What does MN think of how this turned out? (TW)

[PhantomSmoke]

We had an ordinary marriage. Then I found out my husband had been viewing images of child abuse

I’m a bit shocked, tbh…

No sympathy for her, if this was my DH, he'd be lucky I didn't kill him myself let alone let him step anywhere near our front door or our children.

He's a paedophile, no ifs or buts. Disgusting. He's vile.

Maybe you're right but that was the only conclusion I could come to with the angle that The Guardian went with. Alot of times, PR and journalism go hand in hand. I assume that organisation had reached out to The Guardian and then case studies were sought.

I'm not sure I believe rehabilitation is possible myself, I was just trying to make sense of the empathetic angle of the story.

Is shame a deterrent to make him stop? Or just be more careful and secretive? We only know what he has freely disclosed publicly in the article. For all we and his wife knows, there was a lot more depravity that wasn't exposed/traced to him.

I wasn't advocating for rehabilitation, I was just trying to make sense of the sympathetic angle of the story

I don't agree with the tone set by the Guardian but I do think it is educational to try and understand why in particular the wife stayed with her husband in these appalling circumstances .

I think that in e.g an affair suggestion ( which I am not directly comparing this to ) the initial instinct is to try and preserve the family unit and the wife / non cheating partner may feel some guilt and not want to be the one that "broke "up the family . This however is minimising behaviour and does not fully recognise that the cheating partner is the one that caused the breakup not them .

This situation I cannot get my head around . The wife seems to be placing the preservation of their family unit above the safety of her own child .

This is particularly the case as she is fully aware that she will never be able to 100 per cent protect her child from CSA by the father . CSA is one of the , if not the worse crimes there are . No matter what safeguards are put in place , there is no denying that there is an increased risk to their son . Given the severity of the crime he committed , I do not understand why she is prepared to accept this increased risk .

It is especially galling as she is / was an experienced safeguarding lead so would not be ignorant of this subject .

I think she could have tried to understand why he might have committed these crimes but still not placed their child at increased risk .

They both seem to place this needs to preserve their family unit above all else . He does mention the re- traumatisation of the children but neither he nor his wife put much thought into the real victims here and instead they concentrate on the impact to them .

What about their child , I am not religious but pray that he will be kept safe . If he is , I think he would still question why his mother chose to stay with his father . If he isn't kept safe , he will be further traumatised by the fact that his mother knew the risks but still stayed and by doing so was at the very least accepting the risk to him .

I am also surprised that both sets of their parents have accepted the situation here . As detailed , some of the images were the highest category and the youngest victim was 6 years old . As others have said her parents may not have agreed with the family staying together but felt it would be safer to be actively involved and be able to provide at least some ( limited ) protection .

I wonder if the woman is staying with her paedophile husband purely because she knows the boy would be having unsupervised contact with his father if they split up. I don't think she is right to stay with him, let's be clear, but I can understand her thinking.

He, however, is an unmitigated piece of shit, and frankly it's a shame he didn't end it in that hotel room. The tone of this article is very odd. I really hope we aren't going to start seeing more articles about MAPs...

I feel very uncomfortable with the article, for all the reasons previous posters have mentioned.

I've worked with child protection police officers. They are very, very carefully selected and even then only allowed a limited time in the role, because hearing accounts of child CSA and looking at these images is traumatic and damaging to (and I will use the word) normal people.

"Matthew" sought these things out, again and again and again. It was no mistake. As for "bad decisions", would that wash with robbery? I think the sentences reflect property is valued over human suffering. His minimisation is I'm sorry to say very typical of paedophiles who especially in "no contact" crimes centre themselves as hapless victims, ignoring the fact those pictures show real children being abused.

Would he be allowed unsupervised access ?
Although even living together how do.you guarantee he's never alone with his child

About why wives choose to stay...

In the case of my former acquaintance who decided to stay with, and marry, her paedophile partner... in her case, her partner was significantly older than her (got together when he was 30 and she 21) and had always spoken very patronisingly to her. [I never liked him and always said so.] I'm convinced that he managed to persuade her of all the similar gumph that Matthew says; in fact I'm sure of it from some things I'd heard afterwards and also from court reports.

He claimed it was compulsive behaviour blamed on his neurodiversity (!) and also blamed stress and ptsd from his very ordinary desk job. She was so used to adopting all his opinions on everything, that there was nothing to do but accept his explanations.

If you asked her now, I'm sure she'd say similar to Emily, that her husband is a recovered addict, that therapy saved his life, etc etc. This is a man who had category A images of babies.

Last I heard (soon after everything became known) they were TTC.

He’d stumbled across the images and was repulsed, but had been drawn back

'Stumbled across', aye. About as believable as the men who turn up at A&E having innocently 'slipped and fallen' onto various objects now wedged up their anal passages.

Imagine living with a security camera in your child's bedroom to keep an eye on your paedophile husband. It beggars belief.

More likely he's convinced her that because the images were of little girls, there's nothing to worry about with little boys.

He's more worried about a future DSL at his kid's school finding out and then knowing that they're having pool parties and the like as though she wasn't harbouring a bloke who gets off on children being raped (and is probably thinking about them every time he makes do with sex with her).

@NeverDropYourMooncup 🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢

@PonyPatter44 I had that thought but wondered was I being a paranoid weirdo, was the tone of the article testing feed back so we can open the floodgates to more MAP bullshit and a more understand approach.

I do believe help to peadophiles who've never intentionally viewed csai or in anyway abused a child should be move available but I think going down the route of being too understanding about a predator is a slippery slope.

There are already barely any deterrents in place, piss poor sentences and in cases even men with 1000s of cat A images are still not getting incarcerated. It's all bollocks.

Aside from everything else in this disgusting article, I can't imagine the impact on their child of spending his childhood under surveillance in his own home, in a futile attempt to, what? Protect him from abuse, as if he couldn't be abused anywhere else in the house?

As for the mother, I think she's fucking repugnant. And the fact she's obviously sleeping with her husband again but too ashamed to admit it (whilst he has no qualms about discussing their sex life).

Another woman putting cock before her kids. I agree with a PP, if they were working class that child would be under services with a view to having him removed. Scum, the pair of them.

And as a PP mentioned, the CCTV material itself is a problem. But even if he’s not interested for himself, it could be used in a trade with other paedos for material of other children.

I think it’s likely the Guardian think they’re doing some kind of good deed by reaching out to Guardian readers who are involved in viewing CSA material and trying to get them to get help, in a roundabout way, but that’s under a false illusion that you can actually cure men who get off on watching the most horrific acts being done to children. I think that’s wishful magical thinking. These men need serious punishments, which they aren’t getting.

I mean wtf is going on with how lenient these men are treated?

In the end he got a three-year community order and 100 hours of community service, and was put on the sex offender register for five years.

He is minimising it, as though he's been convicted for just watching normal porn and being on the dark Web. He didn't once acknowledge the child sexual abuse. They are both disgusting. And I think she is just as bad as him. It's even worse that they have a child and she's just hoping that that child is safe.

I think this article, the fact that the guardian have published it, and the implications for the future of child protection and paedophiles is up there with the worst things I have read on mumsnet.

The Guardian has been out of step with the average Briton's opinion for a very long time. Don't worry, this is not the direction of motion for the country generally. Paedophiles are still pretty much universally despised by ordinary people.

It's the Guardian being outrageously pro-creep as usual

That about sums it up really…

I started to watch that one but I couldn't stomach it. He's made a couple I think.

I think in the jail they used aversion therapy and some men did opt for chemical castration (but how does this work long term/when they are released)?

I think men watching child abuse is much. much more common than we know or want to think. I have read articles where the police units tasked with this say there is so much its out of control - they can't police it all it is so huge. There's a high turn over of staff as the things they have to see are so soul destroyingly awful.

How could we stop it? Stop the objectification of women and children?

What's MAP? No I don't want to Google it!

@Alltheyearround it stands for 'minor attracted person' - I think it is a term preferred by paedophiles because they feel it it sort of [but doesn't really of course] "sanitises" what they are/do.

I hadn’t heard of MAP. Another code phrase I’ve seen is ‘age gap kink’, probably so they can yell at you not to ‘kink shame’ them. Funny how the ‘kink’ always skews into a particular age range though…it’s not generally the grannies they’re after.

The article was really disturbing. Especially the part where she describes them as both secondary victims, no your husband is a criminal.

How on earth is she going to explain the video monitoring to their son ? Or are they filming him in secret, which is just a massive violation of his privacy, especially as he gets older.

Lastly, absolutely no remorse for the victims from the husband.

This is probably a minor detail, but it’s bothering me that I don’t understand.

So, seven CSA images were found on the family’s devices. Is anyone else thinking that this total doesn’t seem to match up to Matthew’s own description of his offending?
I thought that all images viewed would be stored forever on the device used and even if an offender tried to delete them, they could still be recovered by experts.

I have no ideas but is it what they can prove ?
I dont doubt there were many.other offences but can they prove them?