Mum tells of anguish when husband's abuse of their daughter was revealed

JUST four lines of crude language, hurriedly scribbled on a torn piece of paper, and Emma Charles' comfortable, suburban, middle-class life in Edinburgh vanished.

"Your preshus Daniel has been after my t*** and c*** for the last five years. I have to leave or he has to, and you seem to need him. And f*** you, you probly wont beleave me anyway." Tamsin Charles, Emma's dyslexic eldest daughter, was 15 when she finally wrote down the words she had been unable to voice after five years of sexual abuse by her father.

"She thought it was her fault," says Emma quietly. "That she was the one who was in the wrong. That was why she said nothing for so many years. And I had no idea anything like that was going on – it was a horrific moment."

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But it is a moment which Emma – not her real name – has now committed to posterity, writing a so-called "misery memoir" about their lives from that moment when everything changed in December 1996. Her book "How Could He Do It?" is about to be published in paperback, and it tells the heartbreaking, but true, story of how a daughter was betrayed by her father – and how his actions also tore apart the lives of his wife and their younger daughter, Sam.

"I actually wrote the book at the end of 1999," she says. "And I wrote it because I had to. People have to realise that the perpetrators of these crimes aren't strangers but family and friends. It's vital that this dangerous misconception surrounding child abuse is banished.

"I had been thinking of writing a novel based on our experience, but there would have been too big a credibility gap. I thought no-one would believe our story if it was written as fiction, so I had to write it as it happened and let people know it's the truth. I spent three or four weeks just obsessively writing, getting it out. I was so angry about it all. It was all still raw then, but the writing was definitely a cathartic experience.

"Tamsin hasn't read it – she can't remember a lot about what happened now because the whole experience has left her so mentally unwell that she wasn't laying down any memories, and in a way I'm quite glad of that. But Sam has read it."

Emma, of course, remembers every second of the day she discovered her husband of 18 years had been preying on their eldest daughter. The family were living in one of west Edinburgh's affluent suburbs. Tamsin spent her weeks at a special private school for highly-functioning children with special needs while Sam attended another private school. As Emma says: "We were an ordinary family: mum, dad, two kids, three dogs, one rabbit, two guinea pigs. I stayed at home, Daniel worked, and the kids went to private schools.

"We lived in a rather nice semi, in a rather nice area, took rather nice holidays, wearing rather nice clothes . . . I never thought my family was extraordinary until that day when Tamsin told me that her father, my loving husband, had been sexually abusing her."

It was the run-up to Christmas and Emma's husband, Daniel Schenker, of Swiss origin, was working in the Far East as a ship's chief engineer. He wasn't due back home until the January, so she and the girls were preparing for the festive season without him.

"The pressure of it all had obviously got too much for Tamsin," says Emma, from her new home in Cumbria. "I found out later that she had confided in the head's wife at her school, and it was she who had encouraged her to tell me. She had also told her best friend and it was when I said that she couldn't have her own phone just to call this girl – because I would have to fork out for the cost of calls – that seemed to set her off. She became incredibly moody, which wasn't like her, and then the next day she just flung this note at me and stormed out the house with a bag."

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She adds: "In the few seconds it took me to read the note my whole world came tumbling down. I could almost hear it. Bricks falling into rubble like you see when a building is blown up. I could almost see the dust, the noise blasted my hearing, so for a few minutes I was blind and deaf."

Tamsin had obviously decided her mother would not believe her, but through her shock and tears Emma chased after her and told her emphatically that she did and that "nobody hurts my kids and gets away with it".

Tamsin came home and told her how her father was always "feeling her up", brushing against her in ways which were not accidental. Emma hoped it was just a misunderstanding, but when she asked if anything else had happened that hope died. "Last time he was home on leave," Tamsin told her. "I woke up and he was all over me."

Emma admits there was no hesitation on her part. She immediately called Lothian and Borders Police and the social services department at Edinburgh City Council. Given that Daniel was not due home for some time, it took a week or so before statements were taken and the process which would eventually lead to his arrest, subsequent trial and a jail sentence for 12 months after being found guilty of lewd and libidinous behaviour, began.

"I had no doubt that calling the police was the right thing to do," she says. "Imagine if I hadn't? The girls wouldn't have been protected and Sam may well have been taken away."

Yet it must have been difficult to believe that the man she describes as her soul-mate, whom she met as a holiday romance, and for whom she gave up her own life in Edinburgh to travel round the world with him as he carved out his career as an engineer, could be guilty of such a heinous act. "Of course, it was difficult to comprehend. It was strange but in my mind I had to split him into two – the Daniel I loved, and the one who had abused my daughter. And it was the second one that I had to deal with."

The couple married in 1978 and, when Tamsin was born three years later and then Sam in 1983, Emma believed they had a great life.

The fly in the ointment, though, as her book recounts, was that Daniel found it difficult being a father. He expected better behaviour from the girls when they were young and was quick to use corporal punishment against them.

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Indeed at one point – when they lived in Carlisle – she was so concerned about his anger that she organised a parentcraft trainer from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to come and see him.

But, she says, she never considered that he would turn out to be a sexual abuser. It also transpires in the book that Sam could have been another victim if it wasn't for the fact that she would have been more likely to tell her mother immediately. "He was going into her room and giving her back rubs, but that's as far as it went because when he offered to rub her tummy Sam told him no," says Emma. "She's a different character to Tamsin – she would not have been able to keep that sort of thing to herself.

"As soon as I knew what had happened to Tamsin, there were things which clicked into place, and you do then ask yourself, 'how could I not have known?' But you just don't think that anything like that can be happening in your own home. I knew Tamsin wasn't sleeping well and that when her father was home she found it difficult to be around him, but I thought that was just teenage awkwardness, as I had felt with my father."

What was incredibly difficult was preventing her husband from realising that his actions had been revealed, so that he would return to the UK. "I knew I couldn't talk to him on the phone so I just faxed and told him our phone bill was too expensive. I also knew that I couldn't let him set foot back in the house when he came home, so I told the police what flight he would be on. He was arrested at the airport."

That was March 1997 and Daniel admitted everything to the police. On October 6, he was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison and five years on the sex offenders' register. "It does sound like hardly no time at all, but that was back in 1997 and if he were to be found guilty now of what he did he'd get a much longer sentence," says Emma. "He thought that he'd get a suspended sentence, so I was just delighted that didn't happen."

Of course, there were also a practical fall-out from Tamsin's bombshell. During the wait for the trial, Emma and her daughters had to move out of their home into a council house because they could no longer afford the mortgage. She also had to sell her car to keep paying the bills, as alimony she was receiving from Daniel didn't cover costs. Later – after he served his sentence – she had to ensure the Child Support Agency was able to find him to get any money at all.

During this time, Tamsin's mental health continued to suffer. At first, she was prescribed diazepam and beta-blockers, but that was just the start of years of neurotic behaviour that led to severe episodes of self-harming and was at one stage wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenia. Now 27, Tamsin suffers from clinical depression and is on antidepressants, but has a job and lives for her horses. Both she and Sam still live with their mother.

"Everybody who's been abused is liable to depression and anxiety. As long as things go smoothly she's all right, but if something goes wrong she panics," says Emma. "She has been able to have some relationships, though. She had a long-term relationship with an older man which was actually very good for her. But Sam has not had a boyfriend at all. She cannot trust men at all. Daniel hasn't got a clue what he's done to them."

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Emma herself has been disabled since her 40s with a back condition called arachnoiditis and she now has Crohn's disease, a bowel problem she believes was brought on by stress. She studied for her psychology degree through the Open University and became a philosophy teacher, although she now no longer works.

"There are some days I don't even think about what happened," she says. "It will be 12 years in October since I last saw Daniel, but I don't miss having a man in my life. As long as my children are fine and we have a house to live in, that's all I'm bothered about.

"I just hope that people who read the book will realise that stranger danger is the tip of the iceberg and the biggest threat to children is within the family. The vast majority of children are abused by a relative. We have to face up to that and think about why it happens and how we can prevent it."

*All names have been changed.

How Could He Do It? by Emma Charles is published by Preface from May 7, priced 6.99.

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