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BOSTON -- When prosecutors charged a 37-year-old mother of three with raping a 13-year-old boy, residents of the small suburban town of Maynard were shocked.
Such incidents rarely come to light, although it is unclear how many actually take place. While the law is the same as when a man is charged with raping a young girl, experts say many things are different when the genders are reversed.
"The typical responses are the victim is greeted either with disbelief or minimized or joked about: 'You're lucky, you got it when you were 13 and I had to wait until I was 20,'" said Mike Lew, a Newton therapist who counsels male survivors of abuse.
Female sex abuse "may be relatively rare, but, more likely, it's relatively underreported," Mr. Lew said.
Boys are often reluctant to report a relationship with an older woman for fear that other children will mock him or adults won't believe him, therapists said.
"There are a lot of societal reasons for a 13- to 15-year-old boy not to come forward and admit he was a victim. It's not socially accepted," said Martha Coakley, who heads the child abuse prosecution unit in the Middlesex County district attorney's office.
In the Maynard case, Kathleen Kennedy was arrested only after neighbors looked in the windows of her home and later reported to police they had seen her having sex with the boy. They had come to her house to visit but got no answer when they knocked on her door, police said.
Ms. Kennedy pleaded innocent to charges of statutory rape and indecent assault and battery. Having sex with a child under 16 is considered statutory rape even if the youth "consents."
The boy had been staying in Ms. Kennedy's Maynard home so he could finish the seventh grade without changing schools after his family moved to Lynn. Prosecutors said the sexual contact allegedly took place from May 30 to June 9.
Though not nearly as common as men who abuse children, some adult women do sexually molest children, prosecutors said. According to a national study released by the Department of Justice in March, only 3 percent of 14,000 inmates serving time in 1991 for violent crimes against children were female.
About 10 percent of child molesters prosecuted in Middlesex County are female, Ms. Coakley said. But many of those women were acting in conjunction with a male partner.
For some boys, having sex with an older woman is the ultimate wish fulfillment, therapists said.
"What it gets at is the forbidden," said Thomas Quinn, a Brookline-based psychologist who specializes in counseling men. "It's the universal Oedipal complex. Every boy wants to seduce his mother at some level, and this is like that fantasy come true."
But when the fantasy comes true, it can lead to emotional problems. In Western culture, for example, women are typically the ones viewed as sex objects or victims -- not men. And a child may not want others to know that he was perceived in a "feminine" light, therapists said.
Like girls who are abused by older men, boys who are victimized by women may feel they have been used and manipulated. They may question their sexuality or virility if they don't enjoy the sex. And they may feel naughty if they have been told to keep things secret, Mr. Quinn said.
David Finkelhor, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, said some people might believe that abuse by a woman isn't as serious as abuse by a man.
If an older man were involved, "people immediately assume there was more coercion involved."
In fact, that may be true, said Mr. Finkelhor, who has written five books about child sex victimization. Men tend to be more violent than women.
Some research shows that boys don't react as consistently negatively to sexual contacts with older partners as girls do, he said. The number of sexual incidents reported by boys also drops dramatically when they reach adolescence.
Because sex has greater consequences for girls -- namely, pregnancy -- society tends to make a bigger deal when girls are abused, according to Mr. Finkelhor.
Several experts noted the public outrage over the Ms. Kennedy case might be even greater if the child were younger. Because he is a teen-ager, some view the incidents as a romanticized form of sexual initiation.
It's not clear whether the boy wanted or enjoyed the relations with Ms. Kennedy. Ms. Coakley said investigators haven't asked him "whether he liked it" because it is irrelevant to the case.
"A 12- to 14-year-old boy may have certain urges, but he's totally intellectually and emotionally not in a situation where he's capable of giving consent," Ms. Coakley said.
The child's statements to investigators -- corroborated by the two eyewitnesses -- formed the basis of the indictment against Ms. Kennedy, she said.
Having a third party witness an alleged act of child rape is itself very rare and helps to "bring home the point that these cases are probably underreported," Ms. Coakley said.
Prosecutors said they are treating Ms. Kennedy no differently because she is a woman. But some suggested that the district attorney's office is using the case to make a point to the public.
Mr. Lew said gender shouldn't matter when talking about sex abuse.
"It's not about sex and it's not about gender and it's not about relationships. It's about sexually abusing children," he said.
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