“It’s easier to think that a girl is a victim” : A qualitative vignette study on professionals' views of girls who commit sexual abuse

This study aims to examine professionals’ views of girls who commit sexual abuse in order to problematize norms and conceptions of gender and sexuality in the work with children and young people. In order to do this, we used a vignette study and combined it with focus groups interviews as a method to gather data. We had two focus groups where one consisted of three social workers and the other of four teachers. Our two vignettes depicted a fictional case where the characters in the vignettes were two children, age 10 and 12, where the oldest child sexually abuses the youngest. The only difference between the vignettes was the perpetrator’s gender. The purpose of the vignettes was to examine the professionals’ views of girls who commit sexual abuse as well as norms and conceptions of gender and sexuality linked to the problem. To analyse the results, we used Hirdman’s theory of gender system and Gagnon’s and Simon’s theory of sexual scripts. In line with the previous research we presented, our results show that the knowledge of girls who commit sexual abuse among professionals is not sufficient and that prevailing gender structures and conceptions of men’s and women’s sexuality affect the professionals’ views of girls who commit sexual abuse. The main result of our study shows that the professionals use different explanatory models regarding sexual abuse committed by girls and boys, which can be seen as new knowledge that our study has identified as this has not been addressed in the precious research we have taken part in.