Ever met someone you later learned had done something really bad? **Content warning: thread contains mentions of child abuse**

[user2848502016]

Just asking because a few months ago someone I worked with suddenly stopped coming to work... then we found out he had been found guilty of possessing child porn 😬
He hadn't been working with us for long so didn't know him that well but he just seemed like a nice, slightly boring middle aged man! I know you can't ever tell by looking at someone but it just made me think anyone I know could be doing anything behind closed doors.....

Thread titled edited by MNHQ to add a content warning

This was posted well over an hour ago, and there has been a whole discussion on the subject since then. This is my objection - the same posts are being dragged up repeatedly to make the same points. So instead of the thread the OP intended we end up going round in circles in the ensuing bun fight.

Exactly. I'm surprised people jumped to 'doesn't mean it's true'.

Sorry. It’s not porn. It’s child sexual assault.

This.

It's also not virtue-signalling. Pretty disturbing to call it that.

Worked with someone in Canada 20 years ago, who the legal dept. later found out been the Grand Wizard of the Canadian KKK in the 70s and had been in prison for attempted murder. HR caught a lot of flax for not having checked out the background. Swore he had changed his outlook though.

This thread is so fucking depressing I wish I hadn’t posted on it!

A male friend from many years ago ended up on the front page of our local paper, he had been arrested for looking at indecent pictures/videos of children of the highest category, absolutely sickened me still does when I think the he was probably doing it when I knew him

A have a few brushes with crime.
I worked with a murderer. He served 23 years after a fight where the other lad suffered a smashed skull. My co workers left it a week before telling me. I'm not sure he would be convicted of murder today. Nothing sinister.

A long term friend who stole £250k in an elaborate mortgage fraud in the 1980s (that one has never left her and she can't hold down a job because people out her).

The one that freaks me out is the vicar that married me. He left the parish suddenly. My mother a former copper didn't like him or he her. Turns out he was a paedophile.

My DC is studying to be a forensic psychologist and I don't want to know.

@Fgfgfg But their job was relevant. For me it's like saying hairdressers, nurses etc. No one should judge a person for their job but saying women is too broad a category because he didn't just pick on any woman!

I agree it is helpful to reinforce that sexualised images of children are child abuse, but the word porn itself doesn’t imply consent. In fact by avoiding the term there’s a risk of failing to acknowledge that adult pornography may involve abuse. People are not guilty of wrongthink just because they use the word porn in this context.

This always happens, though. This is a thread with over 350 posts, started last night. Dozens of people have already made the point about terminology but still people are repeating it. Why they don't check first is a mystery.

I think I have read that there is a theory that the vast number of men looking at images of child sexual abuse is because of how easy it is to watch porn now. Many men become addicted and the algorithms lead them to look at worse and worse things to get the same hit. That was mentioned in the wake of the Huw Edwards conviction.

Now, obviously there have always been abusers, but the number of men and boys looking at images of abuse seems to horrifyingly large now, and surely this didn't used to be the case?

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, with no internet, pornography was much more tightly controlled. There were soft porn magazines like Playboy which were sold in newsagents but had to be placed on the top shelf so they were out of the eyeline of children. There were hardcore magazines which were sent through the post in plain brown envelopes. Sometimes the police intercepted these and if they broke the law they could be suppressed. There were sleazy cinemas showing pornographic films in places like Soho which were obviously all well known to the authorities and had to have some sort of licence.

Maybe I'm being naive but the difficulty in getting hold of the worst images must surely have meant that most men wouldn't even have tried, out of laziness if nothing else?

If Mumsnet spearheaded a campaign to try get sites like Pornhub closed down I'd back it.

Another person here who thinks the world would be a far safer place if Pornhub was closed down.

An estimated 500,000 to 850,000 in the UK, shockingly

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/child-sex-offenders-estimate-nca-b1853513.html

Too many to list as it's to do my with my work.
Some have dropped the mask, or perhaps never had one, and look exactly as depraved as they are.
Some seem normal enough but you get a disconcerting feeling once you get talking with them and can sense something off kilter about them.
Others are very charming and pleasant and you would never guess.

Only one I can think of thats not work related is a boy I used to play with as a child. He lived four doors down from me. I remember him as the nicest kid on the street; everybody liked him, so funny and great fun to play with. Nice to everyone.
But I do remember as we got to being 11 or 12ish he was very fixated on boyfriend/girlfriend conversations and would constantly try to bring conversations back around to it. They moved away around this time.
He popped into my head a couple of years ago and I googled him - he has a very unusual first name and relatively uncommon surname. It was such a shock to read he is in prison with a very extensive history of sexual assault with underage girls (teens) and underage abuse images. As far as I could make out his record stretched back to his early teens, only a couple of years after they moved away. He'd served time, come out and immediately began re-offending so he's back in prison again. The judge described him as an adept manipulator who is extremely dangerous to young girls. I felt sick for weeks after reading it. Wish I'd never looked him up and had remained in igornance. He was an only child of older parents who always seemed like really lovely, kind people.

I read this and I wonder if I'm just hard-hearted because I don't think I could even look at someone again if I knew that about them (the murderer who turned his life around I mean).

The only person I know of was someone I worked with briefly. I didn't like him, he was a bit of a know-all, but that was it.

He went to prison for grooming a 13 year old girl who he then tried to get to kill herself before everything came out. This was in cahoots with someone else I believe.

The worst thing was that his mother worked in the same department and didn't find out until the police came in to tell management why he wouldn't be coming back.

He did, actually. One of the reasons the first few victims were women working as prostitutes is probably because they were women who a murderer could easily get hold of. His later victims included several university students (not all killed, fortunately).

I didn’t know him personally - someone very prominent in local politics* - but had disliked him because of certain opinions I’d strongly disagreed with.

So I did feel vindicated to a great extent when he was banged up for possession of child abuse images. A justified case of Schadenfreude here.

*before anyone makes assumptions, he was not a Tory!

I posted on this upthread in answer to that poster. I think there’s a misconception that because someone has dementia their whole memory is affected, which is just not true. Depending on the type of dementia and how it manifests, short term memory may be bad, but long term memory can be largely unaffected. In my own mum’s case she can recall accurately lots of events from years ago, but her short term memory span is only a few minutes before she repeats things. In fact her long term recollection at age 93 is better than mine - especially when it comes to significant events.

I also think there’s a tendency for some dementia sufferers to be seen as inventing stories or telling lies, when in fact they are just trying to cope with a world they can’t relate to in the same way as they used to. The fact is, that without independent corroboration there’s no way to know if that patient had been an SS officer or not - the assumption that it must be a lie comes from not really understanding how dementia works.

This thread is chilling.

Thanks for your criticism and explanation of your experience of one person with dementia. It is very comforting to believe war crimes didn't happen, I'll try that now.

Oh I've just remembered another one, a very creepy teacher of mine at secondary school was, a few years after I left, imprisoned for rape of a 17 year old. I would never have predicted that but looking back he very was obviously mentally unstable and also inappropriate as a matter of course, and its utterly shocking that the school took no action over this. That man should never have been a teacher.

Someone I worked with. After he left our company he murdered his wife

It was a long time ago, from what I remember was an ordinary chap

Similar to others - my first year of teaching, I started with another new teacher. He had year 2. Seemed like a nice normal guy, good teacher. After Easter he didn’t come back, and we were told he had been arrested for possession of child sexual abuse images. It really shook me. We were mates and I had no inkling whatsoever.

Out of interest, did you do anything with this information i.e report it to anyone? As he could have legit been some key missing bit of history that people have been searching for for 80 years.