To not know how to feel about this revelation?

[Laurat859]

My boyfriend and I have been together for almost 4 years. I moved in with him a few months ago, and with this came some shocking news from his Mum.
She came round and sat me down to tell me that her husband (my boyfriend's step-dad) is on the sex offenders register. The offence was against children, it was about 20 years ago (before she met him) and he has done time in prison for it. That is all I know about what he did.
She said that the reason she was telling me now was that obviously things have become more serious between myself and her son, and if we are planning on children in the future then I need to know. She said she needed to know my feelings because when she has grandchildren she wants to see lots of them and be able to have them stay over at their house etc etc. If knowing about her husband's past meant that I wouldn't let that happen then she said she would prepare to leave him.
She told me that he suffers with bipolar and when the offence(s) was committed he was in a really bad place and it wasn't under control with medication. Not that that was any excuse, but now his mental health issues are being treated well. Apparently as part of being on the register, he has yearly visits and he is deemed very low risk. She trusts him completely that nothing will happen again.
I was completely shocked. I have always got on well with him and he has done so much to help myself and my boyfriend. They have welcomed me into their family.
There is no way that I would stop my boyfriend's Mum from seeing our children when we have them. She will be a fantastic grandmother one day. But there was also no way that I could put her in the position that she is willing to leave her husband. They are a very close couple and I know that she would be devastated to be brought to do that. Myself and my boyfriend agreed that, should we have children, then as long as his step-dad is never alone with them, then of course they will see them.
Does this sound reasonable? Or am I being a bad mother before I am even a mother? It is playing on my mind that I have agreed to this, but what if I feel differently once said children arrive? What if, god forbid, something were to happen to them? It would be my fault for risking the situation.
I just don't know how to feel

To the people saying it's not the oh's fault that his mum married a paedophile. Of course it's not. But he had lied by omission. He should have told her before they moved in together no matter how hard that conversation

Worse. He obviously knows op is a teacher. She works with children. He knew this and still introduced her to a paedophile. And must knew this would have serious consequences for her.

Maybe he's also been groomed/just accepts this as normal. I don't mean he is blame in that respect. But he can't see the danger and the issues then he is frankly just as dangerous. If he sees no issue with grandpa - what's to stop him taking the kids round when ops away.

Honestly this is all such a mess. But it's incredibly creepy that they've waited till you moved in together. Op cannot leave so easily

I think she's looking for a way out. I also think that, whilst he should have told you himself years ago, that it could be incredibly difficult to admit that one's own mother prioritised her relationship with a paedophile.

Have just seen from a previous thread you were on that you work in a school?? - if this is true, you will need to disclose that you are in contact with an offender (ex or not) IF you work with kids under 5. You may lose your job over it (The 'disclosure' is liable to be rescinded fairly soon tho)

That's if you're living with someone who is a sex/violent offender, not just if you know them.

I would run like hell from this sick,twisted family....
In the meantime I suggest you look him up on theukdatabase.com
I presume you know his full name?
A neighbour of ours was caught for an unrelated offence,in searching his home police found "photos" you know the sort,
Googled his name on the ukdatabase.com to find out he was convicted of kidnapping a young child 20 years ago, and many other offences not mentioned in the press!
The ukdatabase.com is a very good resource .......

A bloody good pint made by Jemima! If you were to split in the future, you have ZERO say over whether your DP allows the child to be around this man

I could just about understand that your boyfriend didn't tell you this. It's a hard thing to admit, and he may have been worried that you'd leave him over it.

However, the fact that he thinks it'd be OK to put his future kids in the hands of a paedophile is appalling. It may be that your DP hasn't been abused because your prospective FIL is only interested in girls, or pre-teen children - so he still sees him just as his step-dad, and thinks of his crimes as being an abstract thing in the distant past. He's not father material.

His mother knowingly married a paedophile, and thinks that having grandchildren in her home overnight with aforementioned paedophile is acceptable. She is not grandmother material.

His step-dad is a paedophile who has committed serious crimes that put him in jail and on the sex offenders register for life. He's not only not granddad material, he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near children.

As others have said, if you have children with your DP, the vigilance required would be enormous, even if you never allowed his paedophile step-dad to see them. No day trips or babysitting with granny, because she's already decided that her paedophile husband is OK with kids. Constant monitoring of granny to make sure that she doesn't take any photos. No sharing photos with her. Would your DP be OK with that? If you split with him, he could give his paedophile step-dad access.

My thoughts:
Fil: peodophile= scum of the earth would already have but him out.
Mil: freak! Invited said peodophile to live with her child. Cut her out too. Think Maxine Carr character.
DP: tell him your kids will never be alone with his mother and never in the company of fil. If he doesn't agree walk away.
You: sorry this is harsh op but you like in cloud cuckoo land! He can't be alone but he can be in the house with the peodophile apologist whilst she baths them and puts them to bed. Yeah your plans full proof!

If you split with him, he could give his paedophile step-dad access

Never even thought of this horror!

I wouldn't be able to have contact with any of them every again; your bf lied to you, making you a friend of a peadophile against your own knowledge, I couldn't to forgive someone's who is meant to love me for that. As for his mother knowingly marrying a paedophile; well I'd never want further contact with her either for being a supporter of the sick bastard; and I'd be making sure everyone knew why the relationship ended!

No way would I be letting my child within a mile of this man. You would always be on edge. As for overnight, not if my life depended on it. I can't understand a woman that would willingly marry someone that she knows is a convicted child sex offender. It's not normal.

I would struggle massively with this. Just the thought of a man who has abused children even seeing a picture of my daughter makes me want to vomit, never mind being in the same room.

You deserved to know this before you got into a serious relationship. Your BF should have been honest with you from the start but I feel sorry for him too in a way as he is having to deal with the consequences of his own mother marrying a paedophile. It’s affecting his life too.

How any woman could be intimate with a man who has sexually abused children is abhorrent to me.

I don’t know what I would do. I think I would have to refuse to have children with my BF unless the abuser wasn’t even in the equation. otherwise I would end the relationship.

Just one of the things that would rile me, is you can imagine GM-to-be and your other half talking together, deciding to keep it quiet, advance managing/planning it in probably more than one conversation, and then 'handling' you quite purposefully by giving you blatantly not all of the information/warped/twisted version of the information.

OP, with all respect, get your head out of your ass and run from you other half and from this woman and her repulsive family.

If you had DC in the future and SS found you were giving them access to this man, you'd be in for quite an amount of scrutiny and rightly so, because it would indicate someone gullible and unable to understand the risks and implications of that.

Honestly, I know it's come as an awful awful shock, but you need to back away as fast as you can. My god, they let him have contact with you deliberately so he could butter you up and make you think he was benign and harmless - when he isn't, he's fucking dirty bastard paedophile!! Urgh, makes my flesh crawl and I as an adult couldn't be near him, let alone expose any child to him even over the telephone. They would never be safe, ever.

People have very rightly pointed out the deceitfulness of DP and MIL. I'd argue that if this man really gave a shit about proving himself or going some way to atone, he would at the very least shoulder some of this himself. He's very quiet for his own crime. I wouldn't trust anything about him at all based on this.

You have no option really. Your dp is either minimising or kept important information from you until you moved in with him. He also let his mum tell you which shows me she has the final word on this subject. You could get into serious trouble or lose your job if your socializing with a paedophile comes to light. You (being human) cannot be 100% sure that Sfil will not have access. Even the idea that he would fantasize about your child, whether seeing them in a group or in photos is unacceptable. Then what about explaining the situation to your future children? And their friends and family. You love your partner but sometimes love is not enough. Could he maybe have therapy to see the situation for what it is? Then maybe you could start your life together but you would need to break off the relationship until then. Your MIL and dp would have to be clear that the current state of affairs is not acceptable.

No fucking way.

I think you'd feel differently when kids are here. The amount of protection you feel for them is immense and unquantifiable.

If he offended 20 years ago and is still checked out then surely that means he did something awful and is at risk of re-offending?! He served how long in prison?

Also, the wife sounds blinded by her love /loyalty towards him so you can't trust her either. Did you boyfriend not know?

Mental health issues are no excuse either.

It's a no from me.

No way. A child's safety comes first. Don't even go there. How would you feel if something happened? This is truly awful. You could ruin yours and your kids lives. You say you'd never leave them alone but how are you going to ensure that?

This must make terrible reading for you Laura. I am so sorry you have been put into this appalling situation. Are you ok?

Come on mnetters, please let's not insult the OP. She's not the one who's chosen to spend her life with a paedophile. She's the victim here. As far as she knew she was in a happy relationship with her partner, and his family were kind and supportive. All that's been torn away and it must be a terrible shock.

I worked with a man who was later outed by The Sun as a paedophile (because he'd started living opposite a primary school despite having been convicted and serving 7 years) and the rest of us were completely surprised. He was charming and seemed completely normal. It was mentally difficult to suddenly reclassify this colleague as dangerous and predatory man so I can't even imagine how difficult it will be for the OP to get her head round this re: someone close to her.

Quite Apples. The smugness and pillorying of the OP (who is innocent) by posters here makes me so angry.

I wonder how many woman on this thread are smugly blasting the OP when their own husbands/partners/whatever ogle young girls, look for goodness knows what online and harbour thoughts that their partners are blissfully ignorant of but would be horrified about. They can spout off here when the only difference is their OHs haven't been caught and labelled. On balance of probabilities there are bound to be some.

This is such a shit situation. Have some compassion for the OP and stop projecting onto her partner too because she hasn't given any detail about what he knew and didn't know and whether he was abused himself or not. Just stop it.

There is a helluva lot if projecting going on here.

There's a sex offender in my DP's family. Neither he, his partner or anyone else on that side of the family will consequently be allowed to babysit or be alone with my DS. This is agreed by my DP. It's not difficult to do. You cannot visit the sins of one man on his entire family. That is insane.

OP, if you're still there? Yes, your DP probably should have told you before now but it's not an easy subject to broach: "by the way, my stepdad is a paedo, pass the salt"...

If everything else is good with your DP, I'd just never leave your child with that side of the family and ignore it. The mother is clearly batshit anyway.

'Our offender' lives hundreds of miles away which makes life easier.

I think in fairness to responses (and I for one know that OP is in shock and trying to sort her head out) people are responding to parts of the original post including:

• There is no way that I would stop my boyfriend's Mum from seeing our children when we have them
• She will be a fantastic grandmother one day
• There is no way that I could put her in the position that she is willing to leave her husband - they are a very close couple and I know that she would be devastated to be brought to do that
• and that you have agreed with your BF that as long as the step dad is never alone with any future children, he'd be allowed to have contact with this paedophile and grandma.

No one is pillorying OP, OP has been hung by her own words and understandably people are agog and trying to enlighten her on how unfeasible and risky and worrying all of those comments are.

To your last question OP: "What if, god forbid, something were to happen to them? It would be my fault for risking the situation" - yes, sadly this would indeed be the case and what everyone is saying is that it's just not worth the risk. You open that door a chink to any kind of access (supervised or otherwise) with a wife who can overlook finding out that her partner is a paedophile and you KNOW she WOULD take them for/allow them contact with him no matter what you said - she's deluded and therefore, just about as dangerous as him if not more so, because she would no matter what she says, go out of her way to somehow finangle contact with this man because 'he's ok now cos he's on his meds'.

Once again I acknowledge the utter shock and can't imagine how difficult it must be to take on board all of this but please please listen to the experience and views of PPs - all comments are genuinely meant to help you consider the potential ramifications.

I came on to comment on the MIL’s insistence that if the op has children she expects to see them a lot and have sleepovers, etc. but I see that’s already been mentioned by a pp. That’s a thread in its own right on MN and we haven’t even got to the paedophile FIL!

Op it’s hard to comprehend at the moment because the child is hypothetical and you don’t know what it’s like to feel the animal instinct to protect your child when it kicks in.

You see threads on here all the time about people not being comfortable with MIL babysitting because they won’t cut up their strawberries into small enough pieces or they won’t follow whatever other minor rule has been put in place. This is the ABSOLUTE worst situation you can bring a child into. You won’t be fretting about whether she puts your kid to bed at the right time. You will be wondering if your child is going to be raped or not.

And if she leaves him and you decide “fuck, I actually don’t want my child to have sleepovers at granny’s house” - she’s going to have a bloody good stick to beat you with over that one isn’t she??

You have been given an opportunity to leave now. In your shoes I would absolutely grab it with both hands.

keeponworking, well I disagree because some of the posts are like sledgehammers instructing the OP what she MUST do.

Fair enough about the step-father and the mother, it's quite clear that she was guilty of putting her own wants and needs about the safety of her child. Whether that child (OP's partner) suffered for that decision OP hasn't said.

It must be a hell of a subject to broach and some (a lot of) posters are treating OP's partner of four years with the same disdain, making him complicit. There must be quite a few emotionally stunted or short-sighted posters if they cannot see what an enormous shock this must have been for the OP and a horrendous situation for her partner also. None of this was of his making either.

OP has some hard decisions ahead of her and her life as it exists can't continue in the same way it is now. I know I'd find it very difficult to come to terms with it all and OP has my absolute sympathy.

To all those asking how I am and asking me to return to the thread, I'm not feeling good at all. Thank you to those who have seen my point of view and offered advice (even if harsh). The personal insults were downright unnecessary though. You have read my problem, you do not know me or my life
I feel I have heard all I need to from this thread now, thank you.
And yes, of course I am taking this extremely seriously.

Ukdatabase.com
search him!!!