Yellow posted... https://www.jstor.org/stable/23717437
Here's one. Want another?
Linking an actual study is a good step, but without the full text available it's hard to critically assess the methodology or any other aspects that dictate its credibility. Off-hand, though, here are a couple issues:
- It's asking solely about sexual interest, not anything about acting on that interest
- It's self-reported, which is generally going to result in data that's skewed according to prevailing social ideas, particularly being filtered by any attempts the respondents make to rationalize their feelings instead of admitting to them (in the case of female sexual abusers, it's been found in studies to often involve thinking more in terms of loving the children than wanting to have sex with them, which I would expect to translate into a lower willingness to self-report sexual interest)
- Being self-reported also means prevailing societal attitudes of "males are supposed to enjoy sex, so they can't be sexually assaulted" are going to interfere with respondents reporting on being abused themselves
None of this conclusively means the figures
don't represent the true proportion, but it does mean that they - like most specific numbers around sexual assault - need to be taken with a grain of salt because there are a lot of factors that could be skewing them. As Dark said, most people that have studied the matter in-depth agree that men are probably more likely than women to commit child sexual abuse, but the exact magnitude of the difference is largely unknown and that makes conclusions that rely on there being a significant difference invalid.