The Darkness I Confront: Why I Fight for Your Children and Their Safety Online
⚠️Trigger Warning - CSAM/Abuse/C-PTSD references that some may and actually should find disturbing⚠️
I was chatting to a friend (thanks Robin), and we got onto the subject of why I do what I do. It made me realise I have never properly laid it out in print. Writing this will trigger me, and it's so important to me that I'm okay with that.
I have never wished what I deal with on anybody; not even my worst enemy deserves this, and I even find it hard to talk to my therapist about the graphic details because I don't want to damage them or feel like I am perpetuating the abuses I have witnessed.
I sometimes think that every parent should experience 5 minutes of viewing the world through my eyes to fully understand the dangers that are faced by their children when they are sitting quietly in the corner looking at their phone screens, tablets or gaming monitors.
But again, I would not wish that on anybody, so I will try to walk a fine line as I write this post to try and avoid triggering you, and if I do, I am truly sorry, but hopefully, it will help people to connect with me and understand why I continue to do what I do. This will likely be my longest piece of writing yet. Sorry, not sorry.
Who Is This Crazy Man?
I started life in N. Ireland where I was born 46 years ago (Yesterday), in the hazy past. I had a very normal and happy childhood well, as normal as it gets for us geeks of the world. I managed to mix time in front of computers, dismantling all my toys to see how they worked, reading, and the like, with playing sports and getting up to no good until the street lights came on.
If I am honest, I always wanted to be a 'Real' policeman but was told I was too young. The next best thing for me was the Royal Air Force Police, and back in 1997, as a young, naive 18-year-old, I started my journey into adulthood. I enjoyed much of my 22-year career seeing many parts of the world, Kuwait, Iraq, Falkland Islands, N. Ireland (again) and Germany with NATO. The experiences are some of my most cherished memories as also are many of the friendships I made along the way.
The last 8 years of my RAF career were where I believed I belonged and had spent my entire career aiming towards. I was now a Digital Forensics & Incident Response analyst helping to protect the MOD network from threats of all skill levels, including the user! What I was not aware of until I arrived was that the investigation of criminal and inappropriate web browsing would be carried out by us. Over the course of 6 years, I often asked about the provision of counselling, but apparently, there were no resources. I learned very quickly how to wear a mask and still appear as that happy, cheeky chappy so I wouldn't lose my job for being weak. Some of you may have noticed at the start of this paragraph that I said 8 years; where are the other 2 years? Unfortunately, after 6 years, I broke and was officially diagnosed with PTSD, and since then, C-PTSD.
This paragraph contains things I find very difficult to even write so please feel free to skip to the next. This started 2 years of being trapped in my home but also trapped in my head. It didn't just affect me, though; it affected my wife, who had to live with me and also many of the friends I once had. I estimate I viewed more than 1 million inappropriate images, with at least 1/4 of those being criminal across all levels. I was a typical man, and the 'Bravado effect', yes it's real and mentioned within ACPO guidelines , kicked in, plus,in the military ,the stigma attached to mental illness is one that was linked to weakness.
Those images floated around in my head and morphed into images of my nephew, neighbours’ kids and other family members’ kids. You truly can't imagine the torture that causes, but when I tell you I would not wish it on my very worst enemy, then you might start to realise. I also now have somniphobia, a genuine fear of sleep, where I lose all control. I don't generally sleep anymore; I nap when my body needs it, and I have tablets should I need more.
My wife dealt with my thrashing, screaming and crying at night, my drastic mood swings and my self-imposed isolation, yet she still stuck by my side like the Rock she has always been to me. But the day she turned to me in the car after one of my many road rage incidents and said, "I don't feel safe in the car with you", it was like my heart stopped beating, and the very next day, I sought a referral to the Defence Centre for Mental Health. That started 2 years of intensive therapy and medication. The therapy has not improved my mind substantially, as I still have a huge distrust of humans and still feel safest at home, where I control my environment. The medication has stabilised me, helps me to leave the house when I need to and has also prevented any further fits of anger. Over ten years later, I still rely on therapy and medication, and that will likely be for the rest of my life.
Over the years I have lost family and many of the people I called friends, because they couldn't understand who I had become, they didn't realise that the old Dale had died and was now just a mask I wear to help people feel at ease around me. Colleen is the only person who has to see and deal with the person behind the mask. The very few friends i have managed to keep in my life are those who barely have to see me but I am thankful they will be there if needed.
About the time I was diagnosed, the other addition to our lives was our dog, who we called Leffe. Up until that point, I never understood the bond between people and their dogs, but I also hadn't realised how important he would become for me. I call my wife My Rock, but she would have to go to work so Leffe became My Pebble and got me through many rough moments. He will often sense when I am triggered or spiralling, come to me and place a paw on me, and that has been enough to ground me in that moment. I am not exaggerating when I say that both my Rock & My Pebble are life savers.
The World Through My Eyes
⚠️Trigger Warning - CSAM/Abuse/C-PTSD references and descriptions in the following paragraph⚠️
What would 5 minutes through my eyes look like to a parent? Let’s consider that over the six years I was doing the job that broke me, I would go in daily to sit in front of a bank of large monitors and take the next ‘job’ from the top of the stack. In layman’s terms, that would then involve extracting data from the packets that had been captured for a users web browsing session. Packets are essentially an envelope that contains everything that makes up a web page for a user to view when they browse the internet. Until the point of extracting images and web addresses from the packet, we never knew if we were dealing with inappropriate (normal porn) or criminal content.
Some people think you can harden yourself to these things, but I was never able to do that, and every time I saw an image that made me realise I was dealing with a criminal case, it was like a punch to the stomach. Criminal pornography ranges across many genres from bestiality, fantasy, rape, necrophilia and ultimately also child porn or Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) as it is called today. I did not realise how naive I was before starting the role and the levels of depravity that existed on the internet. My mantra used to be “If you can imagine it, it’s on the internet, and if you can’t imagine it, it’s on the internet you just haven’t found it yet”
I observed some truly horrific imagery, some of the more disturbing involved animals, rape and torture but none affected me as much as the imagery that involved children, because they are the most vulnerable in our society and they are the ones we as adults should be protecting and not using as a tool for sexual gratification purposes.
I viewed these images because my role was to grade them for the legal process that would follow and because I was a policeman I would try to take in every detail, hoping to be able to identify a perpertrator or maybe a location, becoming fully invested in each image, if I had been prepared for the role I may have had a toolkit of coping strategies I might not have damaged myself so much and maybe been able to disassociate myself from what I was seeing.
Alas, many of my night terrors are so realistic, and as I have looked into the eyes of some of those victims, it causes me a great deal of emotional pain. Can you imagine waking in the night with an instant feeling of disgust, shame and nausea as your immediate feeling is that you have not done anything to prevent the abuse? That is not a question I would normally pose or describe, but in this post, I want you as parents to take a moment to read that sentence again and contemplate what it means and how it has impacted me as a human being.
When I say in other posts, “I don’t want your child to become evidence in a case or another stat”, this is what I am referring to. There are brave people out there at this very moment still doing the job that I used to do because there are still bastards out there who want to use your child for their own and others’ sexual gratification.
That is the reality of the world we live in today, and technology has only made it easier for sexual predators to target their victims, allowing them to take months to groom a child rather than the old days where they had to risk being caught abducting children.
You may be starting to realise what 5 minutes viewing the world through my eyes looks like.
Parents MUST Understand The Dangers Lurking Online
The online world has many positives going for it, and children obviously need to learn about it to be able to develop and be relevant with their peers. My point is and always has been that Parents need to be aware of all risks and how to teach their children about them. You cannot rely on schools to be doing this as I have explained in other posts this is a postcode lottery with regards to the level of awareness they are being taught.
When I was growing up we were all aware of ‘Stranger Danger’ and not to talk to strangers, accept sweets or get into vehicles. Stranger danger is still a threat today but is seen as high risk by predators. Therefore, they have moved to the online world, where they can take their time to build trust and protect themselves from casual witnesses, which is the main threat regarding the stranger danger we had as children. As I said before, they can now take as long as they want to build a relationship as “Johnny aged 15” then the first a parent knows something is wrong is when their child isn’t there in the morning because they went to meet Johnny.
It is impossible to truly know who you are talking to on the internet, even more so these days with the advancements in deepfake technology you can be talking to a visual representation of somebody completely different to reality.
When a parent chucks a phone or tablet at a child, in a similar way to chucking a dummy in their mouths, to quiet them down are they even aware what they are doing with it? Children these days are far more technically literate than most parents and if they want to hide activity from you, it is probably trivial for them to do so. Most parents think “I am a friend to them on their social media I can see who they are friends with” and to be honest at least that shows a level of actually giving a shit which is more than I have witnessed with some, but most of those parents are probably unaware of the “Spam” accounts that kids these days have, yes they are separate social media accounts that they don’t tell parents about, for activity they wouldn’t want Mum and Dad to see.
I have never said parents need to be a geek like me, my message as always is try to stay interested in what they are doing, have open and honest communications with them and talk about the risks in the same way you would have the chat about “Stranger Danger” you may not fully understand the online world but don’t let that make you put your head in the sand, if you need a reminder why, just read my previous section again.
The Internet and Its Dark Corners
The internet you know and probably love is vastly different from the dark areas of the internet that is home to the lowest of the low and most depraved of our society. The “Dark Web” is where they live and operate from and also where they congregate in communities, sharing material that they have gathered and also tips & tricks with each other, enabling others to destroy the lives of other vulnerable and innocent children. Just two of my recent articles on such communities and how they operate, if you have not read them I suggest you have a look when you get some time.
These communities are also full of ‘people’ and I use that term extremely loosely when describing this vermin, will egg each other on to carry out even more depraved acts each time in competition with each other, your child is nothing to them, not human and just an insignificant toy, these are the people you must protect them from becoming a victim of by educating them, by talking to them, by letting them know that if something does not feel right they can come to you and raise it as a concern without fear of judgement, otherwise you risk losing them to this world and the life sentence that follows being abused and I know the majority of parents who understand this would not wish that.
Why This Matters Now
The number of reports of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) worldwide has been increasing significantly. In 2023, the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) received over 32 million reports related to online child sexual exploitation, including CSAM. Data from Childlight’s Into the Light Index suggests that one case of child sexual abuse online is reported every second.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) reported that in 2021, 62% of CSAM assessed involved children aged 11-15 years, with a notable increase in self-generated content among teenagers.
These are just a couple of the stats that are available online to show the magnitude of the issue, and it is not something that is abating; technology is advancing at light speed daily, and that will only create more opportunities for those who lurk in the dark corners of the internet.
As I mentioned earlier, you cannot rely on schools to be educating your child properly about online risks and how to stay safe. Read the following article I wrote if you need to know why.
So it is your responsibility to protect your child online, but fear not I am here to enable you, answer your questions and fight beside you to give them the best chance at not becoming a victim and now you know exactly why I am so passionate about it and will never give up whilst I have breath in these lungs.
If this article has hit home with you, please make sure you share it with others who have kids or a duty of care for them, subscribe to get future content, and connect with me over on BlueSky.
Thanks for reaching the end, as it means you care about protecting your children.
You are an Amazing writer and creator of a saver internet for our children.
I'm so grateful for all of the hard work and dedication you have displayed for our children. This awareness should be spread more widely than it is currently.
You are absolutely correct when speaking about the thread that lurks in the darkest corners of the internet.
Reach out to me, at any time, should you ever need help reaching out to others communities.
I'm so sorry for all you (and others like you) have been through, and continue to go through. It's awful that these jobs are so important, and that with the increase, there will be more people like you going through it. :(