Women represent a higher percentage of child abusers and killers

• Age and Sex of Perpetrators:  For FFY 2007, 56.5 percent of the perpetrators were women, 42.4 percent were men and 1.1 percent were of unknown sex.2 Women typically were younger than men. The median age was 30 years for women and 33 years for men. Of the women who were perpetrators, more than 40 percent (45.0%) were younger than 30 years of age, compared with one-third of the men (34.5%) (figure 5–1). These proportions have remained consistent for the past few years.
  
  
• The above bar graph presents the perpetrator data by sex and then by such age groups as younger than 20, 20–29, 30–39, 40–49, 50–59, 60–69 and 70–75. This chart provides a percentage of perpetrators that fall within each age/sex category. Men aged 30–39 were the largest percentage of males, with 34.2 percent, while women aged 20–29 were the largest percentages of females with 41.0 percent.

• Victims by Parental Status of Perpetrators, 2003:   This bar graphs shows that approximately two-fifths (40.8%) of child victims were maltreated by their mothers acting alone; another 18.8 percent were maltreated by their fathers acting alone; 16.9 percent were abused by both their mother and father. Victims abused by a nonparental perpetrator accounted for 13.4 percent of the total.

All data from: US Department of Health and Human Services