Female sex offenders
This piece was written based on a request from JK Rowling to provide her with information in relation to cisgender female sex offenders and sexual predators. This request came based on my assertion that cisgender women commit sexual offenses orders of magnitude more than trans women who have transitioned prior to their sex offenses do. Thus, this is my good faith analysis of female sex offences and the issues in both quantifying female sexual predation and the lack of actual data to verify any figure conclusively.
To caveat this, in 2022 I did a systematic review of the UK sex offender data to answer this question as part of my PhD as I wanted address the question of trans female sexual predators. When I looked at UK police, courts, and prison data two problems emerged both for trans and cis women that complicate my analysis here. First, the UK police only report the sex of the victim, meaning that without internal police data it is impossible to see how many women, cis or trans, have been arrested and charged with a sexual offence. Second, the UK courts do not release any demographic data for defendants, only name, address, and occupation. This means that much of the public discourse around sexual predators has come from media outlets covering court cases, with demographic data imposed onto a particular defendant which the defendant themselves may not agree or disagree with. Third, UK prison data is always in flux, and any snapshot provided by the UK Home Office is by nature methodologically flawed due to all demographic data presented to the public what is permissible under GDPR.[1] All told, this means that it is impossible to ascertain any accurate information on cis or trans female sexual predation other than a snapshot based on arbitrary datapoints which immediately go out of date the moment they are published.
As Ozturk et al suggest, further issues complicate this because while some information is available in the public sphere, most popular conceptualizations of female sexual offenders are more heavily influenced by mythology and popular culture than science.[2] There is no general public access to the “sex offenders register”[3], meaning that unless you are a parent or need access to the database it is not possible to search for data and statistics. Following a full risk assessment, the police will reveal details, in person, to the person most able to protect the child (usually parents, carers or guardians) if they think it is in the child’s interests. The person who is told is not allowed to tell anybody else.[4] This means that any quantification of risk, all attempts at external verification, and all third party websites cannot give you the data you need to make any assertion about the rates of female, cis or trans, sexual predation in the UK.
This is not to say that it is impossible to ascertain levels of female sexual predation in the UK, it means that we need to rely on Freedom of Information (FOI) Requests, academic research, other government data, and third sector data to scope out the question. One example is the a May 2024 FOI request made to the Metropolitan Police requesting information about how many women are indefinitely on the Sex Offenders Register in London, to which the Met replied 49 as of May 2024.[5] A 2020 Office for National Statistics report showed that in the year ending 2017 186 women of all ages had been charged and brought before magistrates courts for various sexual offences.[6] This date does not differentiate between cis and trans defendants, and it also doesn’t give the sex of those who are convicted. The data does show that roughly 40–50% of people sent to the crown court were convicted of some form of sexual violence, meaning that on the balance of probabilities between 80–90 women were found guilty; this is an estimate based on the median figure for all sex based criminal convictions.
Tracy Emmott draws out from the most recently available data:
“However, conviction rates may only be the tip of the iceberg. In 2015, forensic psychologist Dr Joe Sullivan suggested the number of women sexually abusing children was much higher than conviction rates would suggest. Reasons for low conviction rates are cited as male teenage victims in particular feeling reluctant to come forward because of a fear that their experience will not be viewed as ‘abuse’, feeling pressure to view their sexual encounters with women as a badge of honour”.[7]
The Lucy Faithful Foundation have long sought to flag female sex offenders, especially female paedophiles, and educate the public on the prevalence of such women.[8] In 2009 they flagged that the true number of female sex offenders could be as high as 64,000 women and around 5–20% of all sex offences carried out by women, though without concrete data this is a best estimate based on available evidence.[9] Elliott and Bailey suggested in 2014 that based on international female sex crime data the rate could be between 4–5%, but again due to the lack of academic and governmental statistical scrutiny this is also an estimate.[10]
Jennifer Grant highlights:
“Female sexual offending has generated much less concern than its male equivalent. There remains a societal disbelief of women’s propensity to commit sexual offences, because of the female nurturing role”.[11]
She points out that without education and a public dialogue, they are not equipped with the required knowledge about female sexual offending. This is backed up by Morgan and Long who draw out that our knowledge still lags considerably behind that of their male counterparts.[12] They highlight that the number of victims of female sexual abusers was only 0.66% compare to male abusers at a London support network, meaning that either men commit 99.34% of all sexual offences or victims of female sexual violence do not wish to come forward. The answer based on the Lucy Faithful Foundation research suggests that it is more likely to be the latter, though given conviction rates the former could be based on how prepared victims are to come forward and talk about it.
An area of specific contention with respect to trans female sex offenders is their housing in the prison estate, namely their removal and ban from the female prison estate irrespective of their surgical history. Two high profile cases of Karen White and Isla Bryson led to the UK Home Office banning trans female sexual offenders from the female estate, yet two questions remained from that ban which intersect with cis female sexual predators: first, female sex offenders are housed in the female stand and second, there is a gap in the research literature in documenting the nature of these sexual interactions between UK incarcerees and staff and how the relationships that facilitate them develop.[13] The first relates back the number of female sex offenders at any one time in the female estate, which is both impossible to prove and impossible to map out due to lack of public data. And the second relates to the inherent power dynamics between female prisons and prison officers, where there is no public data on the levels of sexual relations between female prison officers and those in their care, which is sexual abuse due to the power dynamics involved. For every out trans woman in the female estate there are order of magnitude more female sex offenders across the estate, which asks the question as to why cisgender female sex offenders are not considered a threat in the same way that trans women who committed no sexual crimes are.
The central issue is this: no matter what answers you seek to find about female sexual predation in the UK you will find a paucity of data and government willingness to engage with the issue. This is especially pertinent when measuring the danger one demographic to another, and comes back to my original posit that cis gender women commit sex crimes orders of magnitude more than trans women who have transitioned. Now, my assertion can falter on two facts. Cisgender women make up 51% of the UK population, trans women roughly 0.5, with less than 0.1% have actively socially transitioned at any given point. Thus, cisgender women have a ratio of 100:1 to 500:1 depending on how you wish to measure it. Already the ratio is two orders of magnitude. Thus, if one out trans woman is arrested and charged with a sexual offence in a given year she is already statistically inside the 100:1 to 500:1 ratio and it would take 100 to 500 cisgender women to ratio that. The data itself suggest that this is within the bounds of actual cisgender female sexual offences conviction rates in the UK, so 1 trans woman per year fits a normative sexual predation pattern in the UK. This is based on population size alone, and is only a statistical exercise based on flawed data. In reality there is no way to know for sure what the actual ratio truly is.
My assertion that cisgender female sexual predation happens orders of magnitude more is based on the Lucy Faithful research and the conclusions it has drawn on nearly two decades. Since 2004 8464 people in the UK have been issued with a gender recognition certificate.[14] This is just a small subset of trans people in the UK, and with the UK population of around 68.35 million this means that between 68,350 and 341,750 trans women live in the UK in various stages of transition. Again, it is impossible to know for sure any specific person’s gender history, and due to the gaps in existing data anyone can make assumptions about this group. I would suggest that based on the Lucy Faithful Foundation Data you would expect to see 1 sexual predator per 1,068 women (68,385/64), so with out trans women you would expect to see 64 to 320 trans female sexual predators living in the UK who transitioned prior to committing their crimes. Again, this is caveated on approximations so this figure is a best guess. Even with that, the data that is publicly accessible shows that this is simply not the case.
I use “orders of magnitude” to infer the practical reality of the population disparity between cisgender female sexual predators and any potential transgender female sexual predators, while also pointing to the fact that I do not rely on the queer theoretical framing of a person being a particular gender at law forever and always the moment they came out. While I can see merit in a person’s history being morphed at point of transition, from the purpose of criminal statistics and data this is a flawed premise because societally a person moves through the world and is interacted with as one gender then on transition is treated as their affirmed gender. Thus, from a data perspective the moment of transition is the moment the data collection changed. Much is the same for married women, religious converts and anyone who has their title and status changed. This is why trans women who transitioned after their crimes are statistically men for the purposes of any statistical modelling, as their threat to their victims is based on how they moved through the world as men and were treated as men. Their criminal data and history ought to be compared to men because at the point of their crime they were men. This is why the data on trans women in the prison system is flawed because there is no granularity provided to filter this out. From the available data it is my considered opinion that trans women who transitioned prior to their crime commit sexual violence commit their crimes at least two orders of magnitude less than cisgender women, though this is an estimate based on extensive media analysis and combing through available government data.
The two methods I used above demonstrate why there is a dire need for hard data on female sexual predation in the UK, especially when it is being used to undermine the rights of trans women and anyone who is gender non-conforming. Without hard data it is impossible to know for sure the rates, victims, and complex social patterns that lead to female sexual predation, leaving the forum open to statistics which have no grounding in reality.
My overarching point is this. In a vacuum we all make assumptions based on the best available evidence available to us. When it comes to female sexual violence British society has a blind spot for both the actual data and the broader societal conversation about it. Trans women have been used as an exemplar of the dangers to women based on the fear that they will commit male pattern sexual violence. The available data does not back this up; indeed, the available conviction rates and offending rates suggest that cisgender women are two orders of magnitude more likely to commit sexual violence than trans women are. More research is urgently needed on this, as there is no definitive answer to the question at hand other than possibilities and potentialities.
[1] Office for National Statistics. (2024). Number of sex offenders in the female prisons. [Online] Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/numberofsexoffendersinthefemaleprisons
[2] Ozturk et al. (2024). Understanding the Characteristics and Motivations of Female Sexual Offenders: A Systematic Review Journal of Forensic Social Work 8(1) Available at: https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.1936-9298.2024.8.1.48-57
[3] Beard, J. (2023). Registration and management of sex offenders. House of Commons. [Online] Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05267/
[4] Narco. (2025). I’m on the Sex Offenders Register, who will be told about my offence(s)? [Online] Available at: https://www.nacro.org.uk/nacro-services/criminal-record-support/advice-for-individuals/sex-offences-shpo-mappa/advice-for-people-on-the-sex-offender-register/im-on-the-sex-offenders-register-who-will-be-told-about-my-offences/
[5] Metropolitan Police. (2024). Females currently on the Sex Offenders Register. [Online] Available at: https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclosure-2024/may-2024/females-currently-sex-offenders-register/
[6] Office for National Statistics. (2018). Sexual offending: Ministry of Justice appendix tables. [Online] Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/sexualoffendingministryofjusticeappendixtables
[7] Emmott, T. (2024). Female paedophiles — how prevalent are they? Emmott Snell Solicitors. [Online] Available at: https://www.emmottsnell.co.uk/blog/female-paedophiles-how-prevalent-are-they
[8] Lucy Faithful Foundation. (2021). Understanding and preventing child sexual abuse by women. [Online] Available at: https://www.lucyfaithfull.org.uk/understanding-and-preventing-child-sexual-abuse-by-women/
[9] Townsend, M and Syal, R. (2009). Up to 64,000 women in UK ‘are child-sex offenders’. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/oct/04/uk-female-child-sex-offenders
[10] Elliott, I and Bailey, A. (2014). Female Sex Offenders: Gender and Risk Perception in: Responding to Sexual Offending. [Online] Available at: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137358134_3
[11] Grant, J. (2022). The significance of safety and space to the primary prevention of female sexual offending. [Online] Available at: https://www.britsoccrim.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/BSCN-Summer-2022-The-significance-of-safety-and-space.pdf
[12] Morgan, L and Long, L. (2018). Available at: Female perpetrated sexual offences reported to a London sexual assault referral centre Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine 54 130–135
[13] Bone, J and Sweeting, F. (2025). Understanding the Nature and Prevalence of Sexual Misconduct in the UK Prison and Probation Service The Prison Journal 105(2) [Online] Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00328855241309116
[14] Jones, I. (2025). Gender recognition certificates: Key numbers and trends. The Standard. [Online] Available at: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/ian-jones-b1222985.html
