Female-Perpetrated Sex Abuse ─ Knowledge, Power, and the Cultural Conditions of Victimhood

Female-Perpetrated Sex Abuse is a groundbreaking study into gender, sexuality and victimhood. It examines the cultural conditions of possibility for FSA victimhood as a means to advance contemporary critical understandings of the role of gender and sexuality as instruments of modern power. As the first direct exploration of FSA victimhood, this book analyses:

• why victims of FSA remain so underexplored and invisible as objects of human science knowledge;
• the limited and overly rigid discourses in local and global psychological theory and practice that continues to treat particular subjects as ‘victim worthy’ through paradigms that construct victimhood as gendered; and
• the possibility of new discourses that could disrupt normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and power in sex abuse, and as constitutive to the beginnings of a counter-knowledge on transgressive sexualities.

By tracing the historical and cultural conditions of the emergence of FSA broadly and FSA victimhood specifically, Kramer illustrates how deeply engrained constructions of gender and sexuality both produce and constrain the possibilities for reporting, disclosing and self-identifying victimhood.

Female-Perpetrated Sex Abuse is essential reading for academics, researchers and students alike, in the areas of psychology, sociology, gender studies, criminology, counselling and social work.

Sherianne Kramer is a registered South African research psychologist and psychology lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research interests are primarily focused within the critical psychology discipline and include crime, violence and injury prevention, female and child perpetrated physical and sexual violence, gender identity and performativity and knowledge productions.