The whole Jeffrey Epstein saga reveals why it’s so hard for the world to eliminate sexual abuse.  Let’s consider the facts.  There are around 1000+ women who have complained about being abused by Jeffrey Epstein through his vast sex trafficking network.  Even though investigations have taken place for years and continue to take place, the only person to ever be convicted is a lone woman.  Let that sink in.  One woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, has paid the price for the abuses of thousands of men.  It’s almost as if the world has never moved on from the witch-hunting days.  We are still hunting witches and burning them at the stake.  In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, a woman was burned at the stake for the crimes of men, and the world wants us to move on and accept that this is justice.  There is a complete refusal to release the names of people implicated in these abuses.  Their privacy must be protected.  The most high-profile person to be exposed, Prince Andrew, was never arrested or prosecuted.  Epstein himself committed suicide before he could be tried for his crimes, thereby escaping accountability.  Therefore, in this vast network of sex trafficking and abuse, only one woman has been held accountable for her crimes.  One. Woman.  All the men, many of them powerful, who did the actual abusing, have not been held accountable up to today.  At every level of accountability, they are protected.  The media does not reveal their identity.  The police do not arrest them.  The justice system does not try them and convict them.  They still retain powerful positions in society.  There is zero accountability.

What is the real problem here?  Does society believe that it is okay for a woman to be sexually abused?  Do we see sexual abuse as a problem, or are we comfortable living in a world where sexual abuse is common?  Is sexual abuse just an unfortunate incident that is best forgotten?  Are we okay with the suffering of women?  It’s very telling that the only person to be punished in relation to Jeffrey Epstein was a woman.  Does it mean that women have a higher threshold of pain?  Do women even feel pain?  They seem to go through childbirth easily enough, whereas we all know that if it were men who had to give birth, we would have perished as a species.  So, it must mean that women don’t mind pain.  It must mean that women’s pain is not serious.  We all know that there are people out there who believe that black people don’t feel pain.  I guess the same goes for women.  They don’t feel pain.  That’s why we have 1000+ victims and not one man convicted.  I guess men wouldn’t survive in prison.  Men should not be expected to pay for their crimes.  They are too fragile, and also, they are just boys being boys.  Who would want to punish boys for being boys?  Especially white boys?  Their reputations!  Their careers!  Their prospects!  Their future! Their families!  Their children!  Quelle horreur, to subject a man to such pain.

Why does society have no problem sending one woman to prison for 20 years for the abuse of thousands of women, and not a single man?  Are powerful people too big to convict? Will society fall apart if powerful people start paying for their crimes?  I tend to think society will become better if we started exposing these powerful people and forcing them to pay for their crimes.  They should be locked away and the keys thrown away.  After all, the most powerful people commit the worst crimes.  Crimes that affect entire populations.  Crimes that impoverish entire populations.  Crimes that kill entire populations.  Crimes that cause entire populations to live without basic needs.  And these are the people we choose to protect?

We need to have a reckoning.  The kind of reckoning that is taking place in France, a country steeped in rape culture.  We need to have a Gisèle Pelicot-style reckoning, where tens, hundreds, thousands of men are held accountable for their crimes against women.  Men should be held accountable (arrested, tried, imprisoned – just in case it’s not clear what I mean by ‘held accountable’) for raping women in colleges, in slums, in homes, in the workplace.  For raping children.  For incest.  For sexual harassment.  For domestic violence.  Instead, we have a culture of protecting the perpetrators and punishing the victims or those who try to protect the victims.  Only a small minority of cases reported to the police are taken seriously.  Jeffrey Epstein abused girls for years, and even though they kept reporting to the police, nothing was done for years.  Only a small number of cases make it to trial, and only a small number of those are convicted.  At every turn, there is a concerted effort to protect the perpetrator, to excuse his actions, to minimise them, to hide them.  Victims are revictimized by a system that is optimised for allowing the perpetrator to get away with his crimes.  Victims are shamed, as if it were somehow their fault.  What we have done is we have allowed society to be shaped by the worst among us, rather than the best.  The standards of how we live and what we accept are set by the worst people.  We must change this.  We must let the most gentle among us, the most loving, the most tender, the kindest among us, set the standard for how we should live as human beings on this planet.