For 12 years, Franky Dean was haunted by a terrible secret, one so bad it triggered panic attacks, flashbacks and even suicidal thoughts.
This secret festered until last year, when she finally felt able to tell her parents that, aged just 12, she’d been abused by a friend’s father while she was at a sleepover.
‘I said I was sexually assaulted,’ recalls Franky. ‘I was expecting them to be shocked.’
What she wasn’t expecting were the next words that came out of her father’s mouth: ‘We know.’
Because, for a decade, her parents had been carrying their own burden. Two years after Franky had been abused, her friend’s father was arrested for covertly filming women and girls in his house, as well as public toilets and changing rooms.
Among the extensive material discovered when police seized his computer – which included 13,000 indecent images of children – was a recording of him assaulting Franky as she lay in bed.
But when the police contacted her parents during their investigation, because it appeared their little girl had been asleep and unaware of his sickening actions, they were advised not to tell her.
As loving parents, they followed this guidance, thinking it was best to spare their daughter unnecessary distress.
Except that she had been aware.
For Franky, now 25, confiding in her parents was a watershed moment, the culmination of years of turmoil; but also the start of a process that has, in many ways, compounded her trauma as she’s come to terms with both what happened to her – and what was hidden from her.
‘I was upset and confused. It had taken everything to keep it to myself for 12 years,’ Franky says now. ‘I’d spent half my life hiding it, only for the two closest people to me to have already known.’
Her parents – who Franky doesn’t blame – were also left reeling.
‘It came as a terrific shock when she told us she knew,’ Anne, 64, says. Andrew, 67, adds: ‘Our sole thought was to protect Francesca. It turned out to be the wrong thing to do.’
Franky’s experience, and the issues it raises, calls into question the rights of ‘unknowing victims’ of sexual assault. They include those who have been filmed without consent, assaulted in their sleep or assaulted while drugged.
Perhaps the most high-profile of these types of cases is that of Frenchwoman Gisele Pelicot, 72, whose former husband Dominique is currently on trial for drugging Gisele so that he and at least 51 strangers could sexually assault her while she was unconscious. Her husband also videoed the assaults.
During the trial, which is expected to conclude next month, Gisele said of finally learning about her husband’s despicable actions: ‘My world fell apart. For me, everything was falling apart. Everything I had built up over 50 years.’
But while Gisele’s experience is extreme – and, thankfully, rare – as the use of tech has increased in recent years so have the number of unknowing victims of sex crimes.
As a result, the Sexual Offences Act has been expanded to include crimes like upskirting, where photographs or videos are taken underneath a person’s clothing without their permission.
So is it ever in a victim’s best interests to have the crime kept from them? Should it be considered a lesser crime if they’re not aware? And how can anyone be sure the victim doesn’t know what happened?
For Franky, a documentary maker, it’s the desire to get answers to these questions that has motivated her to bravely waive her anonymity and highlight the plight of those in her situation. As she says: ‘I’m reclaiming what happened to me to help other survivors.’
Until the assault, she describes a happy childhood with her parents and older sister. Growing up in Reading, Berkshire, she enjoyed horse-riding, sunshine holidays and ski trips to France.
Aged 11 she became a boarder at a private school where she met Jo, and in turn Jo’s father Greg. (In order to protect the identity of the girl she was once so close to, Franky has asked that we do not use Greg and Jo’s real names.)
The two became friends and Franky enjoyed several visits to Jo’s house in the school holidays, so she trusted Greg, who worked in the military. ‘He was always nice to me,’ recalls Franky.
But things took a sinister turn during a sleepover in November 2011.
Jo slept in her sister’s room so 12-year-old Franky could spend the night in her single bedroom, which also doubled as Greg’s office.
The head of the bed was next to a desk with his computer on it and Franky recalls waking up ‘and him being sat there. I thought he was doing some work.’
Unconcerned, she fell back to sleep but her next memory is of Greg, having pushed aside her pyjama bottoms, and touching her intimately. ‘He was staring at the computer, almost as if he wasn’t concentrating,’ says Franky, who was half-asleep and unaware she was being recorded.
‘I froze. None of it made sense.’
The next morning, her recollections were ‘so blurry I wasn’t sure if it had happened or not’. Greg certainly made no mention of the assault and Franky didn’t tell anyone.
‘I didn’t know what had happened was wrong. I had no understanding of what happened to me because I didn’t understand sex,’ she recalls.
Almost two years later in July 2013, Greg was arrested after three women in a family changing room at a leisure centre noticed a hand holding a camera under the cubicle walls and reported him to management.
Around this time Franky – unaware of the arrest – remembers being called into her headmistress’s office along with other girls in her year and questioned by police.
‘They asked if anything had happened on any sleepovers recently, but I didn’t link it with what had happened to me,’ she says, adding that Greg’s name was not mentioned, nor, to the best of her memory, was any suggestion of sexual assault.
But in the spring of 2014, her parents Andrew and Anne were visited by a female officer and informed that their daughter was one of Greg’s victims. Franky had been pictured in the shower and on the toilet, she said, and there was a video of Greg touching her vagina and breasts on the night of the sleepover.
‘We were angry and horrified,’ says Andrew, a retired IT business owner.
Anne recalls feeling ‘sick at the thought of what he’d done to my little girl. As a mother I think you feel physical pain when you realise someone has hurt your child.’
Both Anne and Andrew say the officer was ‘absolutely certain’ Franky didn’t know what had happened to her, and their daughter’s behaviour – she was her usual bubbly self – also gave them no cause to think otherwise.
There is no official guidance for police on whether they should tell unknowing victims about the crimes committed against them, and Andrew feels no anger towards the police officer. ‘We believe she was doing what she thought was in Francesca’s best interests,’ he says. ‘We were told it shouldn’t make any difference to the outcome of the case.’
So they decided not to tell Franky.
Though they now have regrets about how it was handled, both say they’d do the same again.
‘Clearly this is a massive trauma for Franky,’ says Anne, a retired businesswoman. ‘We now know we made the wrong decision, so obviously we feel sad and sorry about that. But at the time we couldn’t see how she would benefit from us telling her, and I’m not sure how I would have done it differently.’
In order not to raise Franky’s suspicions, and because Franky liked Jo so much, Anne and Andrew let her continue the friendship, but engineered ways to ensure she didn’t visit Jo’s house.
In December 2015, Greg – whose thousands of indecent images included pictures of Franky and other school friends – pleaded guilty to 22 separate charges including sexual assault, voyeurism and outraging public decency. He was discharged from the Army when his offences came to light but had the continued support of his wife.
Custodial sentences for child sexual assault range from four to six years, and Andrew and Anne were expecting ‘an automatic prison sentence’. Instead, on sentencing him to a desultory three-year community order at Reading Crown Court, Judge Johannah Cutts seemed to suggest his victims’ ignorance was a mitigating factor: ‘I’m told that these girls do not know what happened. But if they did a great deal of harm would be caused.’
Understandably, Anne and Andrew were furious at the leniency of the sentence – and the fact police had told them Franky’s ‘being asleep’ would not affect Greg’s punishment. ‘We felt let down,’ Andrew says. ‘The court gave him a slap on the wrist.’
Anne recalls a ‘dilemma’ at that point. Pressing for an appeal ‘would have meant bringing Francesca into the picture, and we didn’t believe she knew.
‘We’re more angry now because maybe we could have done something about it.’
In fact, it was around this time that Franky’s flashbacks started. She’d got her first boyfriend and becoming sexually active triggered memories of the assault. Yet this made her more determined to keep it a secret.
‘I didn’t want my friend to lose her dad; for what had happened to me to ruin her life,’ says Franky, unaware that Greg, still living at home as normal after escaping a prison sentence, had been unmasked as an abuser. She also ‘vowed’ not to tell her parents ‘because I didn’t want them to blame themselves that they’d sent me to his house’.
Nonetheless, she recalls lashing out at them as she started to process the abuse. ‘We put it down to her being a teenager,’ says Andrew.
The couple didn’t talk about Greg’s conviction with parents of other girls in Franky’s friendship group who had been filmed. Nor did they discuss it between themselves much, with Anne admitting: ‘We probably shut it out of our minds a bit.’
Meanwhile, Franky’s mental health deteriorated.
‘I couldn’t sleep without noise, or have silence, ever, because as soon as there was silence, I got flashbacks,’ she says.
When she was 18 and at university, her GP put her on antidepressants. She did tell an NHS helpline she’d been assaulted and requested counselling, but was informed – wrongly – that having therapy would require the NHS to report the abuse to police, ‘so that put me off’.
She continued to be friends with Jo until she was 19, when Franky saw Greg’s face as Jo FaceTimed her father while they holidayed together. ‘That was my breaking point. I thought: ‘I can’t be friends with her any more. I can’t have the reminder of him.’ ‘ After that, their friendship ‘fizzled out’.
The same year, a conversation with another school friend about the mysterious police visit to school clarified things further when the friend admitted she’d been told by her mother that it was ‘because Greg had filmed us all in the bathroom’. The impact of that revelation on Franky was profound. In the following weeks she had a ‘full-on breakdown’.
‘It felt as if I were outside my own body. I couldn’t control anything that happened to me. I broke up with my boyfriend. I lost all my friends.’ Her suicidal thoughts also started.
On a visit home, she asked her mum if she had been aware of Greg’s filming. Anne – believing this was all her daughter knew – replied that she had, adding: ‘I never let you stay over at his after that.’
Franky explains: ‘It fuelled my determination not to say anything. My parents would be upset that they thought they had protected me but hadn’t.’
Anne, meanwhile, recalls being ‘cautious not to say too much’ lest her daughter suspect worse.
As far as she was concerned, the topic was laid to rest until Franky arrived in New York for her Masters in Journalism last year and found a helpful therapist.
She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, prescribed stronger antidepressants and was feeling more resilient when she watched the documentary film To Kill A Tiger, about a 13-year-old Indian girl who reports men who gang-raped her. Franky sat in the cinema and sobbed. ‘I thought: ‘Why have I not come forward myself?’ ‘
She filed a police report online that day and FaceTimed her parents the day after – when the truth was finally revealed. ‘My initial reaction was to be upset with everyone knowing and no one telling me,’ admits Franky. ‘But I quickly understood they did what they thought was the best thing for me. Now I put that blame on the police.’
Andrew showed Franky his chain of email correspondence with the police from 2014, which outlined the extent of the abuse to her for the first time.
‘I didn’t know about him touching my breasts, which he’d filmed as well,’ she says. ‘I broke down.’
She was – is – enraged by the leniency of Greg’s sentence.
‘This man has put me through something to the point I didn’t think I wanted to be alive any more and he didn’t spend any time in jail. How is that acceptable?’
When Franky came home last Christmas, she was interviewed by police to assess whether the assault she remembered was the same assault cited in court – and whether Greg could be re-tried because Franky had been awake.
Reliving her ordeal in detail was traumatic. ‘I had to remember everything, like the room layout and the hand he used, that I’d never thought about. But I could remember so clearly when they asked: it reactivated everything.’
Police reminded her of their visit to her school when she was 13, and the fact she hadn’t mentioned the assault then.
‘They were saying they did their due diligence, but it felt like victim-blaming,’ she says.
After two months, police concluded the assault was the same one Greg had been convicted for, so he couldn’t be tried again.
Not only that, they told Franky that the Crown Prosecution Service had decided Greg would be given an even lighter sentence if he was tried in the knowledge Franky were awake – shockingly suggesting that she’d have been more in control.
‘It was so illogical. Surely the knock-on effect of being awake and knowing what is happening is more dire,’ says Franky.
The case was closed and Franky’s opportunity to give a victim impact statement denied.
‘Everything I’d worked up to for 12 years had collapsed. I was crushed. All I wanted was justice. I couldn’t even be part of my own case.’
Greg, who now owns a construction business, is ‘living his life as if nothing has happened’, while her flashbacks continue.
She at least has the support of her parents. ‘They’ve been so understanding,’ she says. ‘I think it has been going back and forth in their heads.
‘They said ‘sorry’ to me and I understand why they said it, but I reassured them that I don’t think what they did was wrong.’
Whether victims – adults or children – in situations like hers should be told of assaults they don’t remember should be decided on a case-by-case basis, she believes.
‘Yes, finding out could ruin your life, but your body remembers things even if you weren’t present in your mind, which could be affecting you without you realising.’
For all the trauma, one thing is clear – the secret is better shared.
As her father says: ‘We are very proud of Francesca and her desire to bring this injustice to light.’
