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.
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.
