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.
Orbituary@lemmy.world wrote:
I’m not certain of what they meant, because I haven’t met them and can’t read minds. Obviously, I’m being charitable with my assumptions about details that are both unknowable and irrelevant to my point.
You sound just like an aggressive cop’s catchphrase: “Stop resisting.”
Maybe you should stop willfully misinterpreting people’s words and slinging accusations.
Then don’t assume they meant well.
They…literally prefaced it with “I assume” to express that they were making an assumption. They didn’t state they knew the cops’ intention. Like, the whole nuance is “I don’t know, but I’d like to believe they meant well”. Meanwhile a little girl was raped and you’re going off on a random ass irrelevant nitpick ass tangent. Like just stfu.