Family and Friends Forum

Hey there, its a horrible situation to be in. They will want to ensure youre a protective parents and not prioritising your relationship over your children. They do this whether theyre the bio dad or not because ultimately they are now considered a risk.

You can argue like I did that I thought it important to my own child's mental health he stayed a part of her life as thats their normal. Suddenly changing their normal too much can damage their mental health. It will be hard enough having them not there over night let alone not seeing them for a number of months.

They will want to assess whether or not they feel you are prioritising your relationship over your children and whether or not you deny anything he has been accused of or minimalise his actions. Expect some not very nice conversation to have with social services. Just remember they act on the idea theyre the worst person ever because if they dont and they get it wrong. Children end up hurt. So its horrible to experience but theyre just trying to make sure your children are safe.

They do try tactics to get you to seperate when you choose to stay because its the ultimate keep the kids safe route. Ive had a year of hell with them because i chose to stay. We are now post sentence for pocession and distribution of IIOCs and SS are for the first time talking to me in a possitive way. We still have a long path ahead but if our assessments go well we are looking at a much shorter path to moving back together. If they dont go well, well I will be back in the pit of doom and gloom.

This is a hard thing to hear, but you don't at this stage know if he's being honest. You won't begin to know until forensics comes back. The second hard thing is that this won't just go away - even if he eventually gets NFA'ed, SS will still be involved

The starting point is what do your children want? How old are they? Please please do tell them the truth, in an age appropriate way, even if they are pretty young. Don't lose their trust. But i would say be led by them

Firstly, yes you personally CAN survive this, whether you and your OH as a couple can is another story which you may have realised from reading the forum and varies from person to person for a multitude of reasons. Saying that you know he is being honest is understandably worrying for anyone who was told that and it wasn't true, but as I know from experience how anxiety-making that can be when you are clutching at straws of hope, I just want to add that sometimes they are being honest, That's not a criticism of anyone whose experience is different though, please don't take it as being that anyone!

I took the idea that our son might be lying to postpone us finding out more about his offences, to heart, partly because I had read so many accounts of that happening - if I had a pound for every time I quizzed him about whether he was being honest, I would have paid his barrister fees easily for him! We had a nightmare scenario when the police kept asking for a password for an app on his phone which he kept saying he had no idea what they meant. Apparently it was an app where it looked like something innocent on the surface but you could hide things behind it (people use it for banking details, not just illegal stuff). We went round in circles for months with requests for this password, son saying he had no idea what they meant, another wait of several weeks and then another request for the password. He ended up discovering they were referring to a phone that wasn't his, it was an Iphone which he has never had but it delayed things for months....but the point of my rambling is to say that sometimes our people are being honest and i wish I'd been able to hold that in the mix instead of preparing myself to discover that he was a liar.

Mentally none of this is at all easy, but I wish I'd been able to hang onto more trust in my son telling the truth although it's easy to say that now I know it would have been justified.

Trying to prepare for the worst whilst still hoping for the best is one of the biggest challenges for us all in this nightmare.....personally I now wish I had had more faith in him. It was horrendous enough knowing what he had admitted to without all my extra mental torment so I just want to send you strength and peace for as long as it takes and whatever the truth is. Either way brings its own challenges which you absolutely don't deserve and will need strength to keep going and a huge dose of resilience which you will find even if right now you feel it's far too big an ask. If I survived it then so can you x

Hi, I am in a very similar situation and each day I my mind is all over the place. I have a 6 year old, and a peodophile hunter group came to our home last September. He is Step Dad, SS are imvolved, at the moment it's unsupervised contact, and not to sleep at the same house. My child is on a CPP but have been told he can come off once I've completed a Safeguarding Assessment but it's getting to the point where I feel like I'm being accused now. I'm being told different things all the time, and they are booking in meetings which never seem to happen. Just would be nice to speak to people in similar situations really as awful as this all is.

Sorry supervised contact*