A terrible story of child sex abuse this month has depressed and disappointed me more than anything that I’ve read for a very long time. The victim was aged 11; the defendant a 21-year-old babysitter.

Despite the huge age gap - ten years may not be a lot in middle age, but it is a lifetime to a pre-adolescent - and the fact that the child was five years under the age of consent, full sexual intercourse took place at the carer’s instigation.

The child described to the court feelings of discomfort, knowing it was wrong.

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Shocking: Jade Hatt, 21, was given a a mere six-month prison sentence despite admitting to having sex with an 11-year-old boy she was babysitting

The exploitation of a position of trust and the defilement of a minor is horrifying enough. But the judge’s sentence shocked me the most: a mere six-month prison term, suspended for two years, and a short stint on the sex offenders’ register.

Why such staggering leniency? The judge, Tim Mousley QC, described it as ‘an exceptional case’, saying that while the defendant was ‘immature’, the victim was unusually mature — which ‘narrows the arithmetic age gap’.

Even more incredibly, the child’s father spoke in defence of the babysitter, pronouncing his child ‘sex mad’ and ‘fully up for this experience’.

Obviously I was not the only person astounded by the leniency, and the sentence is under review.

But sadly this apparent lack of justice is not unusual in a case such as this. And I believe that’s because there is another sinister factor at play here: gender.

The child, you see, is a boy and the abuser a young woman.

Jade Hatt, the babysitter who is now on the sex offenders’ register, has admitted she ‘falls in love too quick’ and said she had learned from her mistakes.

Sordid: Mary-Ellen Mooney, 18, persuaded a 13-year-old boy into sexual activity with her, and also dodged jail

But if the roles had been reversed, it is my belief that - no matter how ‘vulnerable’ or ‘honest with the police’ the abuser had been - there would have been no such expressions of sympathy for a 21-year-old man who abused a young girl.

The full weight of the law would have been applied - and rightly so.

Why should it be any different if the victim is male and the abuser female? As the mother of two sons, I am appalled at the inference that a boy can’t be raped by a woman and damaged for the rest of his life by such an experience in the way we would expect a girl to be.

Most alarming of all, this kind of case can no longer be considered exceptional.

In the past two years, an increasing number of female teachers, tutors and teaching assistants have come before the courts accused of attempting to seduce and, in some cases, succeeding in seducing boys in their care.

All too often their punishment has been risible.

Just this week we read yet another sordid tale — that of Mary-Ellen Mooney, the 18-year-old babysitter who admitted two counts of causing or inciting a 13-year-old boy to engage in sexual activity.

As Mooney sat on the sofa watching TV with the boy, she began making sexual suggestions and then ‘guided’ his hand down to her genital area, a court in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, was told.

And yet Mooney was also described in court as a young woman ‘of good character’.

Seemingly sensible, respectable, educated women - who cannot possibly hope to excuse their actions as a result of ignorance of the law - are becoming predators of the most sinister variety.

Take Helen Turnbull, a 35-year-old teaching assistant, who thought it acceptable to send pictures of herself in her underwear to a 16-year-old boy.

She was given a four-month suspended sentence and told to sign the sex offenders’ register after admitting kissing the boy and calling it one of the perks of her job. She was cleared on charges relating to allegations that she had sex with him.

Preying on pupils: Teaching assistants Helen Turnbull, left, and Caroline Berriman, right, both admitted to inappropriate activity with teenage boys

Then there’s Caroline Berriman, 30, another teaching assistant, who avoided a jail sentence last week despite admitting to two counts of sexual activity with a 15-year-old.

The boy, who called her two-year suspended sentence ‘atrocious’, said the abuse had ‘scarred him for life’.

In 2014, yet another teaching assistant, Charlotte Parker, 32, was also spared jail after admitting sending thousands of lewd messages to a 14-year-old pupil at a school in Chelmsford, Essex, with whom she later began a two-year affair when he was 16.

A third: Teaching assistant Charlotte Parker, 32, confessed to a two-year affair with a student

And what of Yvonne Preston, 49, a former English teacher who became infatuated with a teenage pupil, showering him with gifts?

She was banned from the classroom until July 2016, when she can apply to have the ban lifted.

Earlier this summer, we learned of perhaps the most extreme example of a woman involved in child sex abuse.

Marie Black, 34, from Norwich, was found guilty of running a paedophile ring, raping children and ‘playing an instrumental role in using children as sexual playthings’.

There are a number of theories for this apparent rise in female sexual abuse. Many believe social media and the proliferation of text messaging and sexy selfies have begun to erode traditional moral boundaries.

A passing fancy that might once have simply flitted through the mind, but never been pursued, for example, can now be only too easily written down and ‘sent’ at the click of a button.

Or could this corruption of women (let’s not forget that as little as two decades ago, the idea of a grown woman having sex with a child would have caused a huge moral outcry) be borne out of the fact that a growing number of females are deeply disappointed with their relationships with adult males?

All too often we hear that the internet is enabling men, to pursue affairs for which they might otherwise have had no opportunity.

The rise of internet porn has made some men assume extreme and brutal sexual practices are normal and theirs to enjoy by right.

Could it be that sex with a boy makes women who have fallen foul of such men feel they have regained the upper hand?

Yet it is illegal to seduce someone under 18 - even though they may have passed the age of consent - if you are in a position of trust.

To do so means the older person is ‘abusing’ that position. It means disgrace, loss of job and, possibly, loss of liberty.

So why are seemingly sane, intelligent and often attractive women behaving in such a manner?

Dr Nina Burrowes, a psychologist who specialises in the psychology of sex abuse, agrees that more female sex abusers than ever before are appearing in court.

It may not be the case, she warns, that the numbers are increasing - rather that the crimes are being reported more often.

Perhaps most chilling of all, she says, it’s not uncommon for victims of historical abuse to reveal that they were once abused by their mothers. We’ve been reluctant to acknowledge this fact because we don’t like to think of a mother as a danger to her children.

But women, says Dr Burrowes, have a capacity for cruelty equal to any man, although it’s rarer for the cruelty to be sexual.

Infatuation: Yvonne Preston, 49, admitted falling for a student then showering him with gifts - but can appeal her classroom ban as soon as 2016

For men, she says, sex is a very direct way to express masculinity and power, but for women, too, it can satisfy a need for control.

There is, though, a more pernicious strand to that recent case of the 11-year-old boy and his 21-year-old babysitter - and that’s the response of the boy’s father.

Surely we’ve learned enough about the harm suffered by boys at the hands of sexual predators to understand that their gender does not protect them from profound and long-lasting damage.

Surely only the most outdated, unaware father, still steeped in the old macho values, would fail to recognise his own child’s sensitivity.

This particular parent, who claimed that he had also slept with the babysitter, seemed to think that his little son was something of a stud.

He told the court that he was ‘totally unaffected by it’ and had counted it as ‘a notch on his belt’. All this despite the boy having told the court he had felt uncomfortable because he knew it was wrong.

Dr Burrowes stresses that children are not sexual beings, but that offenders will often claim sexual activity was the child’s idea.

This she describes as ‘cognitive distortion’, where an abuser, or, perhaps in this case a father, tries to make the world fit their own ideas.

Children, she says, are at the mercy of the adults around them and when an adult, male or female, hurts them, boy or girl, the experience is horrific.

And if the abuser is a woman, says Dr Burrowes, the boy may very well wonder if anyone will even believe them, so unlikely does the notion of a female perpetrator seem.

After all, if the judge in this month’s case can be so lenient in the face of such a seismic betrayal of trust, what message does that send out to other young boys and, crucially, potential female predators?

Today’s boys face quite enough problems as it is, not least the proliferation of pornography and wrong-headed ideas about what sex and being a man is all about.

We’ve struggled for years to help boys understand that becoming a man doesn’t necessarily mean accepting the old stereotype of the cold, distant, insensitive pater familias who expects a woman to pander to his every need.

Yet if we ignore the harm done by the exploitation or sexualisation of boys and set aside their emotional feelings, we doom ourselves to producing yet another generation of males with little respect for women.

Similarly, if we afford female abusers a level of leniency that we would never condone in a male, how can we possibly instill a sense of self-worth and respect in this generation of boys?

Which brings us back to that poor 11-year-old. This boy needs kindness, love, education and an understanding that sex is for grown-ups who have the ability to consent with the full knowledge of what they’re letting themselves in for.

Otherwise he too risks growing up to be a man who sees being ‘sex mad’ as a badge of honour.

Most importantly we need to acknowledge that women can be sexual predators and can do serious harm to the children they abuse.

It was Margaret Atwood, discussing her novel Cat’s Eye, about girl bullies, who said: ‘We must never assume that women are gooder.’

The potential for evil doing is in us all - male or female - and we shouldn’t be surprised that an embittered or cruel woman, who generally has less physical power than an adult male, may well choose a child as her victim.