Female perversion
term coined by Estela V. Welldon
Female perversion is a term coined by Estela V. Welldon in 1992 to refer to women who commit violence, either against themselves or against others.
Though the term can be used pejoratively and sometimes has sexual connotations, its strict definition is an instance of human behavior that deviates from what is considered orthodox or normal, and it is in this sense that the term is used by psychologists. The term is also controversial as according to Welldon there is a prevailing denial of the existence of female violence, throughout the legal and mental health community.
Model of female perversion
Welldon (1992) put forward a model of female perversion that introduced the term into the psychological nomenclature. The model covers several categories of violent behavior that can be directed at one's own body, against children, or against adults.
Freudian psychoanalytic theory suggested that perversion fell solely within the male domain, that it was related to the phallus, and that aggressive drive was unique to men. In her book Madonna, Whore: The Idealisation and Denigration of Motherhood, Welldon challenges this notion, and argues that women are equally capable of perversion. Though they do not use the penis with violence, they instead use the whole body.
In doing so, they attack the whole body, and sometimes by extension the bodies of children. They are symbolically wreaking revenge on their own internalised, often cruel and perverse mother.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5442763. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Female perversion” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.