For the first 20 years of her life, Emily had what she thought was 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 arrived 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 proper job,' she explains, 'but the police didn't know that. They were trying to protect me.'
Police arrest father for online fantasies
When Fiona heard the door go at 7am, she had just got up. 'I wasn't even fully dressed,' she says. 'I looked out of 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.' The police put Fiona and Mark in separate rooms and searched the house. They kept asking, 'Where's your daughter?' It was only as Mark was led away that a senior female officer told Fiona why they were there: 'Your husband has been sexually abusing your daughter.'
Through her shock, Fiona immediately thought it couldn't be true. But the police told her Mark had been caught on a chat forum describing how he had been raping and sexually abusing Emily for years. It was written as a confession. He'd even used her name and talked about where they lived. The random stranger Mark thought he had been talking to was an undercover police officer.
Claims 'not matching with reality'
'I was sitting shaking with shock,' Fiona says. 'They were staring at me and I felt 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 had 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 everything like that. They were saying he had boasted online about abusing her recently at a family event. But I knew that event never happened. It was not matching with reality.'
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 that the police had got this completely wrong. 'They took over the call and were asking lots of questions like, did I remember him giving me baths when I was little, did he ever touch me? I just kept saying no.'
Charges dropped, father walks free
The sexual assault charges against Mark were dropped and changed to sending indecent messages under the Communications Act 2003. But 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,' Fiona says. 'The officer I spoke to told me that in the eyes of the law, Emily was not a victim and therefore no crime had been committed. He actually said that in this situation the 'victim' was the undercover officer as they were the ones who read the messages.'
Mark walked away with no criminal record or any form of monitoring. He was not placed on the sex offender register and there is nothing he has to disclose to an employer or a partner. Fiona later met him to get his signature on divorce papers. 'He made it clear that he considered it a prudish response, the public disapproval of a private fetish,' she says.
Legal fight and campaign for change
Emily first wrote to her MP, who secured her a meeting with the minister for victims and tackling violence against women and girls, Alex Davies-Jones. The minister wrote to the CPS, who doubled down on their decision. In a letter seen by the Guardian, the CPS explained that '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.'
Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University and an expert on legislation around violent pornography, argues that the CPS's interpretation was incorrect. 'We have established in case law that you can always further deprave and corrupt. So on that point they are simply wrong. More importantly I think they just did not take this behaviour seriously enough, or understand the danger such men pose. And that is why we need to update the law.'
Growing concern over online fantasies
Michael Sheath, an online child abuse expert who advises the police on offender profiling, says: 'We've known since the 60s that this is not a defence. These sites create an environment where people push boundaries and once you are in that space it's incredibly seductive. You will learn you aren't alone; other people will encourage your sexual interest in children.'
Baroness Bertin, the Conservative peer tasked by the last government with looking at the harms of online pornography, is leading the fight for legal reforms. Working with Labour MP Jess Asato, they recently pushed through amendments to the Crime and Policing Act that will ban pornography that 'features step-incest or performers role-playing as children'. Asato told the Guardian that she is very concerned about the failure to prosecute Mark and believes Emily's experience shows that legislation needs to be tougher.
Impact on family and future
Emily has changed her hair so her father cannot recognize her. 'He knows nothing about me,' she says. Fiona, now living hundreds of miles away, feels hugely proud of Emily. 'She is amazing. She lost everything. She had to question her entire childhood. She lost her grandparents because they took his side. But she has still got her sense of identity.' Emily adds: 'For my own sanity and to preserve my sense of self, I try to separate things out in my mind and keep my childhood memories with him as positive as they once were. That was one person, my dad, and then the person who did this is an entirely different person. I don't know him at all.'
