found pictures of me on hubby's PC - don't know what to do.

[mummyinbonniescotland]

Tonight I went onto hubby's pc. He works from home as a photographer. He had lots of pictures up. I closed down some of his folders, but as I was closing one down, I saw it was pictures of my privates (I was a bit absent minded so didn't pay much attention to what it was until I'd hit the x button)

So there were pictures of vaginas. I was a bit wtf? Then I caught sight of one of me, smiling, lower half naked, legs akimbo, on my couch, wearing clothes I recognise.

I don't remember ever posing like that or for pictures of my vagina.

Actually I have once, but that was a close up of a boil on my vagina that I wanted to take to my doctor's appointment (it was a recurring boil that was always gone by the time of the appt so dr had asked me to take a pic next time).

It was taken by DH on my phone and he handed it immediately back to me and I deleted it off my phone after the appointment which was that day.

So i have no idea where all these pictures come from. I'm quite a private person, and I'd never pose for pictures unless like I said above to take a picture to my doctor.

I'm confused and digusted right now. My DD could have come across this, or my hubby's colleague who often comes to the house, or my very prudish parents.

I did confront DH who says he has no idea where the pictures came from, he doesn't remember me posing either apart from that dr appt one. He did a search and couldn't find the folder I closed. I wish I hadn't closed it but I wasn't paying much attention til the last second.

He did keep asking me to go and fetch his phone, cos he was running late for an appt with a client but now its going through my head, did he want me gone so he could hide the evidence?

I have come across porn videos before and porn sites in his internet history which he keeps saying is a virus/pop ups etc. I have never really believed him but I kind of let it go I admit.

This is different though. These are pictures of me that he appears to have taken. To perhaps look at in his own time? But I don't remember posing for them and I never would either. Even if I had, I would have expected him to delete them immediately, not leave them on the PC for someone to come across such as DD.

I just feel dirty and disrespected. I don't know what to do. I've been with him for 16 years now, married for 9, he's my best friend and I know he's never been with anyone else - I do know where he is all the time (he works from home, my parents live in the same street, we have mutual friends).

I don't know what to do, please help!

NC for this

So glad you are going to speak with your counsellor OP. You have been so brave speaking to the police too. Sometimes it takes weeks for people to build up the courage to do that.

This isn't going to go away on it's own though and I think it is vital for you to try and recover the lost images. Until then, everything is too vague to really understand what went on.

Saying that, you don't have to take this any further if you don't want to, it would be perfectly reasonable to just say enough is enough and ask him to leave. Personally, I don't see how you could ever recover from something like this. Your own dh has violated you and is showing a complete lack of respect or care by continuing to lie to you.

Where else is there to go, he won't budge, you have to either accept it and forget about it or tell him it's over. Sorry, OP, not much choice at the moment. If you get the images back he might be willing to talk properly I suppose.

OP, dont wait too long before you take his computer to the police if you have in mind taking this further.

You dont want him to "lose" his laptop or drop it in the Thames by accident.

"OP if I was in your situation I would have had his bollocks off!"

One should not joke about this. A man was found without his penis cut off this morning. A terrible thing to happen to a man.

It's clear Mumsnetters dont take female on male violence very seriously judging by the minimising on this thread:

"I don't care that she slapped him - there I said it"

"I've also not commented on how right or wrong anyone is for slapping. Not the issue here and has no bearing on what has happened to the OP"

"FFS the slapping isn't the issue. OK it's not ideal but OP knows that. But she isn't the abuser here"

"OP is not domestically abusing her husband. She slapped him in a moment of rage"

"I am just saying that on the basis of the info the OP has given this is not an ongoing DV situation. She justifiably saw red, and lost control"

''OP if I was in your situation I would have had his balls off"

"Hang on - where the fuck did the OP say she hit him? Fuck me, id have kicked my DP in the balls if i were the OP to be frank"

"zigzag - in this instance you may possibly be confusing situational couple violence with domestic abuse. They have very different underlying motivations"

What the OP did in slapping her husband was over in a second and only the two of them know about it"

"The reason for that is that there's a difference between what is obviously hyperbole, and the reality of male violence against women"

...never mind the very many posts indirectly arguing that bringing up the OP 's violence is a rude diversion, these 2 posts being typical.

"Stop derailing. This is not dv"

"I think you're very brave to stand by your principles, hopefully you can ignore all the posters bickering over other issues on your thread"

...and these are just from the last 2 pages, there were many absolute peaches before that (women can't really hurt men, you know...)

Especially as you just know these same selfsame posters would have been going absolutely berserk in their condemnation if the sexes were reversed, regardless of how justifiable or not it was.

Bunch of complete and utter hypocrites

But it's worse than hypocrisy, as the casual normalisation on here shows that in the minds of many MNers, hitting their (male) partners is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If this thread is anything to go by I suspect female on male domestic violence is massively underestimated.

When will I learn about double negations, of course he was not ^found without his penis cut off", but WITH his penis cut off.

So women cannot react when they are violated? They should just sit like nice little dollies and take it?

I am gobsmacked that some people think one slap is a bigger crime than an act of sexual violation. Some people slap their childrens bottoms. And suddenly because the recipient is a man, it is a worse crime than violating a woman. Thats double standards.

Janey, once again, you are twisting words to suit your agenda. Saying that a slap is not the issue here does not mean it is not an issue at all. Just that the issue is someone making pornographic pictures of their wife. That is the issue. Not what comes after. Make sense? You also can't cry hypocrisy without knowing the person.

And are you really saying that one slap is a DV situation? My mum slapped me when I was about 16, once. Am I still suffering abuse? Or is a female slapping a female ok?

I think by doing this you are actually minimising what true DV is.

Excellently put, Quint.

Totally agree with you Qunintezilla and what BOFtastic said.
There is a MASSIVE biological fact and that is the average man is twice stronger than the average woman. Most men can fight off most women. It does not work the other way around.

Those who go on about men when we talk about domestic violence really minimise the experience of women who fear for their lives and can easily end up dead at the hands of their partner. That is not to even start on the issue of women who suffer sexual assault and rape at the hands of partners. Get a grip no one says it doesn't happen to men but I think you have all been watching too much of coronation street thinking there is a Tyrone on every road, there isn't and there are no statistics to suggest there are.

•Men as victims: Research conducted with male respondents to the Scottish Crime Survey 2000 found that men were less likely to have been repeat victims of domestic assault, less likely to be seriously injured and less likely to report feeling fearful in their own homes. The survey retraced men who were counted as victims in the Scottish Crime Survey and found that a majority of the men who said that they were victims of domestic violence, were also perpetrators of violence (13 of 22). A significant number of the men re-interviewed (13 out of 46) later said they had actually never experienced any form of domestic abuse (Scottish Executive Central Research Unit, 2002).

I could't count on my fingers the number threads I have seen where a one off slap by a man has been more than enough for people to suggest LTB.

Photoshopping/ images without consent is certainly also enough to LTB.

But I don't see the one negates the other.

The OP hasn't sat around like a dolly...she has taken other very sensible action. But one thing she did crossed a line that makes a lot of us uncomfortable.

Unless the op is over 6 foot and a female rugby player with a black belt in karate, I am gonna guess that her husband was not in any immediate physical danger from the slap doled out to him.

Abuse can happen both ways, man to woman and woman to man.

But in this scenario, it is the case of a man who has deliberately and over time, behind ops back, violated her systematically.

Op has had a knee jerk reaction to this and slapped him.

I think some of the people who focus more on this slap than on the real issue, and in fact derail from the issue and as such preventing the op from accessing support, should take a long and hard look at themselves and examine why it is they think that a womans knee jerk reaction is worse than long term violation.

Why not just accept that the slap was wrong and move on to the real issue, which is what op is asking for support about?

OP has been violated, sexually, by her husband, for fuck's sake.

Those of you who are gleefully putting the boot into her for her aggression (oh the irony) have clearly lost sight of this appalling fact.

I hope you get to the truth soon, OP. It's not looking good.

"And are you really saying that one slap is a DV situation?"

So how many times do you have to hit someone before it becomes DV then?

All DV starts with the first strike. And if it's so casually dismissed, as on here, then why not another. And another....after all, it's not the real issue and the ends always justify the means, right?

On the file recovery, this might help, I use their other tools, haven't needed to use this yet:

www.piriform.com/recuva

I'd quite happily chop this blokes cock off and serve him it for lunch.

Lazyjaney, why dont you come back with your dv scenario on a dv thread, when there has been a couple of slaps that are in an abusive context, as opposed to a context where the person who slapped acted in response to being violated?

What is your Agenda?

No seriously of course not (just realised that made me sound entirely nuts ) but if I were OP I would have felt an enormous rage at her husbands vile actions. Her slapping him is nothing in this context. Personally if I were her I would prosecute the arse off him (I bet there is more on his computer and who knows what of) and hopefully he'll do a very short spell in prison where someone else will sexually humiliate and take advantage of him. Yes women are supposed to be demure even in the face of sexual violence and the fact that other women also perpetuate that is the most depressing part of it.

OP - On a practical level, you don't have much time.

If your husband is quite technical, he may well have overwritten the deletion already. While you can usually recover deleted files unless they are hard-wiped, they can be overwritten, and that tends to corrupt the deleted file.

If you want to recover the image, you'll need to do that quickly. You could run a program like those listed above - Recuva is pretty well known. There is no point doing a Windows Restore, because that rolls back operating system errors, but leaves data intact. The instructions do mention this before you start the process.

You could take it to the police, if they'd be willing to look at it, but he'd likely be without his computer for quite some time then, and in reality, it'd probably end your marriage.

You could also take it to a computer specialist, but there are downsides to this, too - namely that you'd need to tell them what you are looking for, as well as knowing that they'd see the images, and the fact that if they did recover something that you did want to inform the police about, the computer specialist would need to be in good-standing because you can bet your bottom dollar that DH's solicitor would try to suggest that they put the images there. There are a few computer places around here that won't recover files for this reason.

Your best bet would be to recover the files yourself, which shouldn't be difficult. Look for hidden files, and run a recovery tool. In all likelihood, if that returns nothing, than you are unlikely to be able to get them back without significant investment.

I don't think you'll be able to move on from this emotionally until you've seen what he has, because it'll always be on your mind that there could be other things, that he could be lying. For that reason, I'd find the files and make sure you know exactly what you are dealing with. It's only from that point that you can move forward and decide what you want. Especially if he's lying.

Why is it so important for you that this op is prevented from getting support on her own thread?

Yes Janey, but what if it really is just one? A massive mistake not to be repeated. Still DV?

That was to lazyjaney

quint people responding about DV are responding to the people saying it was fine for her to hit him or that they would have done worse.

They aren't responding to the OP directly. The best way to shut up the people talking about DV is to 1. agree it was a mistake (which the OP already did!) 2. stop posting things like 'I would chop his dick off' when we all know the equivalent posted about a woman would have us all up in arms.

No one is saying the OP hasn't suffered the worst of this, people are only saying that slapping her DP wasn't on...and occasionally pointing out that it is even more important to keep her cool right now when this might end up in court etc.

Ice there are a few people ignoring what the OP has and is suffering in order to pursue the DV road. Which is an issue yes but not one for this thread or this person who clearly needs help and support. How many times does the slap have to be mentioned? On every supportive post?

"Yes here is some advice and support and care and ideas BUT YOU SHOULDNT HAVE SLAPPED HIM". I think she gets it.