Amber*, 17, felt sick when she realised her mum’s boyfriend – a man she considered a father – was spying on her.
My mum and her boyfriend, John*, had been together for nine years. I considered John to be a real part of the family and a father to me. He was always at family events and I trusted and loved him. He never completely lived with mum and I but he’d stay over at our house most nights, so we were like a family. He made my mum happy.
One day I was on his laptop because I needed to use the internet for some school work. While I was on there I saw in his internet history that he’d been looking at child pornography and he even kept some on his computer. I freaked out because I didn’t know what to do. I shut down the computer, completely shocked. And rang my sister’s house to tell her what I’d seen. My sister’s husband answered the phone and I was so frazzled I blurted everything out. We decided that instead of telling my sister straight out, we’d wait for John to go out again so we could actually show her.
When he went out we got his computer and looked through it to show her. To our complete disbelief, we found a video of me undressing in our bathroom. I felt sick. I have no idea where he could have hidden the camera, but clearly he’d removed it because I ran straight to the bathroom to find it and it wasn’t there. I was so shocked that I had been spied on. I never knew he would do this to me .
We decided we had to tell mum that night. Mum cam home from work and when we showed her John’s computer she was incredibly upset. I can’t imagine how she felt knowing her own boyfriend was a pervert. My sister and her husband stayed over that night for support and we decided to confront John in the morning. We were scared he might attack us – we didn’t know what to expect from him anymore - so it was good to have them there.
When we told John we’d found the videos on his computer he started crying and apologising to us heaps. We told him he had to get out of the house and never come back. Even as we were kicking him out he kept saying sorry. It was very upsetting that he didn’t turn out to be who we thought he was – a reliable father figure and good partner for my mum. Instead he turned out to practically be a pedophile.
Mum still feels sick about the whole situation. I think she’ll find it hard to trust any future boyfriend of hers. We ended up pressing charges against John and he got a 12 month suspended sentence. We never want him in our lives again.
* Names have been changed.
