Within the last week, the (partial) release of the Epstein Files (a large collection of documents, images and videos detailing the social circle of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who took his own life in 2019) and the sorts of people named in them have sent shockwaves around the UK and the world. It probably isn't necessary for me to mention the names of the politicians and celebrities mentioned in them, simply because it's been so heavily reported on that the biggest culprits seem pretty widely known without my help. I haven't personally got a great amount of information about the content of the Epstein Files aside from the snippets that are being shared around so it's not really my place to speculate too much on the individual detail until I'm more informed - but, I think we can agree that it's quite evident that substantial numbers of very powerful people, if not sex offenders themselves, were at least aware of and associated with people that are/were.
As usual with this kind of thing, I would argue that the shocking thing is not sexual offences committed on children (that should be shocking, but unfortunately it happens so often that it simply isn't). The shocking thing is the level of cover-up involved in this. I've always been fascinated by the Jimmy Savile scandal, and again, the thing about that that deserves talking about and remembering is not the horrific things that Savile did (which truly are horrific, but they're a matter for the unfortunate victims and survivors). It's the fact that huge numbers of people knew about it. During Savile's lifetime, many people tried to report his behaviour, and they were ignored, disbelieved and/or silenced. One testimony that has always stayed with me, ever since I first read it, is of a man who as a child was molested by Savile in his dressing room after a recording of Jim'll Fix It. The man recalled that during the ordeal, the door to the room opened as someone started to come in, and then hastily retreated again and closed the door. This to me is indicative of how much of an open secret his predatory behaviour was. If you walk into a room where an adult is abusing a child, there are three things that can happen: 1) You don't notice what the adult is doing and continue with what you're doing; 2) You notice what the adult is doing and immediately intervene; or 3) You notice and fail to intervene. This is the third one. Someone who didn't notice, or didn't know what a child alone with Savile in his dressing room meant, would not have immediately retreated - they'd have come right in and carried on with what they'd intended to do. Retreating means that you know what is happening, and you're taking the decision to let it carry on. To this day, not one single person has been convicted of anything in relation to the fact that Savile's child abuse was allowed to carry on.
I want to focus on something else here though. On a Facebook discussion post recently, I came across someone observing, 'Can you imagine how different this would have been if Jeffrey Epstein had been a Muslim?' It's quite clear what they meant. Much of the media and many right-wing politicians, most notably Nigel Farage, continually talk about Muslims as though they are likely to be child predators. Muslims tend to be othered as a threat to British society (whatever that is anyway, I'm never clear) and are frequently used as a political football in conversations about important things like war, refugees, climate change and child abuse. For that reason, instances of sexual assault and paedophilia tend to be discussed far more prominently by politicians and in the media on the occasions when the perpetrators happen to be Muslims than when they aren't.
So, it's understandable to think that if Jeffrey Epstein had been a Muslim, the kinds of politicians who make up Reform UK and the Conservative Party would be talking about this far more than they are, right?
Well... no. Not even slightly right. If Jeffrey Epstein had been a Muslim, certain regular people who subscribe to these schools of thought might be bleating about it a little more to justify their own racism, but I do not believe there'd be any difference in the kind of coverage this is getting from powerful people who have platforms at all.
To explain this, we need to look at race, racism and the purpose of racism (and, for that matter, of other forms of discrimination). Racism does not discriminate equally against everyone with a certain characteristic. That's not what it's for. It's not even about the characteristic itself, that's just a smokescreen. It exists to other people. More than that, it exists to pit ordinary people against each other and cause us to be distracted from the fact that we are all continually overlooked, used, gaslit and systematically having our lives destroyed by the most powerful 1% of people. The way to perpetuate abuse is to make sure that the abuse is not all received to the same extent for everyone. The world is a little bit easier to navigate if you're white. It's a little bit easier to navigate if you're male, and if you're heterosexual, and if you're cisgender, and if you're able-bodied. So if you're all of those things, you're laughing because the world is great for you, right? Wrong, because the operative bit here is 'a little bit'. It's not that much easier if you happen to be a straight, cisgender, white, able-bodied man in the UK, just slightly easier than it would be if you weren't those things. Which means that people who don't happen to be straight, cisgender, white, able-bodied men start to overestimate the amount more privilege these people have than they do. And then that feels a bit uncomfortable for those people, who can come back with, 'Well, my life's not really that much of a walk in the park myself, how dare you talk about white privilege?' And then different factions fight amongst each other over who has slightly more scraps. Meanwhile, the people who are actually doing the oppressing, the ones who are allowed to go on TV and talk about whichever talking point is more likely to get people so riled up in the first place, are allowed to get off scot-free. These people exist in an entirely different society to the other 98%.
At any given point, there's some kind of scapegoat for all of society's problems, and right now it tends to fluctuate between Muslims and transgender women (and, incidentally, Muslims and trans people are pitted against each other in this as well - I've heard political figures talk about Muslims and how lacking in understanding of LGBTQ+ communities they supposedly are, and then go and talk about how trans people are getting out of hand the very next week). At the moment, for whatever reason, these groups of people are an easy target. But there are also instances of people like that who aren't being attacked, because they're in that 1% of people who don't count. A good example is the ban from entering or re-entering the United States for nationals of a number of predominantly Muslim countries, which Donald Trump presided over during his previous term in office, supposedly in the name of preventing terrorist attacks. Most of the countries on the list had never been associated with terrorist attacks on US soil. But there was one predominantly Muslim country that is far more closely linked with terrorism than any of these countries and was conspicuously absent from the list, and that was Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia is a wealthy country, with some of the largest fossil fuel reserves in the world, and plenty of powerful oligarchs that Donald Trump and various other powerful individuals in the US and elsewhere have business interests with. These people aren't the scapegoats, even if they do happen to be Muslims. They exist in the echelons of society populated by Donald Trump, and Peter Mandelson, and Jeffrey Epstein, and all the rest of them.
So if Jeffrey Epstein had been a Muslim, or if he'd been a trans woman, or had any of the other characteristics that tend to make people become a scapegoat, it wouldn't have counted for him. He was One Of Them, and what constitutes One Of Them is far more about the amount of power and control someone has than about what physical, racial or sexual characteristics they have. It only counts for ordinary people on the ground, to make them turn against each other and forget to stand up against oppression in general.
I really hope that the release of the Epstein Files gives us a chance to finally stand up to some of the most powerful people in our society (and that doesn't just mean politicians and media pundits, it means celebrities too - celebrities very often cause just as much harm if not more, and anyone who doubts that should look no further than JK Rowling). I'm optimistic in the sense that I think this leak has caused us all to talk more about how much harm these kinds of powerful individuals inflict on society, which I think is a conversation we all need to have. But I also think we probably haven't seen anything yet. Not all the files have been released, and there seem to be such an enormous amount of people involved that I think the full knowledge of these things would cause us to have to completely dismantle and rebuild our society. And to an extent I think our society needs dismantling and rebuilding, and probably has done for a long time - but we also have to be aware of the number of things that can go wrong with that. To move forward, we need open dialogue and to listen to people's feelings of betrayal and confusion, and I hope that this blog can help with that.
I hope, so much, that this is the beginning of something.
