Warning: This story contains references to child sexual abuse that some readers may find disturbing.

Lacey, Washington, United States – Robert Shilling has seen many terrible things.

Too much for him to forget. Too much to do anything other than file it away in part of his brain and try to keep it there.

This is the only way, he says, he can continue to be a force for good in the world after having witnessed – and experienced – so much of its darkness.

This has come at a considerable cost. It damaged the 73-year-old’s marriage, he once drank too much, and for years he struggled to speak about his work investigating cases of child sexual abuse, except with colleagues.

He suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and every month he makes – and keeps – an appointment with a therapist.

A four-decade career in law enforcement mostly in Washington state concluded with Shilling heading the Crimes Against Children Unit of Interpol, the international investigative organisation headquartered in Lyon, France. There, officers dispatched from 196 member countries tackle crimes that spread across national borders.

Shilling was sent to Interpol after more than 30 years with the Seattle Police Department, the last 10 of which he spent heading up the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit.

When he arrived in Lyon in 2013, his team was small, just Shilling, three officers and an intern.

On their first day together, Shilling called the team into his office and asked them if they personally knew a victim of child sexual abuse. “You’re looking at one right now,” he told them.

He remembers them looking back at him, startled. “They were just shocked that somebody who was their supervisor would tell them this,” he says.

He wanted to convey that anyone can be a victim. “I told them to help them understand what we’re dealing with,” Shilling explains.

5,420 rescued children

It is a grey, rain-spitting November morning in Lacey, a city about 80km (50 miles) south of Seattle where Shilling, who retired from the police force after he left Lyon in 2016, lives with his wife, Karen.

Shilling is at a community centre near his home, dressed in a blue and white chequered shirt. The warm, welcoming space – a gathering spot for people over 55 – has large windows that look out onto gardens. Inside, people sit chatting in front of flickering artificial fires.

Sitting in a small, private conference room, Shilling, who speaks in a distinctly matter of fact way, tells his story.

If you had to boil down Shilling’s time at Interpol into a single sentence, it would be this: Over the course of three years, he and his colleagues identified and helped rescue 5,420 children who were victims of sexual assault in different parts of the world.

Shilling and his team pored through Interpol’s child sexual exploitation database, a repository they set up of millions of photographs and videos forwarded by national police forces who have been unable to identify the children in the material. A 2018 joint report from Interpol and the global NGO network ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking) found, based on the database material, that younger victims faced more severe abuse and 60 percent of unidentified victims were prepubescent and included babies and toddlers.

Shilling and his team used software to collect images of a child if multiple pictures existed in the system. “We would put them together in a series and then try to derive the clues that we could off [that] series,” he explains.

The team would handle multiple cases at once and tried to first tackle ones that appeared the most recent and where abuse might have still been ongoing.

Often, the material was not an image but a video. That meant officers not only had to watch the abuse but listen to it. Shilling says, even now, he cannot forget those children’s screams.

“It was physically and mentally exhausting,” he says. “It was the hardest job I ever had in my life and the most rewarding.”

Between sips of coffee from a paper cup, Shilling says he became bewildered when he asked himself what could make another human being prey on children.

“When you see an infant or toddler being raped, it’s just hard to get your head wrapped around,” he says. “You want to just climb through the computer and beat whoever was doing that to a bloody pulp, but you cannot.”

Shilling and his team scoured the materials day after day, week after week, searching for wide-ranging clues, such as whether the material showed anything that could help identify the city or the country. They became self-taught experts on the electrical sockets used in different countries. Sometimes there would be a brand of soft drink specific to a country or region.

In one case, the team was able to match the fabric of a duvet used by one of the hotels at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida.

The child had been taken to a place that for decades has been associated with innocence and fun only to be abused.

“We were able to rescue that kid,” he says.

‘Did I do something?’

Shilling was born and raised in Los Angeles, the oldest of four children and the only boy. His father left when he was a child, and he and his siblings were raised by their mother, who worked in a department store. They grew up in what were then working class communities in North Hollywood and Sun Valley.

His mother was religious, and Shilling attended a Catholic school.

Shilling had originally hoped to be a professional baseball player, and when he was 17, scouts came to watch him play. He was a third baseman, a defensive position. But an on-field collision with another player in which he broke his nose put an end to that.

After the accident, whenever a ball came his way, he would instinctively turn his face away to protect himself. Unable to follow the action, he had to stop playing.

But hovering over all of this, something he did not share with anyone, was that between the ages of 12 and 16, he was sexually abused by his grandfather.

Soon after Shilling’s father left, his family moved into his grandparents’ three-bedroom house. His youngest sister slept with his grandmother, and his two other sisters slept with his mother in a sewing room converted into a bedroom.

Shilling had to sleep in his grandfather’s room and share his queen-size bed.

When the abuse started, he says, it was too difficult to comprehend.

This was someone who for many years had been a paternal figure in his life, filling in for his father, who had shown little interest in him and whose abandonment made him feel “betrayed”.

“He’d take me to Los Angeles Dodgers baseball games. We’d go camping in the Nevada desert, visiting ghost towns, getting rocks and stuff,” he reflects.

“He was more of a father figure to me than anything else. So when this started happening, you’re rocked to your core.”

Shilling does not pause as he continues his story.

“You’re trying to think, ‘Wait a minute. How can this be happening to me? This is somebody that loves me, supposedly, and now he’s doing this to me.’ And then you start thinking, ‘Did I do something to cause this?’” he reflects. “And you start not even trusting yourself any more because you don’t trust them any more. Now you don’t trust your own feelings.”

‘Prayed for it to stop’

Although Shilling wasn’t particularly religious at the time, he says “when my abuse started, I prayed and prayed and prayed for it to stop, and it didn’t.”

At the age of 16, feeling he was to blame and that he could not speak to anyone about what was happening to him, Shilling considered taking his own life.

One day, when he was close to his lowest ebb, he says he experienced a religious visitation while in the room he shared with his grandfather. He describes sweating profusely and feeling a jolt of electricity surging through his body and a sudden energy.

That night, when his grandfather approached him, Shilling turned and looked directly into his eyes.

“I got up on an elbow, and I got right in his face, and I said, ‘If you touch me again, I will kill you.’ And it was the best Academy Award performance I could give,” he says.

Shilling adds: “Would I have killed him? I don’t know. It wasn’t important that I knew. It was important that he thought I could.”

That same night, he moved out of his grandfather’s room to sleep in one of his sister’s playhouses.

“He never abused me after that,” Shilling says.

The patrol officer

Shilling had pondered a career in the police force, seeing it as a job where he could make a difference. He believes that the abuse “had a lot to do with it”.

He first became an officer in his 20s after completing college in Santa Clara, California, and after a couple of years moved to Seattle, where he and Karen got married in 1980.

Shilling spent 10 years as a patrol officer in Seattle, a period he looks back on with affection.

He and his partner often patrolled their Capitol Hill patch on foot. Historically, the area had many Black residents centred around the Yesler Way neighbourhood along with a sizeable number of the LGBTQ community.

Shilling and his partner were frequently called to tackle assaults on LGBTQ individuals and establishments.

He loved walking the beat. He says it was a way to build relationships and trust and deter crimes before they occurred because, after a while, people started to pass on tips.

Shilling’s service came at a time of tension between police and the local community. In 1984, police killed 42-year-old Black resident Robert Baldwin, shooting him in the back with 21 bullets, after he had stabbed and killed an officer named Michael Raeburn as he was trying to serve an eviction notice. A jury found the police were justified in their use of deadly force, but activists and community members held regular protests to denounce the verdict and the police killing of Baldwin.

Shilling recalls walking through Yesler Way with his partner, knocking on doors, explaining who they were, handing over their business cards and asking people to call if there was a problem.

For a month, nobody called them. But he says locals saw them tackling issues residents had said were important to them, mainly prostitution and drug use.

“Pretty soon, we’re getting calls from neighbours. We would take care of the problem. They would thank us,” he says, his voice warming as he recalls how their relationship with the community improved.

“Soon when we’re walking through Yesler Terrace and people are out on their patios barbecuing, they’d invite us to have some of the barbecue,” he reflects.

But a decade as a beat officer left Shilling physically and mentally exhausted.

“I was working a foot beat most of the time,” he explains. “And from 7.30pm at night until 3.30am in the morning, there is a lot of crime. Ten years was enough.”

So he took and passed the exams needed to become a detective.

Soon afterwards, Shilling, then in his 30s, was told he would be assigned to the unit for sexual assault and child abuse.

It was considered a desirable post, but he panicked: He knew the job would likely trigger many of the memories he had tried to keep buried.

‘I didn’t know how to stop it’

Shilling decided to drive the three hours to the community of Horseshoe Bay in Canada’s British Columbia and check into a motel. For five days, he pondered his future as he watched the ferries come and go.

Although he told Karen about being abused soon after they met in 1978, he went alone. He wanted to determine if he could move on from his past.

By the end of the trip, he decided to accept the role. He knew he would be helping others, but it would require something significant from him.

“I decided I was going to forgive my grandfather for what he did to me,” Shilling explains. “And in forgiving him, it felt like a 10,000lb boulder was released from my chest.”

He then decided he would try to be the best detective he could be. He started taking specialist classes he thought could help and attending seminars and conferences.

He had learned that he wasn’t the only one his grandfather had abused. On a trip to Lake Tahoe with his three sisters when they were in their 20s and he maybe aged 30, Shilling’s siblings revealed they too had been abused.

“We were sitting in the hot tub,” he says, explaining how one and then two of his sisters said their grandfather had abused them. “And then my other sister acknowledged she had been abused.”

None of them had known about the others. “That is part of how sex offenders are able to keep doing what they’re doing [with a] veil of secrecy,” he explains.

Shilling would also have to forgive his mother.

One night, she had walked into the room as he was being raped by his grandfather. He thought she would rescue him. But instead she turned around and shut the door. It was something that had always haunted him.

It would not be until she was 82 and dying of pancreatic cancer that Shilling confronted her, asking why she did not help.

Shilling says he had always had a good relationship with his mother and that she did her best for her children.

“She loved us unconditionally, and she showed it every single day. And her walking out of the room was something that just wasn’t like her, which made me think that there was more to it than what she was letting on,” he says.

He visited her at her home in Palmdale, California, and asked about that day.

“And she said, ‘I’m so glad you asked this,’ and she started sobbing, and she said she was abused by [my] grandfather, her father. She said, ‘If I didn’t know how to stop it for me, I certainly didn’t know how to stop it for you.’”

‘Close to solving this’

Shilling’s last day at Interpol was April 29, 2016. He was asked to stay on for another three years, but he was worn out.

As a result of fund-raising efforts that he spearheaded, reaching out to various foundations around the world and national governments, his department raised $13m in additional money, and his five-member team swelled to more than 20.

He and his team worked 12 to 16 hours a day and sometimes on weekends. He says other units generally stuck to their assigned hours, but his team was particularly driven and dedicated.

Sometimes, if they thought they were poised to crack a case, they’d keep going.

“There were so many cases where you think to yourself, ‘You know, we are very close to solving this,’ and so we would stay.”

Shilling’s passport was filled with dozens of entry stamps as he travelled the world pursuing cases.

To try to decompress, the team would go hiking in the local countryside, taking with them bread, cheese and wine. There was only one rule: to not talk about work.

But the work was isolating – and Shilling could only really speak to others working in his field.

During the week, Shilling and his colleagues would sometimes stop on their way home for a drink at a wine bar to try to take the edge off.

When he returned to Seattle on visits, Karen, who travelled to Lyon just once to help Shilling find a place to live, would ask him not to talk about what he was seeing because she feared she would find it too distressing. On those visits, he would often sleep for 12 or 14 hours at a stretch.

‘A drop of water’

In November, Shilling travelled to Japan to moderate a conference organised by several NGOs at which survivors of sexual abuse talked about their experience.

A year after returning to Seattle from Lyon and ending his work as a police officer, Shilling co-founded the Brave Movement, a global network of survivors of childhood sexual violence who encourage others to share stories and press for changes in the law.

In an example of what can be done, Japan in 2023 raised the age of consent from 13 to 16.

It also extended the statute of limitations for the prosecution of rape from 10 years to 15. Critically, the statute begins only once an accuser reaches the age of 18, the legal age of adulthood. This means a person does not have to try to seek justice while still a child.

“If you’re a child of four years old and you’re getting abused, no kid’s going to report that during that period of time,” Shilling explains.

Another part of the organisation’s outreach is to encourage legislators who are abuse survivors to speak out. By having people in powerful positions do this, they hope to make it easier for others to do so.

Shilling, who is working on a book about his experiences, recently celebrated his 44th wedding anniversary with Karen, 70, with whom he has a 42-year-old son. They have three grandchildren.

“I took my wife to dinner, and one thing I told her was that I was conflicted about my job at Interpol,” he says.

While he was proud of having helped save thousands of children, he feared it had ruined his marriage.

“She says, ‘Well, it didn’t ruin it. You just came back different,’” he says.

“The first six months I was back at home, you probably couldn’t get me to say more than 10 words in a conversation. I was like a deer in the headlights. That was the PTSD.”

Shilling says Karen, who worked for 35 years as a 911 emergency call operator for the Seattle police, often asks him when will “enough be enough” and when he plans to enjoy his retirement.

“When I give my last breath,” Shilling says, to which Karen just shakes her head.

He says it is difficult to let it all go, hard not to think of the children out there he could be helping. A UNICEF report from October pointed to the global scale of the crisis – one in five girls and about one in 11 boys are the victims of sexual assault. Currently, the total number of victims identified by Interpol stands at 42,300.

“When you think of the victims we’ve been able to save, when you think about the legislation that’s been passed,” he says, “it’s like a drop of water in a lake that starts spreading out.”

If you, a child or a young adult you know require support, help is available. Please visit Child Helpline International to find sources of help. In the US, text or call the Childhelp hotline number 800-422-4453.