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But lets set those aside, as it's not really possible to ascertain the incidence of molestation by males and females by looking solely at victims, which was my point in the first place. Lets look at actual offender rates.
According to the USDOJ in 2002,(table 38) 96.3% of sexual assaults in the United States were committed by males.
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A couple points:
For clarification: all the statistics in that report are based soley on victims. This is the BOJ Crime Victimization Survey, which is a survey of victims, not offenders. This in no way reports any "actual offender rates" of any kind, since there is no time frame in the questions and it does not identify or count offender individuals.
In my experience, people's attitudes/generalizations/preconceptions about sexual abuse vary quite a lot from place to place. Because of this variation, and because very few people are aware of this nationwide BOJ survey, I believe that most people's preconceptions wrt this subject are based less on statistics of this kind than on more complex and variable social experience and cultural habits.
In my current mixed neighborhood there is a predominance of cultural backgrounds in which fathers are very physical with their children, show a lot of affection, are more likely to carry them than mothers. When I take my daughter to the park there are always lots of dads there interacting and playing, and I don't feel uncomfortable also playing with whoever my daughter is playing with. This is a mixed neighborhood in South Miami, where there are lots of people with Mexican/Cuban/Haitian background, fairly strongly religious, mostly Catholic and mostly moderately conservative to liberal.
But there is a lot of variation within the U.S. When I was living in Eugene Oregon, in a very liberal, non-religious neighborhood, I would say that there was often almost borderline paranoia about men interacting with children in parks, as if every man was already assumed guilty. There seemed to be an unwritten rule that if you were male, you interacted with your own child only, whereas women were freer in general. I don't know why this particular neighborhood was like that, and it might not have anything to do with conservative/liberal or religious/non-religious; it might have just been chance variation. But I do think cultural background and caregiving habits in general are quite important, and probably more important than nationwide statistics in determining an individual's (largely unconscious) preconceptions.