This, the Government claims, offers bespoke protection for individuals while mitigating the risks presented by prison early-release schemes. Theoretically, offenders breaching the zones might face being returned to prison, giving peace of mind to victims of stalking, domestic violence and sexual offenses. It was reported on Sunday that restriction zones will start to appear in October.

Victims groups have welcomed the initiative. A spokeswoman for the Joanna Simpson Foundation, a domestic violence charity, declared the rollout of the zones “a much-needed change that has long been called for and is a powerful step forward”. Victims have for years complained that knowing abusers are free to roam their communities offers a constant source of pain and distress. I wonder, though, whether they will find themselves disappointed with the policy in practice; theoretical models of offender-control crack like eggs when dropped onto the pavement of reality. Incentives to not reoffend tend not to take into account many offenders’ irrational behavior, occasionally caused by substance abuse or mental health issues.

The Zones raise further questions too, about penal reform, justice and civil liberties — are our criminal justice elites trying to be too clever by half? Hunkered down in their brutalist eyrie, did Ministry of Justice mandarins imagine they’d square the circle of cost-cutting and placating the powerful penal reform lobby, which is generally skeptical about the concept of imprisonment? Now, rather than being locked up, violent offenders can instead be rehabilitated in communities, inside virtual-reality prisons. For now, the Zones are aimed at violent offenders, but what — or who — comes next? Would this model of control be considered for other types of offending, such as burglary or robbery too? Will the restriction zone model offer comfort to victims, or are they a window into a future of soft totalitarianism? And, crucially, will they ever really protect the public from violent criminals?

Towards the end of my police career, I worked for the UK Protected Persons Service (UKPPS). My duties involved what’s known as “witness protection”: that is, monitoring offenders who posed potential risks to vulnerable witnesses. As such, I often worked with the police teams responsible for delivering Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements [MAPPA] — the public protection world is laden with acronyms. These were locally-based officers responsible for the management of high-risk offenders. Their remit included yet another public protection acronym, MOSOVO, or “management of sexual or violent offenders”. None of these acronyms, however, are adequate in describing modern offender management in practice. In my experience, put-upon police and probation officers operate a system held together with optimism and duct-tape. Monitoring offenders is one thing — intercepting and managing them face-to-face is another.

In my experience, MAPPA fails to mitigate the underlying problem with offender management: the progressive-coded rehabilitative bias that affects criminal justice in general, and probation specifically. As the former police officer-turned-policy analyst Rory Geoghegan wrote: “The ideology centers the offender as a vulnerable individual with ‘criminogenic needs’ which the state must understand and address.”

This means that while a violent but newly-released rapist might be an ongoing threat to women and girls, he’s still an individual with “agency” and rights. How dare the authorities harass him? Which is what offender management is, really. Gently intrusive harassment, with a smile and a cup of tea. As ever, the carrots and sticks used by the police to protect the public are both in short supply. Sticks are surrendered to an administrative state in thrall to progressive dogma, carrots to accountants. Most police officers would agree that a sex offender held in a secure environment, with opportunities for rehabilitation, is more likely to protect victims than a GPS tag and harsh words. We used to refer to such places as prisons — hardly an appropriate word for the three-kilometer radius of an offender’s home address. Except the prisons have suffered the same death-by-parsimony as the rest of the criminal justice system. As, indeed, is the ever-struggling probation service.

The restriction zone project will rely on probation officers working with victims of crime to create bespoke safety plans, identifying where an offender might not be allowed to travel without breaching his or her virtual incarceration. The problem with this, of course, is the probation service’s questionable performance, not to mention the problematic relationship the private sector has enjoyed with monitoring prisoners at all. Scandals have concerned equipment and administrative failures, causing dangerous safety gaps for police and probation officers.

Suggested Reading

The high street’s authoritarian turn

By Timandra Harkness

Again we can discern the spirit of optimism and duct-tape lingers. One can imagine an operations room in a busy urban area, multiple lights bleeping on a map as dozens of “supervised” offenders probe the perimeters of their virtual cages. Who will assess risk? Send patrols to intercept rogue offenders? Will the police, still trying to extricate themselves from the burden of acting as mental health auxiliaries, find new work as ersatz prison warders too? Other areas of policing offer clues to the resource demands around monitoring or protecting individuals. A police close protection team might demand between six-to-eight officers to protect their “principal” for a 24-hour period. Three 10-strong mobile surveillance teams are necessary to covertly report on a human suspect’s movements over a similar period. Perhaps, one day, AI-controlled robots will patrol the Government’s invisible Temu gulags, but until then?

The reality of the restriction zone project, one unmentioned in any Ministry of Justice press release, is this: managing violent offenders in the community is, at best, a game of whack-a-mole. I once spoke with a detective on an east London borough where a team of four managed around 600 high-risk registered sex offenders. And London has 32 boroughs. Furthermore, officers working in offender management have a limited toolbox at their disposal. The hammers and nails involve sanctions when an offender breaches their license, meaning they might be returned to that same prison system that is so keen to release prisoners.

The rest of the time? The police compile reports on how offenders engage with the MAPPA regime. Their demeanor. Their life circumstances. Are they complying with probation? Have they tried to contact any victims? This is where struggling police forces interface with equally struggling probation services. Any system which creates more tagged offenders limited to strictly-defined geographical zones will add an extra burden to a system — the BBC reported that 32% of probation appointments with high-risk sex offenders, between 2023 and 2025, were missed due to workload issues. The success of the restriction zone project will come down to whether it can reduce in reoffending rates and prison returns. Sadly, the authorities have a poor record of anticipating, deterring and managing known risks. The cases of human time-bombs like Axel Rudakubana and Valdo Calocane show how knowing someone is dangerous is a completely different proposition from protecting the public from them. The themes, for Britain’s criminal-justice elites, are deeply uncomfortable: mental health, resources, human rights and race. Then there are questions of competence: why are police forces increasingly incapable of public protection?

More from this author

Inside Britain's DEI police force

By Dominic Adler

As a former policeman, I’m used to the consequences of second-order effects. No doubt this project will create new challenges for the officers charged with protecting us from predators such as the serial sex offender Simon Levy or the murderer Jordan McSweeney, both men who were known to be highly likely to reoffend. Sadly, the Ministry of Justice “proof of concept” turns on the lives of the innocent. Statistics suggest that in 2024, one murder a week was committed by offenders on probation. Then, when the optimism dies and the duct-tape breaks, those blamed for systems failure will be ordinary police and probation officers, their seniors lawyering-up for the inevitable public inquiries.

Instead, we have a cash-strapped civil service, one obliged to pay lip service to those theories of “criminogenic needs.” The Ministry of Justice have worked with the paltry resources at their disposal to offer geographic detention, monitored by outsourced technology and enforced by a shoestring police service. Meanwhile, policymakers and mandarins continue with the disestablishment of traditional criminal sanctions. To their minds, rapists and murderers can be managed via the penal equivalent of “20-minute neighborhoods” or planned parking zones. Turning offender management into a technical adjunct to town and country planning might sound novel, but I doubt it will work in practice.

What about the Home Office’s latest wheeze, offering asylum-seekers from developing countries pamphlets politely asking them not to commit sexual offenses? Perhaps that’s another window into our near-future of anarcho-tyranny, one where murderers overstepping invisible restriction zones receive a drone-delivered missive reminding them — gently ± not to rape or murder. Alternatively, of course, we could simply build better prisons, until the innate goodness of the human spirit so beloved of penal reformers finally manifests itself. Until that rapture, though, will they spare a thought for the rest of us?

Despite today’s headlines about officers being sacked or jailed for illicit relationships with prisoners, none of the underlying dynamics are new. Across the 16 years I spent in custody, I saw it all first-hand, from furtive tenderness to outright corruption. But if base human impulse will endure until our jails turn to dust, the prison environment has changed. With austerity undermining the workplace structures that once controlled interactions between inmate and guard, hormones — and self-interested cynicism — are now far harder to constrain.

A recent surge in misconduct cases has dragged prison romance into public view. The media focus has fixed largely on women, partly because several cases have been unusually sensational, from the explicit footage to relationships that fused emotional dependency with criminal compromise. The HMP Wandsworth case, where an officer was jailed after being filmed having sex with a prisoner, illustrated how quickly fantasy, contraband and security failure can collapse into public scandal.

The figures reflect this trend. In the year to June 2024, a record 165 prison staff in England and Wales were dismissed for misconduct, a 34% rise on the previous year. The offenses ranged from inappropriate relationships to smuggling phones and drugs. Across the wider Ministry of Justice and its agencies, dismissals for misconduct have more than doubled since 2022. Increased detection doubtless plays a role here, but so do the cumulative effects of structural degradation. Ironically, the very contraband used to sustain secrecy — mobile phones — has helped expose wrongdoing so publicly that the state has been forced to respond.

In truth, though, this is about far more than a smuggled iPhone. There was a time, after all, when such relationships were contained by experience. Older officers understood prisoner behavior instinctively. They spotted manipulation early. They knew when a conversation lingered too long, when grooming had begun, when a colleague needed to be rotated off a wing. Their presence acted as the prison service’s immune system. I remember one senior officer who ran the wing I lived on. He was firm, sometimes abrasive, but effective. “It’s his train set,” a fellow prisoner once joked, and in a sense it was. He understood the environment and how to keep it stable.

More from this author

The Islamist brotherhood inside our prisons

By Steve Gallant

That authority wasn’t abstract. One officer I knew, who become involved in an intimate relationship with a prisoner, was working under exactly this kind of robust leadership. Once the early signs were identified, there was no slow drift, no tolerated ambiguity. She was removed from the wing and marched off-site within hours. As it was relayed to us later, a superior told her simply: “This job is not for you.”

These protections were stripped away after 2012, when ministers replaced a planned privatization drive with “public sector benchmarking”: doing more work with fewer staff. From 2011 to 2017, frontline officer numbers fell by roughly 30%, and the service has never recovered.

When that senior officer I knew took redundancy, some were glad. Within a year, though, the cost was obvious. The atmosphere loosened. Boundaries blurred, and with them the everyday authority that had kept the wings stable. What followed was a power vacuum, one swiftly filled by violent criminals, organized gangs and Islamists. Authority, in other words, isn’t withdrawn from the landings, nor does it disappear. Rather, it’s ceded: to those most willing to impose it, arbitrarily and often violently.

And for every experienced prison guard who retires, their replacement is almost invariably worse. I saw this first hand, as landings were filled with inexperienced recruits, some barely out of college, and all with minimal training and weak supervision. A vicious circle soon followed, as staff with little life experience were dumped into some of the most brutal environments in the country. I witnessed this shift personally, when a new female recruit arrived on my wing. She was keen and professional, but inexperienced in reading her surroundings. That is not a criticism of her; it’s an obvious risk when 22 year olds are stationed on wings holding around 100 men, and where they’re routinely left to patrol landings alone. High on the third floor, the guard was dragged into a cell by a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder, with no colleagues to assist her. Intervention came only after other prisoners heard her screams.

By late 2023, the scale of this collective inexperience was stark. 41% of prison officers had fewer than three years on the job, compared to just 2% a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the proportion with over 10 years’ experience had fallen from two thirds to less than a quarter. Knowledge that once passed informally between generations of staff — how to read a wing, how to set boundaries — had largely disappeared.

As my memories from HMP Gartree imply, secret relationships between inmates and guards have always existed. Falling in love is human nature, more so in the cramped psychological conditions of prison. Jail distorts ordinary emotional patterns. It compresses isolation and allows human instincts to slip their usual restraints. All this is doubly true for prisoners, starved of intimacy and connection, with deprivation turning small acts of kindness into oxygen.

Yet seasoned criminals hardly forget their methods at the prison gate. They cultivate familiarity, test boundaries — and wait. Once a line is crossed, leverage follows. A favor today becomes expectation tomorrow. Then exception becomes routine, and emotional access hardens into material extraction: contraband, prohibited communications, the “one-off” that last for years.

For officers, particularly young women placed on volatile landings with predatory men, environment and emotional reflex combine with dangerous force. There is the urge to nurture, easily triggered by displays of distress or vulnerability. There is the pull of charismatic alpha males who command status among dangerous peers. And there is flattery, the illusion of being uniquely trusted, understood or “liked”. Some slip into the role without quite knowing when the ground gave way. Others exploit it knowingly, sometimes for financial gain.

Whatever the reason, falling into crime, especially when your duty is to maintain professional boundaries and protect the public, is a choice. Yet when these forces collide with inadequate supervision, thin staffing and relentless exposure, they harden into risk — and the consequences can be severe. Intelligence leaks. Contraband circulates more freely. Debt and violence intensify. Informal power shifts. I have known officers disclose offenses, identify informants or pass on sensitive information, sometimes to ingratiate themselves, sometimes out of hatred for a particular crime. The consequences were predictable: prisoners attacked; debts enforced through beatings; men removed from rehabilitative pathways because trust, once broken, could not be restored.

Of course, not every case crosses the threshold into criminality. Some drift into genuine emotional partnerships. A small number of staff resign to continue relationships openly once prisoners are transferred. In lower-category prisons, this drift has sometimes been rationalized rather than challenged. At HMP Warren Hill, where I was held for over two years, one such relationship involving a charity worker was tolerated on the basis that it acted as a “protective factor” ahead of release, provided it remained “non-intimate”.

Suggested reading

Why pen-pushers can’t run prisons

By Mary Harrington

Still, just like in the real world, many of these staff-inmate relationships founder, and when they do, officers tend to suffer more. If the breach involves improper contact but no contraband, the (often female) officer is removed, barred and sometimes shamed in the press. The prisoner, however, may face little consequence beyond a file note. When criminality is involved, the imbalance widens further. Messages, footage, and entry logs usually sit with the officer. When it collapses, it does so brutally: prosecution, reputational ruin, shattered families and the realization that the promise of love was often as empty as the cell she now occupies. He, practiced in the art of concealment, may simply continue serving his sentence, his network and status enhanced.

His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service has acknowledged part of this reality, expanding its Counter Corruption Unit from 2019 to detect and disrupt wrongdoing. The rise in dismissals reflects that effort. But enforcement alone cannot repair a degraded system. This, too, reflects a wider failure across Britain’s criminal justice system: risk is managed procedurally rather than structurally. Scandals are treated as isolated lapses rather than symptoms of institutional weakening. Responsibility is pushed downwards onto individuals, while the conditions that made failure predictable remain largely untouched.

Honest reform would begin by honestly diagnosing the problem. This is not just a morality tale about individual weakness, but the predictable result of stripped-out experience, supervision and authority. From there, the authorities must re-professionalize the job. That means restoring experienced staff on wings, and ensuring training addresses the ethical and psychological hazards of prison work, all while rotating staff off high-risk landings. The watchword here should be prevention — not punishment.

Aligning incentives with reality is crucial here. Stabilizing violent, drug-saturated prisons is skilled, risky work. Until pay and progression reflect that, the service will continue recruiting for numbers and losing experience. And finally, the Ministry of Justice should improve design and culture, not just detection. Better sightlines and smarter CCTV both matter here, as do schedules that discourage isolation.

Ultimately, this is not about romance or scandal. It is about safety. Yet until prisons are rebuilt as safety-critical institutions — properly staffed and properly supervised — the same quiet patterns will persist: the light footsteps on the landing, the whispers at the door, the lines crossed just out of sight. And the consequences will not remain inside.

“The knock” is the term given by families to the day the police came for their father, partner, husband, son or brother after being caught downloading indecent — and often violent — images or videos of children or babies. It is a moment when lives change forever, when women realise that the man with whom they have shared their life is actually a stranger, and, in some cases, a monster.

“In an instant, the life you had disappears, and you realise that nothing will ever be the same,” says Katie, a 43-year-old mother of two boys, aged six and eight. “The person you thought you knew, you didn’t know at all. Then the suspicion starts among your neighbours and extended family, because surely you must have known what was going on? Your friends melt away, and your kids’ play dates stop, and the police tell you to be careful of vigilantes attacking your house, and your children ask awkward questions. So, you give up your job and pack up and move, and you end up with nothing.…  You lose your home and your friends and your job, and you have damaged children who will grow up without a father. And even though none of it is your fault, you constantly carry round this irrational sense of guilt.”

What happened to Katie happens to scores of families every month. According to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, 35% of homes raided because of online paedophilic activity include children. In 2021/22, there were 10,181 arrests for downloading indecent images of children (IIoC) — an average of 848 each month. That figure has risen from 417 a decade ago. This means that an average of 298 families with children experience the knock each month — almost 10 families a day.

This is a massive, and growing, problem in the UK. The viewing and downloading of child porn is increasing all the time. According to the Internet Watch Foundation, the number of child sex sites found by its experts increased by 1,420% between 2011 and 2020. In 2021, it found 252,000 images of child sexual abuse — up 21% on the year before. The Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which campaigns and provides help to encourage offenders to stop viewing child abuse content, found that “isolation, unemployment and escalating pornography habits” during the pandemic resulted in more than 165,000 people seeking help via its advisory website in 2021. That was a 107% increase on the year before.

More from this author

Inside the race to create a vaccine passport

By Steve Boggan

But while the victims of abuse in online images are rightly given help when they can be found, the women and children left behind after the knock receive no special support from the state, whether financial, emotional, educational, psychological or practical. Because even though they become victims of the crime committed by the man in their life, the government doesn’t recognise them as such.

The knock came to the home of Carly Peters, a 59-year-old nurse, at 11am on a winter’s day in 2019. “You never forget it,” she says. “It’s like when people ask where you were when Diana died. For me, it came the day after a lovely evening which my then husband, Matthew, and I had had with my two sons and my daughter from my first marriage, and his daughter from his. We had been together for 11 years and had the perfect life, a great family, no money worries, a beautiful home, all of it.

“The kids — who are all grown up — had stayed over. The last time I saw the man that I thought I knew was at 8:50am that morning. I kissed him goodbye because I was taking one of my sons on an errand. When we got back, Matthew had gone into work — he owns a furniture business — and suddenly there was a knock on the door.

“Two men told me they were police officers and asked if they could come in. They said Matthew had been arrested on suspicion of ‘illegal downloading’. I had no idea what that was. Then they said he had admitted the offence at the showroom — because that’s where the downloading had taken place — and he had told them there was a computer and a hard drive in a bag under our bed. They asked whether I knew anything about that and I said no. My head was spinning.”

The police asked if there was anyone else in the house and Carly said her children were there. Visibly concerned, the officers asked how old the “children” were and she told them: in their late twenties and early thirties. The police relaxed — there were no young children at risk. The siblings were asked to gather in one room and to surrender all their storage devices, laptops, iPads, telephones, memory sticks and so on. So was Carly.

Suggested reading

Porn will destroy you

By Sarah Ditum

“I asked them what Matthew was supposed to have done, but they said they couldn’t tell me under GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]. More officers came in and they took my home apart. They searched everywhere and put all our devices into black bags and took them out to unmarked police cars. They weren’t wearing uniforms, but it must have been obvious to the neighbours that something strange was going on.

“Then the most senior officer took me into our bedroom and pulled a bag from under the bed. Matthew had hidden it there. But I still didn’t know what he was supposed to have done… After two hours, they were gone, and we were none the wiser. They said Matthew would be home later, and he would explain everything, but Matthew didn’t come home.” Over the next couple of days, Matthew avoided contact with Carly, her children and his daughter. He went to the home of Carly’s father, where he tried to overdose on the father’s insulin. When that failed, he took an overdose of paracetamol and ended up in hospital.

Carly had no right to be given details of their partner’s alleged crimes unless the partner gave permission. “We had Googled ‘illegal downloading’ and seen that it could be for pirated music or indecent images of children or something else,” says Carly. This is a common problem for families in this situation, and it creates a vacuum in which offenders can lie about, or minimise, their illegal activities. These periods of deception — during which women are sometimes tricked into staying with the offender — can last for up to two years because of unprecedented backlogs in court cases post-pandemic and the time it takes to have devices examined by digital forensics experts.

“A couple of days after his arrest, Matthew told me he had a problem with pornography and it involved children,” says Carly. “I asked him how old, and he said: ‘Between three and 12.’ I’ve been a nurse for many years and so I have a strong constitution, but when he told me about the poor victims in these images, I vomited.” But it took two years for Matthew’s case to be heard at Crown Court. Only then did Carly learn the full extent of his crimes. He pleaded guilty to possessing or making more than 4,000 indecent images of children.

“The ‘making’ of indecent images charge was brought because of the way he had downloaded them and organised them into folders,” she says. “They were in age groups: three to five; six to eight; nine to 12. Most of them were ‘Category A’ images, the most serious, which means full penetrative sex. We’re talking about people having sex with toddlers.”

Suggested reading

The forgotten victims of domestic abuse

By Julie Bindel

Matthew was given a two-year suspended prison sentence, and put on the sex offenders register for 10 years. Carly stopped living with Matthew after he told her the bare basics of what he had done, and she has since divorced him. She sold their house, changed her name, gave up her job and moved to a new town. After months of counselling — which she paid for herself because she wasn’t entitled to any special help — she says she is making progress.

Families of online child abuse offenders suffer mentally, physically, socially and financially, according to research conducted by Professor Rachel Armitage and her colleagues at Huddersfield’s Department of Criminology. In 2021, they interviewed 126 family members and friends of offenders. They found that all but 17.5% of interviewees had symptoms consistent with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); 70% had symptoms that suggested they ought to have been diagnosed with PTSD, yet only 22 had received formal diagnoses and treatment for it.

The researchers also found that 65% reported symptom levels that were sufficient to suppress their body’s immune system. According to the Impact of Events Scale they used, a score of 35 would merit a diagnosis of PTSD and more than 37 would be high enough to put immune system function at risk. The mean score for offenders’ children was 55.6 and for their wives or partners it was 44.8. One of the women I interviewed said she developed rheumatoid arthritis after her husband was arrested, while her daughter’s hair fell out.

“Some of the respondents referred to experiencing relapses of disorders that were thought to have been resolved in the past — for example, eating disorders — and several also noted that the stress of the discovery had led to them developing physical illnesses such as autoimmune system disorders and irritable bowel syndrome,” the researchers wrote in their findings.

“Participants described how the psychological impacts were exacerbated by the loneliness and isolation of being in this situation where you have little or no access to agency support, where you are unable to disclose the truth to your own family and friends, where you have lost somebody that you love.”

Suggested reading

Sex positivity's hidden victims

By Mary Harrington

None of the partners and professionals I spoke to was demonstrably critical of police officers who carry out the knock, but they did wonder whether it could be handled more sensitively — in ways that could protect children from the trauma of seeing their father taken away, their homes ripped apart in searches. The National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead on child protection and abuse, Deputy Chief Constable Ian Critchley, says: “The NPCC are aware of and understand the impact policing can have on families where someone has been subject to an arrest involving online child sexual abuse and exploitation. Often there are restrictions on the amount of information which can be provided due to several factors including GDPR, which we acknowledge can be frustrating and upsetting for innocent family members trying to understand why this is happening.” He says the NPCC is working with police forces, researchers and academics to find ways to make the knock and its aftermath less distressing.

During the period between arrest and trial, wives and partners (who, remember, usually don’t know the minutiae of what their man is supposed to have done) must decide whether to allow their children to see their father — usually under the supervision of a responsible adult — or whether to cut ties completely. If they suddenly remove the father, they risk damaging their children’s mental health; if they don’t, they risk being judged negatively by friends and family. Whatever they choose to do, they can’t win.

Katie White discovered this after agreeing that her husband, Bob, a 40-year-old civil servant, could see their two boys under the supervision of Bob’s mother. Within days of the knock, the Children’s Services department of her local authority had turned up, but “once they assess that your children aren’t at risk – because the offender is no longer living in the household – that’s it; they disappear from your life,” says Katie. “You get no help from them. The only time social services get involved is if your husband applies for more access rights or if you want to change the person who supervises his visits.”

Bob was convicted of possessing more than 1,000 indecent images of girls, some aged under eight. “At first, he had told me he might have accidentally clicked on a few images of girls aged 16 or 17,” says Katie. “It wasn’t until his hearing a year later that I found out the truth. I felt sick — lied to, cheated, and utterly disgusted.”

During that time, however, she had agreed to let Bob see their children once a week, supervised by his mother. The children were missing their father – to remove him completely did not seem like the right option. Not everyone agreed. One of her closest friends cut ties with her for allowing Bob to see the boys. After that, Katie, who had already given up her job, sold the family home and moved to a new town. Life was even harder there.

“I made a real effort at the school gates to get to know the other mothers, and fairly quickly I made a lot of acquaintances, but it was hard to make proper friends because I couldn’t afford to let anyone get too close,” she says. “I told them about getting divorced and said I’d moved there for a fresh start. There would be invitations to spa weekends away, or for late nights out and they would say: ‘Why can’t the kids stay with their dad?’. And I would say things like ‘It’s complicated’ or ‘That’s a long story’ but you can only keep batting away questions for so long.”

Eventually, she told three of her new friends about Bob’s offending, but they, too, judged her negatively for allowing her boys to have him in their lives. “One by one, they told me that if this had happened to them, they wouldn’t have allowed their children’s father to see them,” she says. “They didn’t drop me straight away, but they slowly melted away and don’t call any more. Now there’s nobody. I’m isolated in the community, and I feel very lonely.”

Bob re-offended last year. One of the boys wants to cut all ties with him; the other doesn’t. For Katie, this is just the latest in a long line of agonising quandaries that will inevitably see her cast her as villain, either in the eyes of one of her boys, or Bob’s family, or the so-called friends watching from the shadows.

“Every image contains a real child — an innocent victim — being abused, and that heart-breaking fact is never far from my mind,” says Katie. “All I can do is hope that they are identified and given the support they need. But our children need some professional help as well, because this crime has life-long emotional ramifications for them. They are victims of their fathers’ crimes, and they are more vulnerable as a result.”

Suggested reading

Pakistani child sex abuse is an open secret

By Hina Husain

The Ministry of Justice decides who can legally be described as a victim of crime. Under its “Code of Practice for Victims of Crime in England and Wales”, also known as the Victim’s Code, the definition is: “A person who has suffered harm, including physical, mental or emotional harm or economic loss which was directly caused by a criminal offence; or a close relative (or a nominated family spokesperson) of a person whose death was directly caused by a criminal offence”.

Being described as a victim is important as it confers statutory rights. Among these are the right to be kept updated with the investigation and the offender’s court appearances and, crucially, “the right to be referred to services that support victims, which includes the right to contact them directly, and to have your needs assessed so services and support can be tailored to meet your needs”.

Victims also have the right to claim compensation — something that might concern ministers — yet none of the women I interviewed mentioned compensation. Instead, their priority was getting practical and psychological support for their children, at home and at school. Neither they nor their children are currently offered counselling or any other kind of help.

Natalie Smith, a 39-year-old partner in an accountancy firm, says she is struggling with the difficult questions that her daughters, Jane, seven, and Sarah, four, are starting to ask, but she has no access to professional help or advice as to how she should answer them. She got the knock two years ago after a tip-off to the police that her husband, Brad, a 45-year-old businessman, had been sharing images of girls aged under 10 with followers on Twitter.

“After his arrest, I began to feel guilty because maybe I should have noticed something,” Natalie says. “Then you feel guilty for the children your husband was looking at, his first victims. You feel guilty for choosing this man to be the father of your girls, because now they are also his victims. And you feel guilty that this is going to affect them for years to come because they will grow up without a father.”

Natalie immediately moved out of the family home and in with her parents. She is still there, and her husband has no contact with their children. When the girls ask where he is, Natalie wants to answer honestly, but in ways that will not adversely affect them in the long term – she just isn’t sure how to do that. All she has to work with are suggestions from other mothers in an online forum set up by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation.

“Jane came home one day and said there was a boy in her class whose parents didn’t live together, but he still gets to see his daddy,” says Natalie. “She asked why Daddy didn’t come home to us, and so I told her he had looked at something he shouldn’t have looked at and that meant he wasn’t allowed home. Then she asked what he had looked at, and I told her she was too young for me to tell her, but I promised I would when she was old enough. Mothers on the forum say I should give ‘age-appropriate answers’, but I have nobody to ask what is appropriate. Recently, Jane has been asking me to get married again because she wants a daddy. She didn’t say her daddy, just a daddy.”

I asked the Ministry of Justice whether it might attribute victim status to partners and children of IIoC offenders. It replied: “The Victims’ Code stipulates that a victim for the purposes of the Code is ‘a person who has suffered harm, including physical, mental or emotional harm or economic loss, which was directly caused by a criminal offence’.  Therefore, families of offenders are not deemed victims of crime unless they were directly harmed by the offence. There are no plans to change this as it could inadvertently result in victims of crime receiving less support.”

It was a response that disappointed Professor Armitage. “At the very least, under this definition, children of online child sexual abuse offenders should be defined as victims,” she says. But Sarah Champion, the MP for Rotherham and a leading light in the fight against child sexual abuse and trafficking, not least as a result of grooming gangs in her own constituency, is the only Parliamentarian so far to back the calls to acknowledge them as “victims”. “Whenever a close relative is found to commit some of the most heinous crimes, the impact on their family is devastating, and of course they deserve our support,” she says. “But the children of online child abuse offenders become caught up in a complex and unique situation through no fault of their own. I will be doing all I can to get these children the protections and legal recognition they deserve.”

For now, this is where the story ends. This year, hundreds of families will experience the knock and its disastrous consequences — the broken homes, broken relationships and broken children — yet theirs is a dilemma borne of a despicable act that seems too difficult to talk about, too easy to ignore. “We’re a group of people that society would rather not recognise because of the horrible crime that has created us,” says Katie White. “And while I feel there is an acceptance that all of this horror is sure to have damaged my children, it seems that it hasn’t damaged them enough for anyone to care.”

Names have been changed and details withheld to protect children and families.