The Guardian

11/26/2025

We have names for it, sure – PTSD, recurring trauma or some diagnosis that often renders survivors insane. But the truth is survivors can read the room. They can surmise from the lack of care, accountability and justice that their anxiety is based in reality, a landscape where not only is there no safety or protection but where underground rings of sex trafficking emerge each day.

So let me try for the millionth time to explain. Maybe you will open your hearts. Maybe you will dig deep into yourself to try to have empathy and understanding, Rape is betrayal, invasion and theft. It murders the life force of the victim. Like plutonium it lodges itself forever in the chemistry of the body. It robs us of sleep, trust, our ability to be intimate. It destroys self-esteem. It distorts our desire.

For almost 60 years I have tried to understand what pleasure, what satisfaction any man or woman could take in ripping apart a child or a woman’s body against her will.

Where does such hate come from, such disregard? There are many theories – men’s rage at their mothers for their dependency, the jealous need to destroy life force, innocence and beauty, the simple unchecked trajectory of men’s need for conquest and dominance.

Whatever the causes, what matters now is how we stop this rampant insane abuse. Sex trafficking is a $200bn international industry. We are living in a world, as Manon Garcia describes in her new masterpiece about the Pelicot trials, Living with Men, constructed by “a scaffolding of rape”.

Virginia says near the end of her book:

“I’m learning to accept that sometimes I will simply not be okay. That is the process of serious trauma. It lays you low and sometimes makes you your own worst enemy. My goal is to prevent the emotional time bomb that lives inside me – my toxic memories and devastating visualizations of myself being hurt – from every detonating again.” Tragically the last explosion took her life.

But there is another timebomb about to explode and it will if there is no accountability or justice for the Epstein victims. This time it will be directed outward. It will be the alchemized rage of millions of survivors, who have had enough, who cannot and will not live a day longer with this torturous injustice.