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Looking back now, it wasn’t completely out of the blue. For some months, my wife and I knew something was wrong with our daughter.
In 2016, on a summer holiday in Cape Cod, she said she wanted to talk to us about something.
We were staying in one of those beautiful American clapboard houses and the rest of the family – her elder brother, and younger brother and sister – were out.
Just her, my wife and I were on the big bed in our lovely bedroom, an afternoon breeze gently rustling the fine curtains at the open window, when she told us, plainly and simply and very calmly: ‘I was raped.’
It took a moment before the realisation of what she said sank in. Then it felt like my heart was about to stop.
She told us details that she doesn’t want us to go into here but I can say she had been raped some years before, when she was in her teens, by a stranger while on her way home during term time at secondary school. The only other person she had told was her boyfriend a few months previously. However, for years she had just kept it to herself.
I resisted the urge to ask too many questions about what happened to her. Fathers, and men in general, are always wanting to make a plan, to try and do something. But I had to force myself just to listen.
Perhaps it was because several years had passed since the attack, but for whatever reason, all three of us were very calm.
Our daughter is smart and thoughtful. By the time she decided to tell us, she was in her twenties and determined to complete her education.
She was similar when she was younger. When I look back at the time when she was raped, I can’t believe I didn’t notice any signs that anything was wrong with her. But, through that whole period she somehow stayed focused on her studies.
My wife and our three other children have talked about how she was in our extremely busy home during that time. They have said that they too didn’t know anything was wrong. As is very common for survivors, my daughter covered it up completely.
We’d gone on family holidays together since then, but she’d given nothing away. Nothing had changed in how she was eating, or dressing.
After she told us, we obviously thought about what we could have done to stop it happening.
I think any parent who goes through this would do the same.
You think, ‘I shouldn’t have let that happen’. But then how could you possibly stop every single bad thing happening to any one of your kids ever, while still allowing them to have a life?
When our children were young we lived outside London. I was the CEO of Charlie Bigham’s, the prepared meal company, and my wife also worked. Our children were in good schools. We’d chosen the area where we lived as one of the very best in which to bring up a family. Yet this had happened to her.
I’ve asked myself many times whether I was working too much? Was my wife? Is that why we didn’t see anything wrong, or why our daughter didn’t come to us for help in the first place – did she think we were too busy?
I knew where the rape happened, but it would have been pointless to try to find who was responsible because so much time had passed – and because very quickly I learned that this would not help my daughter, myself, or the rest of our family. Instead, my energy and anger had to go a different way.
The next day of our holiday, she told her siblings: two in the same room she had told us; one who was travelling somewhere else, over the phone. Like us, they were desperately upset, and frightened that such a terrible thing was possible. Then began the journey of learning about how to deal with this, and to come through it together.
The rape was an enormous shock to our family, and set off a chain of events that changed all our lives in many ways, and differently for each of us.
For me, the effect was to make me want to know everything I could about rape, and what I had learned – and its long-term devastating consequences – astounded me.
Incredibly, almost immediately, I learned that our daughter was more likely to be raped than she was to be a smoker. And, while most rapes happen when survivors are of secondary school and university age, your daughter is more likely to be raped while at school than university.
I couldn’t believe this was possible. How could I be a father of two daughters and not know that?
You think about all the bad things that could happen: They could crash a car; they could get pregnant; they could get into drugs and alcohol or start smoking. But actually, the single biggest risk is that your daughter will be raped.
Schools warn about other dangers young people face. They do talks about drugs and then that conversation is brought home.
But they didn’t do that for rape. I thought, ‘How can we not be doing more about this?’
So, from that point onwards, more than nine years ago, I began working seriously on being better informed about rape.
I talked to every expert I could, in the US, the UK and all around the world – scientists, criminologists, psychologists, researchers, the leading people who work in the field – about what could be done.
I got to know the US government’s world-leading Intimate Partner Violence team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and learned about a number of promising interventions that had been tested.
In America, a sufficient quantity of consent education – if delivered effectively to a student population – has been shown to reduce sexual violence.
Although well known, approaches such as this one had never been rolled out in the UK.
So I helped develop Talk Consent – a simple, low-cost education programme for schools, to help prevent sexual violence among young people. The initiative has now reached more than 500 schools and 250,000 young people across the country.
We believe that if every child in Britain gets effective education, then, over the next ten to 20 years, it will have a large impact on reducing sexual violence.
Like the vast majority of survivors, my daughter didn’t report her rape attack. The personal costs to most survivors of going to the police are just far too high: being retraumatised, not believed and trapped in limbo.
And there is almost no chance of justice. Some 69,000 rapes were reported to police in England and Wales in the year to June 2024, but there were only 1,220 convictions.
Only around one in six women report their rape or sexual assault, according to the Office for National Statistics figures from 2021, while government figures from 2013, show that more than 430,000 adults are victims of sexual offences.
Nearly all rape occurs in private, with two people who know each other, and the perpetrator claiming it was consensual.
Because of this, very few people report or talk about what has happened; and there is nearly zero deterrence.
I’ve became convinced that knocking down this wall of silence, breaking this taboo, is the key. I have familiarised myself with projects in the US, Canada, Australia and Kenya. Ideas like powerful social media movements, for example, #MeToo, Everyone’s Invited and Teach Us Consent.
Many other people have developed alternative online reporting systems to work alongside the criminal justice system. Nearly every university has one – there’s a system called Report + Support in the UK. Unfortunately, very few people do report because they don’t trust the university to do anything about it, making it not as effective as it could be.
Around the world we’ve also seen the introduction of DNA self-collection kits.
Forensic experts have long known it’s relatively easy to collect an uncontaminated DNA sample from your own body, and that victims are much more likely to do it if they’re allowed to do it quickly and privately. From my previous work at Charlie Bigham’s, I know the power of digital media, e-commerce and social media to transform products and services with new solutions at a very low cost.
With Katie White, whom I met through my son two years ago, I founded a non-profit organisation called Enough, and we studied these ideas intensively. We learnt as much as we could about why, so far, these approaches have not broken through. We went to Bristol and met lots of student survivors of rape. We learned about their experiences and asked them what solutions they wanted.
With Enough, people can report a rape or sexual assault to a private online account on an encrypted platform that is date stamped, and they can also publish a snippet of testimony – which names neither the victim nor the perpetrator – to be shared across student social media. If survivors want, they can use a small, simple Enough DNA kit to self-collect, post the sample straight to a world-leading lab for immediate testing, and have the results uploaded to their encrypted account in 48 hours.
Half the sample is stored for 20 years, so the police can have it if the survivor decides to report their rape later. We always direct survivors to go to the police or sexual assault referral centres first if that’s what they wish.
We designed the platform and kits, spoke to the police, forensic experts, the forensic regulator and leading barristers.
Last October, we trialled Enough in Bristol, which has a very large student population. On the very first day, thousands of students took kits, rape reports flooded in, those reports went viral on social media, and the first DNA sample was collected, mailed to the lab, and analysed.
Since then our social media has reached well over 25million, and 8,000 kits have been distributed, starting new conversations about rape.
After a few months, a number of university societies ran surveys and found that 90 per cent of students were aware of and trusted Enough, 86 per cent said they would report with it, and 70 per cent said it was already preventing rape. Incredibly, more than 800 rapes have already been reported through Enough, which clearly shows that victims overwhelmingly want to use the service.
The low cost and high results of the service mean we are now in talks with several other cities about bringing it to their students too.
We believe if Enough is everywhere, and potential perpetrators thought they could be named and their DNA stored, figures for rape and sexual assault would plummet. Just by awareness of Enough’s existence we are getting students to proactively talk about consent as well as creating a deterrent against rape.
From the first day we gave out our kits, survivors started collecting their rapists’ DNA and having it analysed; and the first samples have been accessed by the police.
Key figures in the criminal justice system, including the most senior law officers and leading barristers, confirm that evidence submitted via the website can be admissible in court.
One of the most heartwarming parts of my time working on this project has been the reaction from other dads.
A friend of 40 years heard about our work and said he wanted to help by setting up Dads4Daughters, a campaign in which dads encourage each other to come to meetings to learn more about rape and Enough. They have their questions answered, then promise to talk to their sons, post on social media, pledge money to fund more kits, and bring two more dads to the next meeting.
Hundreds of dads have now attended meetings. There have been tears as some of them shared the fact that they are fathers of survivors too, and as others see their pain, the understanding of the risks their daughters face sink in. They leave energised to join the fight, and we are so thankful for the strength and support they are bringing to this work.
But despite all this progress, many years after my daughter’s rape, there are times when the grief of what has happened to someone you love and care for so much is still overwhelming.
When I talk about how bad the current situation is nationally, people are rightly horrified, and can’t understand how they didn’t know this already.
It’s because of the taboo around talking about it, and the only way we are going to change attitudes is by recognising that, unfortunately, the system we have as of right now is only working for a handful of survivors.
It is up to all of us to add ideas like Enough so that it works for many more.
Go to myenough.com for more details about Enough and how to get involved in the Dads4Daughters campaign
Go to talkconsent.org to learn more about Talk Consent
As told to Dominic Connolly