A year ago, Franky Dean, a 24-year-old documentary film-making master’s student, decided to make a phone call she’d been avoiding nearly half her life. She was sitting in a dark computer room in New York University’s journalism institute in Manhattan when she FaceTimed her parents. They were in the living room at her home in the UK, where she grew up. Franky told them she’d just filed a police report about something that had happened more than a decade earlier. When Franky was 12, she had been sexually abused by a close friend’s dad.
And then her mum said two words that would change her life, again, for ever: “We know.”
It was meant to be a climactic moment – a revelation that Franky had been building up to for years. Instead, it was the beginning of another story – the unravelling of a shadow narrative that spanned half of Franky’s life. It’s a story about what happens when police assume survivors of sexual abuse to be “unknowing victims” – a series of misinterpretations and missteps that amounted to Franky spending 12 years hiding her abuse from her parents while they spent 12 years hiding it from her.
I hope we as a society will start teaching new parents that they shouldn’t rely on child development advice from a single person, especially one with limited knowledge and experience in that area. Raising humans is complicated, and as with many things, the pitfalls are often invisible unless you’ve run into them before.
I assume the detective constable meant well when offering guidance, but it’s important to consider the source when evaluating guidance, and be a little skeptical when it comes from someone whose qualifications and incentives don’t directly apply.
PSA
If you have been sexually assaulted or abused by someone, please tell somebody. Preferably the police, but if not them then tell someone else that you trust. I know this is a huge ask. I know you want to completely erase it from your memory. I know that doing this means unleashing a shit storm that you can never undo. I know it’s going to dredge up all kinds of pain. I know it might permanently reshape your life. I know it’s going to be incredibly hard. It’s probably going to take courage that you’re not even sure you have.
The reason I’m asking you to do this is because there’s a really good chance that the person who did this to you has done it before or will do it again. YOU may be the only thing standing between the perpetrator and their next victim. The fact that it happened to you is terrible and I’m so sorry for that. But you have the power to help make sure what happened to you doesn’t happen to anyone else. So please tell someone because you might very well be the hero, that you needed, for someone else. There are few things in life more honorable than that.
a huge ask
No, it’s a huge request. This isn’t a used car lot.
And after so many decades, many abusers are just dead now.
To add to this, sometimes one person finding the bravery to speak out can lead to other victims feeling the courage to as well.
That’s a pretty disturbing story, and I never would have imagined they would not tell a victim. I understand the argument against it, but the risk of long term mental illness / PTSD from it being suppressed just seems way too high.
I don’t understand the argument against it.
It’s their body. They don’t just have a right to know. They need to know.
It’s a good point, if one truly doesn’t know and really is continuing on with life just fine then telling them would I’m effect cause trauma where there was none before
One of the most prolific incidents of unknowing victims in recent years was the case of Reynhard Sinaga, who drugged and raped at least 48 men in Manchester between 2015 and 2017. Almost all the victims had no idea they had been raped until police officers knocked on the door years later.
“It was a moral dilemma,” says Lisa Waters, the former child service manager at St Mary’s sexual assault referral centre, who worked with police on these visits. “You can’t just go in there, tell them what’s happened and drop the bombshell and walk away. You have an obligation to keep people safe.”
Some victims were numb; others were furious. “Why have you told me this?” Waters recalls them asking. “I had no idea that this happened to me. You’ve ruined my life. So why have you told me?” But for other victims, the revelation was a relief.
There’s no good answer on this, maybe some sort of initial generic question like “Something bad has happened to you in your past you maybe unaware of, would you like details?”
It would still cause one to worry about that something has happened to them, but at least they would have time to figure out their own best way forward before being bombarded with details
That’s genuinely entirely insane.
Not notifying them should be a serious crime with no defense or mitigating factors and an extremely long minimum sentence.
They have to know.
They have to know.
People have an equal right to not want to know something
The trauma happened. Gaslighting them into thinking it didn’t can’t make them better. Your brain still processes shit whether you’re consciously aware of it or not.
There is no possible healthy path forward that doesn’t involve knowing reality. “Not wanting to know” isn’t possible without knowing what you supposedly don’t want to know. Not telling them is not, under any circumstances, forgivable.
They have to know, and they have to have to get therapy. There’s no other path to recovery.
Gaslighting them into thinking it didn’t
That implies they knew.
Not consciously knowing doesn’t mean their brain isn’t affected.
Not telling them is gaslighting whether they’re consciously aware or not.
Whether to seek therapy or even go on a path to recovery is their choice to make, are you advocating to force people onto a path of recovery‽
It’s true your brain is always processing things, but it’s not guaranteed that it’ll process it into trauma PTSD or another mental health issue. It’s perfectly capable of processing it’s way out of major issues. There are plenty of people who have gone through traumatic things both aware and unaware in which they suffered no I’ll effect. It happens. That bit of the article I quoted is of one such person.
Am I advocating for forcing adults into therapy? Obviously barring court ordered therapy, no. But children are not capable of making that decision and it is not theoretically possible that an adult who doesn’t want to inform them is acting in their interest. Not getting a child rape victim therapy is child abuse.
Informed consent to not know is not even theoretically within the realm of possibility. There’s a reason informed consent is always the requirement for all treatment. It’s because no one else can possibly be justified in making the decision.
The patient must be informed on reality in order to be capable of choosing a path forward. They cannot possibly make decisions while being lied to.
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