Support group for partners of child porn offenders investigates link with domestic violence.

By Katherine Gregory

The founder of a support group for partners and family members of child pornography offenders is investigating evidence which suggests people who access child pornography are also likely to be violent and controlling toward their partners.

PartnerSPEAK’s Natalie Walker says her research highlights similarities between the experiences of non-offending partners and domestic violence victims.

Ms Walker found out 15 years ago that her partner was accessing child pornography on his computer.

She said she felt sick to her stomach.

“If it’s yourself or your partner, you’re so close, you’re an extension of each other, you feel violated by that and horrified,” she said.

“And the abhorrence in the general community, you have that too — yet this is the person you love and trusted.”

Despite increased attention on child exploitation material in the past decade, Ms Walker said there was no support for the partners of the people charged.

She created PartnerSPEAK to fill that gap, and has been investigating the possibility of a link between child porn offenders and domestic violence.

“The stigma is similar, the consequences are similar,” she said.

“And then as I learned more about it, I put it out there and said, well actually instead of saying it’s similar to domestic violence, is it another crime of domestic violence?”

Stigmatised and ostracised

Associate Professor Molly Dragiewicz runs Australia’s first Graduate Certificate in domestic violence at Queensland University of Technology.

She said data from the child protection sector showed a high likelihood that people who were involved with online child exploitation material were also perpetrators of family violence.

“We see some characteristics shared in common between DV perpetrators and those who abuse children,” she said.

“Those can include things like feeling entitled to have other people do things they ask, very difficult to empathise with other people, feeling entitled to use people for your own benefits.”

But Xanthe Mallett, a specialist in forensic criminology from New England University, said she was not convinced the two were linked.

“In a lot of the cases I have worked on, the families know nothing about it, and there has been no indication that males have a narcissistic or sociopathic personality,” she said.

“Certainly a lot of people who access child abuse material, they do it very secretly, and if they had these dominating personality types they may actually do it more openly.”

Both Ms Mallett and Professor Dragiewicz said that non-offending partners faced similar experiences as victims of domestic violence, such as being stigmatised and ostracised.

Ms Walker said the key to changing that stigma was more research to build awareness of the issue.

“[If] we can recognise this as another element of domestic violence and then also services and agencies that she can access, that’s transformative,” she said.

This post originally appeared on ABC News.