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.
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.
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.
