Gender matters more for perpetrators than victims in child sex abuse

Article here. Excerpt:

'There has been a great deal of outrage over the past couple of weeks regarding the alleged discrimination between male victims of child sexual abuse and female victims.

The main argument seems to be that recent abuse against young boys only resulted in the abuser receiving weekend work detention. Abusers of young girls, in contrast, have received hundreds of years behind bars. This implies that the judicial system must not care about young boys.

But what if the gender discrimination is placed on the wrong side of the equation?

It was former Baltimore Ravens cheerleader Molly Shattuck's case that seemed to spark interest in this phenomenon. Shattuck was sentenced to 48 weekends at a work detention facility — spread out over the next two years — for statutory rape against a 15-year-old boy. Shattuck had performed oral sex on the boy, who was a friend of her own son.

But the two stories being highlighted to show this discrimination involve a different female abuser of young boys and a male abuser of young girls.

A 32-year-old man was found guilty of sexually abusing a young girl for years, starting when she was just 6 years old. That man faced 366 years to life in prison. Meanwhile, a 25-year-old woman pleaded guilty to attempted rape of young boys at a trailer park in California. The female abuser in that case had previously been indicted on several other charges, including first-degree rape. She had pleaded guilty to the lesser charges as part of a plea agreement, and received five years' probation.

It's not difficult to see how one might come to believe that the vastly different sentences in these cases comes from a justice system that does not care about young boys. I believe it has more to do with the gender of the abusers.'