'I just burst into tears': the partners of men who commit child abuse crimes

Discovering that her partner of almost three years was in possession of child abuse material was difficult for Sarah Ballen* to bear.

But nothing could prepare her for the task of attending an Adelaide police station to sift through about 1,500 pictures of children being sexually abused to check that none were of her young sons and daughter. There was no one with her to support her in this grim task, aside from the detectives.

“Afterwards the police gave me a pamphlet with a counselling number circled on the back of it but the service was so busy that they said there would be a six to 12-month wait to speak to someone,” Ballen says.

“The police tried their hardest to censor the images but they couldn’t censor them so much that I wouldn’t be able to identify my own children. There was a poorly censored picture of an 18-month old baby ... it still comes into my head two-and-a-half years later and, when it does, I just burst into tears.

“The post-traumatic stress from seeing those images is still there.”

Ballen has shared her story before the inaugural professional development symposium being held by PartnerSPEAK, Australia’s only not-for-profit organisation that supports people whose partners have been caught with child abuse material. Being held at RMIT University on Wednesday, the symposium is open to child protection workers, police and other frontline workers who want to learn more about the trauma faced by people whose partners or family members commit child abuse crimes.

When she met her partner, Ballen had a five-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. She and her partner went on to have two children together, both boys. But Ballen said there was consistent conflict because her partner wanted a daughter of his own and kept pressing her to try for another child.

“I was struggling with that because financially it was already tough and I would say to him, let’s wait until our youngest is in kindy and then think about having another. And what would he do if we had another boy?

“One day after I said no to trying for a girl again, he just lost the plot. He left me and went to his mother’s. And I had been thinking of leaving him for a while by then because there were also other difficult behaviours. He was gaslighting me and, after being made redundant, he just stayed at home and didn’t help much with the children we had.”

Ballen made the discovery that her partner was an offender in the days after he left her.

Her partner asked to come back to collect his belongings but Ballen insisted on leaving them in the shed for him to collect. Her partner had been sleeping in a separate bedroom for several months before they broke up. It was while clearing out his belongings from the closet in his room that Ballen found a box containing about two dozen pairs of her daughter’s underwear. Her daughter was eight.

“The underwear had obvious signs of gratification on them,” Ballen said. “And then I remembered how any time I would go into his bedroom or go towards the cupboard he would freak out and tell me to ‘get the fuck out’. I called the police straight away. A lovely policewoman and policeman came over and had a chat. I booted up the PC in his bedroom and also found fiction about incestuous relationships. At that point I didn’t want to see any more and I left it with police.”

However, because police warned her that because it wasn’t illegal to store underwear or to possess fictional stories about incest, the case was a lower priority and might take them 12 months to investigate.

Eight days after her partner left, she noticed on Facebook that he was in a relationship with another woman and that the woman had a seven-year-old daughter. Ballen alerted police and, because another child was potentially at risk, they escalated their investigation. He was charged two months later.

Ballen also found a CD containing images of child abuse and illegal comics and anime depicting underage sex and child abuse. She turned it all over to police.

He was sentenced to 16 months’ jail with a 10-month non-parole period. Later, Ballen would discover he had several online dating profiles while they were in a relationship together and that he used them to convince young women to send him explicit photos. He would also arrange dates with them and, instead of meeting them, would watch them from afar.

Ballen’s daughter was interviewed by police following her partner’s arrest and police were confident she had not been abused. Ballen found no images of her own children among the explicit images possessed by her partner. As her children get older, Ballen is also grappling to explain to them why they can’t see their dad.

As well as post-traumatic stress disorder, Ballen has struggled with guilt and anxiety. She feels that people must wonder how she could not have known and that they must also be blaming her.

There was more rehab and support offered to her jailed former partner than to her, she says.

“Counsellors would say there is nothing we can do,” she says. “They would say they could refer me somewhere or give me something for depression and anxiety but, as far as the anger I was having towards this person because of what happened, they would say there was nothing that could get rid of that and the sense of betrayal.”

She says her key sources of support were a couple of close friends and online resources provided by PartnerSPEAK.

“Women share their stories on PartnerSPEAK and seeing that others had gone through the same thing has been heartbreaking yet cathartic,” Ballen says. “I don’t feel so much like I’m the only one to have had the wool pulled over my eyes.”

A justice and child protection expert from RMIT University, Dr Marg Liddell, is one of the few researchers in Australia to have looked into the impact of child sexual abuse offending on the offender’s partner. She will be speaking at the symposium and encouraging frontline workers to more carefully consider and respond to the trauma that partners experience. Partners should always have a support person accompany them to the police station, she says.

Liddell led research published in 2015 and commissioned by PartnerSPEAK that found the partners of men caught with child abuse material suffered long-term trauma including stigma and isolation from family and community. Yet she found they received little support from police and other agencies.

One research participant Liddell interviewed said felt that she was regarded by police as a vengeful wife because her report to police was made once she had felt safe enough to leave him. Four of the research participants did not receive updates from the police about the investigation, court adjournments and hearings.

Families and friends often blamed or judged the women or minimised the significance of the offences and the women experienced great difficulty in sharing their traumatic experiences, Liddell’s research found.

“It has been really difficult for me to get funding for further research into this area, but I am tenacious and intend to continue to fight for funding and recognition of this as an issue,” she says.

“If we don’t address this now, we will have a situation a bit like the child sexual abuse royal commission occurring at the moment, where we will have so many traumatised people saying something should have been done to help us and that someone needs to be held responsible.

“We know child abuse is growing enormously, the number of people being investigated by the Australian federal police keeps growing and so too do the number of partners affected.”

Liddell says her research found domestic violence and child sexual abuse or possession of child abuse material often seemed to go hand-in-hand. Among those speaking at the symposium is the former Australian of the Year Rosie Batty, who will discuss the shock of finding out her former partner, Greg Andersen, who physically and emotionally abused her, was facing charges related to the possession of child abuse images of girls aged between 10 and 14. Andersen killed their 11-year-old son, Luke, and died after stabbing himself and being shot by police.

As in Batty’s case, partners of perpetrators often struggle with how to keep their children safe while a police investigation is under way.

“The domestic violence often experienced in these situations puts women in an extra difficult position,” Liddell says. “That’s one of the factors we need to explore further. Women who experience this are in a very insidious position and, at the moment, authorities don’t fully appreciate the impact of that.”

* Names have been changed