How Alliyah's community missed the signs of a female predator

A police officer investigating Kellie Whiteside — a teacher who was recently convicted of repeated sexual conduct with a former student — allegedly told the victim's mother that it was a "unicorn case".

"None of them at the police station have ever dealt with a female teacher molesting a female student," recalls Jackie, whose child, Alliyah, was groomed and abused by Whiteside over the course of a decade. "They've never dealt with it."

The statement stuck with Jackie as she grappled with how a female teacher had sexually abused her child for such an extended period of time, despite multiple complaints being made about her.

It had Jackie wondering: were the red flags missed because of the teacher's gender?

"I think they expect it to be a female teacher with a male student or a male teacher molesting a male or female student," Jackie says.

"I think they just didn't take the concerns seriously because you don't really hear about it."

Earlier this year at the District Court in Brisbane, Whiteside pleaded guilty to repeated sexual conduct with a minor and was jailed for five years, with a non-parole period of two years. Whiteside was only arrested after Alliyah came forward themself.

Alliyah — who uses they/them pronouns — believes that if their abuser had been a man, rather than a woman, things would have been different.

Alliyah has given the ABC consent to identify them as the victim in this case.

"If it was a male doing any of those things, one of those things, it would've been called out and it would've ended so much sooner," Alliyah says.

Reflecting on her own reaction, Jackie believes that she would've acted differently too. Even though various family members made three complaints about Whiteside — to the schools and the police — she feels guilty for not doing more.

"I would've reacted completely different if Kellie had been a man, completely different," she says.

"I think everybody involved would have reacted completely different."

Alliyah is telling their story in the hope that the red flags missed in their case will be caught in time to save others.

Female accused given benefit of the doubt

Over a year and a half, we've spoken to Alliyah's friends, members of their family, people who knew Whiteside and a teacher who taught Alliyah.

Almost every person the ABC spoke to agrees that they missed the signs partly because Whiteside was a woman.

This tendency to give women the benefit of the doubt goes beyond Alliyah's case.

Amanda Robertson has spent more than a decade investigating sexual abuse and misconduct allegations against teachers.

Ten years ago, while working in NSW helping independent schools meet their reporting obligations for that state's mandatory reportable conduct scheme, Dr Robertson noticed that allegations against women weren't as rare as people might have thought.

"We were starting to notice this pattern of female perpetration — mid-30s women involving adolescent students," she says.

The team she was working with also noticed that when allegations came up against a woman, no-one took them as seriously as they did if it was against a man.

Firstly, victims and their families were less likely to want to report the matter to police.

"But there was even an unwillingness to view it as a criminal matter — that this would even be something that we would think about going to the police for," Dr Robertson says.

When allegations were reported, schools and police were less likely to treat it with the gravity they did for male-perpetrated offences.

"Schools sometimes [needed] a little bit more assistance in helping them move to a place where they view this as a really problematic allegation that requires risk assessment and reporting," she says.

Dr Robertson believes there are a couple of reasons for this: women are mostly accused of abuse by boys in their late teens. The cases face a double stereotype: women are seen as nurturing, and teenage boys are seen as highly sexual.

"Most people don't perceive sex offenders to be women and don't perceive most women to be capable of causing harm, let alone sexual harm," she says.

"Gender stereotypes are not just about the perpetrator being a woman. I think it also comes into the male being the adolescent victim and that kind of mentality of 'he should be so lucky.'"

"Females for so long have been perceived as less harmful and almost asexual," says Dr Larissa Christensen, co-leader of the Sexual Violence Research and Prevention Unit (SVRPU) at the University of the Sunshine Coast. And this, she says, leads to the public being more likely to "turn a blind eye" to women committing these crimes.

But research in this area is slim and it's hard to get reliable national data.

Every state has a different way of handling allegations, sexual abuse of all kinds is under-reported in crime statistics and very few cases make it to court.

"That is even more pronounced when it is female sexual offenders because so few of them are prosecuted through the criminal justice system," Dr Robertson says.

"So there's not a lot of data that exists, and certainly none that's kind of publicly available."

Data shows schools more likely to take 'no action'

Dr Robertson wanted to see if what she was seeing at the coalface was backed up by the numbers.

So she scoured through 809 sexual abuse and misconduct allegations reported to the NSW Reportable Conduct Scheme, made about school employees between 2015-2019 and involving alleged victims aged 13 to 17.

The scheme has been running in NSW since 1999 — it requires certain organisations with caring responsibilities for children to investigate and notify the regulator whenever it receives an allegation of harm against an employee or volunteer.

Her research found about three-quarters (76.6 per cent) of alleged cases involved male employees and one-quarter (23.4 per cent) female employees.

Criminal data, released by the Australian Institute of Criminology this year, shows more than nine out of ten allegations of sexual offending to police are about men.

While men are more likely to commit child sexual abuse, the figures for female offenders — in Dr Robertson's study and others — are "much larger than most would expect", says Bricklyn Priebe, a researcher at the SVRPU.

"Because the reported rates are lower, often there's less attention given to this issue, despite the fact that the harms are very, very significant for victims."

Dr Robertson also interviewed frontline workers and picked over court cases.

"One of the experts I interviewed spoke about police laughing at a male victim who'd gone to police, to pursue a matter against his female perpetrator," she says.

In 2023, she published a PhD on alleged offenders in schools, including women, looking at who they are, how they commit and how schools and authorities reacted.

And there was something striking — and troubling — in the data. When someone first came forward with an allegation of a serious sexual offence, if schools did nothing while an investigation took place, the allegation was more likely to be about a woman.

"When that first comes into a school, the data suggested that schools are significantly more likely to take no action, no risk management action beyond reporting to the reportable conduct scheme when that allegation is against a female compared to a male," she says.

State-based system means location plays a part

All these findings align almost exactly with Alliyah's case.

In 2014, when Whiteside was caught messaging Alliyah, it was reported to the Queensland Education Department, but she was allowed to keep teaching and no action was taken against her.

In 2016, Alliyah's parents went to the primary school again, this time because they were concerned Whiteside had requested a transfer to Alliyah's high school.

The teacher was transferred to a third school following that complaint, but there seems to have been no investigation into her behaviour.

Queensland Police have no record of referrals from the Education Department.

An investigation might have uncovered that Whiteside had been sexually abusing Alliyah since early 2015, had one been conducted.

In Alliyah's later high school years, they moved into Whiteside's home. Their brother Sebastian was so concerned about the teacher's hold over his sister that he called the police.

"I was like, 'I'm telling you that I think something is wrong and you need to check this, like it's a teacher with a student', and they just pretty much went 'the only people that can complain are your parents or Alliyah,'" he says.

He said police told him this was because they were over the age of consent.

Queensland Police have no official record of that report.

Dr Robertson believes gender was definitely part of the reason Whiteside's perpetration was missed, but she doesn't believe that's the whole story.

She believes jurisdiction also played a role in how Alliyah's abuse went undetected for so long, as Queensland's reporting systems lag behind many other states.

The 2017 royal commission into child sex abuse recommended all states and territories implement a mandatory reportable conduct scheme like the one in NSW.

Queensland is still in the process of introducing such a scheme. Had it been in place when Alliyah was at school, the education department would have likely had a regulator watching over their investigation of Whiteside's messaging.

Alliyah's parents would have also been able to report their concerns to the scheme for an external investigation at any time.

Separately, this year, Queensland passed new "position of authority" laws which make it illegal for a person in a position of care over a child to have sexual relations with them — even if they're over 16 and consenting.

The laws came into effect this month.

"When the victim's brother had gone to police, if there had been a special care provision at the time, I wonder whether that would've raised just a couple more flags for police to go 'actually, that's concerning,'" Dr Robertson says.

Women become enmeshed in victims' lives

Dr Robertson's research tells us that Whiteside isn't unique.

While it is less common for a woman to allegedly offend against someone as young as Alliyah was, women can be abusive.

Most allegations against women come from boys, but a significant minority come from girls.

And the women accused often have other problems going on in their personal lives, play supportive roles for their victims, become deeply enmeshed in their victims' lives and offend in multiple locations outside of school.

Whiteside was suffering from post-natal depression and her marriage was breaking down when she first started messaging Alliyah.

Alliyah said they witnessed Whiteside go through a dramatic change of identity in the early stages of knowing them.

"I think she thought that the white picket fence was like a prison cell. I think she felt trapped and she just did everything that she was supposed to do," Alliyah says.

"I just think that she just went from being like this stereotypical wife, with the kids and the husband and the good life, to, like, the complete opposite. Like, 'I'm gonna stand up and I'm gonna say my opinions and I'm gonna stand up to people, even if it has nothing to do with me. Like, I'm gonna do all those things and I'm gonna get tattoos and piercings.'"

At the time, as a young teenager, Alliyah admired this; they saw Kellie Whiteside as an empowered woman.

'It was all to nurture Alliyah'

As is common for female perpetrators, over the years that Whiteside was in an abusive relationship with Alliyah, she became completely enmeshed in every part of their life.

Whiteside exploited a number of vulnerabilities Alliyah and their family were facing.

At home, Alliyah's parents were separating. They were also supporting Alliyah's two older siblings, who were having troubles of their own — their teenage sister was pregnant with her second child.

The teacher was outwardly providing support to Alliyah who was suffering from nightmares and anxiety after an earlier assault.

 "The way Kellie weaved herself into Alliyah's life and our family was in a nurturing way," Alliyah's mother Jackie says.

"It was all to nurture Alliyah, to support Alliyah, to be there for Alliyah."

After being caught messaging Alliyah, she apologised profusely for overstepping and within months, she was tutoring Alliyah at her house, attending their soccer games, and inviting Alliyah for sleepovers and trips.

Whiteside was also a mother with three children of her own.

"She would always use the kids as a reason to have time with Alliyah. The kids would come over to the house. I used to think, well, if the kids are there, Alliyah's with the kids, it's not just Kellie, it's not Alliyah and Kellie on their own," Jackie says.

A former child protection detective, who was not authorised to speak to the media, agreed to speak to the ABC anonymously about what they saw in the force.

The detective spent years working at a child protection unit based in Brisbane. She says that police in this field are extremely busy, dealing with cases of active abuse and neglect.

"You've got to choose what child is most likely to be at risk now and what child can wait till tomorrow morning," she says.

The detective we spoke to also said in the years she spent working in that division, she only ever saw one case involving a woman.

She says gender stereotypes might play into a busy detective's decision on how to prioritise a case.

"By and large, offenders were always male, and so I think if a female came along, their behaviour was more likely to be explained as other things as opposed to predatory behaviour," she says.

She says demand is so high, it's the cases that get pushed to the bottom of the pile that detectives lose sleep over.

"What they might have missed. It certainly keeps me up at night, because you really hope that you've made the right decision through all of your investigations," she says.

Sexual trauma 'only one piece'

Queensland sentencing data from 2005 to 2021 shows 98 per cent of offenders who faced court charged with maintaining a sexual relationship with a child were men.

While the law concentrates on sexual abuse, for many victims, that may not be the most difficult part to come to terms with.

"I think generally something that we, society don't fully understand yet about child sexual abuse is the emotional component to it and how entwined and enmeshed people's lives become in these types of cases," Dr Robertson says.

"That's definitely part of the abuse. I don't think society generally understands that at all, let alone police. I think police are a microcosm of that broader kind of problem. And I think this is particularly pronounced in female-perpetrated cases."

For Alliyah, making sense of years of memories, spent under the control of someone they trusted and loved above all others, is one of the most challenging parts of their recovery.

The ABC requested an interview with police investigating Alliyah's case, but the request was denied. The ABC also reached out to the Queensland Education Department and the principals involved in Alliyah's case. All declined to comment on the specifics of their case. Read their responses.