Assessing female sexual offenders’ motivations and cognitions: an exploratory study Anthony R. Beech a *, Natalie Parrett a,b , Tony Ward c and Dawn Fisher a a Centre for Forensic and Family Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK; b Psychology Department, HMP Foston Hall, Derbyshire, UK; c School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (Received 11 June 2008; final version received 14 September 2008) Semi-structured interviews eliciting cognitions and motivations were carried out with 15 incarcerated female child sexual abusers (nearly 50% of the current UK female sexual offender prison population). Qualitative analysis indicated that four of the five motivational schemas (implicit theories) suggested by Ward (Ward, 2000; Ward & Keenan, 1999) to underlie male sexual offenders’ cognitions could be clearly identified in women, these were: Uncontrollability (UN, identified in 87% of participants), Dangerous world (DW, 53%), Children as sexual objects (CSO, 47%) and Nature of harm (NH, 20%). Entitlement, the final implicit theory (IT), commonly found in males, was not identified in any participants in the sample. Further analysis indicated that there were four main motivational types of offender based on combinations of these ITs. These were: (1) presence of DW/ CSO, indicating sexual motivation and cognitions with fear of violence; (2) presence of DW/no CSO, indicating fear of violence with no sexual cognition or motivation; (3) presence of CSO/no DW, indicating sexual motivation and cognition; the NH IT also strongly featured in this group; and (4) presence of UN/ no DWor CSO, indicating lack of control, sometimes with sense of protection for the victim. Suggestions are made on how the results can inform theoretical developments in the field as well as policy and practice. Keywords: female sexual offenders; implicit theories; cognitive distortions; motivations Introduction Female sex offending is an under-researched area compared to male sexual offending (Grayston & De Luca, 1999; Matthews, Matthews, & Speltz, 1989). However, this is partly due to the small numbers of females being convicted of sexual crimes (Bunting, 2006; Fromuth & Conn, 1997; Johansson-Love & Fremouw, 2006). For example in the UK a recent estimate revealed that there were 32 females currently in prison convicted for sexual offending, accounting for less than 1% of the total female population for England and Wales (data from National Offender Management Service, UK, 2007). This appears to be a figure comparable to other studies, for example in the USA, in a telephone survey of 1481 women asked about their sexual victimisation experiences 1% were female perpetrators (Finkelhor, Hotaling, Lewis, & Smith, 1990), and of the 1644 registered sex offenders in Arkansas, 2.4% were *Corresponding author. Email: a.r.beech@bham.ac.uk ISSN 1068-316X print/ISSN 1477-2744 # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10683160802190921 http://www.informaworld.com Psychology, Crime & Law Vol. 15, Nos. 2 & 3, FebruaryMarch 2009, 201216