ON THE COVER Shock discovery: My husband was a paedophile

One woman shares her heartbreaking story

It was a Friday morning in summer and I was getting ready for work when the doorbell rang. ‘How odd that someone should turn up this early,’ I thought. It was only 7am. Next thing I knew, the house was overrun with police officers. From the window, I could see two police cars parked on the driveway of our house in the Midlands, which I shared with my husband of 25 years – the loving father of our two grown-up daughters, who were both away at university.

I had no idea what was going on, not even when my husband and a female police officer entered our bedroom where, moments earlier, I’d been applying make-up before heading to the secondary school where I worked as a teacher. My husband was a secondary school teacher, too, but everything was about to come crashing down.

‘Police are searching the house and are going to arrest me for viewing indecent images,’ he told me bluntly.

I was thrown into total confusion. This was the man I loved. How could this be happening?

I’m not alone in having been through this. The national Stop It Now! helpline offers support to people worried about their own or someone else’s sexual thoughts and conduct towards children and young people. The pandemic has contributed to an increase in calls – between June and August last year, the helpline was contacted by 47% per cent more people compared with the three months of the first lockdown.

With family and friends spending more time together, the warning signs had seemingly become more apparent. But it had never occurred to me that my own husband could have gone down this path.

We had met in the early 1990s and quickly realised how much we had in common. By 1992, we were married, and started a family together two years later.

When our daughters grew up and left home, we were looking forward to more freedom, and hoped to travel. Our marriage was pretty good – or so I believed.

I’m not saying that things were perfect. My husband had a history of depression, which had come and gone over the years. Looking back, there were some red flags – but nothing that could have alerted me to the truth.

He was having difficulty sleeping and would regularly stay up late at his computer downstairs. He said he was looking at forums about the things he was interested in, which made sense, as he’d always been quite obsessive about extreme exercising, dieting and spectator sports.

LATE-NIGHT ACTIVITY

I would go to bed and leave him there, and often he’d never make it upstairs. He’d fall asleep on the sofa, where I’d find him fully clothed in the morning.

He told me he was anxious about work and job security. I could see it was getting him down, so I encouraged him to seek help. I later learnt he’d been on the verge of confessing his actions to the GP, but he’d ducked out, uncomfortable with disclosing something so troubling

‘LOOKING BACK, THERE WERE SOME RED FLAGS’

to the young locum who saw him.

Innocently, I had warned him to be careful online. ‘Take care you don’t stumble across something you wish you hadn’t found,’ I said. He looked me in the eye and replied, ‘I wouldn’t do anything illegal that could put my career or our marriage in jeopardy.’

Except he already had and now police were swarming all over my house, seizing all our electronic devices and placing them in evidence bags.

My husband and I were escorted downstairs to the living room. We weren’t allowed to speak to each other in private. He was shaking as I asked him, ‘Is this true?’ He just kept repeating, ‘I am not a paedophile.’

Initially, I believed him. I thought someone must have set him up – perhaps a malicious former pupil.

‘This is the sort of crime that breaks up families,’ the investigating officer said before they took him in for questioning, leaving me at home, alone and confused.

CONFRONTING THE TRUTH

I heard nothing for hours, so eventually I phoned the station and was asked to come and collect my husband at 8pm.

He was brought out from an interview room looking chastened, exhausted and sweaty. For the first time since his arrest, I was able to speak to him alone. And that’s when he confessed. ‘I’m a porn addict,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking at porn for the last 10 years. For the last two, I’ve been viewing indecent images.’ Of children.

I had no words at first; I just let out a scream. I had to get out of that cell-like room, away from its bare, breeze-block wall and plastic chairs. It was all I could do to drive us both home safely. That night, we talked. ‘You’ve betrayed us,’ I said. ‘You’ve been lying to us all.’

He told me how depressed he’d been and how sorry he was. When I phoned my sister the next morning, she advised me to leave the house, for the sake of my teaching career. She sent a friend to collect me and take me in for a week.

Sitting in the passenger seat of this woman’s car, I stared out of the window. Nothing felt real. I saw my neighbours standing around, wondering what was going on. I feared they’d seen the police descending on our home the day before. I felt dissociated from the world, and totally numbed.

The following week, I saw a solicitor to set in motion my divorce. Some women choose to stay with their partners after they’ve been caught, but I could never have rebuilt a trusting and equal relationship with mine after our marriage was traduced.

More pressingly, I had to tell my daughters. This was as awful as you’d imagine. My older daughter was tearful, shocked and full of questions. Her younger sister folded in on herself and couldn’t cope at all.

There was a long wait before my husband’s case came to the Crown Court. He was found to have viewed a large number of images, many in the highest category of offending. He was handed a community sentence, however, went into therapy and was placed on the sex offenders register.

I had tried to go back to work, but lasted only a fortnight. I was bursting into tears all the time and struggling to focus. Back at home on my own (my husband had moved into a camper van), I was living in constant fear of a vigilante attack. I felt scared and alone.

Stop It Now! was a total godsend. Through the helpline, I spoke to counsellors and found reassurance. I moved away and remarried, left teaching and found another job.

Four years on, the wounds have largely healed. My ex-husband and I have little contact these days. One of his family disowned him, our daughters never did. I hope if any good comes from telling my story, it’s that others will seek the help they need before it becomes too late.

‘IT WAS ALL I COULD DO TO DRIVE US HOME SAFELY’