Susannah’s Story

Names have been changed to protect identities. This account was first published on the old Anonywrites blog. Writer: Annie Hope

It was an ordinary day. My husband Johnny was at work. I was at home with our youngest daughter Grace, age seven. My older two children Olivia and Jack were not at home. I recall that Grace was in the bath. She loves a bath and will play for ages in the water.

17:10

My phone beeped, and a message appeared from Johnny. ‘Be home soon, just getting fuel.'

I assumed that he would be back home soon and didn’t give it a second thought. Grace was playing happily, singing and talking.

As time went on, I began to get worried. Johnny had not arrived home. Surely it couldn’t take this long to get fuel. Where was he?

I called his phone, and it just rang out. I called his work phone. Ditto.

Had he been in an accident? Someone had hit his car? I felt a sense of fear and panic, and my mind went to scenarios that could have happened. Normal fears, perhaps.

18:30

I looked out of the upstairs window and saw a police car parked at the back of our house. I wondered which of the neighbours they had gone around to. I watched as my oldest daughter Olivia’s car pulled up behind the police car.

Grace was still in the bath. It was time she was getting out. I went to help her, and I heard the front door open. I called down to say hello to Olivia and said, ‘I don’t know where Johnny is, I’m getting really worried.’

Olivia called back, with an urgency in her voice. ‘Mum, can you come downstairs please? It’s the police.’

My mind was spinning. I made my way quickly downstairs, telling Grace to go and play in her room. Luckily, Grace did as I asked.

As I saw two uniformed police officers at the door, I began to shake, thinking the worst.

‘It’s about your husband.’

‘Oh my God. There’s been an accident? Is he alive?’

‘Not an accident. He’s alive. We are just here to come and collect devices.’

By some strange coincidence, I had watched a 24 Hours in Police Custody programme the evening before, and it showed someone’s devices being taken, so I was suddenly very aware of why police might turn up and do this. I asked Olivia to go upstairs and keep her sister company, as the police entered our home. They needed to take any devices that belonged to my husband, or that he had had access to, so they took my computer and my daughter’s tablet.

Police were very respectful in the circumstances and maintained a level of calm. But frustratingly they couldn’t give me any information about why they were in my house, other than to say, when I pushed them, that it was a ‘third party allegation.’ And that they were ‘just there to get devices he had used.’

I don’t recall the police having a warrant. I was certainly not shown one and I have heard of other cases where there wasn’t one, so I have no idea whether there was a warrant or not. It’s just not something you think to ask for. We don’t expect police to turn up at our house and start taking things away, with no explanation. I had never had dealings with police before. It was a new and awful situation. We were given no receipts for the devices that had been taken. They just left, as quickly as they had arrived.

19:00

Grace had remained upstairs with Olivia. Grace must have picked up that something wasn’t right as my girls were both in shock. I was in shock. My phone kept ringing and ringing. I just remember the repeat ringing. I looked at the screen. One of my neighbours.

I thought ‘why does my phone keep going off? Did my neighbour see the police come in?’

I ignored the phone as I was focussed on my daughters and trying to make sense of what had happened. We went downstairs to the living room, and I had to sit Grace down and tell her calmly that her dad had been arrested. She screamed. It was a visceral scream, and it filled the house.

I just remember the screaming. And not knowing anything. Looking at both of my girls in shock and seeing them not understand any of it, and I didn’t understand either so I couldn’t explain.

From that day onwards, the three of us were in the same room. We all slept in the same bed. We were scared to be alone.

19:30

My phone was ringing again. It was Johnny. I went out to the conservatory so that I could talk to him privately without my daughters overhearing. I remember looking from the conservatory to the living room and my girls were just holding each other. Grace looked so confused.

The conversation with Johnny didn’t go well. I called him the most awful names for the fifteen-minute phone call. I was scared and angry. I remembered I needed to take the dogs for a walk so I finished the phone call, trying perhaps to regain some normality and routine, and also in deep shock.

I told the girls we were taking the dogs out, and all three of us walked outside the house. That’s when it all kicked off.

Two neighbours saw us and came out, asking if we were ok. I wondered how they knew anything was wrong – had they seen the police?

‘How do you even know?’

‘It’s all over Facebook. It was a vigilante group.’

One neighbour then asked in front of my daughters if it’s true that Johnny had been convicted of rape five years previously.

I asked what they were talking about as this was simply untrue. It was because apparently the vigilantes were shouting this allegation on the livestream, and it was therefore taken to be fact. My daughters had to hear that. Absolute lies, with no grounding whatsoever. How can these people be allowed to just make things up? Nobody is policing them. It’s so harmful.

Another upsetting thing was discovering that my neighbours watched this livestream as it was happening. They let is all play out and didn’t think to call me at the time? It was outside our house. Our family home. I would have come out and given them my thoughts. Although it’s probably just as well I didn’t because it wouldn’t have gone well for me. There is nothing anyone can do.

It turned out that Olivia only just missed it when she pulled up in the car behind the police car. Little did we know, but Johnny had actually been sitting inside that police car.

We retreated back inside our house. It was the only place we could go. I couldn’t really talk to Olivia as Grace was with us and I didn’t want to frighten Grace, as she was too young to begin to understand. We tried to settle her as it was getting toward her bedtime, but she was not able to be on her own. She was too scared and traumatised. This continues to this day, and we are almost four years on.

I rang my son Jack. He said he knew because his friends had been on to him. It was all over social media. I felt so helpless. How would we get through this?

My phone kept ringing. I remember all of the details vividly, but I can’t describe how I was feeling. It’s a strange numbness. It’s like nothing else. I didn’t eat for three weeks.

Grace didn’t go to school for seven weeks. We were prisoners in our home. This was not lockdown, it was the year before and yet we were on lockdown in our lives, to keep safe from community response. The school were really supportive and authorised the absence and sent work home. But why should my child have had to take these steps to keep safe? Why are children being placed into this situation? It’s appalling.

We didn’t hear from social services until four weeks in. So, the early days, I navigated all on my own. No support. No guidance. Police didn’t call back. There was no welfare check for my children and me. Nothing. I will say that my social worker, when they did arrive on the scene was excellent. And that’s a rarity in these cases (I have been in this world for four years now, supporting many family members via WhatsApp groups and am familiar with a lot of cases). The social worker was non-judgmental and supported us as a family. They did arrange therapy for my youngest but due to the fact that social services would not agree to funding the therapy and my social worker had to fight for it, it took seventeen months to arrange. Although it wasn’t tailored therapy for this situation hence it didn’t resolve a lot. My child began self-harming, in addition to sleep problems, fear of being alone, and isolation from friends. She also began physically attacking me and her sister as she didn’t know how to process the emotions.

Whilst we were hiding in our home, I would receive phone calls from school mums. To be honest, I felt a lot of the ‘offers of help’ were actually people wanting gossip. That may sound cynical but when you go through something like this you become quite hypervigilant to people’s motives. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I was suddenly receiving many friend requests from random people my husband worked with. Not messages of support, just people wanting to have a nose.

I was told that there was nothing bad about me and the children in the social media comments and that it was about Johnny. This was untrue. There were awful things online about all of us. Really vile comments. And all for what? Likes and shares for the vigilante groups?

We received intelligence to suggest that my husband’s car (which was parked out the front of the house) was about to be targeted and vandalised. So, one of my neighbours helped to move the car elsewhere to keep us safe. Some neighbours were supportive to us in the beginning but that would soon change.

One neighbour, we discovered, had been watching the video of the livestream and sharing it with people at my husband’s work.

And actually, it got worse – much worse. My children and I received death threats. Can you imagine how that felt? We were already living in fear, isolated. And then we had threats on our lives. It was a living nightmare. our address was shared online and despite being told that we would be checked on for our welfare (this was mentioned during the livestream), we never were, and the vigilantes refused all requests to remove our address information. We were actively put at risk.

Although another neighbour remained really supportive. In fact, they came around to see me and casually mentioned ‘I’ve got a friend who is going through the same thing.’

I was in such shock and going through such a trauma that I didn’t really take in or process their comment at the time.

It was only ten days later when this neighbour came around with her two adult daughters that I began to understand.

Her daughter looked at me and said ‘I’m going through the same thing with my boyfriend.’

It had all come about just when they were about to get married. So, it wasn’t my neighbour’s friend, it was her own child who was going through this horror.

I was really struggling myself though. One of my biggest internal battles was how could I still love a man that’s done this. I felt as though agencies would pressure us to split. You don’t know what this situation feels like until you are in it yourself.

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, CSA. It happened to me at a very young age. The vigilante situation added to the trauma for me. My husband is also a survivor of CSA which made things so complicated. It presents an extra layer of confusion and trauma.

One of the things (there were others) that happened to my husband was when he worked in a shop when he was thirteen. The manager of the shop used to make my husband watch porn as a ‘reward’ for good behaviour. The manager used to then watch my husband pleasure himself. This was at a time when my husband’s sexuality was emerging. A boy just starting out in his teenage years, and it was marred by this awful experience.

In fact, I knew that my husband had a pornography addiction. I knew because as a couple we had fought for the best part of a decade to get help for him. We consulted with the GP, and we tried every door possible. Porn addiction was not recognised by the NHS and there was no support, therapy, help or anything offered. No exploration of why my husband used this as coping mechanism. No support for his past trauma. Nothing. We had tried so hard to get help. This is what hurts so much.

One thing that people who had watched the livestream had said to me was that my husband didn’t look mentally well on the video. They could see something was wrong with him. This ties in with what he was experiencing during his addiction. His mental health was severely affected.

His online behaviour mirrored what happened to him as a teenager. This is not talked about, and I am hoping that my story will prompt discussion.

My husband received a community order. He has sought help from charities that we had no idea about, were not signposted to, and didn’t realise existed until after the fact. One of these is Safer Living Foundation. My husband is now about to begin work as a volunteer for another charity, helping those with addictions who have been imprisoned. He has worked really hard on himself and continues to do so. He has done a lot of work with the SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous). He has a zero-tolerance approach to porn now. He realises he cannot risk watching it at all. Like any addiction, it takes work, and he works at his rehabilitation every day.

Four of the charges were dropped due to weak evidence and exaggerated claims by the vigilantes. We researched these men and found out that they all had criminal records for violence. The leader of the vigilante group has five convictions for family violence, violence against women.

As for our children, they remain affected by what happened. The trauma is there and has not gone away. We had a battle getting my youngest a school place, when she left primary school and didn’t get into secondary school. The appeal was not successful and for a while she had no school place. Nobody helped us. We had to fight alone.

My youngest still self-harms and is emotionally and socially affected. She doesn’t like to be alone and is fearful. I don’t feel that she has received the right support yet to help her make sense of everything that’s happened.

It’s not right to me that children can be left in this situation. Vigilantes should not be allowed to operate. It seems that they are accepted by society. Nobody realises the harms being caused.

The only people who supported me were the Knock community members (people going through similar). There was no support offered to me by statutory services in order to help me process what had happened.

My wish is for these groups to be stopped, and I hope that the Online Safety Bill will play a part in ending them once and for all.

Vigilantes claim to be safeguarding children. There is no evidence that a single child has actually ever been saved by these groups. On the contrary. It’s actually the case that children are actively being harmed.

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Guest blogger: Annie Hope

Twitter:@AnnieHopeWriter

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