The problem is far bigger than Jeffrey Epstein

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/03/jeffrey-epstein-violence-women

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Treating the scandal as an aberration misunderstands the global epidemic of violence against women

On 2 July, the jury delivered a guilty verdict on some of the charges against the music mogul Sean Combs, accused of horrific sexual abuse of women with the help of his extensive staff and deep pockets. He’s also accused in many civil suits of sexual abuse of adults and minors. It seems like everyone promptly forgot about Combs when the facts about the financier Jeffrey Epstein’s decades of horrific sexual abuse of at least a 100 girls and women, with the help of his extensive staff, deep pockets, banks, and elite connections became the next front-page ruckus.

In June, the movie producer Harvey Weinstein was found guilty in a New York retrial for some of his decades of horrific sexual abuse of women, with the help of his extensive staff, top lawyers, the film industry, some ex-Mossad agents and of course his deep pockets. In February a federal appeals court upheld the convictions and 30-year prison sentence of the singer R Kelly for racketeering and sex trafficking; last year his other 20-year sentence was also upheld, for producing child abuse images and enticement of children for sex. Of course his deep pockets and extensive assistance had also been factors in how he too was able to abuse girls for so long.

One of the reasons the epidemic of violence against women is so unacknowledged is because cases like these are talked about individually, and often treated as though they are shocking aberrations rather than part of a pervasive pattern that operates at all levels of society. Another is that it is in the most literal sense not news – there are tides of hatred and violence against other groups that ebb and flow, but violence against women is global and enduring, a constant rather than an event. Another is that law enforcement and the legal system have often been more interested in protecting perpetrators and society has often normalized and even celebrated violence against women.

Imagine that we had no word for cancer and no recognition of the varieties of ways it manifests, so that we just had occasional lurid news stories about strange and sometimes fatal growths in various parts of various people, not connecting the versions in brains to the versions in prostates and breasts. If we didn’t recognize the common denominators, we couldn’t develop diagnoses and treatments or address root causes. Feminism has in fact offered a diagnosis, steadily, for decades and centuries: that the cause is misogyny and the violence is intended to perpetrate the inequality, exploitation and subordination of women. But the one-case stories avoid this recognition by treating something ubiquitous as exceptional and isolated.

The only thing exceptional about Epstein’s crimes was their scale and maybe the complexity of the international financial, transportation and other systems he used to traffic, control, abuse and silence victims. The nature of the crimes was ordinary and common. In the US, there’s a rape every 68 seconds, a woman is beaten by an intimate partner every nine seconds, and while more men are murdered annually than women, “over half of female homicide victims are killed by a current or former male intimate partner”, according to the CDC. Globally a woman or girl is murdered by her partner or family member every 10 minutes. A high percentage of human trafficking worldwide is of women and girls for sexual exploitation.

Instead of focusing on high-profile cases in my opening paragraphs, I could have found examples from the hundreds of cases of sexual abuse of women, girls and boys by ministers of the Southern Baptist church. NPR reported in 2022 that, “the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee mishandled allegations of sex abuse, stonewalled numerous survivors and prioritized protecting the SBC from liability”. Or the grotesqueries of Andrew Cuomo’s alleged sexual harassment and groping while he was governor of New York, followed by his persecution of those who spoke up. I could have brought up that both US and Canadian residential schools for Indigenous children are being exposed as former students who were sexually abused in them find the space to speak out.

The pretense that we will find out whether or not Donald Trump is a sexual predator if the Epstein files are released is itself a kind of cover-up, since we already know he is – though I’m all for finding out exactly what it is he’s so frantic to hide. He was found liable for sexually assaulting E Jean Carroll in a 2023 civil trial and has been credibly accused of groping, grabbing, and assault by numerous women. His worse-than-creepy behavior around the teenage girls in beauty pageants he managed is well-documented, as is his closeness to Epstein.

Now, like all the men mentioned in the first paragraphs of this essay, Trump has a protection machine at work – one without precedent. Our own federal government, funded by our taxes, is apparently striving to protect Trump from whatever’s in those files. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, has adjourned Congress to protect Trump from Democratic measures meant to force Republicans to vote on releasing the Epstein files. Many high-level officials are serving not We the People, but Trump the Frantic.

As the Hill reports, Senator Dick Durbin of the judiciary committee “says he has received information that Attorney General Pam Bondi ‘pressured’ about 1,000 FBI personnel to comb through tens of thousands of pages of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and flag any mention of President Trump”. A thousand workers pulled off their official jobs – this extraordinary effort only makes Trump look like he has a lot to hide.

But in another sense the whole society is hiding something: that this violence is everywhere and it deeply shapes – or misshapes – our society. The statistics I cited above address the victims of specific crimes. But all girls and women are impacted by the reality that so many men want to harm us and these crimes could happen to any one of us. This violence affects the choices we make about where to go and when, what jobs to take, when to speak up, what to wear. The threat of violence and actual violence by some men against some women and girls establishes female vulnerability and fear and disempowerment far more broadly. Society has largely required us to alter our lives to avoid this, rather than society being altered to make us free and equal. This violence is an engine of inequality that benefits all men, insofar as being “more equal than others” in this respect is a benefit.

The piecemeal stories – “here is this one bad man we need to do something about” – don’t address the reality that the problem is systemic and the solution isn’t police and prison. It’s social change, and societies will have changed enough when violence against women ceases to be a pandemic that stretches across continents and centuries. Systemic problems require systemic responses, and while I’m all for releasing the Epstein files, I want a broader conversation and deeper change.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of No Straight Road Takes You There and Orwell’s Roses