CXF not correctly escaping >

We have a string containing > (literally > not >) and we are trying to return it in a response but it is getting converted into >. I would have thought if any escaping occurred it would have possibly converted it to > and then back to >

We were using encoding of UTF-8. We did notice that if we were using ISO-8859-1 this would occur so we aren't sure if somewhere within its processing it may be defaulting to ISO-8859-1 and then passing it back up.

using apache CXF 2.5.1