Husband didn't tell me his BIL is a convicted child sex offender

[DearBee]

We have a young DD (toddler).

The conviction was a few years ago- shortly before we met. DH said he was too ashamed to tell me. Online child sex offences.

DD has been in his (BIL) company occasionally - never alone - at family occasions. DH has said he would never put her at risk. Apparently he is not allowed unsupervised contact with children (obviously!).

I feel like I had a right to know given I am her mother. I would have wanted to make a different decision, and would not have allowed DD in his company at all - ever.

I feel like this is a massive betrayal.

I am reconsidering our marriage, tbh.

He never actually told me the truth - I found out from someone else.

I don't know what I am looking for from this thread. I just feel so betrayed and don't know if/how I can trust him again.

Exactly! No wonder the op's DH didn't tell her, it seems like a weird family dynamic to keep secrets at all costs.

My DH's cousin's DH was charged with child sex offences when my dcs were 6-10 yrs old. It made me question every single time my dcs were around him and although they were never left alone with him it was such a disturbing feeling.

I can't imagine willfully allowing your own child to be in the presence of a child sex offender.

He put his shame and his discomfort above everything else, including your ability to protect your daughter from potential threat.

You have every right to feel as upset and betrayed as you do. This is beyond selfish.

I would be raising the following:

Photographs of your child - assuming grandparents have these, likely on display. Perhaps there is a shared family WhatsApp group or similar. Tell your DH that photographs are not to be shared of your child on this, especially if SIL is on there. Try and stop sending pictures of your child to grandparents, and explain to your DH that a man who is sexually aroused by images of children may be seeing any pictures he sends. Ask him how he feels about this.

Sarah’s Law - you may still be able to do a Sarah’s Law request as your child has had contact with this offender. Officers may choose to disclose further relevant information to you or parents of other children he is in contact with, so this could alert other family members that their children are at risk of harm.

Social Care - if you believe he is having contact with other children in the family, they are at risk. Contact social care in their area with their names, parents names, and contact details and address. Explain that PIL’s are deliberately hiding his past and this is putting children at risk of harm. Social care will be able to get full information on his convictions and speak to parents.

What else are PIL hiding? Does he have other conditions imposed on him, eg not allowed to live near a school? Is he breaching conditions? If SIL and PIL are minimising and ignoring his behaviour, he could be befriending local families for example. Consider passing this information to the police when requesting Sarah’s Law.

Your in laws attitude is absolutely disgusting.

i would be done with the whole family after that.
Not only keeping it from you but because they seem to be minimising and continuting to spend time with this man

When they decided to have children!

Some. Of these responses are gobsmacking!

Your DH and his family are sweeping this under the carpet.

Your daughter is not safe in their care.

They are currently teaching your daughter that her uncle is a safe person to be around and he is NOT.

Abuse can happen in plain sight.

Sitting on a lap, tickling, playfighting, blankets, hugs are all ways a child can be touched innapropriate in plain sight by a perpetrator.

This makes my skin crawl and I could never trust him or them again.

Again - awful advice. None of these people are qualified to decide what ‘type’ of pedophile this man is and then grade the level of risk.

you don’t have a chat with a convicted pedophile to decide if he is a risk. awful, awful, awful advise.

he is a risk to children. Full stop.

i have found some of the responses on this thread incredibly concerning. It really makes me understand why abuse happens in families. Some people really don’t think it’s that big a deal.

The only sensible thing to do is shun the pedophile. That is what society needs to do. This is a horrendous crime. No one should tolerate it.

I have decided to tell my family about BIL's child sex offending. I need them to know, in case I fall under a bus or something. I need people to protect my child and at the moment I don't feel reassured by DH's track record on this.

I know I need to have another serious discussion with him. At first I actually thought he didn't know and I was breaking the news to him (a mutual friend sent me a link to a news article where it was reported!). His face showed me he did. I told him they were all 'a bunch of sick fucks' (I was furious) for excusing/condoning it (as I see it). He said he knows how horribly wrong he was, it became a bigger secret the longer he left it. So he does seem genuinely remorseful and says of course we don't have to go there ever again, but the conditioning is strong and I just don't trust him right now.

I wouldn’t go near the whole family, they all knowingly hid it from you. They don’t care for your dd.

Also strongly agree about not allowing him access to photos of your children.

I knew a man who turned out to be a paedo. He had cropped photos of his nieces and nephews faces and imposed them onto images of children being abused.

Very very scary.

Did you ask him how he could knowingly allow his own DD near a cso?

I just don't understand how any father would do this.

Good god, that is horrifying. I'm on it re: the photo thing. They are all blocked from social media. I've said to DH that I don't want him sending photos. Considering asking SIL and MIL to delete all photos they have, but I doubt they would listen.

Are you joking? You are making this the op’s fault.

@MrsKeats completely agree!

There is nothing like a good bit of victim shaming! Poor DH didn’t tell his wife his daughter was in the company of a pedophile because she is a judgy bitch.

so he let his daughter be in repeated danger - but totally justified because no man deserves to be embarrassed. It’s the wife’s fault and she needs to consider her behavior in all this.

awful, awful, awful attitudes here.

My first instinct would be divorce as well, but I would not want my husband to have that kind of unsupervised custody.

i wouldn’t want the children to see BIL again. I would probably extend that to SIL for thinking it is acceptable to stay married. The problem becomes where is the line. MIL for asking to cover it up? Honestly, I at least would never let her have the children unsupervised. She would never babysit.

While I can understand your husband feeling ashamed to being related to a person sex offender he should have told you early on in your relationship. You weren’t given the information to make informed decisions on how you and your child interacted with him and the wider family. They have minimised his offence(s) to preserve their image.

I would keep myself and my child away from all of them for now, no need for big declarations or drama. Then ask police for advice, I think you can apply for full disclosure under Sarah’s Law. Googling his name and town and court report might turn up info too.
How you go forward with your husband I don’t know. Would he speak to the NSPCC? I think talking with a professional to help him see the risks, understand the magnitude of the BILs offences and attitudes of his family etc might help him make his own decisions rather than just falling in with what his family wanted.
Once you’ve both got all the information and advice you can decide together on how you go forward.

You are right that he was preserving the wider family.

You are right to feel this is a huge betrayal. He has put the family ahead of his relationship with you and his responsibility to his own defenseless child.

Given that the dynamics of the family seem so skewed, I feel that no child in the family would be safe. None of them mentioned this enormous thing to you, not while you were dating, not when you married, and not when you brought your baby to family gatherings. And SIL seems to have accepted what her husband did and stayed loyal.

There is something absolutely rotten at the core of this family.

The sex offender will be emboldened by the family's acceptance of him. No child will be safe around him, and the entire family will be loath to support a child who reports an assault.

I seriously suggest your husband needs to find a therapist to examine his childhood and the family dynamics that led to this point.

Tell your husband that you will not attend family gatherings where BIL will be present. Require that your husband stay away too. Under no circumstances should your child be among these people if BIL is included in the occasion. If he turns up when you're at a family gathering or visiting an IL family member, take your child and leave.

You should do it all the same. Do it in writing, and keep their responses, or if they respond verbally, make a note of exactly what they said and the date, and commit the memo to file. You will also have the failure to return of photos to note. Keep all of this from your H.

Having access to photos of your child innhis home may just about qualify as a breach of conditions of release into the community.

Sorry to say this, but you'll need a paper trail if you decide this is big enough to warrant divorce. You'll need evidence to argue that your H and his family cannot have access to your child.

How has H responded to your SM block of his family, or is he aware?
Does he have SM and post photos of the child? Has he blocked his family too?

@DearBee
Please ask your husband to attend couples therapy with you, and ask him to go to individual therapy to examine the family dynamics. He needs to understand fully what it was that caused him to lie by omission, and what sort of family system he comes from.

If he kept this from you because he was trying not to lose you or scare you away, that's a problem. It's s a problem because he ignored the seriousness of the crime. It's a problem because he was desperate to present a picture of his family that was simply not accurate. There's a huge people pleasing element to all of this, and a 'have my cake and eat it too' element. He thought he could balance the competing pulls on his loyalty. He should not have felt any loyalty to his family in the first place. He needs to work on answering the question of where his deepest loyalty lies.

He needs to answer the question of when he intended to tell you.

He needs to consider carefully whether he would have told you if he had noticed BIL engaging in any inappropriate behaviour with DD, or whether keeping the secret would have been more important to him.

This matter needs to be thoroughly dissected. He needs to go to a therapist and work on the big questions.

@DearBee

If you and your H haven't yet asked a family member to become a guardian of your child in the case if your untimely deaths, you need to start asking your wider family members if they would be willing to step up. His family should not be considered under any circumstances, and access to your child and photos of your child by his family need to be clearly discussed.

The chances of a tragic event are slim but never zero.

You will learn a lot about your H's loyalty if you push this.

Talk to your family. Take out life insurance to make the future guardian financially secure. Go to a solicitor and get this nailed down.

I'd lose my shit with MIL over this, then I'd go NC and ensure she never see's her grandchild again.

This isn't just a matter of questionable judgement, she deliberately wanted a very important thing kept from you by your DH that affected your DC's safety. That's not ok, and it's not ok that your DH kept it from you.

I think I'd be staying with my DH in order to make sure DC doesn't have contact with MIL, SIL, BIL again.

No. I'm not. Read my post.

I said her anger is justified.

I am saying they need couples counselling and understand why he didn't tell her.

If she's wanting to split up over this fine, no problem. I wouldn't blame her.

If she wants to stay in this marriage then they need to understand this communication breakdown because it can't happen again

Not to sound defensive but this is a decision my DH made from the very beginning of our relationship. I don't think it's me. Not saying I am a perfect person. I think it's something in him - that inner sense of shame. And I do feel for him with that, I really do. I agree with you that it does affect the communication in our relationship and we could look at that from both sides. But I am quite unwilling to accept that he felt he couldn't tell me about something so serious because I am apparently intimidating or something. I know you didn't use that word but there was an implication. I don't think that's fair.

This must be tough.

re the photos SIL has - you should definitely ask her to delete them. She might not, but she needs to be told that while she’s happy to sweep it under the carpet, you are not. I’d be asking her to delete them all and tell her your dc can’t be in the same building as her or her DH, he’s a danger to children and her decision to stick with a man who is sexually aroused by child abuse is a sign she’s also a danger to children and so you will treat her as equally dangerous to children.

She might not delete them, hopefully it’ll give her the shock reality that her family’s response is not normal.

Also your other SIL- contact her and say you’ve just found this out, not sure if she knows, that obviously you won’t allow your child to be in the same building as SIL and BIL (again repeat SIL being ok with her dh being sexually aroused by children is a sign she’s also a danger to children), and that you wanted to make sure she is also aware so she can keep her children safe.

And it's this sort of thing that should have been the exact reason you knew.

Your DH has been ridiculously irresponsible.

It can happen. For DH and I, it was a guy DH had worked with in a retail Saturday job when he was a teenager. They, as is common, became Facebook friends. When DH finished uni, got a full time office job he never saw this guy again. Circa 15yrs later, he gets sent a link to a news article from an old friend from school. This guy he worked with had been caught/sentenced for creating images of kids over covid lockdown. He was taking photos from Facebook of other people's kids and super imposing them onto child abuse pics and distributing them on the dark Web. DH raced to his FB and yep - he was still there as a 'friend'. Thankfully our DC was just weeks old and we'd only posted one pic of them as a newborn. He immediately removed him from his fb but it begged the question, 'who else'. It was a stark warning and we have never posted another pic of DC anywhere on social media since.

The latest stat I heard (disclaimer, I haven't verified it was ironically just something I saw on instagram - a police officer being interviewed) 1 in every 4 households there is a man searching child pornography. 1 in 4 households - apply that to your social media.....if you have e.g 250 FB friends that's more than a handful of perverts.

To keep from you that it was a family member so you couldn't even have the conversation about social media is unforgivable - let alone all the other risks!

Go into your WhatsApp and delete all the pics you sent your MIL and SIL. I think the pic then becomes blurred to them.

What is your MIL thinking - it's not even her son?! How can she be so passive - with her own grandchild.

This is awful OP, really feel for you.