Women Assaulting Women Is The Crime We Can’t Ignore — & Alex Cooper Is Opening The Conversation

Alex Cooper, of the Call Me Daddy podcast, recently alleged in her new documentary, Call Her Alex, that she was the victim of sexual harassment during her time at university, at the hands of her soccer coach. The coach, being a woman, would interrogate Cooper about her sex life, her relationships, repeatedly instigate moments so that they’d be alone, and would comment on her looks, Cooper claimed. Since then, other women have come forward about sexually inappropriate behaviour that took place within that same soccer team, again with the abuse allegedly happening at the hands of a (different) woman. Boston University will now conduct an external review into the claims, all these years on. If the idea of a woman being a predator is difficult to swallow, think again. There are plenty of reasons these stories rarely come to light. A small study sample used for research on female-perpetrated sexual violence found that often people don’t disclose what’s happened to them, and they struggle to label it as sexual assault until retrospect kicks in.

When women report acts of rape, assault and harassment, most times, we’re talking about male perpetrators. Although the statistics show men are far more likely to incite this kind of violence than women, that doesn’t mean women aren’t assaulting women. 

By outdated definition, rape involves a penis. As a lesbian who experienced rape by another woman while at university, Harriet* (name changed to protect identity), 28, struggled to make sense of what happened to her. It was only seven years later that she felt able to call it what it was. The fact that a woman that had done this to her left Harriet confused as to how to define it. “I was 18 and having the time of my life, getting drunk, partying and having too much fun. There was a girl on my course who was a little bit older than me. We flirted from time to time and had kissed on a night out, but that was it really,” says Harriet. “One night we bumped into each other at the bar on campus and spent the evening hanging out, drinking and eventually making out.” The bar closed so they went back to one of their flats. “I hadn't been there long before I passed out from being too drunk,” continues Harriet. “I had laid down on her bed fully dressed, with everything fastened correctly but when I woke up my top was lifted and my trousers were unzipped and the waistband of my pants was twisted, like someone had tried to pull them up. My vagina also ached internally. When I realized, immediately I felt gross and very anxious but also very conflicted. In my heart I knew something wrong had happened, but she'd always seemed so sweet and gentle, so I tried to persuade myself that this was okay, that she wouldn't do anything violent toward me.”

For the next three years, Harriet had to see this woman frequently. “She was always friendly and acted like nothing had happened,” she says. “If she had violated me, surely she wouldn't be acting like this? This happened 10 years ago, then last month she sent me a friend request on Facebook.” Harriet only processed what had happened to her three years ago while in therapy after struggling with disassociating during sex, something that began, she was able to pinpoint, after that act of violation. “My therapist affirmed I had been raped, which in a strange way was comforting to name it but also completely horrifying. I'd never named it that, mainly because she was a woman, but I was penetrated without consent within the framework of how I have sex as a lesbian, so what else could it be?” Even so, Harriet still sometimes feels as though the word “doesn’t belong” to her. She still gets heart palpitations. “I make myself believe that she didn't realize she'd raped me, because how could she when she'd looked me in the eye and smiled in my face for the three years afterwards? When she seemed a bit confused when I withdrew from her? But when the delusion thins, I do get flickers of rage.” It took Harriet many years to tell people what she experienced, including her wife. She was afraid that friends might minimize her experience because her abuser didn’t fit the classic profile associated with these crimes. “She’s quite petite, smiley, knew lots of people… she didn’t give off the vibe that this would ever be something she’d be capable of.”

In 2023, a Springer Nature journal published a piece focused on the Republic of Ireland, in which researchers wrote: “Female-perpetrated sexual assault is under-represented in sexual assault research, and indeed possibly an underreported crime.” Of those studied to inform this research, many knew their attacker already. They might have even been friends. This is common in cases of male-perpetrated sexual violence, too.

When rape or sexual assault happen at the hands of a woman, it can be very disorientating for the victim. Ana Flores Reis, a therapist specializing in trauma and abuse, says gendered assumptions can play a huge role in how someone might process their assault. “Most dominant cultural narratives frame men as perpetrators and women as victims, and while this reflects the majority of cases, it leaves little room for alternative experiences,” she explains. “As a result, when women do perpetrate abuse, their actions are often minimized, dismissed, or reframed as less harmful, playful, or even flattering. These reactions are rooted in gendered assumptions about harm, power, and agency in sexual violence.” Victims can end up isolated, holding the belief that what happened “doesn’t count”, Reis adds. “Many may internally minimize the abuse because it doesn’t match mainstream representations of sexual violence. In LGBTQ+ contexts, this can be further complicated by concerns about reinforcing harmful stereotypes or being disbelieved within one's own community.”

When someone’s experience of sexual assault isn’t validated for years, there are many ways it can play out. It can affect their mental health, how they view the event and themselves. Possible outcomes include internalized doubt, shame, compounded trauma, low self-trust and worth, depression, grief, dissociation and anxiety. This goes no matter who perpetrated the crime. However, imagine coming to terms with not only what happened, but the added confusion of processing who enacted this.

Of the limited research out there on female-perpetrated sexual violence, much of it references child abuse. Frankie* (real name withheld), 36, from Northern Ireland, experienced this at the hands of her aunt, aged four to 10. Her aunt was around the age of 18 at the time. When acts of sexual assault were instigated, her aunt would refer to it as “playing that game”, which involved being touched and kissed. Frankie didn’t realize what exactly happened to her until her teenage years, when she confided in a friend who had also experienced child sex abuse. “It made me question my sexuality as a teenager, not in that I was attracted to women, but because a woman had done this to me,” says Frankie, who is heterosexual. “It made me have a lot less respect for myself with sex. I definitely slept with a lot more people than I would have liked to through university. I think a lot of that was almost like for me to try and reclaim it for myself.” Frankie also went on to experience sexual assault at the hands of men, because her perception of “normal” had been skewed before even understanding sex. She at one point joined a sugar daddy dating app and was having sex for money, because sex had such little personal and psychological value to her at that point in time.

“I feel annoyed that she would never be assumed to be a perpetrator,” Frankie says. When she told her parents what had happened, she wondered if her mum would have been more sympathetic had it been her uncle instead of her aunt. Her dad was more sympathetic and still wants her to go to the police about what happened, but for Frankie, “there is still that shame attached to it, I think, because it is a woman.” She isn’t confident she’d be taken seriously.

Public perceptions of sexual violence go completely against what these women describe. Sherianne Kramer, PhD, author of Female-Perpetrated Sex Abuse, says we implicitly are taught that men are aggressors. As a result, “a lot of people who are victimized by women don’t necessarily see it as sexual”. When Kramer started researching in this field in 2008, there were only 14 articles on the subject worldwide. Although much of that research claims that 1-8% of sexual violence cases are perpetrated by women, Kramer believes it’s closer to 25%. “It’s very difficult for people to fathom a raping woman,” she says. “I’ve worked with people who were victims of both male and female-perpetrated sexual violence and they tended to report the male sex abusers rather than the female ones.” This was because people didn’t have the language for what had happened when it was done by a woman, and they feared police wouldn’t believe them. “The system validates that feeling,” says Kramer, “because of those [that I worked with] who did report it, the police laughed and said that wasn’t possible.” 

Kramer had spent some time working in correction facilities in South Africa between 2009 to 2016, and what she witnessed there reinforced how widespread these attitudes are. When women were there for sex crimes, they were often given “gender realignment therapy”, because the act of committing rape was unwomanly. Instead of targetting the issue of sexual violence, the system works within the constructs of gender, “invisibilizing the possibility for women to be sexually violent.” There’s this idea Kramer has witnessed that if you experience sexual violence at the hands of a woman, it can’t be anywhere near as damaging as having experienced it by a man. The repercussions can deeply impact a person’s psychological wellbeing. “Once someone is abused sexually, it is likely to happen again,” Kramer adds, which is why it’s so vital that people who go through it at the hands of a woman are validated and understand the reality of what’s taken place. 

“It’s really important to me that we talk about sexual violence as something that can happen to anyone by anyone — anyone can hurt anyone else using sex as a mechanism. That way, no victims get left out,” says Kramer. That is the very least we should be taking away from the conversations Cooper’s documentary has sparked. We owe it to all the women whose experience of sexual violence happened to be instigated by another woman.