ABSTRACT
Research into child protection service systems, as well as the nature of the child sexual abuse encountered within them, has also begun to provide estimates of the frequency at which women are found to be responsible for the sexual abuse of children within the family and as part of their role as caretakers. This chapter reviews the data, and provides a discussion of its investigative significance to law enforcement and child protective service investigators. The motivational factors that contribute to female sex offending and the crime scene behaviors that define it are clearly distinct from those that characterize sex offending by men. The incestuous longings that constitute the oedipal complex of psychoanalytic theory became a central therapeutic construct in the first half of the twentieth century, as Sigmund Freud began to describe the “family romance” that he believed characterized the emotions of all developing children.
