WARNING: This story is about the sexual abuse of children.
In 2015, a 43-year-old man was jailed for more than 15 years for the premeditated, prolonged and persistent sexual abuse of his two young daughters — filming much of the abuse of the youngest and uploading it to vile websites.
He was also convicted of sexual offending against two little girls he met through his job at a community centre and of secretly filming an adult friend having sex.
He was recently refused parole, and his daughters spoke to senior journalist Anna Leask, host of the Herald podcast A Moment In Crime, about their ordeal.
- For a much more in-depth explanation of this case, listen to A Moment In Crime: My father - the sex offender.
They looked like an average Kiwi family, but behind closed doors, they were anything but.
Behind closed doors, Steven Jones was violating his young daughters almost every day.
“I did the maths recently, and he made the choice to violate my body approximately 830 times over four years,” his youngest daughter, Ash, said.
“And that does not include the images and videos of my body that are forever on the internet.
“Abuse isn’t always obvious. In my case, if you looked in from the outside, you would see some problems, but every family has flaws.
“There were good times, moments when we all got along, and it seemed like everything was okay. We were all very good at pretending everything was fine for other people.”
The family and their dark secrets unravelled one day in late 2014 — the day before Ash finished high school.
“The day is burned in my mind. I was sitting in English class, enjoying the atmosphere — the last full day of high school, revising for exams coming up, joking with classmates. Then my phone rang,” she said.
“It was a detective asking to meet with me. They said it was regarding my father. I honestly thought he was dead, he had been very depressed for a few months.
“They picked me up outside my school, I was terrified. When we got to the station, we went around the back to a small room. The first few times they said the words, my mind couldn’t make sense of them.
“They had raided my family’s home this morning, there had been an investigation ongoing for a while now, they had tracked down the leader of a child porn ring to the community centre my father had been working at, they had arrested him, he had confessed. He was still in the station a few rooms away. Did I want to see him?
“It didn’t make sense. It had been two years since I had lived in the house. In that time, I had locked everything away. I could barely remember my life from 12 to 16.
“The secret was out. I couldn’t process anything. How big this was, what it all meant. Everything had changed in a moment. They dropped me back at school, but I didn’t go back in. I had adult friends who lived close by. I walked there, sat down outside and broke down. I cried for six hours straight, and then I was numb for days. I went through the motions of finishing school, barely talking to anyone, just a shell of myself.”
In mid-2015, Jones pleaded guilty to four charges of raping Ash, four of unlawful sexual connection, eight of sexual conduct with a young person under 16, and four offences of indecent assault.
Many of the charges were representative — meaning multiple similar offences had been grouped together.
Jones also admitted repeatedly photographing and filming the girl in sexually compromising poses as he was violating her. The footage was then uploaded to a child exploitation website.
He also pleaded guilty to three counts of rape, four of unlawful sexual connection, six of sexual conduct with a young person under 16, and one of indecent assault in relation to his oldest daughter Jamie.
Some of those charges were representative.
As victims of sexual offending, Ash and Jamie’s legal names were automatically and permanently suppressed.
Since then, they have both changed their names and identifying them as Ash and Jamie in A Moment In Crime, and the Herald does not breach the protective orders.
Alongside the long-running abuse of his daughters, Jones admitted performing indecent acts on two other little girls.
He met and befriended their families at a community centre where he worked. Once he had the trust of the adults, he turned his eye to the girls, aged between 5 and 10.
Finally, he admitted making an intimate visual recording of his friend and a woman having sex on two occasions without their knowledge.
Jones had secretly installed software into his mate’s home computer, enabling the computer’s camera to be motion-activated.
At sentencing, the judge told Jones he had caused significant and, in some cases lifelong harm to his victims.
“The psychological harm to your daughters has been significant. Both have self-harmed, have attempted suicide, have trouble maintaining both platonic and romantic relationships, and exhibit antisocial behaviour of different sorts. The relationship between Jamie and Ash is also strained,” the judge said.
“One of them lost self-motivation in her education and turned to drug and alcohol abuse. The other struggled with mental illness, including anorexia, depression and insomnia and consequently is unable to work.
“The scale of offending must be taken into account. More than one incident, or extended abuse over a prolonged period of time, is more serious, as is repeated rape or other sexual violation and associated degradation or indignity. This includes, in this case, videotaping or photographing. Offending against more than one victim also increases the scale of offending.”
Jones was sentenced to prison time for his offending against each victim and ordered to serve the lags concurrently.
He was sent to prison for 15 years and nine months.
The judge then ordered him to serve more than half of that time before he was eligible for parole.
Jones recently became eligible for parole. He has appeared twice before the Parole Board, which has refused to grant him an early release.
Both Ash and Jamie want him to stay behind bars for as long as possible. But when he is released, they have both said they want to take legal action to have his name suppression lifted.
They want the public to know exactly who he is and what he has done. They want to protect other little girls and teenagers from the monster who almost destroyed them.
And, they want to highlight the fact that some of the worst sex offenders, on the face of it, are normal dads, good guys, community figures, employed and trusted, respected and liked.
“Every child deserves a safe home, to be loved and cared for by the adults around them,” said Ash.
“In cases of grooming, it is never the child’s fault. My father was an adult with a fully developed brain, and he was capable of making choices.
“I remember he praised me so much. He said as a 12-year-old he thought I was so mature, I was practically an adult. We talked about his past relationships and how he thought if someone was mature enough and they’re not hurting anyone else, there shouldn’t be any laws preventing things like incest and how he thought the age of consent should be lowered because most teens are having sex anyway.
“And then, when I felt safe and comfortable with the only person in my home who liked my presence, he kissed me. And being 12 — and in hindsight, groomed for years and pushed away from anyone else — and desperate for any affection, I was okay with it.
“Things progressed from there. I felt special and grown up and loved. He told me we had to keep it super secret, other people wouldn’t understand, my mother would hate me even more because he loved me and not her.
“As I grew older, I knew it was wrong, but desperate for any affection, it kept going. I thought it was just me, I was special to this one person. I told absolutely no one, I didn’t even hint at it.”
The abuse only stopped when Ash left the family home at 16, unable to live with her mother any longer.
“Obviously, my childhood has had a huge effect on my life.
“It’s been a decade, and I’m still struggling on a daily basis. I still have panic attacks regularly. I have two children now and they are my whole life. My goal is to raise children who don’t have to recover from their childhood.”
- For Ash and Jamie’s full stories, listen to A Moment In Crime - My father, the sex offender.
Episodes of A Moment In Crime are usually released monthly and, so far, Leask has covered 64 cases including the murders of Grace Millane, Scott Guy, Austin Hemmings, Carmen Thomas, Karen Aim; the deaths of the Kahui twins; the Christchurch mosque attack and the historic heavenly creatures murder; the case of Lauren Dickason who was jailed for murdering her three young daughters soon after emigrating to New Zealand and the massacres at Raurimu and Aramoana.
In 2023, the podcast published a three-part special covering the case of rich lister and philanthropist James Wallace, who was convicted of sexually assaulting three men.
He was jailed and had his knighthood stripped from him.
And to mark the 30th anniversary of the Bain family murders, Leask produced a two-part special reflecting on the atrocious loss of life and legal saga that followed.
A Moment in Crime is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released monthly.
The series is hosted by senior journalist Anna Leask — who specialises in crime and justice reporting. She joined the Herald in 2008 and has worked as a journalist for 18 years. If you have a crime or case you would like to hear more about, email anna.leask@nzme.co.nz.
Since 2019, A Moment in Crime has produced over 55 episodes and has been downloaded over 1 million times, with listeners in over 170 countries. It was nominated for Best True Crime Podcast at the 2024 Radio and Podcast Awards.