DADDY’S DARK SECRET
It began with police at Laura’s door. And, as she bravely reveals, it ended with the most horrifying conversation any mother could ever have with her daughters
AS LAURA James rushed to get her two daughters ready for school and herself ready for work, her morning routine was disturbed by a knock at the door.
What happened in the next few seconds would wreck her family’s comfortable middle-class life.
‘ There were four plain- clothes policemen on the doorstep,’ she says.
‘My husband Bill was away from home on a business trip and I immediately feared the worst. I assumed he must have been in a car crash.’
The reality was somewhat different, but still devastating. The detectives told Laura they had a search warrant for the couple’s £500,000 detached home.
Her husband, a successful project manager, had been caught downloading child pornography from the internet and was at that very moment being arrested elsewhere in the country.
As part of a co- ordinated raid to build the case against him, the officers had arrived to gather evidence at the family home.
‘I said: “You have the wrong man — he’s got two daughters. Someone has framed him or hacked into his computer.” I was convinced there had been a mistake and it would all be sorted out.’
A thorough and humiliating search of her home ensued. As well as taking all the computers in the house, the police asked her two girls, the youngest of whom was still at primary school, to hand over their mobile phones.
‘I couldn’t tell the children what was going on,’ says Laura. ‘I made up an excuse that their dad had been involved in some sort of tax problem, and sent them to the neighbour’s. It was awful.’ BUT for Laura, an accountant, it was just the start of a nightmare that endures to this day. Because in the four years since then, she has had to stand helplessly by as everything she cherished was destroyed — her happy marriage, her family’s secure future and her confidence.
How could the man to whom she had been married for 20 years, the father of her children and someone whom she trusted implicitly, have found some sort of warped sexual gratification in downloading depraved images?
But as Laura has learned, there is an epidemic of child pornography.
Last year the NSPCC warned that more than half a million men in the UK may have viewed child sex abuse images on the internet. The charity says that the problem is so big it should be viewed as a ‘social emergency’.
As Laura would discover as she met other women who had found themselves in a similar situation, the stereotype of the ‘dirty old man’ alone in his bedsit just doesn’t hold true any more.
As extreme pornography can be downloaded by anyone at the click of a button, more seemingly ordinary husbands and fathers are being tempted to dabble in mainstream porn before moving on to child porn, tracking down ever more extreme images in the darker regions of the internet.
‘Offenders don’t look like the stereotype,’ says Laura. ‘ It could be the man next door with a wife and children, who sees his offending as completely separate from his family life. It’s impossible to tell. I should know.’
Indeed she should. When the thunderbolt struck, Laura was looking forward to a happy, stable future.
Her daughters were growing up and the hard work she and her husband had put in meant that by then, in their mid-40s, they were financially secure.
‘Our relationship was really good,’ says Laura. ‘I thought we had a good marriage.
‘It sounds bizarre looking back, but I really thought we were in danger of falling into the “smug married” category.
‘I had a good job and Bill was an executive earning a six-figure salary. We had three family holidays a year and were very happy.’
As for the physical side of their relationship, she says that she had no concerns or worries whatsoever.
It is only in retrospect that she can identify any warning signs at all.
‘In the year before his arrest, there was quite a lot of working late on the laptop downstairs,’ she says.
‘I would go to bed earlier and I wasn’t sure what time he came up.
‘I do worry about that with hindsight — but at the time I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought he was under a lot of pressure at work and trying to get on top of his job.
‘I had no idea he was looking at pornography, let alone child pornography.’
So when that knock on the
door came, she was unprepared for what was to follow.
For four hours police searched her house. Laura struggles to control her emotions as she describes how they even looked through photo albums of their family holidays.
At first she was convinced the police had made a mistake, but then the doubts about her husband started to grow.
‘After he was arrested it was a couple of days before Bill called me — and that was the first thing that sowed a seed of doubt in my mind,’ she says.
‘I thought if he was innocent he would have called me sooner.’ When he did call, Bill admitted straight away that he had, indeed, been looking at child pornography. ‘he was full of remorse, really upset, crying a lot. I think he was aware it was serious and he could lose his family,’ she says.
‘he described it as an addiction and said he had been doing it for between six months and a year and very quickly got quite heavily into it.’
It was only much later that Laura discovered how extreme some of those images were.
Under his bail conditions, Bill was not allowed to return home because the children were living there. So it was left to Laura to try to continue with family life while explaining away the absence of her husband.
Worried about the stigma if anyone found out, she was forced to lie to all but her closest friends. ‘I was in complete shock really,’ she says.
‘I just remember not sleeping at all for the first three nights, then going to see my GP and barely being able to put one foot in front of the other. he gave me sleeping pills to tide me over.
‘It was very difficult because I had the children at home and they still needed meals three times a day, clean clothes and homework to be done.
‘ With work, I basically said something had happened in my marriage and my husband had walked out. Most people assumed it was an affair, so I just carried on with that fiction.’
Of course, she had to tell the children the truth.
‘My older daughter understood more about these things from school, but I told the younger one that there are things online that are just deemed so unacceptable it is a criminal offence to look at them and, unfortunately, that was what Dad had been doing.
‘ Their reaction was one of complete bewilderment. They couldn’t understand how he could not see that the images were real children and someone else’s daughters.’
And worse was still to come. The police told her that her children would have to be interviewed by social services in case they had been abused by their father.
‘The police said to me: “have you ever left your daughters alone with him?” And I said: “Of course I have.” I’d had no cause to suspect anything.
‘During the interviews I wasn’t allowed to be in the room with them, which I found very hard.
‘Fortunately, I have a very good relationship with the girls and was sure nothing had happened.
‘ having spoken with social services and the police, they said they were satisfied it had been purely online and had nothing to do with the children.’
In the following months, Laura arranged for Bill, then living with relatives, to see the children, always under supervision.
The girls, she says, wanted to see him. But she continued to struggle to understand why he’d done what he had.
‘his answer was that he saw it as a completely separate part of his life, nothing to do with me or the children,’ she says. ‘But for some reason he was drawn to it. I think it was the thrill of the illicit, of the dark side of things.’
It would emerge that he had been arrested after police discovered he was sharing images with another man whose activities they were monitoring.
Seven months passed before Bill appeared in a magistrates’ court, where he admitted possessing indecent images of children.
Laura did not attend the hearing, but asked a friend to go along, determined to find out the full details of his offending.
The court was told that some of the images he had downloaded were classed as Category A, the most extreme type. They included images of pre-teen children and scenes of violence.
Though Bill was warned that he might receive a custodial sentence, instead he was given a three-year community order.
But while he avoided jail, there was no way back for Laura.
‘ The brutal nature of it all changed it for me. The violence,’ she says. ‘I found the whole thing really hard to process.
‘It became clearer as I learnt more that I could never trust him again — because if these were the kind of things that were filling his head, how would I ever know that he had really stopped?
‘I gradually realised over about six months that we didn’t have a future. The trust had gone.’
The couple were divorced within a year and Bill, who lost his job soon after his arrest, attempted to rebuild his life.
he has a new partner and has found work, albeit on a fraction of his former salary. he continues to have the support of his side of the family, which Laura admits she finds difficult to understand.
‘his family has maintained he is a great dad and would never do anything to harm his children, that this was all online, that no one got hurt,’ she says.
‘They see it as almost like a nervous breakdown, that he was under a lot of pressure and that, of course, it wouldn’t happen again and it didn’t translate into real life.
‘If I put myself in their shoes, I suppose it’s the only palatable version of events there is.’
Laura, meanwhile, has been left to deal with the realities of her husband’s behaviour. As a single parent, it is only because she has a good job that she has been able to keep the family home.
She has also been helped by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a charity dedicated to reducing the risk of children being sexually abused. It offers services to offenders and their families. Laura was given support via their Stop It now! telephone helpline and through face- to- face Inform group courses.
‘ The course put it all into context,’ she says. ‘It was beneficial to see a group of women who are very similar to me to whom this was happening and to see that it is survivable.
‘It helped me to process why he would have risked what he had. We talked about the addictive nature of the material and how someone might start with adult porn, then go seeking more thrills and finding more and more explicit, younger images.
‘It helped to explain how someone arrives at the point where he has effectively gambled and thrown everything away.’
Of course, there will be many more women like Laura.
In the past five years, the number of offences of viewing child sexual abuse images under the Obscene Publications Act recorded by police has more than doubled across the UK, reaching a total of 8,745 in 2015. But experts believe the true scale of offending is far greater.
By bravely speaking out, Laura hopes to highlight this is a problem that can’t simply be ignored — and to show the damage such behaviour can wreak on the innocent members of an offender’s family.
‘It has ripped my life apart,’ she says. ‘It just changed everything. It struck at the heart of what we had created together.
‘The suggestion that the children at the heart of our family might be at risk from their father — it was just too awful.’ Names and some personal details in this article have been changed.
IF YOU have any concerns about child sexual abuse, you can call the Lucy Faithfull Foundation’s confidential and anonymous Stop It Now! helpline on 0808 1000 900. Alternatively, you can access further information on the charity’s Get Help website at get-help.stopitnow.org.uk