At 12 she was abused by a friend’s father. Police told her parents she was asleep so there was no need to let her know. The problem? They were wrong … | Rape and sexual assault

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.

Franky stared at her phone. For a moment, her parents didn’t say anything.

“How do you know that?” Franky remembers her dad saying.

“What do you mean? How do I know that?” she said, taken aback. “I know it because I remember it.”

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.

Franky’s story sheds light on a complicated and little-understood area in criminal law. What should police do if a victim does not know – or is presumed not to know – that they are a victim of a crime?

There are a number of instances in which someone may be an unknowing victim of a sex-related crime. For instance, if someone is date raped and does not remember that they have been assaulted. Or if they have consented to having sex with someone but do not know that they are being filmed or that the film is going to be distributed.

One of the most extreme examples is Gisèle Pelicot, 72, whose former husband Dominique is currently in court in France accused of drugging her to the point of a “coma-like” state so that he and more than 70 strangers could sexually assault her at home. Gisèle says she had no idea that any of the alleged assaults had happened until she was told by police. She has chosen to waive her right to anonymity to raise awareness of the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse.

Franky has chosen to be public about what happened to her because she feels that misunderstandings about her experience as a victim have led to a miscarriage of justice.

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Franky was a happy and bubbly child. She boarded at a private girls’ school in England. One of her best friends was called Jo. Outside term time, the two girls played at each other’s houses. Sometimes Jo’s dad, Greg (not their real names), took them on outings, such as fishing trips. Anne Dean, Franky’s mum, remembers respecting him. He had a military background and seemed nice. Perhaps a bit quiet, but she thought of him as “a normal dad”.

One night, Franky was having a sleepover at Jo’s house. Jo had offered Franky her bedroom and said that she would share her younger sister’s bunk bed. At some point during the night, Franky noticed the glare of a computer in the corner of her eye. Greg was in the room, sitting on a chair by the desk. She wasn’t alarmed and fell back to sleep.

But then, some time later, she felt something. Greg was touching her. He was still looking at his computer, but his left hand was under her loose shorts. Franky lay there, frozen. She didn’t know what sex was, but she knew that what was happening was wrong.

The next morning, everything appeared to be normal. Greg lived in a detached house on a private estate, so he had to drive Franky to the gate for her mum to pick her up. During the journey, neither of them acknowledged what had happened. In the car ride home with her mum, Franky didn’t bring it up. She felt ashamed. She wouldn’t talk about it to anyone for several years.

The first person Franky told about the assault was her first boyfriend, when she was in her teens. She’d begun getting flashbacks to that night at Greg’s house. “It’s almost like the memory came to me later in life,” she says now. Sometimes when her boyfriend would touch her, she’d feel uneasy. Or, when they were intimate with one another, she’d have a panic attack afterwards.

But even small things, like the sound of her own breathing, could trigger her. “It’s the silliest thing, because I’m breathing all the time,” she says. “I’m almost stuck in that position of constantly going over it, over and over again.”

The flashbacks had become vivid and all-consuming, but at the same time, they made Franky confused. She sometimes doubted whether the assault had happened at all. It felt like waking up after a nightmare. “You wake up and you’re thinking: was that real? Was that not real?”

One day, when Franky was still a teenager, she called an NHS helpline to try to get therapy. She says she was told that since a child sexual assault had taken place, she’d have to report the crime first. Franky felt trapped. She knew she needed help but she didn’t want to be responsible for her friend’s dad going to jail. “I loved her so much,” she says. “I didn’t want her to lose her dad.”

So she made a promise to herself. “I’m not going to tell my parents,” she decided. “Whatever happens, I’m not going to tell them.”

What Franky didn’t know was that her parents already knew.

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In 2014, Franky’s parents received a call from a detective constable. She asked if she could meet them at their house, and arrived soon afterwards. She told them that Greg had been arrested. A year earlier, three girls in a changing room had spotted him holding a small camera under the cubicle walls. Thames Valley police raided his home and seized his computers and laptops, which contained 13,000 indecent images of children. Some of the footage was of Franky. He had filmed her at his home: in the shower, using the toilet, and while he touched her vagina and lifted up her top, revealing her breasts.

Franky’s parents’ memory of that first meeting and what came after is blurry. Recently, they’ve begun trying to pin down exactly what happened and when. But one thing stands out in their minds. They remember the detective telling them that it looked as if Franky was asleep in some of the videos, and advised them that they shouldn’t discuss what had happened with her.

Franky’s dad, Andrew, describes himself as someone who is “fairly fussy about people”, but nothing about the police officer’s manner alarmed him. Andrew and Anne were horrified about what had happened to their daughter, but the detective was “personable” and had explained everything in a “reasonable way”. Her advice made sense to them. Franky’s behaviour hadn’t changed. She was still going to Jo’s house. “We just thought: well, what’s the point?” Anne says. “If she knows nothing about it, what good is it going to do to tell her that this has happened?”

Still, keeping it a secret was a challenge. They no longer wanted to let Franky go to Jo’s house; but they couldn’t explain why. Once, when Jo was at their house, Greg arrived to collect his daughter. Anne was horrified; she couldn’t believe it. She ran inside to get Andrew. “He’s here,” she said.

The man who had molested their daughter was metres away from them, outside their house, but the Deans felt they had to act breezy. “We didn’t want to make a fuss in front of the girls” or “stir anything up that might make Franky think anything about it,” Anne says. “We also didn’t know who knew what, because the police hadn’t told us.” Andrew pulled Greg aside and told him to leave. “I didn’t care what happened to him. It was so far down the priority list,” he says. “My overriding question was always about what’s best for Franky.”

On 2 September 2015, the detective emailed the Deans to inform them that the Crown Prosecution Service had authorised 22 charges against Greg. She said that since they strongly anticipated him pleading guilty (he had already fully admitted to the offences in interviews) there was no need to inform Franky about any of it.

The sentencing hearing took place in December. According to the local news account, Greg described his obsession as a “cancer” – a disease he wanted to defeat. On 22 December, he was sentenced to a three-year community order but no jail time – despite admitting to all 22 charges. The Deans couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to jail. But they kept quiet. It was the same problem all over again. “What do we do about it?” Anne says. “Because if we try to do something about it, we’ve got to involve Franky.”

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According to Suzanne Ost and Alisdair Gillespie, professors of law at Lancaster University, there is no explicit guidance in England and Wales on how police officers should deal with unknowing victims. “If you look at the Victims’ Code, for instance, there is nowhere in it that says: ‘victims have a right to know’,” Ost tells me.

In 2019, Ost and Gillespie published a paper in the International Review of Victimology, addressing what they believed to be a gap in victimology and criminology literature. They put forward a hypothetical situation: a law enforcement agent comes across abusive images of a toddler, who is now an adult. As far as the agent knows, the victim is not aware that the images exist, or that the abuse has taken place. “Now imagine that victim is you,” they ask the reader. “Would you want to be informed of the crimes and the existence of the images?”

When Ost and Gillespie consulted police officers about this conundrum, they tended to agree that unknowing victims deserved to be told. But without any official guidance to disclose such abuse, potentially life-changing decisions are left to interpretation. As technology develops, the prospect of being filmed, photographed or AI rendered without one’s consent becomes increasingly likely. But unknowing victims remain in a legal and ethical grey area, their fates determined by the discretion of individual police officers. “They need more guidance full stop,” Ost says. “This issue is not going to go away.”

Should unknowing victims always have a right to know, even if it will cause them trauma that could otherwise have been avoided? And what if a mistake has been made? What if – as with Franky – the unknowing victim, in fact, does know? Across the board, experts in child sexual abuse believe that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to these questions.

“It’s just such an ethical debate,” says Lawrence Jordan, director of services at Marie Collins Foundation, a charity that supports victims and survivors of technology-assisted child sexual abuse. “No one has been able to say with confidence – probably because it’s a case-by-case basis – that yes, a survivor should know or no, they shouldn’t.”

Donald Findlater, the former director of Lucy Faithfull Foundation, the preventive child sex abuse charity where Greg received therapy (according to local newspaper reports at the time), recalls a story he heard at a conference. A woman said that when she was a child someone had taken photographs of her through the windows of her family home without her knowledge. She only found out years later when police knocked on her parents’ door to tell them that someone had gone to prison for the crime.

The woman wished she hadn’t been told. The revelation made her anxious. How could she protect herself from future danger if she was unable to protect herself from this? “As a consequence of that knock on the door, she’s now living with this very spooked world of thinking: who’s watching me?” Findlater says.

What makes these decisions so challenging is that every survivor is unique; it’s impossible to predict the impact of disclosure until it happens. 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. They didn’t have a clear memory of the night, but they had a feeling that something bad had happened. “Unknowing was harder than not knowing, even though what I know is horrible,” one victim told the BBC.

What may seem like an obvious distinction – between knowing and unknowing – is, in fact, hazy. Waters says that survivors sometimes report sexual assault years afterwards, perhaps because they have only recently remembered it happening.

“Sexual violence can affect people’s mental health so deeply and so tragically that sometimes people will dissociate from their experience,” she says. “People will come to us, years later, and say, ‘I don’t know what it was that made me think this is what has happened to me.’”

Sam Tarling, a child investigative interviewing specialist, says she understands why police might not talk to unknowing victims of sexual assault when they are children, but adds, “There’s a massive difference between: ‘Let’s not tell them now’ and ‘Let’s never tell them.’” She also cautions against the rationale for non-disclosure being that someone looked as if they were sleeping. It’s not uncommon for children to pretend to be asleep during traumatic situations.

At its core, the concept of unknowing victimhood poses a deeper question: how certain can we ever be about what we know and what we don’t know? A wealth of research into pre-verbal trauma tells us that we are shaped by experiences before we can even articulate them. In 1995, a clinical professor of psychiatry at University of Colorado hospital, Theodore J Gaensbauer, published a case study about a young boy called Robert (not his real name), who, at the age of seven months, was physically and sexually abused by his birth father.

When he was adopted, Robert was “catatonic”. He was afraid of men, he didn’t want to be touched and he preferred to be left in a dark room, alone. As a child, he had behavioural problems and intense mood swings. Robert’s adoptive mother decided to take him to therapy. In one session, when Robert was eight, he said that he’d had a scary memory of his father hurting him. He flung himself to the floor, wailing hysterically, raising his bottom in the air. He shouted: “Stop! I hurt all over! My bottom is red!” and, “Don’t let him hurt me! Please don’t do that to me! I’m just a baby!”

Robert’s adoptive mother was disturbed and perplexed. She’d made a point not to talk about Robert’s birth father in front of him and he was too young to comprehend his assault when it took place. Yet it seemed the experience had stayed with him.

Tarling gives an example of a baby witnessing a violent fight between their parents, in which a knife is pulled and bottles of alcohol are everywhere. “You won’t be able to process all of that because you don’t have language for it. But what you might do, when you’re five, is have a complete meltdown when you see somebody get a bottle of beer out of the fridge,” she says. The child may not be able to explain why they are reacting so viscerally, but that “doesn’t mean you don’t remember, it means that you can’t articulate what you’ve experienced, because when you experienced it, you didn’t have words”.

Without disclosure, unknowing victims of sexual abuse risk being isolated in a lonely, liminal state of partial knowledge, deprived of victim compensation or adequate psychological support built from a full picture of their histories and mental health.

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About a year after Franky was assaulted, she and a group of girls were called into the deputy head’s office. It was a bright room, overlooking the front of the school. Franky remembers two police officers standing there, asking the girls if anything weird had happened at a friend’s party or sleepover. Franky recalls the girls looking round at each other, confused about what they were talking about. Months had passed since the assault and it wasn’t at the forefront of her mind. “It didn’t trigger anything,” she says. “Even though I knew what had happened to me, it never clicked.”

Years later, when Franky finally reported the assault to the police, they brought up this school meeting, as if to say: why didn’t you tell us then? “It felt very much like victim blaming,” Franky says. There’s a particular art to interviewing children who might have been subjected to sexual abuse. It’s called the ABE technique, which stands for achieving best evidence. It’s a balancing act between wanting to get all the necessary information, without asking leading questions. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always go to plan. “The biggest problem is the lack of planning,” says Tarling, who has observed police rush into schools, and, because they don’t want to ask leading questions, don’t give children a full understanding of why they are there.

Tarling believes that hiring specialist child investigative interviewers (as opposed to police alone) could improve the process – people who understand both the demands of navigating an adversarial court system and child psychology. “I have very strong views about the feminist discourse around this,” she says. “A lot of it is rooted in this belief that speaking to children must be easy, because women [typically] do it … they look after children and they stay at home.”

Philip Baines, a safeguarding and training consultant at the Marie Collins Foundation and former police detective on the Child Abuse Investigation Unit, covering Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, says he has also observed officers miss opportunities for disclosure. “It’s not necessarily that the child doesn’t know the answer, it’s just you haven’t asked the right question.”

In 2019, Franky was getting ready with her friend Kate (not her real name) for Henley Royal Regatta, an annual rowing race on the River Thames. “Did you ever know why the police had come to our school and talked to all of the girls?” Franky remembers Kate asking her. Franky said she didn’t.

Kate said that her mum had told her. “It was because Jo’s dad had filmed us all in the toilets.” Franky didn’t say anything, but her mind was whirling. It was the first time she’d had confirmation that the shadowy memory of that night was probably real.

Soon after, standing with her mum in the kitchen, Franky decided to float what Kate had told her. “Who told you that?” Franky remembers Anne saying. Franky told her that it was Kate. “I never let you stay over at his after that,” her mum responded. Franky felt devastated; “I remember thinking to myself: it was way too late.” Franky and her mum were facing each other, talking about Greg’s predatory behaviour, but at the same time, they were worlds apart, each barricaded by their lack of understanding of what the other knew.

“Both of us were obviously keeping face, almost hiding our own secrets,” Franky says. “She was feeling me out to see if I knew anything about my assault, and I was feeling her out.”

It would be years until they would address it again.

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The night before Franky filed a police report, she’d been to the cinema to watch a new documentary, To Kill a Tiger. The film follows the story of an Indian farmer seeking justice after his 13-year-old daughter was gang raped. Franky was moved. “If she has the confidence to do that where she is and at her age,” she remembers thinking, “I should be able to do the same.” She called the police the next day.

But months after filing the police report, Franky is still waiting for some form of closure. After the phone call with her parents, Franky’s dad sent her his email correspondence with the detective who first approached them, which went back to 2014. Franky scrolled through it, feeling nauseous. She started having a panic attack. “There was stuff that I didn’t know had happened.”

She didn’t know, for instance, that Greg had lifted up her top and filmed her breasts. Franky had recently started therapy at NYU, where she’d been diagnosed with PTSD. She found this new revelation particularly upsetting. “I’d look at myself in the mirror and be like, I’m disgusting,” she says. “It was the body part that I really loved and now it just feels so violated and horrible.”

Franky’s perceived unknowingness was brought up during Greg’s trial. “I’m told that these girls do not know what happened,” the judge is reported as saying, “but if they did, a great deal of harm would be caused.” To Eleanor Laws, a barrister specialising in criminal, sexual offences, and civil harassment cases, this indicates “that the judge has reduced his sentence because she thought that and was told that the victim was asleep”.

The starting point for a prison sentence for someone who has committed a child sexual assault of this kind is usually four years, and if Franky was found to have suffered severe psychological harm, the starting point would have been higher: at least six years. But without Franky having the opportunity to give a victim statement, the judge would not be able to gauge the full impact that the assault had on her life.

Last Christmas, Franky returned to the UK and recorded an interview with a police officer at her house. She sketched out the room where she was assaulted; recalled details such as Greg touching her with his left hand. “She was asking me questions that I’ve never even thought about before, but I had the answers to them, they were still in my head,” Franky says.

But after cross-referencing Franky’s statement with video evidence gathered at the time, police came back with a response that Franky found disheartening. Sitting alone in NYU’s journalism department, Franky spoke to a detective constable over Zoom. He told her that it was unlikely that the incident she remembered was different from the one Greg had already been charged for, meaning that the case could not be reopened.

Franky felt depleted. In the UK, the prosecution can appeal against a sentence if they consider it to be too lenient, but there is a short time frame in which this can be done: 28 days. After this, the defendant cannot be retried for the same charge, unless new evidence arises that may amount to a separate criminal offence.

“Everything that I had been working up to for the past 12 years was unsuccessful,” Franky says. Listening to the police officer’s words, she couldn’t stop crying. “This whole thing went on about me,” she says, “about my vagina, about my boobs. And I had no clue.”

“I’ve completely lost what I needed, which was to be in court, say my piece, say what he’s done to affect me,” she says. “This man has completely wrecked my mental health and I can’t even sit in front of a court and have what feels to me like my own fair trial.”

Today, Franky wonders what might have happened if the story had gone differently, if police hadn’t assumed she was asleep in the videos. She thinks that if she’d been given a chance to speak, the outcome of the trial and the trajectory of her life might have been different. “I just have to deal with the fact that I can never be part of my court case.”

Franky doesn’t blame her parents for what had happened; she thinks that “if I was in that position, I would have done the same”. But Anne and Andrew can’t help but reflect on the years that passed them by, the years they kept Franky’s assault a secret, consumed by guilt. Sometimes they wonder, knowing what they did at the time, if they should have done it any differently. “The answer’s no,” says Andrew. “Because we did it out of love.”