My father viewed thousands of child abuse images over many years, but rather than accept his guilt, he blames my wife and me for ‘refusing to move on’ because we no longer let him see our young daughters

I learned of the arrest one summer morning a few years ago, when my father rang with the news: “This is very difficult for me to say. I’ve been using the internet to look at pictures of children, and I’ve been arrested. Now, because of your girls, social services are going to need to talk to you …”

In the months and years that have followed, I have learned more about my dad’s crime, but when unpicking what he did and uncovering the truth, rarely do I think back to that morning. So much of what he did is not contained in what he said. The fact that he was downloading, on his home PC, thousands of obscene images and videos of children and storing them on his hard drive. The fact that he had been doing it for many years, during which time my wife and I had lived in my parents’ house and, later, stayed regularly with our young daughters. The fact that one of the charges related to adult pornography so extreme as to be illegal. The comment from the judge that some of the images of children were “probably about as bad as it gets”. The video of a toddler being raped. The suspended prison sentence. The requirement to remain on the sex offenders’ register for 10 years. The report from the probation officer that questioned my dad’s level of “victim empathy”.

But some of what was to follow was contained in those first few remarks on the phone. “Very difficult for me to say,” he said. His thoughts did not seem to be on how difficult it was for me to hear. “Using the internet,” he said, to look at “pictures” of children. Layer on layer of minimisation; distancing himself from the abusive acts he was undertaking. In his mind, he was not participating in the child abuse process. He was not abusing children. He was merely looking at pictures, and not even actual pictures – he was just using the internet really; using the internet to look at pictures.

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My mum stayed with my father. She said that everyone deserves a second chance. She wanted to be there to help “rehabilitate” him. My wife and I chose a different path. While I am happy to continue to see my father alone, we no longer welcome him into our family life, or let him see our children.

At the sentencing hearing, the judge told him that he created a market for child abuse and that what he did was an act of abuse. He did not grasp this when he first rang me, and I think still neither he nor my mother gets it. The seeds of the attitude he showed in that first phone call – the distancing and the minimisation – have grown and spread over the years, and I can see it in my mum as well. They referred to his suspended sentence as “some sort of community order”. He is only on the sex offenders’ register because that is “procedure”; the judge had no choice. And his lawyer told them that all sorts of upstanding members of society commit these crimes: accountants, solicitors, high-court judges. In his mind, and my mum’s, he is not like those paedophiles you read about in the tabloids; he is more of the respectable high-court judge variety. He has only found himself in this situation because of the rigid formulas set out in the sentencing guidelines.

During the year between my dad’s arrest and sentencing, my parents lived in a state of purgatory. Was he going to jail? Would their friends find out? Would it be in the papers? Would he be targeted? Other than telling no one outside the immediate family, and putting pressure on my sister and me to do the same, there was not much they could do but wait. Once the criminal proceedings had run their course, however, my dad told me that he and my mum wanted to “normalise relations on all levels”. They wanted my dad to be welcomed back into our family home, and reintroduced to our children. My wife and I said no. We did not want to “normalise relations”. Our relationship with my dad was not normal, nor could it ever be again, but we felt as if we were being pressured into acting as if none of this had ever happened.

His apologies and admissions of responsibility feel to me as if they come from behind a glaze of arrogance

My father attended a course for people who had been caught viewing child abuse photographs, and my mum did a similar course for spouses of offenders. She said that before going on the course she “would have reacted like you have”. She used to think “people who did this were monsters”. But now, she says, she understands that it is just “something that gets into someone’s head”, a “dopamine rush”, to which they become addicted. But I find this problematic, this reduction of the crime to a chemical process – purely an addiction to dopamine. Surely it misses the point that it is abnormal to experience a dopamine rush from viewing children being abused in the first place.

They compare our decision to that of other friends and family members who are willing to welcome my dad back into their lives, along with repeated references to how supportive and accepting others have been. We, by contrast, in their words, have not been “prepared to move on”. But the reactions of others are irrelevant to our decision. No one else has the same relationship with my parents as I do and so there is no one with whom an exact comparison can be made. Even if there were, two people can experience a situation in different ways, and both are entitled to have their decisions respected.

I am angry and baffled that so many friends and relations seem to have welcomed him back as if nothing had happened

For a long time after my dad’s arrest, my mum would come to see us, play with our girls, chat and have dinner. But after these visits, she later said, she would cry and feel incredibly low for weeks. Her answer to this has been to stop coming to see us, and to stop calling, and – she has told us – it has worked. She now feels much better, she says.

I am incredibly sad about this. My interpretation is that we are being shut out because we are a reminder of the unpleasant reality. And yet we have not caused this reality. I am concerned about my mum, but it feels as though I am being punished – along with my family, including my mum’s young grandchildren – for the actions of my father. And with it I can feel an unspoken ultimatum: welcome my husband back into the family or I will not see you. Even in breaking the news – in that first phone call – my dad’s choice of words indicated that he saw my family and me as the problem. “Because of your girls, social services are going to need to talk to you.” I remember my anger; I thought: “It is not because of my daughters, it is because of you, and what you have done.” So little has changed in this respect: it is my parents who have not “moved on”.

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My dad and I have talked about what he has done. But every time his apologies and admissions of responsibility feel to me as if they come from behind a glaze of arrogance. It is as if he thinks that the mere act of saying the words should, and will, exonerate him. I think he is angry, and genuinely baffled, that, in my case, it has not. For my part, I am angry and baffled as well: baffled that so many friends and relations seem to have welcomed him back as if nothing had happened, and angry that through no fault of our own we have found ourselves out on a limb, exiled by my mum for somebody else’s crimes.

I know from first-hand experience the emotional manoeuvres, the psychological contortions, and the linguistic sleights of hand a user of child abuse imagery will employ to play down the severity of his crimes. This is why the recent recommendation of chief constable Simon Bailey, the lead on child protection for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, makes me so angry.

Bailey has proposed not prosecuting viewers of child abuse images categorised as the least serious, referring to a lack of resources to deal with the large number of people committing these crimes. My understanding is that even if Bailey’s recommendations were put into practice, my father’s crimes would still have been serious enough to warrant prosecution. Nevertheless, the message Bailey is sending out plays into the hands of the perpetrators, and all those who seek to minimise the seriousness of viewing these images.

Perpetrators only get to hear the frank, unflinching words of a judge when a case is prosecuted, and in my opinion it was crucial that my father heard these words. For people like my father, the last thing we should be doing is strengthening the arsenal of arguments they can use to say that what they were doing was not that bad after all. Shining a light on these dark crimes is, in my opinion, the best way to counter them, and prosecution plays an important part in doing this. Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant.