There Are Female Sexual Predators in Our Midst

And most people have trouble believing they exist

Jacqueline Ma, 35 [pictured above], was an elementary school “Teacher of the Year” who pled guilty, last month, to sexually abusing two boys, aged 11 and 12. She had previously been facing 19 felony counts, but ended up pleading to four. It is a notable case not only because of the boys’ youth and the severity of her abuse, but also because little effort has been made in news reports to excuse or soften what Ma did.

I have been unable to find in any of the reports an expert quoted to say how rare it is for adult women to abuse boys of 11 and 12. (Actually, as I’ll show, it’s not that rare.)

So far, there has been no mention of mitigating circumstances that reduce Ma’s culpability: a difficult childhood, abusive boyfriend, or history of mental illness.

The prosecution, in initially asking for a sentence of 180 years (which one report called “staggering”), did not seem softened by the sight of Ma’s tear-stained face. Even after she entered her sobbing guilty plea, she is still expected to receive “30 years to life” when she is sentenced in early May. We’ll see what actually happens then.

Thus far, Ma has been written about, without special pleading, as a dangerous woman who irreparably damaged the lives of two young boys.

That is a small step forward, given our cultural propensity to make excuses for vicious women and to downplay or outright dismiss the harm they cause.

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There were, however, a number of red flags apparent to those of us concerned with men’s and boys’ issues. For example, the Daily Mail characterized Ma’s crimes (twice) as “sexual relationships.” It’s impossible to imagine any male teacher who committed statutory rape and assault of young girls having his crimes called relationships.

Moreover, it was often difficult to tell from the reporting what Ma’s offences actually were, and I remain uncertain whether the vagueness was due to sloppy reporting, squeamishness about child sexual abuse, or reluctance to expose a woman’s bad actions.

A relatively substantial news item in the New York Post, for example, never revealed the basis for the charges, mentioning love letters, explicit texts, and sexy pictures only. Readers could have been left with the impression that the “relationships” were carried on at a distance—weird and wrong, perhaps, but not depraved.

The Daily Mail was similarly vague, telling readers no more than that “Ma is said to have had a months-long relationship with the boy and sent him explicit pictures of her, asking him to do the same back.” In addition to the focus on the pictures, it’s not clear why the journalist chose the passive voice (“is said to have had …”) as if the abuse were an allegation only. Ma has confessed to sending the pictures—and to much more than that.

It takes some digging to discover that Ma, in fact, “pleaded guilty to oral copulation and sexual intercourse with a minor student. She also admitted to causing another student to touch [himself] and to possessing matter depicting a minor in sexual conduct.” This was a woman who had sexual intercourse and oral intercourse with a 12-year-old boy and would almost certainly have done the same, if she’d had the chance, with the 11-year-old she had begun grooming around the same time. Upon learning of her guilty plea, some students from her school went on record to say that she had had a history of unusually close relationships with students and former students. “Maybe whatever’s been going on has been going on for a long time,” speculated one. In other words, there may well be other victims, going back years.

One unfortunate result of the guilty plea is that much about Ma’s actions will probably never be known, and although it is likely a relief to the victims to be spared the ordeal of a trial, an important opportunity for public understanding has been lost. The prosecution has had in its possession the messages exchanged between Ma and the students. In one of these, one of the boys was provoked to write “Sometimes I think you don’t understand that I am a kid still.” What exactly had caused him to say that? What did she respond? Were there other instances of the boys expressing unease? We will probably never learn what was in most of the messages.

We do know, as City News Service reported, that “Deputy District Attorney Drew Hart [in an earlier bail hearing] described the defendant as ‘obsessive, possessive, controlling and dangerous’ toward the [first] boy, thus presenting a danger to him if released.” News reports note that in some of the messages, Ma “‘expressed frustration with the child for not responding to her quicker. She expressed being jealous at times when she believed this victim was talking to other girls [sic].’”

It seems that this 35-year-old woman (hardly a “girl”) not only sexually exploited but also aggressively pursued, manipulated, and harassed the two boys—one of them for nearly a year. Given how little is known generally about women’s abuse of minors, and given societal reluctance to confront the scale and severity of it, the full story of this California teacher, and others like her, deserves to be better known.

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Even when we are aware that women prey on children, many of us can’t really believe it. When Florida Congresswoman Anna Luna, a Republican elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, proposed three new bills last year that would impose harsh penalties, “including the death penalty,” for various forms of sexual abuse, child pornography, and child sexual exploitation, it is impossible to believe that Luna thought any number of women would be executed for child rape, and nor will they be given the leniency that is shown to women in the criminal justice system (see Sonja Starr’s research).

Yet similar crimes to Ma’s are easily discovered. In the same month that Ma pled guilty, a Martinsville, Indiana teacher was charged with three counts of sexual misconduct against a minor, a 15-year-old boy who has alleged that as many as ten other students were raped by the same woman. The month before that, a New Jersey primary school teacher was charged with aggravated sexual assault against a boy who was 13 years old when she bore his child; it is alleged that she began raping the boy when he was 11. The month before that, a Tipton County, Tennessee teacher [pictured below] pled guilty to a dozen sex crimes against children ranging in age from 12-17 years old. It is thought that she victimized a total of 21 children.

In the same month, a Montgomery, New York teacher pled guilty to criminal sexual assault of a 13 year old boy in her class, whom she assaulted over a period of months. In the previous month, a San Fernando Valley teacher was charged with sexual assault of a 13 year old male student; police believe she victimized others also. Earlier in the year, a substitute teacher in Decatur, Illinois was charged with raping an 11 year old boy. These are just a few recent cases, and only those involving female schoolteachers. Female predators are also to be found amongst social workers, juvenile detention officers, and sports coaches.

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The feminist position on male sexual abuse of women and girls has for a long time been that it is about power. Men rape and abuse, according to Susan Brownmiller [quoted above] and others, because they believe it their right as men to keep women subordinate. Rape compensates for male inadequacy and allows for the expression of men’s hostility toward women: it is not about lust but about men’s need to humiliate and degrade. As Paul Elam once noted in a Regarding Men episode, the theory is fatally weakened if even a single woman does the same thing. Feminists have responded by saying that female sexual abuse is fundamentally different from male, less dangerous to society, less hurtful to its victims.

While I was doing research for this essay, I happened upon a recent podcast discussion between Louise Perry, British author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and Meghan Murphy, Canadian Substack author and editor of Feminist Current. The podcast was called “What Happened to Feminism?” and I tuned in because I have enjoyed their perspectives on other issues.

Perry and Murphy are both critics of feminism who remain, as their conversation confirmed, staunchly feminist and anti-male. At one point in the podcast (at about 50:00), the conversation turned to #MeToo, and especially to allegations against teachers. Having already agreed that 95% of MeToo allegations were true, or at least based on something real, the pundits went on to agree, with disconcerting laughter, that there was no comparison between a “crazy” woman who “had sex” with a male student in her class, and a “dangerous” man, a “predatory rapist,” who went after under-age girls in his power.

Murphy even trotted out the old chestnut that abused boys were “stoked about the situation” in getting with “the hot teacher.” After all, she chuckled, “Men are gross predators. Men are perverts. They can’t keep it in their pants.” Perry, seeming taken aback by Murphy’s vulgarity, nonetheless agreed that the sexual abuse of boys is in an entirely different category from that of girls: “It is so annoying to me,” she said, “when people will go around claiming that these are exactly the same.”

Indifference to the victimization of boys, and lack of shame in admitting it, could hardly have been more stark. I mention the podcast not because it was singularly outrageous but because the attitudes expressed in it are still so much the norm, even amongst women who claim to have rethought other feminist beliefs.

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Many of us, I suspect, think we understand child sexual exploitation on the basis of our own experiences, or lack thereof. (My perspective is likely shaped by the sexual aggressiveness of some of my teen female friends, one of whom was intent on seducing a male teacher.) One of the benefits of reading through the reported cases of female sexual predation is finding comments (though too few) by male victims. Some of them speak of years-long trauma and sexual confusion, of an inability to trust women, of fear and self-harm. They are not at all different in kind from what female victims describe, and only a bigot could claim that they are worlds apart.

Cases like that of Jacqueline Ma offer important opportunities, if only our societies cared, to understand the motivations and behaviors of female sexual predators, and to extend much-needed empathy to the boys they hurt.