When women are as evil as men

Society continues to have a difficult time believing women are capable of physical and sexual violence. Social norms and attitudes about women being harmless and innocent persist. When coupled with the belief that women who care for children are inherently compassionate and loving, people may have difficulty accepting the truth when confronted with the reality that women are just as capable and often just as inclined as men to commit horrendous acts against others. There is no better example than the case involving three convicted pedophiles, two women and one man, who met on Facebook and started a ring in which they traded pictures of abused children and in which one of the women who ran a daycare recorded herself abusing babies and toddlers to send to the other two pedophiles:

In a grotesque betrayal of trust, [Vanessa] George had been using her position to commit acts of sexual abuse on children in her charge, film them and then send the grossly indecent images via mobile telephone to two like-minded strangers she had befriended on the internet.

In a three-way exchange, she swapped pictures and sex talk with Colin Blanchard, an IT consultant from Rochdale, and later with Angela Allen, a ‘truly evil’ woman from Nottingham, neither of whom she had met.

For more than six months, they operated a paedophile triangle founded on nothing more complex than mobiles, Facebook, and the ‘live chat’ MSN messaging service.

One of the emails even hinted at a plan to abduct a child from a busy railway station for their own sexual gratification.

But an elementary oversight led to their downfall after a workmate stumbled across disturbing photographs on Blanchard’s computer and reported them to police.

Unfortunately, many of the articles about this case tend to shift the blame on Blanchard, the obvious reason being that he is male and therefore he must be responsible. The major problem with that is it reduces the culpability of the women in involved and frankly denies the facts. According to the authorities, it was Allen who initiated the image trading. George decided to rape the children in her care all on her own. George also plotted to kidnap a little boy standing on the street, stating in a text message to Blanchard:

“I’m just in the station now, and i went to the loo and there was a little boy stood outside one of the cubicle doors, his mum was talking to him, she was in the toilet, that would have been the perfect opportunity to snatch him, wouldn’t it?”

According to another article the rates of reported offenses committed by women are up. What this case reveals is not only that women rape and abuse children, but how easily those women slip through the net. Investigators would never had known about these two women had those women not involved a man in their circle. Allen and George would have continued to go undetected and there is no telling how many children those two women would have abused.

That is the reality of female predation. Investigators are not looking at women because women hold such a trusted position in society. Had it not been for the physical evidence and the records of texts and emails there is a good chance charges might not have even been filed if someone had made a complaint against Allen or George. The other thing this case reveals is that women are just as willing to use the internet to abuse children. Again, investigators are not looking for female offenders, so it comes as no surprise that they do not find them, although one must wonder how it is possible to never stumble across at least one woman using the internet to groom and abuse children, which seems to be what occurs during law enforcement crackdown on internet predators.

The gruesomeness of these pedophiles abuse is mirrored by the equally gruesome fact that most women who rape children receive little to no prison time. This is fairly common knowledge, and one must wonder whether this thought goes through the minds of female offenders. It is highly unlikely they do not know they can always point the finger at their male accomplice or blame a failed relationship or play the victim card. Case in point:

Nursery worker Vanessa George, convicted of horrific abuse through an internet paedophile ring, told her husband she expects to be out of prison in two years as he began an attempt to force her to name her victims.

The 39-year-old mother-of-two, who admitted a string of child sex offences, said: “I’ll get four (years) and be out in two.”

—-

At Bristol Crown Court last week, Mr Justice John Royce told George she could expect a “substantial” prison term and urged her to help the parents of her victims by identifying which of the children Little Ted’s Nursery in Plymouth, Devon[…] George admitted seven sexual assaults on children, of which two involve penetration and therefore carry the maximum term of life imprisonment, five counts of distributing indecent images of children and one count of making indecent images of children.

Unfortunately, the UK does not have a good track record in regards to punishing women who rape child (not that the US record is any better). As outlandish and cold as George’s remarks about her sentence are, she is likely correct that she has a very good chance of receiving a low sentence. More likely than not Blanchard will receive a longer sentence than either of the women involved, and this is despite George absolutely refusing to name any of her victims.

No one really knows how many female sex offenders there are. However, one organization that deals with female offenders presented a guesstimate:

Child sex abuse by women is significantly more widespread than previously realised, with experts estimating that there could be up to 64,000 female offenders in Britain.

Researchers from the Lucy Faithfull Foundation (LFF), a child protection charity that deals with British female sex offenders, said its studies confirmed that a “fair proportion” of child abusers were women. Donald Findlater, director of research and development, said results indicated that up to 20% of a conservative estimate of 320,000 suspected UK paedophiles were women.

While it is only a guess, it is worth noting that even that number may be a low estimate given that female victims are even less likely than their male counterparts to report abuse by a female. This goes to show how difficult this problem is in terms of both understanding the rate of victimization and actually catching, charging, trying and sentencing female pedophiles.