Who is there to help families in crisis?

Who is there to help the families of men who use and make child exploitation material?

Natalie Walker

Natalie Walker

Natalie Walker is the CEO of PartnerSPEAK, which provides advocacy and peer support for partners and families of perpetrators of child abuse material.

NATALIE WALKER

*Trigger Warning* - Child online sexual abuse, trauma

It was just after dinner about a year ago and the family was starting their night-time routine. Dinner, bath, bed for the kids. And perhaps a glass of wine for the adults, once the little ones were asleep.

Seemingly, there was nothing out of the ordinary about this household - a nuclear family in a suburb of Melbourne. Mum, Dad, and three young kids, including a preschooler. Law enforcement turned up when the family would be home. Bam! Bam! Bam! on the front door. Two plain clothes police standing there. They ask to speak to Andrew, the father. Amanda’s husband.*

She looks at them like they’ve landed from outer space. “What’s this about?” Amanda asks the officers, ashen in the face. The police don’t answer her question. “We need to speak to your husband,” one policeman repeats. This is the first time she’s ever had an inkling her hard-working and beloved husband might be a person who used and distributed child sexual abuse material (CSAM). In that split second, everything Amanda knew about her life and her marriage was pulled out from underneath her.

The children were so distressed that after the police raid, they refused to go back into the home office for months. This is where law enforcement seized phones, computers and hard drives. The smallest child, just four, started wetting the bed again despite being toilet trained for a couple of years.

Visit the PartnerSPEAK website and peer support forum here. partnerspeak.org.au

Contact the PartnerSPEAK Peerline: 1300 590 589 (Please check website for hours)

All peer support is offered by fully trained individuals with the lived experience of having an intimate partner or close family member involved in child sexual abuse material. If you are concerned about the welfare of a child you can get advice from the Child Abuse Protection Hotline by calling 1800 688 009, or visiting their website. You can also call the 24-hour Child Abuse

Report Line (131 478).

the children never found out what their father had done and therefore didn’t tell anyone at all, carrying the burden alone...until she found PartnerSPEAK. What’s PartnerSPEAK, you ask? We are a non-profit that supports the non-offending family members of perpetrators of child abuse material. Our vision is a world free of child exploitation.

I started PartnerSPEAK because eighteen years ago, I was the innocent partner of a man who viewed child abuse material. I was just as shocked as Amanda. (The only saving grace - if you can even call it that - is that, I didn’t have children with that man. ) From my own experience and from hearing many stories over nearly two decades, I can tell you that instead of finding support in the community, non-offending partners are frequently shamed, stigmatised and shunned. Frequently, these women lose everything - their jobs, their houses and even their kids. Take Amanda. When the case finally made it to court for sentencing, she asked the judge for a suppression order to protect her children but this was denied as Amanda wasn’t seen as a victim. Subsequently the media named the perpetrator, his employer and his suburb. Amanda was part of a tightknit community and everyone knew who she was. Other parents refused to let her kids play with their children. She was no longer welcome at church and she lost her job.

Amanda told me that the impact of the aftermath and how people responded was even worse than the discovery of the offence.

This state of affairs is depressingly common. Wives and partners are often named in the media, as if guilty of his crimes. People ask about their sex lives – were they normal? – and they wonder how it’s possible she didn’t know what he was up to (the implication is that’s she’s complicit).

In response, let me ask YOU a question: Do you know what your partner is doing on his or her phone 24/7? I didn’t. And so many other partners and children of CSAM perpetrators don’t either. This might surprise you, but Australian Institute of Criminology research indicates the likelihood of the perpetrator having an intimate partner is as high as 65 per cent and that up to 47 per cent have children.

Shocking, right? Another shocking fact is that you probably know a perpetrator like Amanda’s husband. Or like my ex-partner. Research shows that 2-4% of all men have deliberately accessed CSAM. (This statistic was gathered before the pandemic and we now know this would be higher.)

Before the virus COVID-19 started its rapid spread around the globe, Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton gave a speech on March 5 stating: “ … every five minutes a web page shows a child being sexually abused. Australia, I’m sorry to say, contributes to the epidemic of child sexual abuse.” Then came the pandemic. And now it’s every four minutes that a child sexual abuse is viewed online. Why? Well, think about where we were and what we were doing. Most of us were working in isolation at home, and therefore using our home computers more. Our bosses aren’t breathing down our necks – so dark impulses, or even just curiosity, played out in terrible ways.

How do I know that? As news.com.au reported, statistics from the Australian Federal Police showed that from July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020, the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) received 21,688 fresh reports of child exploitation.

This compares to 14,165 reports received from the previous financial year. In this same period, CSAM charges are up 226 per cent, from 372 last financial year to 1214 in this financial year . PartnerSPEAK runs a Peerline, which is staffed by trained workers who have lived experience of being an affected family member of CSAM perpetrator. What our peer workers are hearing is that things have been so much harder for family members in the pandemic. Seventy five percent of those people we support report feeling “more isolated” and that their “existing anxiety or PTSD is harder to manage.”

One woman said to us recently: “If there were no partnerSPEAK , I would have had a breakdown by now, thanks for saving me and holding me strong.”

Now here’s the thing. I started this charity on my own, from my bedroom. I used to pay for flights to Canberra to lobby politicians for funding out of my own pocket. I used to sleep on my friend’s lounge room floor. These days PartnerSPEAK does get some State Government support - but only to help Victorians. But CSAM doesn’t stop at State borders. We help people all over Australia, although we aren’t funded for it. PartnerSPEAK needs urgent national recurring funding proportionate to the huge social issue that it is NOW.

*Please note: Amanda’s case study is an amalgamation of two stories of families PartnerSPEAK has supported. This has been done for privacy and security reasons. The facts remain true.