Jeffrey Epstein got away for years with raping underage girls, and the public is properly outraged that powerful people seemed to shrug and let him off easy.
But the problem isn’t one tycoon but many tens of thousands of men who pay for sex with underage girls across the country. And society as a whole reacts with the same indifference that authorities showed in the Epstein scandal.
“We see it as this singular narrative about this one guy,” said Rachel Lloyd, who wrote a superb book, “Girls Like Us,” about her own experience being sexually trafficked as a teenager. “There’s a much larger narrative out there about girls, often girls of color, who are commercially sexually exploited, often with impunity.
“It’s part of the same behavior, part of what we allow as a society,” Lloyd added. “He got away with it because society said he could, and that’s what other johns think as well.”
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“What was so painful about the Jeffrey Epstein case is that it wasn’t shocking,” Lisa Goldblatt Grace, co-founder of My Life My Choice, told me. “A wealthy white man leveraged his money, privilege and power to sexually abuse, to rape, young girls.”
Or, as Yiota Souras of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children put it: “Epstein is the tip of a very large iceberg.” – READ MORE