A Paedophile in My Family: Surviving Dad, review: a courageous plea for sufferers to speak up sooner

Three-quarters of the way into A Paedophile in My Family: Surviving Dad (Channel 4), Emily, its subject, looked at the camera and said she didn’t want to go on with making the documentary. By this point in the programme it was painfully obvious why: Sophie Oliver’s film, in which Emily confronted the 18 years of sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, was hard enough to watch. What it must have been like to make one can only imagine. 

It sat Emily down, one by one, with her mother, her schoolteachers and her childhood friends so that she could ask them the most awful question: how did you not see what was happening? No one had an answer; there were only ashen-faced apologies and guilt. 

The most upsetting scene, in a film that made for desolate viewing throughout, was when Emily went to the police officers who eventually sent her father to prison. At her request they read out her father’s statement when he was arrested. It was disgusting not only in its contents but in its vanity: there was no part of him that felt bad for what he had done; indeed, it was largely Emily’s fault in his eyes. 

Astonishingly, this was compounded by the following scene in which Emily bravely began a restorative justice process and yet her father, now released from prison, refused to reciprocate and see her. He was in therapy himself now, you see, and thought meeting the daughter whose life he had ruined might hold him back. 

With documentaries like this one, so dependent on a single person laying themselves open to a film-maker, there is a tacit unease about the purpose of the exercise. Emily began this film saying, “I’m going to take a look back at what happened to me as a child.” Her mother worried about how it would affect her now that she has her life on an even keel. But Emily’s answer was that she wanted to use her voice to help other survivors and find out why her abuse stayed hidden for so long. Hopefully films like hers will encourage other sufferers to speak out sooner, because if there is a throughline to her story it was that everyone wished they’d said something, but no one did.