Ava was heading home from Pizza Hut when she found out her dad had been arrested.
Warning: This article includes references to indecent images of children and suicide that some readers may find distressing
It had been “a really good evening” celebrating her brother’s birthday.
Ava (not her real name) was just 13, and her brother several years younger. Their parents had divorced a few years earlier and they were living with their mum.
Suddenly Ava’s mum, sitting in the front car seat next to her new boyfriend, got a phone call.
“She answered the phone and it was the police,” Ava remembers.
“I think they realised that there were children in the back so they kept it very minimal, but I could hear them speaking.”
“I was so scared,” she says, as she overheard about his arrest.
“I was panicking loads because my dad actually used to do a lot of speeding and I was like: ‘Oh no, he’s been caught speeding, he’s going to get in trouble.'”
But Ava wasn’t told what had really happened until many weeks later, even though things changed immediately.
“We found out that we weren’t going to be able to see our dad for, well we didn’t know how long for – but we weren’t allowed to see him, or even speak to him. I couldn’t text him or anything. I was just wondering what was going on, I didn’t know. I didn’t understand.”
Ava’s dad, John, had been arrested for looking at indecent images of children online.
We hear this first-hand from John (not his real name), who we interviewed separately from Ava. What he told us about his offending was, of course, difficult to hear.
His offending went on for several years, looking at indecent images and videos of young children.
His own daughter told us she was “repulsed” by what he did.
But John wanted to speak to us, frankly and honestly.
He told us he was “sorry” for what he had done, and that it was only after counselling that he realised the “actual impact on the people in the images” of his crime.
By sharing his story, he hopes to try to stop other people doing what he did and raise awareness about the impact this type of offence has – on everyone involved, including his unsuspecting family.
John tells us he’d been looking at indecent images and videos of children since 2013.
“I was on the internet, on a chat site,” he says. “Someone sent a link. I opened it, and that’s what it was.
“Then more people started sending links and it just kind of gathered pace from there really. It kind of sucks you in without you even realising it. And it becomes almost like a drug, to, you know, get your next fix.”
John says he got a “sexual kick” from looking at the images and claims “at the time, when you’re doing it, you don’t realise how wrong it is”.
‘I told them exactly what they would find’
At the point of his arrest, John had around 1,000 indecent images and videos of children on his laptop – some were Category A, the most severe.
Referencing the counselling that he since received, John says he believes the abuse he received as a child affected the way he initially perceived what he was doing.
“I had this thing in my mind,” he says, “that the kids in these were enjoying it.”
“Unfortunately, [that] was the way that my brain was wired up” and “I’m not proud of it”, he adds.
John had been offending for several years when he downloaded an image that had been electronically tagged by security agencies. It flagged his location to police.
John was arrested at his work and says he “straight away just admitted everything”.
“I told them exactly what they would find, and they found it.”
The police bailed John – and he describes the next 24 hours as “hell”.
“I wanted to kill myself,” he remembers. “It was the only way I could see out of the situation. I was just thinking about my family, my daughter and my son, how is it going to affect them?”
But John says the police had given information about a free counselling service, a helpline, which he called that day.
“It stopped me in my tracks and probably saved my life.”
‘My world was crumbling around me’
Six weeks later, John was allowed to make contact with Ava.
By this point she describes how she was “hysterically crying” at school every day, not knowing what had happened to her dad.
But once he told her what he’d done, things got even worse.
“When I found out, it genuinely felt like my world was crumbling around me,” Ava says.
“I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone. I was so embarrassed of what people might think of me. It sounds so silly, but I was so scared that people would think that I would end up like him as well, which would never happen.
“It felt like this really big secret that I just had to hold in.”
“I genuinely felt like the only person that was going through something like this,” Ava says.
She didn’t know it then, but her father also had a sense of fear and shame.
“You can’t share what you’ve done with anybody because people can get killed for things like that,” he says.
“It would take a very, very brave man to go around telling people something like that.”
And as for his kids?
“They wouldn’t want to tell anybody, would they?” he says.
For her, Ava says “for a very, very long time” things were “incredibly dark”.
“I turned to drugs,” she says. “I was doing lots of like Class As and Bs and going out all the time, I guess because it just was a form of escape.
“There was a point in my life where I just I didn’t believe it was going to get better. I really just didn’t want to exist. I was just like, if this is what life is like then why am I here?”
‘The trauma is huge for those children’
Ava felt alone, but research shows this is happening to thousands of British children every year.
Whereas suspects like John are able to access free services, such as counselling, there are no similar automatic services for their children – unless families can pay.
Professor Rachel Armitage, a criminology expert, set up a Leeds-based charity called Talking Forward in 2021.
It’s the only free, in-person, peer support group for families of suspected online child sex offenders in England. But it does not have the resources to provide support for under-18s.
“The trauma is huge for those children,” Prof Armitage says.
“We have families that are paying for private therapy for their children and getting in a huge amount of debt to pay for that.”
Prof Armitage says if these children were legally recognised as victims, then if would get them the right level of automatic, free support.
It’s not unheard of for “indirect” or “secondary” victims to be recognised in law.
Currently, the Domestic Abuse Act does that for children in a domestic abuse household, even if the child hasn’t been a direct victim themselves.
In the case of children like Ava, Prof Armitage says it would mean “they would have communication with the parents in terms of what was happening with this offence; they would get the therapeutic intervention and referral to school to let them know that something has happened, which that child needs consideration for”.
Follow our channel and never miss an update
We asked the Ministry of Justice whether children of online child sex offenders could be legally recognised as victims.
“We sympathise with the challenges faced by the unsuspecting families of sex offenders and fund a helpline for prisoners’ families which provides free and confidential support,” a spokesperson said.
But when we spoke with that helpline, and several other charities that the Ministry of Justice said could help, they told us they could only help children with a parent in prison – which for online offences is, nowadays, rarely the outcome.
None of them could help children like Ava, whose dad received a three-year non-custodial sentence, and was put on the sex offenders’ register for five years.
“These children will absolutely fall through the gap,” Prof Armitage says.
“I think there’s some sort of belief that these families are almost not deserving enough,” she says. “That there’s some sort of hierarchy of harms, and that they’re not harmed enough, really.”
‘People try to protect kids from people like me’
Ava says there is simply not enough help – and that feels unfair.
“In some ways we’re kind of forgotten about by the services,” she says. “It’s always about the offender.”
John agrees with his daughter.
Be the first to get Breaking News
Install the Sky News app for free
“I think the children should get more support than the offender because nobody stops and ask them really, do they?” he says.
“Nobody thinks about what they’re going through.”
Although Ava and John now see each other, they have never spoken about the impact that John’s offending had on his daughter.
Ava was happy for us to share with John what she had gone through.
“I never knew it was that bad,” he says. “I understand that this is probably something that will affect her the rest of her life.
“You try to protect your kids, don’t you. People try to protect their kids from people like me.”
Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email [email protected] in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK.
