For the first 20 years of her life, Emily thought she had a “completely normal” relationship with her dad, Mark. “He was an ordinary man,” she says. “A good dad. We were really close.” Then one morning, police officers showed up at her family home to arrest him for sexually abusing her. Emily wasn’t there. “I had just moved out to live with friends and start my first real job,” she explains, “but the police didn’t know that. They were trying to protect me.” Emily is telling this story two years later, with her mum, Fiona, by her side. They’re close, supporting each other through this difficult conversation and finishing each other’s sentences.
When Fiona heard the doorbell at 7am, she had just woken up. “I wasn’t even fully dressed,” she says. “It sounds silly, but I had just gotten on an exercise bike, so I was in a T-shirt and shorts. I looked out the bedroom window and saw eight people on the doorstep. They weren’t in uniform, but they looked official. They had lanyards on and a dog with them. One of the women looked up at me and our eyes met. She pointed at the door, like she was saying ‘Open this now,’ and I knew right then it wasn’t friendly.”
At the top of the stairs, Fiona saw Mark already at the door. He didn’t seem confused; it was almost like he knew why they were there. Still, her mind didn’t go to abuse. The police put Fiona and Mark in separate rooms and searched the house with their dog. Besides looking for devices like laptops, it quickly became clear they were looking for Emily. “They kept asking, ‘Where’s your daughter?’ I immediately thought something bad had happened to her.” It was only when Mark was led away to the station that a senior female officer finally told Fiona why they were there. “They said to me, ‘Your husband has been sexually abusing your daughter.’”
It made me question everything I knew about my dad. I started thinking back on every moment we’d talked, every hug he’d given me.
Through her shock and confusion, Fiona immediately thought it couldn’t be true. “I’m so close to Emily. I really felt like I would have known.” But the police had horrifying news for Fiona. “They told me he had been caught on a chat forum describing how he had been raping and sexually abusing Emily for years. It was written like a confession. He’d even used her name and talked about where we lived.” The random stranger Mark thought he was talking to was an undercover police officer. Now that officer was standing in Fiona’s living room.
“I was sitting there shaking with shock. They were staring at me, and I felt like I was on trial. I could see the officer thought I was naive when I said I couldn’t believe he had abused her. They said it started when he gave her baths as a little girl, and at that I just said, ‘No, he never gave her baths.’ He wasn’t a hands-on dad. I did all that kind of stuff. They said he had boasted online about abusing her recently at a family event. But I knew that event never happened. It didn’t match reality.”
The police told Fiona they had a photo that Mark had shared in these chats. “I was terrified,” she says. “I thought it might be something explicit. But it was a photo I knew. Emily was young and wearing a new dress. I remembered taking it, her smiling at the camera. That was the absolute worst moment, realizing he had used that photo in those chats.” Then the police told Fiona she had to call Emily so they could talk to her. Two years later, Fiona still regrets making that call. “I didn’t think to stop them. I didn’t think: wait, you’re about to shatter her world, and she’s so far away. To this day, she can’t handle unexpected calls.”
Emily was asleep at the house she shared with friends when her phone rang. “It was a video call that woke me up, and I could see my mum in our living room,” Emily says. “She told me the police were there with her, that they had come to arrest my dad for sexually abusing me.” Emily’s first thought was…Her reaction—just like Fiona’s—was that the police had gotten it completely wrong. “They took over the call and asked a lot of questions, like did I remember him giving me baths when I was little, did he ever touch me? I just kept saying no.”
The police told Emily the same story they had told Fiona: that online, Mark had been sharing graphic descriptions of abusing her. He said he had been doing it for years. The senior officer explained that they had come that morning because they believed Emily was in immediate danger. Then they ended the call, telling her she would need to come home and meet them in person in a few days.
Emily was sure her dad had never sexually abused her. But from that moment, her entire view of him—and of her childhood—started to fall apart. Like her mum, she was filled with horror and confusion.
“Later that day, I went to a party with friends, then to the supermarket. I pushed a trolley around while the call kept replaying in my head. It felt like half of my memories had died or been rewritten,” she says. “They made me doubt everything I knew about my dad and how he saw me. I started thinking back on every moment we had talked, every outfit I had worn, every hug he had given me.”
Events like these—the early morning knock on the door, the feeling of “a grenade going off in your life,” as Fiona puts it—are alarmingly common. A staggering 1,000 people, nearly all of them men, are arrested across England and Wales every month for viewing or sharing child sexual abuse images.
But Emily’s story is different. When she told the police that her dad had never abused her, she was telling the truth. His sex fantasy chats were just that—a fantasy.
There is growing concern about how the police handle pornography and online sexual fantasies. More and more evidence suggests that legal but extreme pornography, which mimics illegal acts, is a major driver of the online child abuse crisis. Convicted offenders are warning that porn algorithms push them down “escalating pathways” to ever more extreme material.
Any images of children being abused are grounds for arrest, even when the men aren’t physically abusing anyone. Yet Emily’s case turned out to be less clear-cut in the eyes of the police. Were written fantasies about child abuse, shared on a legal site, against the law? This question would lead Emily all the way to parliament to try to toughen the law on sex chat sites.
But that was all still to come. On the day the police arrived at Fiona’s home, they assured her that Emily’s memories would “come to the surface now that we have asked these questions to trigger them.” She was left alone in the house, in total shock. Two days later, Emily came home to talk to the police, who brought all the messages to show both women. Until then, Fiona had been considering the possibility that the police might be right—that Emily had buried memories from her childhood. “All weekend I was thinking, have I missed something? Am I such a bad mother that I missed him abusing our child?” But when they were reunited in person, she had no doubt.
Fiona was kept out of the room while the police spoke to Emily. “She was interviewed by their sexual assault experts. The detective in charge walked her through the messages. They were very graphic. I think they wanted to shock her; they were pushing her a bit to see her reaction.”
The messages were incredibly painful to read, but nothing changed Emily’s mind. Mark had been nothing but an ordinary dad to her—distant, not the most involved, but never abusive.
“It felt like they were waiting for me to remember this trauma, for that specific crime to be uncovered,” Emily says. “I didn’t feel like they ever really believed me. I signed a form saying I hadn’t been abused, and I think at that moment they started to lose interest.”
The sexual assault charges against Mark were dropped and changed to sending indecent, obscene, or menacing messages by public electronic communication, under the Communications Act.Under the Communications Act 2003, a court date was set. Emily and Fiona expected Mark to plead guilty, since he had never denied the horrific way he described abusing Emily online. Emily started preparing a victim impact statement.
“I was incredibly worried about Emily,” Fiona says. “I could see she was struggling. She quickly started talking about her dad and ‘Mark’ as if they were two different people. I could see her disconnecting from that relationship.”
Within days of the arrest, Fiona took drastic steps to rebuild the life Mark had shattered. “I had a job interview a couple of days later and just went to it in a daze. I barely remember it, but I got the job. At that moment, I decided I would move house and start the new job as soon as I could.”
While Fiona was getting ready to move, Emily went down a rabbit hole into the darkest corners of the internet. She started reading everything she could about sex chat sites and was horrified to learn how easy it is to stumble into sexual conversations about children. “I couldn’t believe people were openly talking about child abuse there. My dad had a username that was clearly a reference to child abuse,” she says. “It isn’t hidden.”
She wanted the police to know that Mark hadn’t touched her, but she wanted him to be prosecuted for sharing his child abuse fantasies online. And she wanted to be recognized as a victim—something the police didn’t seem to understand.
But one day, as the court hearing approached, Fiona got a text from Mark saying he wasn’t going to plead guilty. “He said, ‘I’ve found a loophole.’ With help from his lawyer, he had found a way to plead not guilty.” Both Fiona and Emily were devastated. “He showed no remorse,” Fiona says.
“I understand why people ask if I’m sure he didn’t abuse me. But this isn’t just a random, unusual thing—it happens all the time.”
Just days before the court hearing, the police got in touch. They were dropping the case. “They told us that, after discussions with the Crown Prosecution Service, they didn’t think there was a realistic chance of conviction. The officer I spoke to told me that in the eyes of the law, Emily was not a victim, so no crime had been committed. He actually said that in this situation, the ‘victim’ was the undercover officer, because they were the ones who read the messages.”
Mark walked away with no criminal record or any form of monitoring. He wasn’t placed on the sex offender register, and there’s nothing he has to tell an employer or a partner.
Fiona has only seen Mark once since the case was dropped: when she met him to get his signature on divorce papers. She saw then how happy he was to have escaped prosecution. “He made it clear that he thought it was a prudish response—public disapproval of a private fetish. We were prudes, and so were the police. It might have been embarrassing to have the messages revealed, but it wasn’t anything that should involve the law.”
The women couldn’t believe this was happening. “How can he talk online about me this way and just walk away?” Emily says. She also found it hard to understand why the sites themselves weren’t held accountable. “If there are so many police on there looking for people talking about child abuse, why can’t they shut the sites down?”
Friends often ask how she can be so sure he didn’t actually abuse her. “I understand why people ask. They’re worried about me. And it gives me a chance to educate them, to explain that this happens all the time—it’s not just a random, unusual thing that happened to me.
I want to make it clear that he was an ordinary man. A good dad. There aren’t warning signs, and no one should be expected to spot them before it happens. He was just my dad, and I loved him.”
For both Fiona and Emily, there’s a feeling that people looking at their situation might be judging them, wondering why they didn’t see the signs. This is especially hard for Fiona. “I have a particular interest in protecting…”I’ve always been extra vigilant about protecting children from abuse, and I’ve been that way my entire child’s life. So for him to talk about her like that, knowing my own background… it was more devastating than I can say.
She and Mark had their ups and downs. “He was controlling with me. I found out in the past that he had been chatting to women online. We went to therapy to work on our relationship, and I thought we were both putting in the effort. Just before this happened, I had noticed he seemed to have a swagger about him. Now I know it’s because he was still getting fulfillment from a secret online life.”
Emily can see how painful this is for her mother. “My mum is such a strong feminist. She was heartbroken that, after trying her whole life to protect me from male abuse, this would happen.”
It was partly this feminist anger that pushed Emily to challenge the CPS’s decision to drop the case. She first wrote to her MP, who invited her to his office. There, she gave a PowerPoint presentation that convinced him this issue went far beyond one family’s trauma. He arranged a meeting for her with Alex Davies-Jones, the minister for victims and tackling violence against women and girls. Davies-Jones then wrote to the CPS, asking them to explain why the charges had been dropped. In their response, the CPS stood by their decision not to press charges.
In a letter seen by the Guardian, they explained that this was because “the prosecution could not prove that the defendant either intended the messages to be indecent or obscene, or that he would be aware of a risk that the messages would be viewed as such by any reasonable member of the public.”
Emily was shocked by the reasoning. “They said that because it was a fantasy and he was talking to someone who wanted to hear it, it wasn’t indecent or obscene. Even though he was talking specifically about abusing me, his daughter. He even named me and gave enough detail that the police found where we lived.”
The letter also explained why a prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act was not considered, saying the meaning of “obscene” must be understood in the legal sense: “having a tendency to depravity or corruption.” “It is this element of the offence which the prosecution could not prove in this case,” the CPS wrote. “The defendant and the recipient of the material were engaged in a private online discussion. The recipient was sending messages back to the defendant which were of a similar nature – and on this basis the prosecution could not prove that the messages – intended to be seen only by the one, like-minded recipient – would have a tendency to deprave or corrupt.”
For Emily, this argument felt immoral. But more than that, she wanted to prove it was legally wrong. While researching people who might be interested in her case, she came across Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University and an expert on legislation around violent and harmful mainstream pornography. McGlynn hears from many victims, but when she read Emily’s email, it stood out. “I could instantly see the gap in the law that her case highlighted.”
Once you are in that space, you will learn you aren’t alone; other people will encourage your sexual interest in children.
McGlynn has just published a book, Exposed: The Rise of Extreme Porn and How We Fight Back, and by coincidence was researching the links between chat groups and porn associated with child abuse when she heard from Emily.
“I had the unpleasant task of going through sites, looking at how many videos there are with themes related to children or incest – or ‘step incest’, which is very popular,” McGlynn says. “I was realizing something I hadn’t before: thatHere’s a whole community of people commenting and sharing stories, interests, and links under these videos. She could see how the videos created a space for people with similar interests to talk. “So, if you want to discuss how much you like daddy-daughter or stepdad-stepdaughter videos—well, here’s a whole community for that. Of course, the big danger is that these men realize they’re not alone. That normalizes the whole idea.”
McGlynn argues that the CPS misinterpreted the law. “We’ve established in case law that you can always make someone more depraved and corrupt. So on that point, they’re simply wrong. More importantly, I think they just didn’t take this behavior seriously enough or understand the danger these men pose. That’s why we need to update the law.” She points to Canada, where encouraging child abuse is already illegal.
Michael Sheath is another online child abuse expert who advises police on offender profiling. “We’ve known since the 1960s that this isn’t a defense. There were debates about whether men in porn shops could be further depraved, and we knew they could be.” He highlights how men can move from one behavior to a more serious one—from thinking about porn to thinking about abusive porn, to thinking about abuse in real life. “These sites create an environment where people push boundaries, and once you’re in that space, it’s incredibly seductive. You learn you’re not alone; other people will encourage your sexual interest in children.”
As understanding of this grows in parliament, McGlynn told Emily she would take her case to her contacts there. Leading the fight for legal reforms in the House of Lords is Baroness Bertin, a Conservative peer tasked by the last government with examining the harms of online pornography.
The knock that tears families apart: ‘They were at the door, telling me he had accessed indecent images of children’
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Working with Labour MP Jess Asato in the Commons, they recently succeeded in pushing through amendments to the Crime and Policing Act. These will ban pornography that “features step-incest or performers role-playing as children,” as Asato said in parliament. In the same speech, she added that “this gateway to paedophilia is swung firmly shut.” Asato told the Guardian she is very concerned about the failure to prosecute Mark. She believes Emily’s experience shows that legislation needs to be tougher and respond to the ever-changing ways people discuss and promote child abuse online.
McGlynn wants to see “a specific criminal offence to advocate, counsel or glorify child sexual abuse in text,” which would cover discussions in chatrooms and comments under videos on porn sites.
Baroness Bertin, who met Emily as part of her research, says that, like the planned ban on strangulation in porn, there needs to be a cultural shift around how sexual fantasies of incest and child abuse are portrayed. “We’ve got to reset what’s normal,” she says. “I feel very strongly that we want to stop people from becoming interested in these extreme topics. When I was researching, there were millions of views of really violent videos with abusive titles.”
The Guardian contacted the police team that investigated and arrested Mark—a specialist unit in a large regional force. They responded that, because all charges had been dropped, they couldn’t comment. The CPS said, “Our prosecutors considered a number of possible charges in this case. However, after a further detailed review of the file provided by police, we concluded there was not enough evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction.”
Emily is waiting to see what will change, but she’s telling her story in the hope that it will help shift political opinion on the poorly regulated world of online porn and sex chat sites. She also felt vindicated by sharing her story with politicians. “It justified how I felt when I found out what my father did. I knew it was wrong, despite what the law says.”She doesn’t want to share anything about herself publicly—not her job, where she lives, or what she loves. It’s not to hide from the world, but to make sure her father knows nothing about her as she moves forward. “He knows nothing about me. I’ve even changed my hair so he doesn’t know what I look like now.”
In her personal life, she’s doing well. “I’ve told most people I know. I want friends and coworkers to understand why I react in certain ways. For example, if an older man is sexist toward me, it makes me incredibly uncomfortable.”
But despite everything she’s been through, she refuses to become cynical about men. “For the first year or so after the arrest, it was hard to hear dads talking about their kids—just nice, normal things. But I’ve managed to stay hopeful about life. My mum always taught me to keep hope. I would never assume all men are the same.”
Fiona, now living hundreds of miles away from the house—and the life—that the police “blew up” early one morning, feels incredibly proud of Emily. “She’s amazing. She lost everything. She had to question her entire childhood. She lost her grandparents because they took his side. But she still has her sense of identity. It’s incredible.
“Once, we were talking and I used the word ‘shame’ about what happened, about what people would think of us. Emily said, ‘Mum, that’s your shame if you choose to feel it, but I’m not going to have shame.’”
Fiona has also been pushed forward by life, by the need to keep being a parent. “I had to function, to work. I haven’t stopped yet. It’s grief, and it comes in waves.”
But Fiona fears that Mark feels no shame or consequences. When she met him to get his signature on the papers that would separate their lives forever, she felt a chill of fear at his lack of remorse. “He should have been charged for what he did. He should have been held accountable. And he’s glad he wasn’t.”
Instead, he’s been able to move abroad and start over. “He told me he was dating someone with kids. It was like he was saying, ‘Look, I’ve moved on, someone trusts me.’”
What Mark has lost, though, is his relationship with his child. “He sends a text on birthdays and at Christmas, which Emily dreads, but he doesn’t know anything about her life. For me, that would be a horrible punishment.”
Emily has the final word on the man who was her dad. “For my own sanity and to keep my sense of self, I try to separate things in my mind and hold onto my childhood memories with him as positive as they once were. That was one person, my dad. The person who did this is a completely different person. I don’t know him at all. He’s the man who wrote disgusting things about his daughter. I have no contact with him, and I never will again.”
Names and some details have been changed. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children at 0800 1111, and to adults concerned about a child at 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) supports adult survivors at 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline at 800-422-4453. In Australia, children, young adults, parents, and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline at 1800 55 1800; adult survivors can seek help from the Blue Knot Foundation at 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helpline International.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the scenario you described written in a natural tone with clear simple answers
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What exactly happened
The police showed up to arrest a father for sexual abuse but it turned out he had completely lied about the abuse The accusation was false
2 Why would someone lie about being sexually abused
People lie for many reasons to get attention to get revenge on someone to cover up their own bad behavior or because of a mental health issue
3 Can the father still be arrested if he made it up
No Once the police find out the accusation is false they will not arrest him The person who lied could be arrested for filing a false police report
4 What happens to the person who lied
They can face criminal charges like filing a false report or perjury They might also have to pay for any costs the police or the father incurred
5 Does this mean false accusations are common
No False accusations of sexual abuse are rare Most reports of abuse are true But when they do happen they are very serious
IntermediateLevel Questions
6 What evidence do the police need to know the accusation is false
They look for things like contradictions in the accusers story lack of physical evidence witness statements that prove the father was elsewhere or a confession from the accuser that they lied
7 Can the father sue the person who lied
Yes He can file a civil lawsuit for defamation malicious prosecution or intentional infliction of emotional distress
8 What if the accuser is a child Does that change things
Yes Children can lie but its more complex Police and child protective services are trained to handle child accusations carefully If a child is coached by an adult to lie the adult can be charged
9 How long does it take for the fathers name to be cleared
It depends If the lie is uncovered quickly his name can be cleared fast If it goes to court it could take months or years
10 What should the father do immediately after the police leave
He should 1 Write down everything
