Do you want to know what incest is? What it really is? No ...

Deeply dependent and vulnerable to threats, these women are easily manipulated. As
one of them said, "If he would leave me, I would be a nobody." Once such a woman
molests a child, however, she may go on to offend on her own. As the mother of a fiveyear-old
put it, "Having sex with my son was more enjoyable than with my husband."
While more than a third of the survivors I interviewed told me that they had been
molested by women, true female pedophiles, Mathews says, are relatively rare—about
5 percent of her sample. Those she interviewed had themselves been abused from
approximately the age of two onward by many family members. They received virtually
no other nurturing—most of the nurturing they received was from the offender—and
came to link abuse with caring.
Like male offenders, some females molest many, many children, their own and those in
their care. But Mathews feels that women may take more responsibility for their acts
than men do. Only one girl she worked with blamed her victim. Seventy percent of the
females took all the blame if they acted alone. One half took 100 percent of the
responsibility if they molested with a man. Where the men minimized what had
happened—"We were only horsing around"—the women were "stuck in shame."
In Atlanta at a poetry reading, the woman sitting next to me asks what I write about.
When I tell her, she leans close. "I molested my son," she whispers. I ask if she wants
to talk about it. "No," she says. "But I will say that it will take me the rest of my life to
even begin to deal with it."
Therapist Kathy Evert of Michigan, extrapolating from her 450-question survey of 93
women and 9 men who were abused by their mothers, sees a more general problem. "I
believe that no one, including me," she says, "knows the extent of sexual abuse by
females, especially mothers. About eighty percent of the women and men reported that
the abuse by their mothers was the most hidden aspect of their lives. Only three percent
of the women and none of the men told anyone about the abuse during their childhood."
Instead they endured their own suicidal and homicidal feelings.
A. Nicholas Groth, the Connecticut psychologist, suggests "the incidence of sexual
offenses against children perpetrated by adult women is much greater than would be
suspected from the rare instances reported in crime statistics." He further suggests that
women offenders may not be recognized as such because it is relatively easy to get
away with abusive behavior under the guise of child care.
Female offenders wash, fondle, lick, and kiss the child's breasts and genitals, penetrate
vagina and anus with tongue, fingers, and other objects: dildos, buttonhooks, screwdrivers—one
even forced goldfish into her daughter. As one survivor told me, "My mom
would play with my breasts and my nipples and insert things into my vagina to see if I
was normal. I'm your mother,' she'd say. `I need to know you're growing properly.' She'd
give me enemas and make me dance for her naked. It lasted until I was twenty. I know
it's hard to believe, but it's true. I was petrified of her. Absolutely."
It has long been believed that any woman who sexually abuses a child is insane and
sexually frustrated but that her abuse is less violent than a man's. None of this is true.
Only a third of the women and men in Kathy Evert's study, for example, said they
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