There has been a great deal of outrage over the past couple of weeks regarding the alleged discrimination between male victims of child sexual abuse and female victims.

The main argument seems to be that recent abuse against young boys only resulted in the abuser receiving weekend work detention. Abusers of young girls, in contrast, have received hundreds of years behind bars. This implies that the judicial system must not care about young boys.

But what if the gender discrimination is placed on the wrong side of the equation?

It was former Baltimore Ravens cheerleader Molly Shattuck's case that seemed to spark interest in this phenomenon. Shattuck was sentenced to 48 weekends at a work detention facility — spread out over the next two years — for statutory rape against a 15-year-old boy. Shattuck had performed oral sex on the boy, who was a friend of her own son.

But the two stories being highlighted to show this discrimination involve a different female abuser of young boys and a male abuser of young girls.

A 32-year-old man was found guilty of sexually abusing a young girl for years, starting when she was just 6 years old. That man faced 366 years to life in prison. Meanwhile, a 25-year-old woman pleaded guilty to attempted rape of young boys at a trailer park in California. The female abuser in that case had previously been indicted on several other charges, including first-degree rape. She had pleaded guilty to the lesser charges as part of a plea agreement, and received five years' probation.

It's not difficult to see how one might come to believe that the vastly different sentences in these cases comes from a justice system that does not care about young boys. I believe it has more to do with the gender of the abusers.

There have been other recent examples of adult men abusing young boys who have received much steeper sentences than the women who were charged. Shortly before the cases described above, a Utah man was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to eight charges of rape and abuse against a 14-year-old boy, an Indiana man was sentenced to 200 years in prison for abusing young boys, and a Maryland man was sentenced to life in prison plus 215 years for abusing a young boy.

Had the former cheerleader or the trailer park abuser been men, the outcomes most likely would have been different. That's because the justice system treats men and women differently when they abuse children. There are many reasons for this, including stereotypes about child sexual abuse and the unique conditions that may preclude young men and boys from coming forward to identify a female abuser. Such stereotypes exist mainly when it comes to teenagers and superiors, where a man who has sex with a female student is seen as a predator but a woman who has sex with a male student must have received consent. After all, young men want sex all the time, with anyone. Right?

A lack of research on female sex abusers also contributes to this problem.

In the meantime, women who abuse children receive slaps on the wrist, while men who abuse children receive appropriately severe punishments.

Ultimately, the children whose abusers remain free to assault them and others pay an undue price for such judicial discrimination.

It shouldn't matter what the gender of an abuser is. What should matter is the crime that has been committed.