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.
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.
I don’t think you read the second half of my original comment
I did. Your solution is not acceptable. It is not theoretically possible to give informed consent not to be told, because you unconditionally have to have the details to be capable of making the decision.