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.
Look around you, being informed is absolutely a choice. This place is a great example of people choosing pleasant fictions over uncomfortable realities every day.
Just because you think it is an unacceptable choice doesn’t mean it isn’t one.
It’s really not a choice, because enough of you knows to be massively harmed. And there are numerous potential physical consequences. But ignoring that, it’s not a choice you’re entitled to.
Literally any doctor, mental health professional, police officer, or other person in any other position of influence/authority who doesn’t give you the information for any reason is an unforgivable monster who belongs in a maximum security prison cell for a minimum of half a decade per offense, with every other person in there knowing that they’re there for covering up sex crimes.
Just… Wow.
The true test of being kind is not just empowering others when it makes you feel good, but empowering others when their choice makes you uncomfortable.
Someone absolutely has the right to say “my life has been fucked up enough already, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”
The truth is you would take that way from them just so you can feel good about yourself, whether it caused depression, or suicide, or hurt. You would take their choice away because you don’t agree with it so you could feel “just” whether it re victimizes them or not.
That right does not exist, because it is literally impossible to have the information required to make it, and it inherently requires someone else to do inexcusable, unforgivable things. You don’t have the right to compel someone else to be a monster.
The act causes the hurt. The knowledge of the source of the hurt is the only way it can possibly be addressed.
“Please watch the following 15 hours of video we found on your uncle’s laptop of you getting raped when you were 12 so you can understand what level of trauma you should be feeling.”
Vs.
“We found out some horrible things that happened to you as a child, do you want to know?”
One of these options is kind and also empowers the victim, can you guess which one?
Neither of those shows the tiniest hint of kindness.
Either makes you a monster.
In my eyes you forcing them to know just so you can sleep at night makes you one. You might as well make them watch footage and really relive it if you are going to deny their right to decide. After, you said they need the information of what happened to them. You just like your arbitrary line of where to stop. All I suggest is giving the victim that choice, and I’m the monster?
They need to know to be capable of living their life.
It is literally impossible to make intelligent decisions about their future health without all the information available. Willful ignorance is not a valid position, and health care professionals aren’t permitted to allow you to make decisions without knowing everything you need to know for a reason.
And again, by definition, you cannot be qualified to make the choice until you know what the information you’re asking to be withheld is, because that information is required to make a rational decision.
People do have the right not to make intelligent decisions.
Sure, doctors and lawyers have their obligations, but a victim has the right to nope the fuck right out of there to avoid additional mental trauma. It isn’t up to you.