By: Dianne Post
A host of UN Special Rapporteurs said “The so-called ‘Epstein Files’ contain disturbing and credible evidence of systematic and large-scale sexual abuse, trafficking and exploitation of women and girls, UN experts said today.” (16 February 2026) “According to the experts, these acts could amount to sexual slavery, reproductive violence, enforced disappearance, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, and femicide…. “These crimes were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption, extreme misogyny, and the commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls from different parts of the world,” the experts said…. “The ‘Epstein Files’, which are suggestive of the existence of a global criminal enterprise, have shocked the conscience of humanity and raised terrifying implications of the level of impunity for such crimes.”… “So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity,” they said.”
They urged an independent, thorough, and impartial investigation including how this could go on so long with no one stepping in. They pointed out that the incompetent response leaves victims exposed and perpetrators shielded. International law requires action be taken and that procedures be victim centered. Instead, gaslighting runs amok. “No one is too wealthy or too powerful to be above the law.”
I’m sure we all agree with the rapporteurs. But nothing in the Epstein files or the articles about it surprises any of us who have worked in child abuse, sexual abuse, or trafficking in the U.S. and around the world. In the U.S. I have seen one-year-olds with gonorrhea of the mouth, nine-year-olds who were raped for three years by their father before the state stepped in, and teenagers rented out by their fathers.
We have 342 million people in the U.S. In 2018, 45 million images and videos of child sexual abuse were uploaded. That is 13% of the total population; that is 127,841 a day, day after day, men make, upload, pay for, make money from child sex abuse. Hotels rent rooms to traffickers. Taxi’s drive customers there. While legislators gnash their teeth and pound their chests, Nadia Cantu from La Voz reported today that in Arizona, someone is spending $70 million on OnlyFans, a pornography site, making AZ sixth in the nation. It’s all in front of our eyes; we just refuse to see. In 2025, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children logged more than 113,000 reports of child sex trafficking. The true number is far higher. Most girls are 15-17, but some were as young as 11-12. And it’s everywhere.
On the one hand, we react in horror when we learn of a particularly horrible sex abuse case. The news cycle repeats, legislators introduce laws to increase punishment, schools introduce new rules never to touch children, and we suddenly hear all about “grooming.” But it starts at home. Most of the abusers and those uploading the porn are using their own children, and we don’t want to pry into families. And when the news moves on, victims remain. Abusers are not held accountable. The abuse continues.
Me Too, Times ’ Up, and now the Epstein files. Real women, real children, real time. Law enforcement knew about it for decades and took no action. Those men frequenting the island, on his jet, at his parties, knew about it and took no action. The girls and women who did report it were ignored – as we are. Someone voted for a man who said he likes to grab women in the pussy, who has been convicted of sexual assault, who has paid a prostituted women to be silent, and, according to Raskin, is in the Epstein files over a million times.
In other countries, things happen. Investigations commence, people lose jobs and titles (without cushy landings like president emeritus), and people are arrested. In Britain, Starmer has ordered internet companies to take down revenge porn within 48 hours after notice because of a national emergency of online misogyny. “Writing for the Guardian, Starmer said: “The burden of tackling abuse must no longer fall on victims. It must fall on perpetrators and on the companies that enable harm.”
The prime minister said that institutional misogyny being “woven into the fabric of our institutions” meant the problem had not been taken seriously enough. “Too often, misogyny is excused, minimised or ignored. The arguments of women are dismissed as exaggerated or ‘one-offs’. That culture creates permission,” Starmer wrote.” They also went after Musk and his Grok fake nudes. But remember Starmer also appointed the U.S. ambassador Mandelson despite his knowledge of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein. He has since been fired.
But in the U.S., the only one in jail is a woman. In the 1991 AZScam sting in Arizona, seven legislators were arrested. Only one went to prison – a Black woman. In the 2004 stock market insider trading scam, only one trader went to prison – a woman, Martha Stewart. And here we are in 2025 Epstein sex trafficking scandal, and only one person is in prison – a woman, Ghislaine Maxwell. Not that she doesn’t deserve it (and more), but it’s the women who are the sacrificial lambs. Like the myth of the virgins tossed into the fire to appease the gods, it’s the women tossed into prison to appease the public’s need for punishment. Men do the harm; women pay the price. A tale as old as Adam and Eve. This cabal of men has been operating and still operates the world over. Our society enables them, and they eagerly continue.
Despite our bleeding hearts for the poor children, we soon forget them, especially when they grow up. We pay no heed to those traipsing the same path behind them as the men insist on younger and younger girls. We condemn those at the Epstein properties for ignoring the girls, and then we do it ourselves. We see them at the bus stations, outside the bars, on the milk cartons. But when it comes time to put money and actual change on the table, we look away. When it comes time to hold adults accountable for creating, enabling, and making fortunes on the system that needs more fresh meat every day (young girls), we turn our heads. We are sickened, but we still must not turn our heads.
The average age of a trafficked girl is 15, and the majority are runaways. Most have run away from physical and sexual abuse in their own homes and right into the maw of a system in which the lifespan of prostituted girls and women is four years.
We must hold abusers accountable. Yes, the hapless buyer who walked into a sting, but also those who set up the system and are making the money, whose fingerprints are far from the scene. But we have that now with Epstein and his buddies, who set up, paid for, and participated in this global scheme, including governments that paid Epstein for various tawdry work, including blackmail. If we arrested those who buy sex, confiscated their cars, and put their photos on the front page of the paper, it would stop immediately. But when Tucson did just that, they were forced to stop. Who made that decision? Who were they protecting? Not the children.
A recent case in the Ninth Circuit that covers AZ (Ratha et al v. Rubicon Resources LLC, 20 February 2026) under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act reversed a case where the lower court had given Rubicon a free pass, because though they tried to get money from trafficking, they failed. Trying to commit a criminal act is “attempt” even if you fail, and they should be held responsible, but because this was a civil, not a criminal suit, a law had to be passed to make it so. The question was whether that law was retroactive. The court said yes.
The plaintiffs were rural villagers in Cambodia forced to work in seafood factories in Thailand that then sold in the U.S. I traveled extensively in rural Cambodia when I lived there, and trafficking was one of the legal problems we dealt with constantly. When the company tried to sell the shrimp here, it was rejected because an article had appeared in the paper about the abusive conditions the villagers were forced to work in. Kudos to the groups working on companies to adopt ethical sourcing policies and reject “sweat shop” products.
Truthout just published an article by Kelly Hayes on 17 February that reported that the far-right misogynist and Turning Point aficionado Nick Fuentes said in an episode of his America First livestream that women must go to breeding gulags. This is what they really think of us. Fuentes is just saying it out loud.
While we as a global society, have conventions protecting children (which the U.S. has never ratified), and though I am quite hardened to the horror of this world, even I was stunned when I read in Mother Jones February/March 2026 issue on page 19 in “Frontiers of Tourism” that “Prosecutors in Milan recently launched an investigation into reports that wealthy tourists from Italy and elsewhere traveled to Bosnia in the early 1990s to take part in “sniper safaris,” where they paid to shoot civilians from hillsides overlooking Sarajevo. A journalist who researched this practice said participants were given a price list of up to $100,000 for specific targets, with the highest fees charged for the right to shoot children, at least sixty of whom were killed by sniper fire during the four-year siege of Sarajevo.”
I’m not sure I believe in evil, but these people are immoral beyond what I could even imagine in my wildest nightmares. We must get over our distaste of looking reality in the face and stop our schizophrenic attitude toward such crimes, wailing about the horror of it but then turning away because it is too painful to see. These things truly are happening. We cannot let them define us.
