Behind the Façade: Exposing Female Sex Offenders and Helping Abuse Victims to Heal

By Julie A. Brand M.S.

In her new book, Behind the Façade: Exposing Female Sex Offenders and Helping Abuse Victims to Heal, Julie Brand, M.S., combines research data, professional insights and survivors’ shared histories to enlighten readers about the reality of female-perpetrated sexual abuse. The book consists of three separate, independent chapters: 1) Female Sex offenders: Unmasking the Perpetrators, 2) What About Our Boys? Understanding the Challenges Facing Male Victims of Sexual Abuse and Assault, and 3) A Path to Recovery and Resiliency. Each chapter includes information from her workshops but also adds riveting new cases and material.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781698709864

Book preview

Copyright 2021 Julie A. Brand, M.S.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-6987-0985-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-0987-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-0986-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021921410

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such

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Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Trafford rev. 10/29/2021

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the

healers,

the helpers,

the survivors,

and especially to those of you who are all three.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1   Female Sex Offenders: Unmasking The Perpetrators

Chapter 2   What About Our Boys?

Chapter 3   A Path To Recovery And Resiliency

Additional Resources

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

When I wrote A Mother’s Touch: Surviving Mother-Daughter Sexual Abuse (published in 2007), ¹ I could not have foreseen the many ways in which speaking out about my childhood abuse would change my life. I had discovered that there was little public information about this type of abuse. It just felt important for me to somehow shed a light on it with the goal of helping others. But I did not dream that over the next decade I would receive emails or phone calls from over 70 other women who had also survived mother-daughter sexual abuse. In addition, I would meet other survivors in person at various conferences and trainings. Victims were just waiting to share their histories. . . waiting for validation. . . waiting to heal. I still receive unexpected, spontaneous emails from other survivors, especially during the pandemic-caused isolation.

I could not have envisioned this second career for me as a child abuse conference speaker and author and consultant. (Certainly not as a national presenter with really cool, colorful power point slide programs! I am such a non-techie. My dear friend, Jan, patiently taught me how to create power point programs!) It has been my honor and privilege to speak at many regional, state and national child abuse conferences, ranging from small audiences of 12 to offering keynotes to over 800 people. (Gulp!) I offer programs on mother-daughter sexual abuse, female offenders in positions of trust, male survivors and resiliency.

I did not know I would meet thousands of amazing professionals who work with sex abuse victims—social workers, victim advocates, forensic interviewers, law enforcement officers, counselors, therapists, CASAs and other volunteers, prosecutors, clergy, health professionals, researchers and others in the field of child protection. What a wonderful, humbling, enlightening journey it has been. I am truly honored to play a small part in the fight to combat child sex abuse.

Everything I wrote in my first book was true for me at that time. There have been many constructive changes since then:

1. Research on female perpetrators was extremely limited back then. Now we have more meaningful new research/data about female sex offenders and an increasing number of female perpetrators have been successfully apprehended, prosecuted and sentenced for their crimes.

2. In the past, I was mostly ignorant about the challenges our male victims experience. If you don’t ask and listen and believe—you remain unaware. For years I was oblivious to their plight. My enlightenment came out of my on-going interactions with CIR, a California-based organization, and from my crossing paths with trusting men who chose to share their personal histories of sexual abuse with me.

CIR, (Center for Innovation and Resources) ², is a California group that supports training and skill building for persons who work in area of child protection. With its Underserved Populations Training Project, CIR focused on male victims as one of four key underserved victim populations. Through federal grant funding, the organization supported my developing and presenting programs on this topic. So, since 2017, one of my most popular new workshops has been What About Our Boys? Understanding the Challenges Facing Male Victims of Sexual Abuse and Assault.

I subsequently helped CIR staff create a brochure designed to assist service providers who work with male victims.

For over a decade I have also worked with and learned so much from the National Coalition for Men³ (NCFM). I was deeply honored and touched to receive their 2019 Award of Honor for my on-going advocacy work for male victims.

3. We’ve seen the concept of resiliency normalized and embraced throughout society. I no longer need to explain what resiliency means when I offer my program on healing. (I might argue that the word is now over-used, but that’s likely preferable to a previous lack of familiarity with the concept.)

4. And a final, personal change—I left my husband in 2010. (My first book was dedicated to him; this one is not.) I moved far away to Nevada, but I brought my passion and my commitment to helping others along with me.

If you are browsing through this book, your interest in the topic of female sex offenders may be entirely professional. It’s for your job. Or it may be intensely personal because you, too, survived female-perpetrated sexual abuse. Or it may be both. Many survivors, understandably, choose to work in the field of child protection.

Whatever your reasons for selecting this book, my wish is that you find it helpful and that it gives you realistic hopefulness for your work and in your life.

Blessings,

Julie

Endnotes

¹Brand, Julie, M.S. (2007) A Mother’s Touch: Surviving Mother-Daughter Sexual Abuse. Trafford.

²The Center for Innovation and Resources, Inc. (CIR)

https://cirinc.org/

https://cirinc.org/up/resources.html

https://cirinc.org/what-we-do/projects.html

³National Coalition for Men (NCFM)

http://ncfm.org/

Chapter 1

FEMALE SEX OFFENDERS:

UNMASKING THE PERPETRATORS

When I first began speaking about mother-daughter incest in 2005 and 2006, I would see expressions of shock and disbelief on many of my audience members’ faces. I asked them to raise their hands if they had worked sexual abuse cases in which the offenders were female. Usually only a few hands went up. If I specified female family members—mothers, stepmothers, sisters, cousins, grandmothers—as the offenders, often not a single hand was raised.

How could victims have found the courage to report if their outcries were met with ignorance, astonishment and skepticism? Or worse yet—facial expressions of revulsion and disgust! Your mother abused you? Ugh. I’ve never heard of a mom doing that! Victims could easily shut down for decades if not supported in their disclosing.

Now when I ask my audiences the same questions, I’d estimate that 20-30 percent of the attendees raise their hands for having worked a case with a female offender. At least half of those report a female perpetrator with a familial connection to her victim.

That is change, thank goodness! Professionals—from first responders to therapists—are increasingly more aware that females can be perpetrators of sexual abuse. We know that both boys and girls are sexually abused. We know that both boys and girls can be abused by either male offenders or female offenders or by both. It has been slow in coming but we are finally knocking women off that false pedestal of presumed safety with children.

Trust should never be based on gender. Do not blindly trust your children’s babysitters, school teachers, coaches, neighbors or religious leaders simply because they are female. Women in these roles are not honorable just by virtue of their sex and occupations.

Female offenders access their victims through on-going relationships. Female perpetrators are almost always women who their victims know well and trust totally. (You almost never hear of a woman going into a mall, grabbing a child she doesn’t know, molesting the child in the restroom and then leaving the building alone. Kidnapping attempts in order to raise a child? Yes. Indiscriminate on-site sexual assaults? Seldom.)

So, what has changed? In recent years have more women suddenly become child molesters? Or was female-perpetrated child sex abuse always occurring undetected, behind a façade of decency and presumed innocence?

I submit that there have always been female sex offenders worldwide. I have received emails from adult survivors of mother-daughter incest from as far away as Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. They find my contact information on my web site and write to me. Not a single survivor has reported to me that their mothers were ever unmasked and held accountable in a court of law. The abuse remains a dark family secret shared only with the survivors’ spouses or best friends and/or therapists. Several women stated that I was the first person they had told. Many survivors are healing and reportedly functioning well as adults. Others were almost destroyed by their abuse and the years of shamed-based confusion and despair.

What is different in recent years is that female offenders, including mothers who assault their own children, are being exposed and successfully prosecuted. Here are several cases of mothers convicted of sexually abusing their own children or child relatives or allowing other adults to abuse their children:

1. Roscommon Circuit Court, Roscommon, Ireland, 2009: a mother was sentenced to seven years for incest and abuse and neglect. Hers was the first known case of a woman in Ireland having been convicted of incest. Under the Punishment of Incest Act of 1908, a man convicted of incest would face life in prison; the maximum sentence for a woman was seven years. ¹

2. Maria Azucena Reyes-Lopez, Panama City, Florida 2016, sentenced to 39 years in prison for child molestation. Her victim was a 12-year-old female family member. ²

3. Kelly Lynn South, in 2017, in Louisville, Kentucky, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 16 years in prison for incest, sodomy and sexual abuse of a child under the age of 12. Her victim, her son, was between the ages of 4 and 7 at the time of the assaults. ³

4. Morgan Summerlin of Fulton, Georgia pleaded guilty to allowing men to rape her five and six-year-old daughters in exchange for money and drugs. The perpetrators: Richard Office, 78, sentenced to life in prison + 146 years, no parole; Alfredo Trejo, 53, sentenced to 25 years in prison + lifetime probation. In 2018, Morgan was sentenced to 20 years in prison followed by 10 years of probation. ⁴

In each of these cases a child victim found the courage to disclose to an adult who then reported the abuse to law enforcement. (In the landmark case in Ireland, adults repeatedly failed to report extreme child neglect, thus allowing multiple forms of abuse to continue for years.)

One phenomenon contributing to an increase in the identification, apprehension and prosecution of female sex offenders is the perpetrators’ use of the Internet and various forms of advanced telecommunication.

Sadly, women, too, are involved in the production and distribution of child pornography. Female pedophiles have been identified and arrested through law enforcement internet crime stings and have been successfully prosecuted:

1. Erika Perdue, a Dallas socialite, wife, mother and grandmother was sentenced in 2014 to 14 years in federal prison for years of transporting and shipping child pornography. She pleaded guilty and admitted to distributing child pornography for over a decade.⁵

2. Kimberly Rachael Moore of North Carolina was also sentenced to prison for 17 years and six months in 2014. She pleaded guilty to one count of production of child pornography, one count of possession of child pornography, one count of receipt of child pornography and four counts of distribution of child pornography. ⁶ Both of these women had extensive personal collections of child pornography plus online photo sharing accounts.

Years ago, I was extremely naïve about child pornography. When I thought of child porn, I pictured airbrushed naked photos of young children playing in a fountain or maybe being tickled. I was so ignorant. Child pornography includes photos of naked children yes, but also pictures (and video) of young children actually being sexually assaulted, In many of the photos, the child victims are under the age of three and are being brutally, violently molested and raped.

Sexual abuse, physical abuse and psychological trauma are all parts of the child sexual maltreatment experience and often at the hands of a trusted relative.

". . . The Crimes Against Children Research Center is an excellent resource on trends concerning the crime of child pornography. A recent report states that ‘child pornography is the visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct includes acts such as intercourse, bestiality and masturbation as well as lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area. Possession of child pornography is a felony under federal law and in every state. The federal statutes that criminalize child pornography possession define ‘child’ as age 17 or younger.’ A staggering statistic in this report stated that peer to peer (P2P) users (those who share images) were more likely to have images of very young children and violent images. Of P2P users arrested in 2009, 33 percent had photos of children age three or younger and 42 percent had images of children that showed sexual violence." ⁷

When judges and juries view the pornographic photos and videos, it can just be overwhelming for them. Yet while heartbreaking and disturbing, these materials constitute evidence and cut through the belief that a woman—especially a mother—just couldn’t do something like this leading to substantial sentences for these female offenders.

Over the last dozen years, we have seen cases of women being identified, arrested and successfully prosecuted for performing sex acts on their own children which they shared with other adults on-line via chat/message boards and web communities such as Kik Messenger: ⁸

1. In 2009, Julie Carr of Maine was arrested for molesting her own 2-year-old daughter while videoconferencing with a stranger in England via a webcam. They had met on an internet-based dating site. She sent him four live videos of herself performing sex acts on her youngest daughter. He was caught in a British law enforcement pornography sting and some of his webcast recordings were traced back to her computer. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2011 to 20 years in prison. ICE agents, Maine law enforcement and English law enforcement all worked the case. ⁹

2. In 2015, Christine Yoder of Philadelphia was sentenced to 25 years in prison. She pleaded guilty to two counts of employing a child to produce images of sexually explicit conduct and two counts of distributing material involving the sexual exploitation of children. She was caught in a FBI sting when she repeatedly sent sexually explicit photos of her six-year old daughter to an undercover agent. She also offered to fly her daughter to Detroit to have sex with the man. Then she said he could basically keep her daughter—that she didn’t want her back. She also sexually abused her 16- month old daughter and took photos. Potentially mitigating circumstances did exist in her case. A forensic psychologist testified that she had the mental capacity of a third grader and a history of being sexually abused herself. The judge found that while those factors might help explain how she could act out sexually on her own children, they were no excuse for her behavior. ¹⁰

In these types of cases local law enforcement, ICE agents and federal partners such as investigators with the U.S. Dept of Justice’s Project Safe Childhood all work together to