Families of SOs Community Group
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I was married for over 10 years to the man of my dreams. He helped me raise my siblings from the time they were teenagers, we had a beautiful daughter of our own, he was a respected mental health provider. I thought I was living the perfect life.
5 years ago, the FBI raided my house. They said my husband had been viewing and downloading child porn for at least 4 months. I was sure they were at the wrong house.
CPS was called (our daughter was 4). They said he couldn't have contact with her until a judge ordered otherwise. He was taken to jail and released less than 24 hours later. He went to his parents house.
It turned out that he had never touched anyone. He had downloaded images of teenage girls. I don't know why that matters to me. It does, though.
In those early days, I had no contact with my husband. I was confused and hurt and betrayed. I spoke to divorce lawyers, got updates about my husband from his parents, tried to make sense of it all. His name and picture made front page news, I got death threats on the dirty website that exposes sex offenders. I read countless vile and angry messages about how he should be punished for his crimes. Crimes he had only been accused of, not convicted of.
I decided I could only make decisions based on my daughter's well being. I couldn't make any decisions about how I felt about it all. I could make logical decisions about her life as the daughter of (potentially) a registered sex offender. We live too close to a school. His livelihood depends on a background check, etc. It was not the life I wanted for her. We spent 1 day together talking about it all. I was calm about everything. I was supportive of him. I still didn't see him that way. He actually said I was the most loving and spiritual person he knew. That I could trust God to help me make the right choices for our family and not hold any animocity toward him.
In the end, I didn't have to make those decisions. He took his own life 6 weeks after he was arrested. He said he thought it was best for my daughter and I. Then I transitioned to being a widow. I dealt with being a widow. I got my daughter into counseling for dealing with her dad's death. I spend so much of my life relating as a widow.
I'm 5 years out and the past 6 months have been a roller coaster of apparently suppressed emotions about being married to a pedophile. I'm suddenly needing to know how I feel about that. I'm feeling that animocity and outrage now. I still don't see him that way. I still can't wrap my head around how the man I knew and loved could do that.
How do you come to terms with that? I know he was sick. I logically get that. I just don't know how someone who had the mental health training he had didn't get help. I don't understand how someone who loved us enough to end his life for us didn't love us enough to not look at child porn. I don't understand how he could do that to us. And understanding it as a mental illness no longer placates me. It is no longer is enough to explain it.
How did you deal with all the shame and guilt and anger? How do you let it go?
By no means am I saying what your husband did was ok, but think about it from a biological perspective. It isn’t abnormal for a person to be attracted to someone who is sexually mature and able to reproduce. In fact there were times in human history where older men married younger girls. Even look at Mary and Joseph in the Bible, the Jewish custom was to get engaged at 12-13 for girls and married a year or two after that. The men were usually early 20s. That means in today’s age Joseph would be a sex offender.
This to me points to the idea that there isn’t a biological reason being attracted to sexually mature teenagers is wrong but it is wrong on a social level. Teenagers are not anywhere near mature enough to make decisions when there is vast differences in personal and social power. That is why in today’s legal code they lack the ability to give informed consent.
So I don’t think the attraction is necessarily wrong, I think acting on it in any way would be. And that includes looking at pictures because a lot of the time the pictures and videos were taken against the teenagers will and they lacked the ability to give consent in the first place. But I don’t think people who get into underage porn necessarily will go on to molest a child. There is no research that shows that to be the case. As such I think the current punishments for having pictures of CP is just ludicrous. People caught with it are given longer sentences than people who actually molest children, that’s insane to me.
There should be some punishment but it should be a slap on the wrist and not hundreds of year sentences.
So your husband was not a pedophile and most likely a lot of adult men would have at least some level of attraction to photos of teenage girls. I think biologically it is not wrong to have the attraction to sexually mature teenagers but socially it is with the vast differences in power in our culture. And I think the current laws for CP are producing some truly ridiculous sentences. I think people should be punished but not anywhere close to what they are at this time. If we want to stop CP we need to go after the biggest fish, not the low hanging fruit.
I haven't walked nearly the road you have but I think I can relate to the piece you are dealing with now. First let me say I am so sorry for your double loss of your husband. I'm so sorry that the system is so messed up that it led to him taking his own life. I can hear the grief you are still carrying and processing in your words. Based on my own journey I can only imagine that you have had so many big things to deal with and grieve for, and be there for your daughter, that you have not had a chance to really process this part about who was your husband and how could he have done this.
I have been going through that process related to my son in the past year since I found out he had touched his sister multiple times in a way he shouldn't have, and that he had some porn use that was concerning to police and thus to his lawyer. It's a different situation but it was still a shock for me to learn, I never would have guessed he would have done any of that. I have spent much time trying to wrap my mind around this, trying to figure out who he really is, how to "label" what he actually did accurately (I don't think the reality is as bad as it sounded legally but then what really was it...), thinking about what really is evil, what makes people do bad things, how we all can be good sometimes and bad other times, how do people "compartmentalize" their lives to do things that seem opposite (his therapist used that term)... I don't know what else to say to you now but I think I can relate to that part of what you're thinking of now.
I have shared this song with others and although it was written for preschoolers I really haven't found anything yet that says it better, it was written by Fred Rogers:
Sometimes people are good
And they do just what they should
But the very same people who are good sometimes
Are the very same people who are bad sometimes
It's funny, but it's true.
It's the same, isn't it, for me and you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro2qQuWUEs0
One road I have gone down in thinking about my son (supported by reading books like The Lucifer Effect which describes behavior of prison guards both in a research situation and in real military prisons in wartime, and No Future Without Forgiveness, which describes the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with atrocities of apartheid in South Africa) is that basically anyone is likely to do things they swear they would never do, that they know are wrong, if put in the right situation. Very few of us are as good at resisting temptation as we think we are. I unknowingly put my son in a situation over his head when I let him still share a room with his sister after he turned 10 years old. The dark part of this is facing that any of us have the capacity to do bad things but just might not have been put in the right combination of circumstances for it to happen yet. I don't know if that helps for you or not?