My daughter was abused at a sleepover – this is my biggest regret

Anne Dean’s daughter Francesca was 12 years old when police turned up at the family home, telling her and husband Andrew that Francesca had been sexually assaulted at a sleepover. The couple were left with an agonising decision over whether to tell their daughter. Here, Anne describes what happened next. Francesca was a very happy little girl, and a very young 12. She went to a boarding school about four miles away from our home, where she was in the same house as her older sister. She was very sociable, we always had friends coming around, and she was always going to somebody else’s. One girl she was friends with was from what seemed like a nice family. The father was military, and both Andrew and I had a lot of respect for him. He seemed a dedicated father and did lots of activities with them, such as tie-dye or taking them fishing, and Francesca enjoyed visiting. The only thing that surprised me was that the house was quite messy, not like other Forces houses I’ve seen. But there was nothing that made me ever think there was anything to be worried about. Shorts One evening, a female police officer turned up at our house. Andrew and I took her into the sitting room, and sat on the sofa opposite her. Francesca was away at boarding school. This father had been arrested because he’d been caught filming three young girls in a family changing area. The police had found 13,000 indecent images and videos of children on his computer, including one of him abusing Francesca. The police did not show us the video, but described that she was in a bunk bed, and was in her pyjamas, and he had lifted them and touched her. They said she barely moved and clearly had her eyes closed. I sat there like an idiot. I could not believe what was being said. I even asked: “Our Francesca? You’re talking about our daughter?” The officer said police were absolutely certain that Francesca was asleep, and that this man was being prosecuted. She asked us what we wanted to do. Francesca had never said anything about this incident, which had happened more than a year before. We had not experienced any upset from her, and she had continued going to play at that house. We were secure in the knowledge that she didn’t know, so we said: “Well, if she doesn’t know, is there any advantage to telling her?” and agreed not to tell our daughter. Of course, we immediately stopped her going over there, giving different excuses as to why. But their daughter would still come to us – even while the father was awaiting trial. One day during that period, I was in the garden with Francesca and her friend when the dad turned up. I was so angry and upset. He got out of the car and spoke to me as if everything was normal. I went to distract the children while Andrew told him he had to go. We rang the police and told them, and they stopped the father going to the school or having any contact with us. The police told us the court date but we decided not to go. I don’t think we really wanted to hear all the rest of it, and assumed he was going to be punished. In court. he pleaded guilty to all 22 charges of voyeurism, sexual assault and outraging public decency. He was sentenced to a three-year community order, banned from any unsupervised contact with girls under 18, and required to undergo intensive therapy. He was placed on the Sex Offenders Register for five years. I still have so many questions: why had he not been sent to prison, when he was a paedophile? Why was he not on the register for life? We were told we had the option to appeal against the sentence, but it would involve Francesca giving an account of what happened. She was our only concern, so while we were cross that he had received this stupidly light sentence we weren’t about to rock the boat – if we continued, he would be punished, but then she would know about it. So we maintained our decision – we would not tell her. I was always cautious about what Francesca said, looking for signs that there was anything that indicated she knew. But she never said anything, and Andrew and I buried it – it was gone, it was over, it was finished. Around the age of 16, Francesca changed. She became disrespectful, badly behaved, surly and argumentative, like so many teenagers at that age. We even went to family counselling about what can only be described as tantrums. It never occurred to us that it had anything to do with what had happened four years before. Then, when Francesca was 19, she said she had seen an old friend who had told her about this chap and what he’d been convicted for. Francesca asked: “Did you know about this?” and I deflected it, saying: “Oh yes, I do recall that, I don’t think there was anything odd about it.” I just wanted to get her to move on and talk about something else, so it could all go away. I didn’t realise she had an agenda, to bring it up to see how I would react. In 2022, Francesca was studying in New York when she FaceTimed Andrew and me. She was really upset, and crying, saying: “There’s something I need to talk to you about.” When she said, “I’ve been abused,” I thought she meant it had happened recently, in New York. That’s how far down I had pushed down what happened. But when she told us it happened when she was 12, I suddenly realised we had done the wrong thing. She knew. We learned that Francesca had been suffering with flashbacks since her teens – and that’s what had set the bad behaviour off. She wasn’t sure what had happened, didn’t want to bother us, and worried about what would happen to her friend. It’s typical Francesca – she really worries about other people and will think more of how things will affect them than how it will affect her. In New York, she had watched a film that had brought her memories back. When she told us, Andrew and I went quiet and just looked at each other. We told her everything. It gives me goosebumps to think about it. It was devastating to realise that while I thought that I was doing the right thing and protecting her, actually I was not. I wasn’t protecting her at all. Francesca went back to the police to see if there was anything they could do to reopen the case, but they said new evidence would be needed, and the fact that she had, in fact, been awake when the abuse occurred would not make a difference. If we had talked to Francesca at the time, perhaps this man could have been punished properly. But we were not given any guidance. Looking back it sounds so naive, but we had just taken the police’s word for it. I don’t blame the officers – they were doing their job within the framework. What is wrong is the framework. We needed someone to immediately help us understand what had happened – therapists, psychologists – but support was never offered to us. Francesca has been quite remarkable. She’d have had every right to have been really cross with us, to have blamed us. But she has always said she understands why we did what we did, and that we were doing what we thought was right, which I think is incredibly generous. Luckily, we’re closer than we’ve ever been. Last year, I went to go and see a talk by Gisèle Pelicot – the French woman who was drugged and raped by her husband and dozens of men while she was sleeping, and bravely waived her right to anonymity. It brought out the horror of what people can do. But I think the fact that Gisèle has stood up and been counted has been a huge relief for an awful lot of other people. And that’s why I’m so supportive of Francesca doing her work to raise awareness of what happened to her, because I think it enables other people to have the strength to say something. What concerns us is that we do not believe the framework has changed in the last 15 years. If the same thing happened today, I don’t believe it would be handled any differently. I believe there is a lot more that can be done to support both victims of abuse and their families, and it’s something that needs addressing urgently.