Rhidian Brook

Good Morning,

In the rushed attempt to reckon with the Epstein files and what they mean, it’s become hard to hear from and easy to forget the women who were actually the victims of his crimes.

But if we are serious about understanding the forces that lie behind a network in which women and girls were trafficked for sex, we’d surely do well to start with the witness of their victims.

Whenever these women have spoken, it is striking how eloquent they are, not just about what has happened to them, but also about the huge challenge of bringing the perpetrators of these crimes to justice.

Many of them point to the heroism of Virginia Giuffre who, against massive intimidation and, according to other survivors, the cost of her life, helped to start the process that brought these crimes to light.

In her memoir - Nobody’s Girl – she wrote, ‘I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected, victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else.’

I read her book whilst researching a story for an opera about modern slavery. As part of my research, I interviewed a woman who had been trafficked for sex alongside the policewoman who had rescued her from the trafficking gang.

‘Not once in 30 years of law enforcement,’ the policewoman said, ‘did I meet a pimp or sex trafficker who expressed remorse. They see women as product in a business transaction.’

Her words chimed with Giuffre’s insight that we live in a culture that ‘tells girls their primary worth is to appeal to men,’ mere objects to discard once used. Their humanity redacted. This thinking infects the Epstein files where women and girls, some reportedly as young as nine, are offered as though they were meat on a menu. They do this without shame and an entitled belief that the rules don’t apply to them. The Psalmist describes this: ‘In their own eyes they flatter themselves too much to detect their sin. Even on their beds they plot evil; commit themselves to a sinful course and do not reject what is wrong.’

Virginia Giuffre wanted to live in a world where victims were treated with compassion; not compassion as sympathy, but as a radical form of criticism, that says, ‘this hurt is to be taken seriously; it’s not normal; and we have to act.’ In his ministry Jesus sided and stood with the abused and the used. His compassion for the victim was an implicit critique of the system, forces and ideologies that produces victims.

At his execution, he entered into that hurt and even came to embody it. On the cross his silence is eloquence. He redacts himself and becomes the Victim God; a witness to, and reckoning with, corrupt and controlling power.

One common theme is the total lack of remorse and sense of entitlement.