is we simply don’t know; however, reports of more women committing sexual crimes coincide with shifts in how crime statistics data are being collected: in many jurisdictions, perpetrators’ gender identity is now recorded, rather than their sex.
The following examples highlight the alarming implications of this shift:
United Kingdom
On January 19, 2021, the BBC reported that the number of reported cases of child sexual abuse committed by women almost doubled between 2015 and 2019, from 1,249 to 2,297 (an increase of 1,048).
Fair Play for Women, a campaigning and consultancy group working to protect the rights of women and girls in the UK, clarifies that it is impossible to determine whether more women are actually committing child sexual abuse (CSA) based on the data available (a detailed explanation is provided here).
However, the consultancy group notes that various Freedom of Information (FOI) requests reveal that police commonly record self-declared gender identity instead of sex, even when the crime is rape. Thus, male suspects and convicted rapists are officially recorded as women if they identify themselves as such. Using Ministry of Justice figures of sex offenders in prison, Fair Play for Women calculates that if a similar profile holds for CSA crimes, almost 900 of the alleged 2,297 female CSA perpetrators are actually male. If accurate, these males account for almost all the reported increases since 2015.
Collecting data based on gender identity instead of sex means we lose the ability to monitor changes based on sex.
Norway
In 2016, Norway introduced self-declaration of sex, meaning that males can register themselves as female. The Norwegian policy academy’s annual report, Rape in Norway, indicates that, in the year following this change, the number of reported cases of women committing rape more than tripled from a steady 12 per year, up to 41. Some of the increase is due to a change in the definition of rape (15 cases), but this does not account for the remaining 14.
A woman emailed the policy academy asking whether anyone had changed their registered sex, and whether the increase in female rapists had any correlation with an increase in males identifying as women. Not only had this not occurred to the researchers, but they were also unaware that self-ID even existed – meaning the effects of this policy change are not being evaluated.
The report “Rape in Norway 2017” made sure to track the effects on a paragraph that changed the categorisation of certain kinds of sex-acts. But no-one thought to track the effects of the changes made to the entire variable “sex” ?
— another cell (@_matriarken) June 6, 2020
Canada
Following the addition of gender identity to the Canadian Human Rights Act in 2017, the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) implemented an interim policy, whereby prisoners are placed according to their gender identity “unless there are overriding health or safety concerns which cannot be resolved”. Definitive data on male prisoners housed in women’s estates is difficult to obtain; however, estimates are that 50% of all requests for transfers from men’s to women’s prisons are from sex offenders.
Heather Mason, former Canadian federal prisoner and advocate for women in prison, is slowly compiling data on the number of male prisoners in women’s prisons, and the crimes they have committed. Ms Mason is currently aware of 16 transgender prisoners convicted of sex offences. If these cases are added to the estimated 21 women in prison for sexual assaults, the proportion of convicted sex offenders almost doubles.
I counted 21 women in prison for sex offences on the last ATIP someone gave me.
I counted 2126 men in federal on sex crimes.
And I have 16 trans on my list for sex crimes, SO FAR!
Keep sending me trans prisoners so I can keep the list updated.
— Heather Mason (@Mason134211f) January 19, 2021
Featured image credit: Mika Baumeister
