You and I called for the release of all files and related materials that law enforcement investigations uncovered concerning the Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell criminal network. We contacted our Representatives and Senators, the White House, journalists, and the DOJ. You and I want the network’s clients, rapists, pedophiles, abusers, and criminals held accountable – not simply via social media smear campaigns nor merely in the court of public reputation – but in courts of law. We want to see all the men and women who participated in the criminal activities brought to justice.
However, too much public attention in news agencies, social media, and Congress focused on the adults, the perpetrators, all those who partook in activities with Epstein and Maxwell. We need to bring the criminals to justice. But just as necessary and desirable, we need to understand the victims and the reasons that criminal networks like this one can happen, thrive, and prove ‘Too Big to Punish and Destroy.’
Following the 2008-2009 financial crash, the DOJ under President Obama decided not to bring political and industry leaders to justice. The banks, mortgage lenders and holders, Wall Street speculators, and Congressional Oversight under the previous administration, deemed ‘Too Big to Fail or Punish’ went about their businesses without a pause. While millions of America’s workers and small investors suffered severe losses, the wealthy and powerful walked away from accountability, their wealth and privilege intact. When a young man of seventeen drove his car while drunk and speeding into another car, killing an elderly occupant, police arrested him shortly thereafter, he plead guilty in court and served seven years in prison. This was justice. But months later, the same Colorado Springs court system gave a time-served sentence to a local wealthy, middle-aged man who also killed someone when he drove drunk into another vehicle. The judge said that the man “is too important in this community to serve time in prison with criminals.”
Writers and journalists could devote their lives revealing the two-tiered justice system in the U.S.A. The incidents and court cases are numerous. However, writers and journalists should do far more than expose the privileges that our nation’s powerful and wealthy people enjoy. They MUST expand their investigations and expose these matters: Why some people are invisible in progressive societies; Who benefits most when some people are outside and unseen; Who are most vulnerable to exploitation and unfair, unjust treatment; Why normal, traditional protections for the vulnerable fail; How those who are weak or defenseless are exploited, abused, wronged, enslaved, cheated, and made to suffer to advance the privilege of the few; When susceptibility to exploitation is most likely to happen, least likely for other to notice.
I will focus on the girls and young women who Epstein and Maxwell (and, Trump, according to his own words and emails in published files) exploited, raped, enslaved, abused, and harmed forever.
Adolescents, teenagers, and young adults are vulnerable to exploitation and criminal attacks because their experiences are few and their knowledge is inadequate. Their curiosities have expanded beyond the protections their parents and guardians put into place; they willingly and impulsively push those boundaries. When babies shove objects into their mouths, they are exploring. Their guardians watch closely and remove objects that have the potential to harm the babies. Beyond the age of ten, children explore places, people, and behaviors. They are receptive to suggestions, visual images, groupthink, praise from adults they admire, exaggeration, excitement. Ideas and academic research are boring. They seek stimulation.
For all their love and concern and firsthand experiences, the adults who watch over young people are ill-equipped to protect them. They must certainly try in every way possible to protect their young charges, but the task is huge and complicated. Adults must balance their responses to bad behaviors, giving positive attention that at least equals the negative. They must include deeper explanations for their responses and the boundaries they set…explanations beyond “because I told you so.” They must describe realities of which young people have skewed knowledge – what they see on television, in video games, and on social media is misleading and prejudiced. Wealthy adults control those images and target young people. A parent’s word against those appealing images comes across as bigoted and unfair.
Although many young people have guardians who care enough to set and hold boundaries, to speak honestly, to avoid condescending and superior confrontations, to provide healthy experiences and dedicated support, many other young people do not. Other concerns waylay the best parental intentions…work, illness, aging parents, finances, relationships, stresses. Stay-at-home parents, traditional, or those in religions or cults that promote extreme parenting strategies and no better at protecting teenagers from harm that the most pre-occupied, mediocre parents. Young people from eleven to twenty-five are impulsive, vulnerable, inexperienced, immature, and self-centered. Adults from parents to schoolteachers and community leaders are responsible for all these young people, for everyone’s child.
We adults must be diligent, knowledgeable, unselfish, and thoughtful. We must hold all other adults accountable for their negative contact with our children, whatever form that takes. This is a fight for the next generation and society. More important, this is a fight for all the young individuals whose happiness, stability, safety, health, and ability to thrive relies on us.
Young people are invisible in a progressive society until they are criminals, until they announce their independence, until they step across their guardians’ boundaries. Places like resorts (Mar-A-Lago being one) where wealthy single and married adults seek revelry should never hire teenagers or young people below twenty-one years of age. Local officials should shut down places like Zorro Ranch in New Mexico where young people gathered with adults to party. Beauty contests and modeling agencies should be heavily regulated. Where child exploitation has the potential to exist, adults who want to exploit children for monetary gain and sexual predators come to take advantage. American society, mainly because capitalist ideas dominate policies, also because it unreasonably promotes conservative religious beliefs, remains a society where children are not safe. The exploiters are the protected class, especially if the exploiters are ‘Too Important to Imprison.’
Our children and young adults are not safe to explore their curiosities outside their homes until we regulate the businesses, networks, schools, churches, and organizations for practices and activities that exploit them. The potential for harm to our children and young people is less when we regulate these organizations and prosecute all who do harm. Sexual predators thrive where their freedoms are unrestrained. Pedophiles thrive where adults keep their activities secret.
Policies that protect our children and young people should be top priority. The Department of Education’s “History Rocks!” tour is an absolute, unmitigated farce. Despite hoping to rewrite history in favor of wealthy, capitalist white people, the message is clear: This Trump administration and the Republican party will never hold accountable those who committed genocide among the indigenous tribes; those who disappear indigenous girls and women today; those want to fund private education with public dollars and thereby deny a good free education to all who the private schools exclude; those who hire children to work in unsafe conditions and where sexual predators find the children in vulnerable situations; those who coverup the crimes that wealthy, powerful adults commit against children.
I hope to see in the coming weeks and months that powerful men and women who participated in the Epstein-Maxwell sex trafficking network, financed the network, covered up the crimes committed, protected the perpetrators, exploited the children and young people, and suppressed the files brought to Justice. More important, I hope to see journalists, investigators, psychologists, women, writers, and politicians reveal the full scope of the network’s crimes and urge government policies that protect children.