Insights on Female Sex Offenders from the Missouri Registry

There is limited research on female sex offenders and their offending characteristics. The sociocultural description of women as being nurturing, nonaggressive and, more significantly, nonsexual has diverted the attention from female sexual offending. Although reports have shown that female sex offenders make up two percent of the whole sex offender population, the true rate is remarkably higher because the caretaking behavior of women masks their sexual offenses. The purpose of our study is to explore the characteristics of female sex offenders. We analyzed the publicly available Missouri sex offender registry database and selected all female sex offenders (n = 532) of any age who committed their crimes in Missouri and were convicted in Missouri. We found that the 532 female offenders had a mean age of 29.8 years at the time of their first offense and were convicted for a total of 992 offenses. The calculated recidivism rate was close to 0.6 percent. Moreover, 89.5 percent of offenders had strictly contact offenses, whereas five percent had strictly pornography offenses. Implications for risk assessment are discussed.