Partners who stay with Sex Offenders *WARNING - EXTREMELY TRIGGERING CONTENT*

[nanoonanoomindy]

Hi

I realise this is a very uncomfortable subject but a thread on mumsnet a couple of days ago with a weblink for support for parents whose children have been referred to social services (can I say I absolutely agree such services should exist and that there isn't enough support for these families).

What has 'surprised' me is the extent that parents (and of course mainly mothers) are posting for advice and contempt that SS are involved as they are in a relationship/married to a partner who has been convicted of downloading child abuse images/found to be grooming 13/14 year olds. 'He was in a bad place, he's not like that now', 'He's been on this course and won't reoffend' and the best 'it was a malicious accusation' - negating the 1001 images recovered from his PC and can't understand while SS have a contact order meaning her partner can't have access to her children is in place.

There are women on there who KNOW their partners wave been convicted of abuse to children and are still claiming 'he isn't a threat'

It's so common on this link surely we have to have some wives/GF's on mumsnet who agree - I genuinely hope those living with a partner/whose children have been removed because you put your sex offender bloke first, will come forward and explain what I'm missing.

There’s a lot of psychological grooming too of female partners, even when they’re unaware of the sex offending they’re being controlled and made to doubt their own thoughts and capabilities.

My heart breaks for her DD thinking of her being ‘moved on’ from the celebrations to allow the offender in
this is so awful, she is given the message that she must defer to a person who has damaged and violated her, he is protected and given special treatment, the message to her is that she is fair game for anyone, anyone can have a try and get away with it because she's not important.
I have experience of this in my family and the attitude towards the sexual predator was that he should be protected because it wouldnt be fair to disrupt his life, the victim who was under school age is then framed as a selfish sexual temptress who tries to ruin men's reputations.

thank you for sharing your experience @Lizzie48
I hope you both continue to heal and recover

There’s also a type of woman who just doesn’t give a fuck as long as their own needs are being met.

I always wonder about people like Maxine Carr who not only cover up for sexual abuse but sadistic murder too. Is she an enabling codependent?

Fannywork it's good if you to take the time to explain all that, must have been a very tough role that you were working in :(

I always wonder about people like Maxine Carr who not only cover up for sexual abuse but sadistic murder too.

There is no evidence Maxine Carr did that.

Maxine Carr believed Huntley's claim that he had been victimised by the police before when previously charged for sexual assault. She believed it hook, line and sinker. I wouldn't be surprised if she was on anonymous social media in the years prior, telling everyone that her partner had been 'falsely accused of rape' and agitating for rape victims to be named when pressing charges.

Huntley told her that he needed an alibi to stop the police fitting him up, and as MC was wholly convinced he was innocent of the prior accusation, she did. I expect she thought she was helping the police really by forcing them to look for the 'real criminal'. She was wrong.

She testified against Huntley when she was convinced he had actually killed Jessica and Holly.

Maxine was a complete fool, and she impeded the investigation, but she didn't assist in the murders. She was not Myra Hindley.

An ex friend of mine was convicted a few years ago. As soon as I found out, I immediately cut contact and was disgusted. Quite a few people felt the same way.

However, I still have a few people who stick by him. “It wasn’t little kids. They were 14. Old enough to know better.” And other excuses as long as my arm.

There are always people who will make exceptions.

I don’t know where he is now. Last I heard he was in prison but he didn’t have a long sentence.

It wasn’t little kids no doubt if it was they'd be saying that the kids were too young to remember, or some such self serving lie

Maxine Carr's life should be a salutary lesson to many women on the forum linked by the OP.

By the grace of god go they. She's been branded the most evil woman in Britain, and ended up having to change her identity. She never knowingly exposed children to a convicted sex offender after being warned by social services.

She's not the first woman to interfere with a police investigation to protect an 'innocent' boyfriend and nor has she been the last.

Whosorrynow, thank you for your kind words.

I'm not sure which category my DM falls into, FannyWork. We were very much a Christian family and she took seriously the teaching on submission in the marital relationship, especially in the area of sex. Her advice to me when I couldn't cope with sexual intimacy because of the traumatic memories I was reliving was to 'lie back and think of England'. (My DH was horrified at this.) She did say once that she wondered whether she was to blame for not satisfying my F sexually.

But she's also highly intelligent and has always appeared to be very strong, and was a workaholic, as I said earlier. So I really struggle to work her out. But she's nearly 80, so I suppose she is from a previous generation.

However, she's also very damaged. She minimised the SA she went through at the hands of her uncle, who was her guardian after her parents died. And he started this almost immediately after she moved in with them. She doesn't appear to get how vile this was, and her only concern as a child was to protect her aunt from the knowledge of it.

I have NC’d in Mumsnet a few times, but I have told my story.

I was 27 - I discovered my husband was downloading abuse images of children. I called the police to take all our electronic equipment away. He was viewing images of children being abused - police discovered he had been for years. Each and every one of those children were abused over and over again each time someone viewed those images.

He may have been In a bad place (curious about own abuse etc) - as far as I was concerned he was also an abuser by proxy with the potential to escalate. Police informed - wish I could say job done, but sentence was pathetic (community service).

Just awful.

DSDs Mum has a revolving door of men who move in after a few weeks and meet DSD. I have told my DH she is a predators dream, it really concerns me.

These women genuinely don’t deserve their children.

Sadly I read too many case notes where the reason for care is 'mother unable to prioritise children over partner' (it's not a code per se it's a theme). Quite a few of those mothers have learning difficulties, addictions or mental health issues. Where is the relationship advice in schools preparing young girls to encounter these predators? It's toxic and it's growing. The number of children who are in care but for their mother's poor choice of partner is heartbreaking. And she musters the strength to get rid of him (or more likely he's imprisoned for some crime or other, not necessarily child related) and she pulls herself together enough to get the children back...only for it to fall apart again when the next predator reels her in and the kids get taken off her again. Awful awful awful. No wonder attachment disorders are rising.

That forum is disgusting. Many of those women don’t deserve to be mothers.

JamieVardysHavingAParty I see, it’s only I saw the ITV documentary a few weeks back where they spoke about Maxine using the past tense when speaking about the girls, which they said was an indication she did know of their demise. You’re right, it’s not proof though.

@MsMaisel, I'm so sorry that's that such dreadful things happened to you and that your mother didn't protect you, I hope you're ok💐
Regarding the hobbyist group it sounds as if he had in some way groomed all of them too, inasmuch as he had presented to them a version of himself that somehow precluded the possibility that he could do anything wrong.
I feel that these people over time become experts at 'public relations'?

didn't you just want to shout at these members who defended him and say and say
'oi you you fucking paedophile apologist what the fuck are you thinking'

We need some of this over here
l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmetro.co.uk%2F2019%2F06%2F05%2Fnew-law-will-force-child-sex-abusers-pay-castration-released-jail-9824047%2F%3Fito%3Dsocial&h=AT1iqhBiy_EpnrJzNsENR1GPXXTbkO5nLcCEeGEGmQueSIYmyjTFX04PYtfHGJoEqiyHZP_Y0hAYEKQAWbHiXboRSi4wB68AlvPM6DyfmOdSRyTug85ICTXTAQLmI14S-wAdLdg

It's funny someone should mention Ian Huntley as there are actually many people who believe he was set up and framed for those murders, there's a lot about it online. It's shocking stuff actually.

There is no evidence Maxine Carr did that.

Maxine Carr believed Huntley's claim that he had been victimised by the police before when previously charged for sexual assault. She believed it hook, line and sinker.

Actually there was evidence that she did. People often forget that what put Carr in danger in the first place was that she carried on lying in court and was perceived as having ‘got away with it’.

What’s in your original post is what Carr claimed in court. She said Huntley had told her he had been falsely accused of a sex offence a few years before and was so traumatised by that she chose to protect him by lying. She said she had absolutely no idea he had a sexual interest in young girls and she couldn’t have known he was like and had no reason to suspect him. The jury accepted that although she had lied she had no reason to think he may have committed the crime so she was convicted of the lesser offence of perverting the course of justice and acquitted of the more serious offence of assisting an offender (which required her to have known he’d killed them.

After her conviction it turned out that rather than being a hoodwinked woman who assumed her partner was innocent, she actually had quite extensive knowledge of previous allegations against him including providing an alibi for a previous rape allegation (which she would have known was false). She’d also forensically cleaned the house from top to bottom removing evidence which could have shown what actually happened to the two girls meaning their parents would never know.

Both of those details were ruled inadmissible as evidence but public opinion after the verdict swung behind a feeling that those extra pieces of evidence proved she did know he was likely to have killed them and wasn’t innocently trying to protect Huntley.

I had a look at the website linked ,it's not just sex offenders ,those women are defending, there was one women whose two year child had been physically assaulted by her partner of eight months ,and she was wondering if social services could stop her partner from seeing her kids, all the women minimised abuse,their own actions etc and it's always evil social services fault they are not allowed to live "Happily" as a family their are always decent and loving to their kids it's frightening how people can justify it.

Okay, I did not know about the cleaning. That's a different kettle of fish from the alibis.

His girlfriend, Maxine Ann Carr, was the girls' teaching assistant at St Andrew's Primary School. Carr had provided Huntley with a false alibi and received a three-and-a-half year prison sentence for perverting the course of justice

Wow - imagine how you'd feel if that were your child - unbelievable and shame on you pathetic parents who could ever excuse her part in it

All of this is such a complex issue, I’ve definitely had this discussion here before, possibly around the MJ documentary as that really affected me.

I don’t think it’s ever as simple as child abuser = paedophile, and paedophile = child abuser. As a victim my main concern is reducing / preventing abuse against children so understanding how that’s achievable is important.

I don’t think the MAP argument holds much water because some people can only get their thrills through very violent and exploitative acts and we don’t as a society say ‘Oh well, poor you, just get on with it’

We do say that generally (or at least a large proportion of people do) as long as the other party is consenting. Men have gotten away with horrific things in the name of BDSM, or other violent and exploitative actions, by arguing that consent existed.

Fortunately we still live in a society where we recognise that minors cannot consent and we need to fight for that to remain the case, because there are most definitely people in the background waiting to challenge that.

Having said all that, I do believe that there are people who are exclusively sexually attracted to children. I can’t even imagine how horrifying it must be to experience that. There are support groups in place for those who are paedophiles but who have not offended (including use of CSA images) and want to stay that way.

Our understandable outrage about these crimes puts children at risk, however, in a few ways:

1. we think that everyone who has abused a child is an identifiable monster, not a seemingly normal three-dimensional person. See this quote from the BBC article: "What he did was bad, but he was a good person, so I decided that I wanted to make the marriage work.” Because her DH had always seemed like a good person, this one aspect of his life wasn’t enough to dissuade her from that. We need to understand that people are complex, made up of good and bad. This is doubly true for abusers, who rely on your belief in their innate (at least potential) decency for you to stay. If they were obviously evil, no one would stay

2. The way some talk about paedophiles in one breath (eg they should be murdered) and then that they should seek help before offending concerns me. If you were someone who was completely innocent of crimes against children, had never acted on your urges, but experienced sexual attraction to children, would you feel able to come forward and seek help? I’d be absolutely terrified to do so, even if I’d done nothing wrong, even if I was a victim myself, etc. We need to make it possible for paedophiles to seek help before they offend, in order to protect children from them.

3. This is the one that people struggle to get their heads round the most, but which rings true with lots of victims: IME most child abusers are not paedophiles, at least not in the literal meaning of the word.

I had this feeling about my own abuse - my father had been in multiple relationships / marriages with adult women. Aside from the instances of abuse, I never saw any signs that he was attracted to children, or attracted to me specifically, whatsoever. I believed that actually he was a prolific abuser and misogynist of any female, he identified in me a female he could more easily manipulate and groom, and being an alcoholic did not help his impulse control.

I tried to float this idea to my counsellor who thought I was ridiculous - if he abused children, he’s a paedophile. And yet I have spoken to countless other victims with similar stories to mine. I wasn’t abused by a paedophile - I was sexually abused by an abuser who saw an easy mark.

I think this is why so many partners don’t believe it or don’t understand, because their boyfriend / DH is interested in them sexually and has never shown signs of uncontrollable attraction to children. These men just want to control, abuse and hurt (usually women and girls, but not always) and they get off on this. I suspect the same is true for some of the men caught with CSA imagery on their hard drives.

It has taken a long time for us as a society to understand that rape is not only carried out by men who are aroused by an absence of consent. The causes are many, but include simply not caring or understanding about a woman's bodily autonomy, getting off on fear / violence, thinking they’re owed sex for whatever reason, etc. Someone who seems like a decent lovely man day to day can rape someone. Understanding this is the first step in stopping rape from happening in many cases. We need a similar epiphany about child abuse.

The men with prior convictions who get into relationships with single mothers or grandmothers are the most dangerous abusers IMO. They’re most likely not exclusively attracted to children or battling an attraction that they know is wrong. They are indiscriminate abusers looking for vulnerable women and children to abuse. That’s why that forum scares me so much.