PANORAMA -
The sexual abuse of children by women
THE ULTIMATE TABOO

Su Pennington

            The sexual abuse of children by women was once thought to be so rare it could be ignored. Today the victims tell a different story.

Lesley Wildman

            You know when my mum was being really nice you knew you were going to get raped.

Chris Roberts

            Image your worst nightmare come true.  That probably doesn’t even come close to it.

Su Pennington

            Tonight Panorama reveals how the scale and nature of this sexual taboo has been severely underestimated.

Cheryl

            We used to play football together, go for walks, and we just went.

Su Pennington

            Cheryl’s friend was just a twelve year old schoolboy. She was nineteen. Walking with him one evening she committed such a serious act of sexual indecency she went to prison for it.

Cheryl

            So I says to him I says “We’ll walk the field way”  So we started walking the field way. And I sat down. He sat down. I pushed him back, pulled his trousers down and I pulled mine down. Then I had sexual intercourse with him until someone was walking past with a dog.

Su Pennington

            And how long did this assault go on for?

Cheryl

            For about fifteen minutes.

Su Pennington

            Why did you do it in the first place?

Cheryl

            Because I was feeling aroused.

            He was crying, shouting for his mum. He wanted to go home.

Su Pennington            

            And what did you think when you saw him crying?

Cheryl

            At that time I couldn’t think straight so I just carried on.

Su Pennington

            After she had raped the child Cheryl realised that as a woman who’d abused she’d broken one of society’s most serious taboos. She marched him to a railway bridge believing there was only one option left to her.

Cheryl

            Then I looked round to see if anything was coming such as transport and there was nothing and I just pushed him over.  I was thinking what have I done wrong.

Su Pennington

            Why did you push him?

Cheryl

            To try and frighten him, scare him so he wouldn’t tell what happened.

Su Pennington

            You could have killed him.

            Did you know that when you pushed him?

Cheryl

            Yes.

Su Pennington

            The boy survived his fall from the bridge. Cheryl was sentenced to eighteen months for indecent assault and grievous bodily harm.

            Sexual abuse by anyone is appalling but when the perpetrator’s a woman the crime seems so unnatural it offends against all instincts. It’s thought ten percent of the population are abused as children. It’s hard to accept some of their tormentors are women.

Jacqui Saradjian

            I think people find it so difficult to see that women sexual abuse children because the whole view of women is of nurturers, carers, protectors, people who do anything to look after children and who they see the women as victims rather than any perpetrators of any abuse.

Dr Michele Elliott

            I think the issue strikes at the core of what we perceive ourselves as women to be and I think that it’s easier to think it’s men, it’s them, it’s the enemy somehow but it can’t be women. This is one thing women can’t do. You know we can be equal, we can be free, we can be in charge of companies but we can’t sexually abuse children. That’s a load of rubbish.

Su Pennington

            Reaction to twenty eight year old Tina Purser’s relationship with another twelve year old boy demonstrates society’s reluctance even to associate women with sexual abuse. Purser, a trained nurse and mother of four, secretly abused the twelve year old for two years.

            When did she make her first sexual approach?  How did she do it?

MOTHER OF ABUSE VICTIM

            Apparently not long after he was twelve. Her own children she sent round to the local park to play. Our son was  in the house and she was just doing her housework and apparently while she was cleaning the bathroom she just turned around to our son and said “How would you like this?” and actually abused him. 

            She masturbated him on that first occasion with him apparently leaning against the door.  Afterwards he just cleaned himself up and she said “You’d better pop off and play with the children now and I’ll finish the housework and will see you later.”

Su Pennington

            Do you think she targeted him?

MOTHER OF ABUSE VICTIM

            Definitely. Definitely. She went for that blonde, gorgeous little boy. She used her son to get him. She used her son to get him over to play. She used her son to do the things that our son liked doing. If our son liked certain videos she’d get her son to like them too.

Su Pennington

            On any level do you understand what she was getting out of a relationship with a twelve year old boy?

Woman 1

            None whatsoever. If he’d have been a Chippendale yes but a twelve year old boy no.  I can only presume that she was getting from it sex and didn’t have the problems of a grown up man and the demands of a grown up man and a full-blown relationship. This was just easy sex.

Su Pennington

            It took secret tape recordings by a private detective to convince the authorities Tina Purser was abusing the boy, albeit he appeared to consent. The family were distressed the media reported the relationship as an affair.

            Would you say what they were having was an affair?

Woman 1

            No. She raped him. She raped him hundreds of times and robbed him of six years of his childhood. I had a gorgeous little boy and now I’ve got a very aggressive, moody teenager.

Su Pennington

            Tina Purser was found guilty of two indecent assault charges but the sentence was just two years’ probation and the judge said he didn’t see Purser as a future risk to children.

Dr Michele Elliott

            What tends to happen is the female  sexual abuser is excused in a way. Oh “she must have been misguided or it was called an ‘affair’, for example an affair with a thirty four year old woman and a ten year old boy. I mean we  wouldn’t have said that about a man. What happens is the sentences are more lenient. The judges might even think well a woman couldn’t really have done this. It must have been a mistake. And they usually get probation or they walk free. A man doing that would be locked up.

Su Pennington

            That’s because men have long been seen as both capable of sexually abusing children and as being the main perpetrators. That still holds true. They are. But there’s increasing evidence that far more women sexually abuse children than previously thought.

Dr Michele Elliott

            In the past the statistics have indicated that perhaps two to five percent of abusers are females. I think, based on the people who have contacted me, that that would probably be much higher, maybe as high as twenty five percent.

Su Pennington

            Chris Roberts, seen here in the 1980’s in a foster home, was removed from his own home because of physical abuse by his father. What the authorities didn’t even consider at the time was that his mother might be sexually abusing him.

Chris Roberts

            There’s no way you could describe how unpleasant it was. You couldn’t put it into words. 

            Imagine your worst nightmare come true. That probably doesn’t even come close to it. My earliest memory would be when I was probably about two and a half to three years old - beatings, physical and you know sexual abuse, mental abuse from both my mother and my father where my mother, she’d keep us away from playschool, my other two brothers from school, and use us for her sexual perversions whilst our father was at work. When I was three  I remember I was put into a children’s home.

Su Pennington

            But Chris’s abuse was not to end there. On the weekly visits they were allowed to the home his parents continued the abuse.

Chris Roberts

            The Supervision Order, it wasn’t enforced. We’d be taken into a playroom and our father would just ram a chair up against the door and then abuse was going on, you know, on the property of, you know,  the children’s home.

Su Pennington

            And what sort of abuses happened in the home?

Chris Roberts

            At this point in time our mother had lost a set of twins.  Can I stop for a minute please?

Su Pennington

            Chris was told he was to blame for the twins’ deaths. His feelings of guilt helped to ensure he’d submit to yet more abuse.

Chris Roberts

            There are many forms of abuse - physically, mentally and sexually . I had a mixture of mentally and sexually. They would bring pornographic magazines into the children’s home where we’d be made to sit and look at the magazines whilst performing sexual acts with our mother and our father joining in as well.

Jacqui Saradjian

            Approximately one in every hundred girls in the population and one in every hundred boys in the population are sexually abused in their childhood by a woman and that’s a vast number of victims that we are avoiding if we’re not looking at the issue of women as sexual abusers.

Su Pennington

            Victims trapped in the custody of their mothers as children often only speak out after they’ve escaped. When they do much of their testimony shatters the myth that women only sexually abuse if coerced by men.

            Lucy Jenner had a single mother. Lucy took the place of a husband in the bed she had to share every night.

Lucy Jenner

            She would lock the door and after a certain time she would snap on the light and sometimes I’d try to pretend to be asleep so it wouldn’t happen but it didn’t make any difference. My mother would be behind me and I would be facing the wall and my mother would be sort of around me and she called it  a chair and she would say that she loved me and various other things. And she would penetrate me vaginally and rectally with whatever she had.

Su Pennington

            There was lasting damage causing pain and bleeding even today, a legacy of the abuse she’d endured.

Lucy Jenner

            I think mainly it was the abuse that has affected my bowel.  I have a rectal prolapse which is a direct result of being penetrated with objects when I was a child when I was sexually abused by my mother.

Su Pennington

            The biggest trauma for some victims though is disbelief. A survey of a hundred and twenty seven survivors by the children’s charity, Kidscape, showed eighty six percent were not believed at first when they named a woman as their abuser.

Jacqui Saradjian

            The fact that we are not expecting women in our society to do this and not accepting that women in our society do this actually has profound effects on the victim in  often making the experience go on much longer than it would have done so in other cases but also make them feel more stigmatised, more different, more betrayed, more powerless.

Su Pennington

            For twenty years no one saw what Sandra and Lesley endured. Their mother started to abuse them aged five and six and continued even after they were married.

            When they threatened to go to the police she threatened to abuse their children. Sandra and Lesley’s mother was accompanied by their father in the abuse but it was she who took the lead.

Sandra Wildman

            Mother used to always come in the bedroom and drag us out of the bedroom and she never had any clothes on so you knew what was going to happen. I was made to do things and I was frightened. I was crying. I was told to shut up and I would have to get used to it.

Lesley Wildman

            You knew when my mother was being really nice you knew you were going to get raped. It felt like it was every night. It was probably four or five times a week they both raped me.

Su Pennington

            Who started these sessions?  Who was the dominant partner?

Lesley Wildman

            My mother.  My mother always came to get me.

Sandra Wildman

            My dad was at work. I was cleaning the bath out and everything when all of a sudden my mum come in the bathroom and she pushed me flying and she grabbed my hair and she dragged me into the bedroom and she made me do things you know for her satisfaction.

Lesley  Wildman

            I couldn’t understand how your own mother. You’ve got no one else to turn to, do you know what I mean.  If it was your dad doing it at least you’ve got someone. You’ve got your mother, you know, to try and talk to if she’s a good mother. But when you’ve got your mother doing it as well what chance have you got? No one’s going to believe you. There was no escape.

Su Pennington

            Sandra and Lesley’s father, John Wildman, was eventually sent to prison for twenty two years. Maureen Wildman died shortly after being charged. It’s her abuse the girls say hurt them most.

Dr Michele Elliott

            Those survivors who tell me they have been sexually abused by both a woman and a man always tell me that it was, more traumatic to be sexually abused by a woman. They feel more betrayed. They feel very angry. They feel the woman should have cared for them, should have loved them instead of abusing them. For some reason they expected it almost of the man but never of the woman.

Su Pennington

            The violence that often accompanies the abuse is also unexpected of a woman. Victims often report excessive force, equivalent to if not greater than that of a man.

            This was the experience in a Newcastle taxi a year ago of a fifteen year old girl. Her thirty-three year old aunt held her down and forced her to submit to oral sex by the driver as payment in kind. Angered by that and other sexual attacks by her aunt, Paula Belisle (phon), the victim has decided to speak out publicly about the abuse.

Louise

            I was sitting watching the tele and then I thought she was going to the toilet and she went in the passage. She come back in and she had this chairleg on top of the electric cupboard.        And then she just come over on the settee and like put her hand over my mouth and pulled me like pants down, had her legs over my legs, and like she’s got like big fat legs, do you know what I mean and they were  really, really tight over my legs and I couldn’t move. Like she had a hand on my shoulder and a hand on my mouth and everything, just one hand, and she was shoving a chairleg up us and really, really, really hard, and I couldn’t hardly scream because she had her hand over my mouth. It was very painful. Honestly it felt like I was having a bairn. And I was just crying because I was really upset.  I didn’t want my own auntie doing that to us.

            I thought men were enemies but women are just as bad, I mean especially my own auntie doing that. I hate her. If I had the chance I’d kill her. I can’t stand her.

Su Pennington

            Paula Belisle is now on probation. Louise says she’s since threatened to kill her for going to the police.

Dr Michele Elliott

            Women are supposed to be the gentler sex. Women are supposed to be incapable of cruelty in a sense and  I would like as a woman to believe that. Unfortunately my experience with the survivors tells me that many of their abusers have been very sadistic to them, cruelty that’s almost unimaginable.

Su Pennington

            In the early hours of one morning in South Wales last year the authorities drew up in a quiet street to a neat looking terraced house looking to arrest a male abuser. Nothing prepared them for what they found.  Child protection officers were to stumble on a den of professional paedophiles but  a den in which the mother was the prime abuser.

Margaret Harries

            It had all the appearances of a normalsort of terraced house from the outside in a very ordinary community and very proud community, and as you went in the front door it changed dramatically.

            The house was full of rubble and rubbish from floor to ceiling. The walls had been taken away right through to the point that you could see bare wires hanging down as though the house was still under construction.

            It gave the appearance of a house that was just designed really to completely disorientate the children.

            In the room where the family actually lived, that’s where they were videoing the children and they used two different cameras.

            The room where the computer was kept was full of rubbish and yet in this corner, in a particular corner which had been sectioned off from the rest of the room, there was the most sophisticated equipment that you could imagine.

            There was a kitchen area and in the larder there were videos, pornographic videos.  Hardly any food. Just videos upon videos upon videos. 

            We also then found under the floorboards videos, home-made videos of the abuse of the children.

            They did what could only be construed as a professional video which we would assume would be for selling.

Su Pennington

            The husband had filmed the videos but his wife did the abusing. She took a lead role, sometimes reading from scripts acting out scenes. Most of them involved her daughter, videoed between the ages of eight and thirteen.

Margaret Harries

            The older child was naked. The mother was naked.  They  strung up the older child. They tied her, gagged her and strung her up on a hook to the ceiling and beat her something like a hundred times in about four minutes. They then laid her on a bed and further abused her. All the time mother was doing this the father was videoing the actual abuse. At the end of it all at one point the child was by the bed almost unconscious and her mother and father sat on the edge of the bed and had a cup of tea together and  I think that portrays very graphically the awful nature of this - to give it the name sexual abuse belies what actually happened in that house. It was torture. It was the most abhorent torture I’ve ever seen.

Su Pennington

            The mother used the Internet to feed her fantasies, linked to the North of England and the United States with stark evidence of leading female involvement in the sort of network of abusers normally associated with men.

The father was taken away and jailed for life. The mother got a lesser fifteen year sentence. “Without the exceptional video evidence,” the authorities say “because she was a woman she may not have been implicated at all.”

Margaret Harries

            Often when children are trying to tell us what’s happening to them we’re dependent on these stories and I do wonder if this child, if we hadn’t found the videos, and this child had simply told us what had happened it would have been beyond belief and I do worry that no one would in fact have believed her. And I wonder therefore how many other children has this happened to where they’ve either  been too afraid to tell or, if they’ve tried to tell they felt they weren’t being believed and have held back because what we know we know from the videos. The children still haven’t talked in full about the horrors that they encountered.

Su Pennington

            Half the women in a recent survey of fifty convicted female sexual abusers said they derived sadistic pleasure from inflicting pain on victims. The research showed neither class nor age were barriers to their behaviour.

Jacqui Saradjian

            In my research I’ve come across women of any age from young teenage girls right up to grandmothers, of any class from women who barely had a house to live in in their lives to women who live in very large houses and from any level of education, women who can barely read and write to women who have got degrees. We can’t make assumptions about the type of women who would sexually abuse a child.

Su Pennington

            More than forty people are now alleging abuse, including sexual abuse, at this former children’s home in Aberdeen. The orphanage was run by the Poor Sisters of Nazareth. The complaints the police are now investigating were until recently dismissed as impossible. They range over a period of thirty years in which individual nuns are alleged to have abused.

Man 1

            Well I was about seven or eight at the time and she was in charge of our group and just one day out of the blue she came along and asked me would I like to learn the time. And I just said “Yes, I would like to learn the time.”  She told me that the watch was inside her breasts underneath her cossack which they used to wear. So I put my hand in and obviously I was fondling her breasts to look for the watch and I found it and while I was doing that, pulling the watch out, she would put her hand next to my penis and she would just gently squeeze it and that would get me excited. And I could tell she was getting excited because her face was pure red and because of her speech. It was pretty excited speech she had.

Su Pennington

            This sort of incident happened on several occasions but the boy felt powerless.

Man 1

            I knew it was wrong to do it but I just did it because I had to do it.  I was afraid I’d get punished.

Su Pennington

            Some children aren’t just at risk from the people they live with, they’re vulnerable targets when they leave their homes.   Out in the community female sexual abusers can manoeuvre with even more ease than men into positions of trust with authority over lots of children.

            Dawn Reid and Christopher Lilley worked together as qualified teachers at a nursery in Newcastle. About a hundred and twenty two to four year olds passed through their classes. Their mothers suspected nothing.

Woman 2

            We really liked her. She  came across really as a nice person, always laughing and smiling and wanting to talk to you and it just made us feel at ease.

Su Pennington

            It took two years for trusting parents to find out that children were being repeatedly sexually abused at the nursery.  Lilley and Reid were never tried in court, making the parents determined to stand up in public and draw attention to the abuse.

Woman 2

            My daughter was sitting at the lunch table and said she didn’t want her lunch so Dawn got her knife and fork and took my daughter to the toilet which was in the classroom and sat her on the floor and inserted the knife and fork into her vagina and Chris was there and they were both laughing.

Su Pennington

            And what did your daughter tell you about that, about how she felt?

Woman 2

            Well she said it had hurt and there was blood and that they had to get a towel when  she got washed and the towel had blood on but they seemed to have done it a few times.

Su Pennington

            This child was one of more than twenty others who went on to tell their mothers what Dawn Reid had done to them. At first they couldn’t grasp what they were hearing.

Woman 3

            I’m angry with her. I can’t understand where she was coming from when she was doing this to the children. I can’t believe, as a mother I trusted her and I can’t believe that a woman would let people trust her and then go on to misuse that trust.

Su Pennington

            Dawn Reid and Lilley persistently misused parents’ trust at the nursery and at other addresses in Newcastle.

            What were they asking you to do?

Girl 1

            Pull our pants down and if I had a dress lift my dress up.

Su Pennington

            Did anyone take any photographs of you?

Girl 1

            Yes, there was a cameraman there.

Su Pennington

            Tell me about that.

Girl

            He was just like taking pictures and like when they were being nasty and everything. I was like crying and just a lot of upset like screaming and saying that I want to go back to the nursery. I want my mum and everything and they wouldn’t be taking any notice. They would be laughing at us.

Su Pennington

            When you had to join in with them what did you have to do?

Girl 1

            I can remember when Chris put his (INAUDIBLE) into mine.

Su Pennington

            And what was Dawn doing while Chris was doing this?

Girl 1

            Looking at the other children, being rude to the other children.

Su Pennington

            She was being rude to the other children?

Girl 1

            Yes.

Su Pennington

            What was she doing to the other children?

Girl 1

            Making them like lift their dresses up and that and take their clothes off.

Woman 3

            Medically there was tearing of the tissues, bleeding trauma, extensive damage to the hymen.   She’s since underwent STD tests and for sexually transmitted diseases. She’s also had an HIV test.

Su Pennington

            Dawn Reid and Christopher Lilley were never brought to justice because the judge thought the child witnesses too young to be heard in court. There was an outcry on behalf of the children. The parents formed a protest group to support each other and publicise fully Reid and Lilley’s abuse. Some children are still showing signs of trauma.

Woman 3

            She was always trying to like play with herself and I used to think oh well it’s just like what children do. I did ask the health visitor a couple of times and she said “Oh she’s just exploring her own body.  She’s fine. A lot of children do this.” But as she started to get older it didn’t just settle with her. I’ve had a lot of counselling about it because I’ve got a fear that she’ll grow up to be an abuser herself. What the therapist  and everything have said is a child that comes from a loving home who’s been abused doesn’t necessarily go on to be an abuser but that’s not to say it can’t happen.

Su Pennington

            The Sexually Abused Child Consultancy Service is one of the few organisations attempting to break this cycle. In specially designed rooms long-term play therapy helps children explore feelings and relationships.

            Half the children who pass through here have been abused by a woman like this ten year old boy.

Mary Walsh

            His abusers were involved in a lesbian relationship and he was also abused by men too so actually he’s a quite confused little boy which is shown very often in his play where he doesn’t really know whether he’s a woman or he’s a man.

Boy 1

            There they are.

Woman 4

            Oh that’s beautiful. A dress.

Mary Walsh

            Isn’t that beautiful. Is that diamonds on it?

Boy 1

            Yes. It’s very expensive.

Mary Walsh

            You’re very rich then aren’t you?

Boy 1

            There are the shoes.

Woman 4

            Oh beautiful.

Boy 1

            The other button came off.

Woman 4

            Oh dear.

Mary Walsh

            That looks like an engagement ring to me. You’re not engaged are you?

Boy 1

            Yes.

Woman 4

            Oh it’s very rough.

Mary Walsh

            He was out of control. Sometimes he’d be physically violent and sometimes that would develop then into spitting, sometimes weeing in the playroom, sometimes weeing over the therapists.  And he was also highly erotised both with adults and with the other children, which meant that there would be a lot of sexual wiggling. He’d get his penis out and wave it around, that kind of sexualised stuff, and trying to do very sexy kisses with other children and with staff.

Woman  4

            Oh, a baby.

Boy 1

            It’s mine.

Woman 4

            Oh, it’s your baby. Oh, when did you have the baby?

Boy 1

            I had it last night.

Woman 4

            Did you?

            Oh look.

Boy 1

            Don’t hug me please.

Woman 4

            Oh sorry.

Boy 1

            Sweetheart.

Woman 4

            Oh.

Mary Walsh

            Did you kiss that baby on the mouth?

Boy 1

            Yes.

Mary Walsh

            I don’t think it’s proper that you kissed the baby on the mouth.

            He understands about nice kissing and safe kissing but, when he was holding the baby, clearly the kissing started to get very unsafe  and he was looking to me to ensure that I had understood that the kissing was unsafe. So an issue for him is unsafe kissing with babies, which of course was his experience.

Boy 1

            Hello.

Woman 4

            Hello.  Hello love, all right?

Mary Walsh

            Some of them become eternal victims and never recover from that. Other children, like this little boy, will mask the confusions and grow into adulthood and never really be able to sustain relationships or have very distorted relationships because of their enormous confusions. And there are other children who will go on to hurt not only other children in their own childhood but in adulthood too.

Su Pennington

            It’s thought more than a quarter of a million people in this country have been abused as children by women. While not everyone who’s been harmed goes on to abuse, it’s thought about five percent do. So what is it that makes them do it and others not?

Jacqui Saradjian

            Women in our society have been portrayed as victims and yes, I’m not disputing that nearly all the women who sexually abuse children in my research were themselves very victimised but somewhere within their             victimisation they learned that to abuse children gave them a sense of power, control, agency that they’d not had in any other area of their life and therefore  they used the abuse of children to gain those things.

Su Pennington

            The natural compulsion of a mother to love and protect her child can be destroyed by years of abuse. One such woman who went on to abuse claims she saw her baby as a mere object.

Zoe

            I was about twenty two. I’d just divorced my husband.

            My sons - one was two and one was a baby in arms. And the eldest son, I changed his nappy and masturbated him once. I felt sick at what I was doing. I felt angry at what I was doing. I didn’t do it for pleasure. It was more for anger for what my brothers and dad had done to me and it was a day I had just finished decorating my bedroom with my eldest brother and he had just sexually abused me and I was so angry at what he had done that my anger came out by masturbating my son.

Su Pennington

            What effect has what you did consequently had on your sons?

Zoe

            Both my sons are sexual abusers. My eldest son is in prison now for what he’s done.

Su Pennington

            What has he done?

Zoe

            Sexually abused a nine year old boy?

Su Pennington

            Do you feel responsible for the way he’s turned out?

Zoe

            Yes, partly.

Su Pennington

            Why is that?

Zoe

            Because if I hadn’t have done what I’d done he wouldn’t be like he is now.

Su Pennington

            Zoe was jailed for four years on three counts of indecent assault. While she was in prison she was ostracised but not treated.  Now she’s back in the community and still considered a risk to children.

Jacqui Saradjian

            There’s very, very little being done to look at the issue of female sexual abuse.  We have no programmes in this country that are aimed at working with female sexual offenders specifically. Quite a lot of professionals are picking up women offenders now. What they’re not doing is having the resources to help them deal with those women offenders. It’s because so many professionals are now picking up women offenders that we’re actually getting to realise some of the extent of the problem throughout the country.

Su Pennington

            Few abusers ever volunteer their guilt and behind closed doors it’s difficult to prove. A woman’s tradional role in the home as a mother often puts her above suspicion and medical evidence is hard to obtain.  But as more and more of women’s victims come forward and speak out they may just force us to face up to the ultimate taboo.

            END CREDITS