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A pregnant woman has told of the shocking moment she discovered her husband had been arrested on child sex abuse charges.
Georgia hadn’t been able to get in touch with her husband on the day of her 20 week scan for their first child.
He told her he broke his phone and had been trying to get it fixed – but she knew he was lying.
“And I just remember I just was like, ‘there’s just something’s not right here’. So I kept pressing him and pressing him. And that’s when he told me that day he’d been arrested and that he was facing charges of child sexual abuse,” she told Sarah Harris on The Project.
Georgia speaks about her ordeal on The Project.
She took off her wedding ring and packed a bag, and left for her parents’ home.
But she was then faced with a daunting prospect – having a child with a sex offender.
“The only contact I received from the police was the next day in court. They had the arresting officer walk up to me and he said, ‘You’re the wife’, and I said, ‘yes’. And he said, ‘How many weeks pregnant?’ And then he handed me a brochure for PartnerSPEAK and that was the only communication I received from the police,” she said.
PartnerSPEAK founder Natalie Walker told The Project their goal was within 24 hours of discovering that crime, every non-offending partner and affected family member will know about PartnerSPEAK.
Natalie Walker, the founder of PartnerSPEAK. Picture: David Caird
“The same way we know when to tell our friends to call Lifeline,” Ms Walker said.
Ms Walker revealed on News Corp’s Predatory podcast her hopes for a permanent Australia-wide service recommended by the Royal Commission into Institutional Abuse will be installed to help non-offending partners.
Predatory also revealed the number of Australians who fall into the predicament Georgia did, every single day – of the 226 people charged last year, three quarters of those arrested on child sex offences have a partner. More than half of them have children.
Four months after her husband was charged, Georgia’s son was born.
“My son deserved to have a father that was present at the birth. My son deserved to have a mother that was happy and safe and calm, not stressed out. My son deserved the best. And I was so shattered that I couldn’t give that to him,” Georgia said.
Her husband pleaded guilty in 2020 to using a carriage service to groom a child under 16 after being caught sending lurid messages to someone he thought was an underage girl – who was in fact an undercover police officer.
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He was jailed for two-and-a-half years but was released on a good behaviour bond for three years. He must undertake a sex offender treatment program and was made a registered sex offender for 15 years.
“The judge in his sentencing actually said that the end of your marriage and the resulting impact that that’s had on your relationship with your newborn child is essentially sufficient punishment to deter you from ever conducting these acts again. And to me, that is just horrifying,” Georgia said.
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