Should the children of online sex offenders receive more support?

0:00Hi everyone, Neil Patterson here, the Sky News Daily on the way in just a second. We're going to be discussing online sexual offending, not from the point of view of the victim or even the offender, but the offender's child, Stalia. Before we get started, a warning. This episode will contain references to online sexual offending, child abuse imagery, suicide and domestic abuse.

0:32Pretty much everyone understands that the victims of crime need looking after. Counselling, support, even compensation, they all play a role in helping them try and move on. And there's broad acceptance that even the accused need some help too. Not just in terms of a lawyer, or even the rehabilitation they receive after sentencing. They can access advice lines and support groups from the moment the police get involved. But what if you're the child of an offender? Particularly the child of someone convicted of online sexual offences, where jail sentences are not always handed down. Well, as things stand, as you're about to hear, they are pretty much on their own.

1:17Let's bring in our North of England correspondent, Katerina Batozzi, who's been looking at the story. When we think of sexual offending, and you can understand why, Your thoughts immediately go to the victims, perhaps the offenders, not the relatives of the offenders. How did you get started with this? So this is a story we started working on many years ago. I think it was back in 2022, actually. We had a very unusual press release from a police force in Northumberland. And it was the story of the wife of a man who had been arrested for looking and possessing indecent images of children. And it was quite unusual as a police force press release because it wasn't about their success at an arrest.

2:03It wasn't about a conviction. It was just the story of this family and how the family of the offender had been affected by his offending, by the moment of trauma of his arrest and how they felt it was deeply unfair that he, as the offender, got more free automatic support than the wife who was suddenly a single parent. having to navigate this world of criminal justice proceedings and also try and support her children who had now had a father who was a child sex offender and there was nothing for them. And as time has gone on and we've looked at this story more and more, following a report last year, I got an email and it was from a man we're calling John who said, I've been watching your reporting on this and I'd like to speak to you to share my experience and what happened to my family.

3:06And this is all to do with the relationship between John and his daughter, Ava. Both of those are names we have given them and we'll be hearing from them throughout the course of the podcast, voiced by actors. Just tell me about the two of them. At the time that Ava found out what her father had been doing, she was 13, her parents were separated. They were really young and she had an even younger brother. She and her brother were living with their mum. The mum was separated from John. Ava talks about coming back from her brother's birthday party at Pizza Hut. And there's something about that detail, being in the back of a car on your way back from Pizza Hut, from your brother's birthday, that just gets me because it's like that could be any child.

3:47Any of us. Any of us. And suddenly her mum gets a call and Ava overhears that her dad's been arrested and she doesn't know why. She's literally sitting in the back of the car. Mum's been called by? By the police. Because in these cases, obviously the police need to inform the guardian of any children who could be in close proximity of someone who's suspected of a child's sexual offence. Because obviously there's that initial safeguarding concern. In this case, John's offences were internet offences. There were no contact offences. But Ava, in that instance, suddenly finds out her dad's been arrested.

4:22She doesn't know what for. she's told you cannot speak or have any contact with your father until we say so. And how is she feeling at this stage? She's a 13 year old girl. She just doesn't have the emotional maturity to understand what was going on in that moment. And she talks about, she says she was in the back of the car and she said, you know, and I could hear he'd been arrested. And she was like, I wonder if he's been caught speeding and he's going to get in trouble. and then fast forward to six weeks later she's finally able to have contact with her dad and then he tells her what he's done and she said her world just crumbled around her.

5:00Okay let's be absolutely clear, what did he do? So John said he started looking at indecent images of children in 2013 and he was really frank and you know it was, these are difficult interviews to do and he was frank enough to be in that room and we asked him those direct questions. So he said he'd been looking at these images and videos since 2013. He'd been doing it at home on his laptop and by the time of his arrest, which was several years after he'd started doing this, he had a thousand indecent images and videos on his devices. Of what level of seriousness? Some of them were the most serious level, category A, and how he was eventually found, which is how most of the offenders are found in these cases.

5:50One of the images that he downloaded had already been tracked by the National Crime Agency. So they were able to say, we can see this image which is pinged up on our system, has been downloaded by this IP address, sent it to the local police force, and he was arrested off the back of that. It was the way that my brain was wired up. I'm not proud of it, but it just spirals and spirals and spirals and you can't stop. And unfortunately, the thing that stops you is when you get the knock on the door and your whole life just changes in an instant, you know. Did he provide any explanation for why over a number of years he acquired thousands of child abuse images?

6:32First off, he said he enjoyed it. He enjoyed looking at these images. He said they were very easy to find. he would be on chat sites where people would share them openly and he said for him it almost became like a drug you would go back to it day after day after day oh is there something i've not seen yet what's this going to show me he said he enjoyed it he found it compelling he got a sexual kick out of it he spoke a bit about his childhood although at the time he said he didn't think what he was doing was wrong he said that counseling he's received subsequently has helped him understand that A, there are very clear victims, even if it's not a contact offence, that the children in these images of victims are being exploited.

7:13It is organised crime. And he also said he had to come to terms with the fact that he was abused as a child, changed his perception of what was happening in these images. What was that immediate 24 hours like for you after your arrest? I wanted to kill myself. It was the only way I could see out of the situation because your mind kind of runs into overtime Then i'm thinking about my daughter my son. How's it going to affect them? Everybody else as well really and then I started thinking i'm better off just killing myself Then you start thinking again about these people that it's going to affect Because you're at such a low ebb you you just Can't see any other way to get through it.

8:00You're all on your own you're in a hell of a lot of trouble. It's just that there's no light at the end of the tunnel in that first 24 hours. Do you feel sorry for what you did? I'm sorry to my family. And I'm sorry to my friends. I'm sorry to society in general. And I think more than anything, I'm sorry to the children that were in the images and the videos that I saw. And just me being sorry is not going to change what's going on. It's not something I turn the clock back. It's done now. and all I can try and do is move on with my life now and deal with whatever gets thrown at me in the course of that and just try and be a better person.

8:37I just can't believe... I don't know why I didn't even think about the effect it had on my daughter. It's difficult stuff to talk about. Yeah. And this story, I think everyone involved in it, John in particular, knew that people would watch this interview and be disgusted by what he did. His own daughter told us she was repulsed. Tell me more about how she felt because, of course, there were the weeks where she knew that her father was being investigated by the police, but she did not know for what. And then comes the moment when she discovers. She said that sense of her world crumbling around her.

9:11She said she was incredibly embarrassed. She said she was scared that people would find out what her dad had done. And she felt she couldn't tell anyone about it. She said she thought she was the only person who'd had a parent that had done something like this. I mean, that couldn't be further from the truth. I mean, just look at the statistics in terms of the numbers of rest for this offence. It's on average, what, 850 a month in England and Wales. So she's far from alone, but that's how she felt. she said that in those early weeks we were sort of told that social services might come and speak to us but they never did and nothing came from that and she said I was just in school every day crying hysterically but not feeling like I couldn't tell anyone why for a very very long time there was a point in my life where I just didn't want to 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 I genuinely felt like the only person in the world that was going through it because I didn't know anyone else whose parents had done something like that Now of course Ava is destroyed by this and you can understand it and I'm certainly not expressing any sympathy for John but there can't have been relief on his part when he was arrested presumably there is a ton of psychological pressure on him at that point.

10:37Was he similarly left alone? No. In John's case, as is in the case of all the families we've spoken to over several years who were arrested for this offence, at the police station, John was given a pile of leaflets. These are numbers you can call and get help. And John describes that 24 hours after his arrest as hell. You know, he talks about, it was a sort of a moment of he gets there, he says, I knew what they were going to ask me. I told them what they would find and they found it. And he says that first 24 hours was hell and he wanted to kill himself. And he went so far as to take steps to do that.

11:15And he said at the police station he'd been given leaflets and it was just in that 24 hours when he's planning to take his own life, he took that leaflet, he rang the number and he said that call saved his life. And it was free. It was a free call with an organisation that deals specifically with people arrested for this offence. And he says it's the best call in all the intervening years that he's ever made. And all the while, Ava is floundering around. I mean, how did she respond psychologically, behaviourally to her dad's conviction? She had suicidal thoughts. she said for very many years she describes it as being very very dark she said she didn't ever see it as getting better and she didn't want to exist she started using class a drugs as an escape remember she's 13 going 14 at this time and she used those for many years because she said it was the only way she could escape from this feeling of shame, fear and isolation.

12:25So there is just no help out there. There's no free help. No free help. So you can get help. If you can pay for it, it's like lots of things. And when it comes to mental health services, if you can pay for services, you can get help. There's nothing free. Is there this sort of assistance provided by, presumably the government department would be Ministry of Justice on this? Is there government assistance for the not victims, but the, I suppose you could even call them secondary victims of this crime, people like Ava in other areas of crime? So if you were a child within a domestic abuse household, if you hadn't been a direct victim of violence in that household, under changes to the Domestic Abuse Act, you could receive support.

13:13So what would happen if you were a child within a domestic abuse setting is that you would be given information about what was happening to your parent along the process of the criminal justice proceedings. So your parent's going to court. This is what's going to happen. This is when you can see them. You'd be given counselling, a therapeutic intervention, and your school would be immediately told that something is happening at home. So there'd be that kind of wraparound care. so that does exist it's not unheard of for these victims indirect or secondary victims to have that level of support legally defined in law automatic statutory guaranteed support that is what charities and professionals that work with families and children of sex offenders online child sex offenders this that is what they want to happen in the case of these children but they say we're just nowhere near it because they get the same response that we did from the Ministry of Justice, which is there isn't enough adequate free support out there.

14:18But when you start actually looking at the lists of where they say that support is, it's just not true. Well, I had a look and I'm looking for charities working with specifically under 18s in the situation that Ava found herself in. I couldn't find any. It's because it doesn't exist. Why doesn't it exist? Because the charitable sector, when you find circumstances like this, where there is a gap in provision, usually it is the first sector to leap into action and plug that gap. Why not here? I think it's a question of resources. We know that there are a limited number of charities that work with parents or the family members, the over 18 family members.

14:58but when it comes to providing services for under 18s I think in terms of financing it's actually more expensive because there's more layers of safeguarding that have to come on and also there's an issue of no one's really sat down and looked at how many children need support because if you're a charity you're trying to get funding for a new service you have to say this is how many children there are this is the harm that they have received this is the support that they need give us money to do it You mentioned, what was it, how many cases a month? So there's 850 arrests in England and Wales every month.

15:32And the majority of those will have families? More so than any other type of offence, yeah. So if you're arrested for this offence, you are more likely than any other type of offence to have a family, including children. You say this is perhaps a question of resources. I'm going to retort and say I wonder whether it's a question of priorities, that actually, when people are looking at the state of the judicial system right now, when they're looking at criminal justice in this country, you know, helping out the relatives of criminals is not close to the top of anyone's list of priorities. I think it's a tough sell in the sense of, and I don't say that flippantly, I mean it in the sense of, if you are a politician and you're trying to lobby for more funding for victims and you've got a list of, okay, is this, is this, and who is more deserving of support?

16:23and this is I think what people sometimes refer to as like a hierarchy of harm. We're in this sort of position where it sometimes feels like you're pitting victims against each other and that's a really uncomfortable place to be in but it's also what charities we've spoken to find very frustrating. It's incredibly short-sighted because just take the case of Ava. early intervention in terms of counselling for children doesn't necessarily have to be that expensive say there's a charity that knows what it's doing it's providing a counselling session I think someone gave me an estimate it was about 120 pounds if that child doesn't get that support and then they're having to find services via GP via specialised mental health services that's going to cost far much more what if that child as we have found becomes a greater risk of offending themselves, which we know is the case, that's going to cost far more in the long run.

17:22Isn't it the characterisation of these people, including Ava in this number, as victims? Isn't that the problem? There's just one pot of money to deal with victims. So if you are starting to use that money to assist with the relatives of the people who've committed the crime, I mean, that just means there is less for the victims of the crime. We already, under the victims bill, recognise relatives of direct victims. So I think it's very hard if you were someone like Ava to say, OK, well, why is the sister of that victim classified as a secondary victim under law? Whereas I'm here, I've experienced this.

18:04Some police forces would call Ava an indirect or secondary victim. And yet I'm seen as a different. Why is the harm I've experienced not as much as the harm of that person? Well, can't I look at it the other way? Why should we be more concerned about the relatives of people who've been involved in online sexual offending compared to the relative of someone who is a serial burglar, a serial killer? Well, the difference is that those relatives will be getting more statutory support because a serial burglar or a serial murderer, you would expect, would be in prison from the point of their arrest.

18:42Whereas online child sex offenders will the vast, vast majority of times be released on bail and then go through a justice process which can take on average about 18 months for this offence. And now very, very rarely ends with a custodial sentence. So there are services which provide support to children and families whose loved one has gone to prison. But in this case, when there is no custodial sentence, these children are just falling through that gap. What's Eva's relationship with her dad like now? Difficult. She said, my dad was my hero. and that just collapsed in one phone call because of his actions.

19:30They had never actually spoken about his offending until they spoke to us for this report. They had kept contact. They had seen each other, but I think it was a case of John wanted to sort of move on and not talk about it, and Ava felt she couldn't talk about it with her father. so they have now spoken a bit about it and I think that just sort of speaks to this feeling of children like Ava feeling like they're so alone in this that they can't even speak to the person that's responsible for causing all this harm in the first place. I suspect she has dwelt on it since it happened. I mean does she have any advice for kids of that age finding themselves in a similar position?

20:18You've just reminded me of this moment in the interview where she had been so unbelievably stoic and brave throughout the whole time we were speaking. And then I asked her effectively that question kind of at the end of our interview, like what would you say to someone who today will have had the same experience that you had? And she absolutely dissolved into tears. And I was like, we've talked about such heavy stuff. Why is this the question that's made you cry? and she said, I just wish I had heard someone tell me this when I needed to hear it. And she just said, I just want, I would tell you just, you know, things will get better.

21:02It won't always be so bad. Thanks, Katerina. And if you've been affected by anything we've been discussing today, the Samaritans are available 24-7. Just call 116 123 or email joe. That's joe at samaritans.org. The Sky News Daily is back again tomorrow.