CHANTAE Gilman broke into a man’s apartment and sexually assaulted him while he slept.

Her victim told police he woke up on his lounge to find Gilman on top of him, his hands pinned behind his head. When he told her to stop, she refused and told him to be quiet.

The man managed to escape and it took more than a year for DNA evidence to link Gilman to the crime.

The incident from June 2013 saw Gilman admit to the crime as part of a plea deal with prosecutors who reduced the charges from rape to attempted rape and assault.

The 28-year-old was last year ordered to serve nine months in jail for the crime, Fox4KC reported.

In June this year, a former teacher’s aide was found guilty by a New York jury of raping a male student.

Jennifer Kennard, 49, was convicted of third-degree rape and endangering the welfare of a child.

Kennard was working at a teacher’s aide at a middle school, when she met a 13-year-old boy with special needs, the Democrat & Chronicle reported.

She had sex with the boy in February 2013 and was arrested the following month.

Kennard was sentenced to three years in state prison for six counts of second-degree rape.

Female sex offenders like these may seem rare, but according to new research they are more common than previously thought.

A recent survey in the US found that a similar amount of women reported being raped in a 12-month period as the amount of men who were “made to penetrate” a female offender.

A new paper titled Sexual Victimisation Perpetrated by Women: Federal Data Reveal Surprising Prevalence, contradicts the idea that female sexual perpetration is rare.

Written by Lara Stemple, director of the UCLA Law School’s Health and Human Rights Law Project, and Williams Institute researchers Andrew Flores and Ilan Meyer the findings were recently published in Aggression and Violent Behaviour.

Using a series of data and information from US federal agencies the study is the first to assess the role of women as perpetrators of sexual abuse on such a wide scale.

“There has been a lot of smaller scale studies on this topic, especially in the past decade,” Ms Stemple told news.com.au

However her study was done on a much larger scale, with researchers collating additional data and surveys collected from tens of thousands of people.

Researchers analysed data from four large-scale federal agency surveys conducted independently by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics over a five-year period.

They then used this data to analyse female sexual predator behaviour, looking at both male and female victims.

“These surveys have reached many tens of thousands of people, and each has shown internally consistent results over time,” the authors write.

“We therefore believe that this article provides more definitive estimates about the prevalence of female sexual perpetration than has been provided in the literature to date.

“Taken as a whole, the reports we examine document surprisingly significant prevalence of female-perpetrated sexual victimisation, mostly against men and occasionally against women.”

Researchers also found while females were far more likely to have been abused by men, the majority of male victims reported they were abused by female perpetrators.

“The form of nonconsensual sex that men are much more likely to experience than women, namely, being ‘made to penetrate’ someone else, is frequently perpetrated by women with 79.2 per cent of victimised men reporting abuse at the hands of female perpetrators,” Ms Stemple’s report reveals.

Alarmingly, data collected by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, found that women and men reported a nearly equal rates of nonconsensual sex in a 12-month period.

The CDC found 1.6 per cent of women in the US reported being raped in the past 12 months (1.9 million), which is a similar rate to the 1.7 per cent of men (1.9 million) who reportedly were “made to penetrate a perpetrator”.

This is a shocking figure but there is major difference when you look at rape numbers over the course of a lifetime.

In 2011, 19.3 per cent of women reported having been raped in their lifetime.

Using the National Crime Victimisation Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, researchers also found female perpetrators acting without male co-perpetrators were reported in 28 per cent of rape or sexual assault incidents involving male victims, and 4.1 per cent of incidents with female victims.

Researchers also looked at sexual victimisation cases in prisons as well.

Using Bureau of Justice Statistics figures researchers found a high level of “sexual victimisation committed by female prison staff and inmates with the report noting that women are ‘much more likely to be abused’ by other women inmates rather than by male staff”.

Interestingly, it also found when it came to inmate-on-inmate sexual assault, women prisoners were more than three times as likely to experience sexual victimisation perpetrated by women inmates (13.7 per cent) compared to men victimised by other male inmates (4.2 per cent).

Overall researchers also found men were more reluctant to report abuse by a woman.

“The idea that women can be sexually manipulative, dominant, and even violent runs counter to these stereotypes. Yet studies have documented female-perpetrated acts that span a wide spectrum of sexual abuse,” they write.

It is something Ms Stemple feels is one of the reasons it remains widely under-reported.

“There’s still this perception globally that women aren’t perpetrators of sexual victimisation,” she said.

“There’s also this perception that male victims haven’t been harmed, or they welcome it, which is far from true.

“Men report similar or roughly the same mental health outcomes as female victims.”

Ms Stemple also said society struggled to deal with the notion that men could be abused by women and that it was harder for men to be believed or to be taken seriously when they did report it.

Ms Stemple also said it was true that many didn’t report it because they don’t think they’ll be believed.

In many cases men were coerced or manipulated and felt they couldn’t report such abuse.

“Looking at all the data, I was shocked,” she said, adding abuse perpetrated by women was a huge concern.

“These are all anonymous surveys, there is no reason for someone not to tell the truth.”

Ms Stemple said society had to move away from wanting proof to believing sexual assault victims.

“Just as the anti-rape movement insisted that women shouldn’t have to show cuts and bruises to demonstrate that they were raped, neither should men,” she said.

debra.killalea@news.com.au