Sex Trafficking Prosecutions Won’t Stop the Next Epstein. Here’s What Will.

What can be done to stop another Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their network of people who participated in the abuse of more than 1,000 girls and young women? Right now, the U.S. right and carceral liberal forces (including many Democrats) are focused heavily on demanding that the Department of Justice release the grand jury files related to the Epstein case — as though this “smoking gun” will finally clarify everything and bring perpetrators to justice. But both the right and carceral liberals have a bias toward protecting the status quo and the very institutions that fail survivors of childhood sexual abuse every day, like police and prisons. What would actually prevent another Epstein and meaningfully deter sexual abuse of children and young people? And why aren’t more of us on the left talking about structural solutions?

We write this as two longtime abolitionist feminists, survivors, and advocates on the front lines of the fight to end violence against women and young people. From where we stand, we see two important dynamics related to the Epstein case. First, we know of no major left organizations or coalitions that have responded by demanding meaningful action on childhood sexual abuse — despite the horrific scale of violence and the deep divisions that Trump’s close relationship with Epstein has created within the MAGA movement, divisions that could be strategically widened. Ending child sexual abuse could hardly be a more unifying issue.

This is a moment for the left to show leadership by exposing the violence at the heart of the MAGA movement, which was built to defend the power of super-elites to control, exploit, and abuse, including the bodies of girls and women. Epstein is a stark reminder that nothing is less “pro-child” than MAGA and the billionaires it champions. And while the corporate Democrats may be calling for the release of the Epstein files, they were part of what created and protected Epstein’s power, both as his friends and associates and by slashing social spending onprograms that are supportive of children, while promoting policies that accelerated inequality and billionaire wealth. So why aren’t we hearing the left offer a compelling alternative to these dismal options?

From our vantage point, this silence is sometimes emotional and sometimes a matter of missing visionary leadership. As we’ve brought the issue of sexual violence against children and young people into movement spaces, many comrades — including skilled and courageous organizers — feel too uncomfortable, confused, or hopeless to take it on. Some privately say the topic is too upsetting or depressing. Others are survivors themselves and find it too painful to engage.

As feminists have long documented, left movements can be sexist and minimize gender-based violence as a private matter, “divisive,” or a distraction from “the real work.” Some see child sexual abuse as an “unwinnable” issue, unlikely to pull people away from MAGA compared to campaigns around affordability or other concerns that don’t provoke such deep grief, horror, or shame. This isn’t without reason. Much of the MAGA base has shown a high tolerance for sexual violence by supporting Trump, a confirmed sexual abuser. And many left organizations feel even less equipped to respond when the violence is labeled “sex trafficking.”

We believe our movements are, for the most part, neither emotionally nor strategically equipped to organize people into a pro-democracy movement working to end child sexual abuse. We also firmly believe a world without child sexual abuse is winnable — but few have organized around this at scale. This vacuum has allowed right-wing and carceral liberal forces to use the Epstein case to push intensified criminalization, policing, and prisons, including efforts to further criminalize the sex industry. This is terrible for survivors — who gain nothing from these strategies — and allows the right to appear as the only force “protecting” children. We want to show how we can fight child sexual abuse using many of the same strategies we use to fight other forms of violence: a Block and Build strategy rooted in economic, racial, and gender justice.

Block the Policing of Young People

Both the right and carceral liberals agree on increasing surveillance, policing, and prisons. They use survivors of child sexual abuse to advance this agenda by calling for mandatory reporting laws, police in schools, longer prison sentences, and by linking child sexual abuse to the sex industry. But policing and prisons are institutionalized forms of rape culture, where sexual assault is trivialized, normalized, and in some cases, authorized. The Trump administration’s proposedrollback of even minimal anti-rape protections for trans and intersex people in prison is a grim case in point. Greater contact with law enforcement does not protect children — it increases the risk of sexual violence, especially for Black and Brown kids.

For example, many schools employ police resource officers under the guise of protecting girls (including from traffickers). But police are sexually violent toward students, especially Black and Brown girls. According to research from the Advancement Project and the Alliance for Educational Justice, as quoted by Interrupting Criminalization, “in the 2022–2023 school year, sexual assault was the second most frequent type of assault, representing a quarter of reported incidents of violence by police against students.”

Similarly, mandated reporting laws are marketed as tools to protect youth from sexual abuse and trafficking. In reality, they cut young people off from support and deputize community members as extensions of the state. When nearly every adult a young person might reach out to for help — teachers, coaches, doctors, therapists — is required to report disclosures to Child Protective Services or the police, the network of community care available to young people shrinks dramatically. In 17 states and Puerto Rico, all adults are required to make reports. Mandated reporters are required to report to the state even when it is not wanted by the person experiencing harm and doing so would actively cause more harm. In the 2016 survey There’s No One I Can Trust, over 3,600 help-seekers were asked about the impact of reporting and 50 percent of respondents said the report made their situation much worse. Groups like Mandatory Reporting is Not Neutral and Mandated Reporters Against Mandated Reporting are organizing to dismantle these systems and change the conditions that lead to violence and abuse.

Rather than the misleading language of child welfare, organizers and activists impacted by these systems offer us the language of family policing. As shared by Brianna Harvey in the new anthology, How to End Family Policing: From Outrage to Action, “Historically, Black and brown communities have always perceived social workers and the foster system as another form of law enforcement that surveilled, criminalized, and investigated their families.” One study estimated that 53 percent of Black children will experience an investigation by the family policing system before they turn 18, compared to 37.4 percent of all children. At its core, the family policing system is weaponized to control, separate, and criminalize Black, Brown, and Indigenous families.

We all need complex networks of care. As adults supporting young people, we may get only one chance to steward the information a young survivor shares with us. If we break that trust, it may be years or even decades before they tell anyone else about the violence they’ve experienced. We can block the harms of the family policing system by abolishing mandated reporting laws, protecting the confidentiality of survivors of all ages, maintaining civil protections for families facing harmful investigations by the family policing system and getting families the financial resources they need to build safe and thriving communities.

Block the Criminalization of Sex Workers

Most people who experience sexual violence know the person who harmed them: 93 percent of survivors under 18 were abused by a family member or acquaintance. The framing of large-scale child sexual violence like that committed by Epstein and Maxwell as “sex trafficking” is not neutral. It is the result of decades-long campaigns by anti-sex work interests to claim a causal link between the sex industry and sexual violence against children. World Without Exploitation, an organization that works with far-right anti-abortion and anti-gay organizations like Exodus Cry and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, or NCOSE (formerly Morality in Media), to promote the criminalization of sex work are using the Epstein case to argue that “traffickers operate because there is a demand for commercial sex.”

Paying adults for sex does not produce child rapists. If Epstein’s survivors have shown us anything, it’s the power of billionaires to groom girls in plain sight, and surround themselves with a massive network willing to cover up their crimes. The problem goes even deeper than that — their wealth hoarding is also to blame for creating the poverty that makes girls and their families desperate in the first place.

The sex industry is largely made up of poor and working-class women and queer people trying to survive under racial capitalism and criminalization. Their work has nothing to do with the violence that men with massive wealth and impunity wield — but they are the first to get hurt when criminalization of the sex industry intensifies. This is especially true for young Black and brown girls who sell and trade sex for survival, as we saw in a recent New York Times Magazinearticle about the “trafficked girls of Los Angeles” that depicted Black and Brown teenage girls being handcuffed and detained by police as a “rescue,” whitewashing the brutal reality of criminalization. We need to divest from anti-sex work narratives, support sex workers organizing against violence and blame the billionaires — those with the power to create the poverty and vulnerability that young people are forced to navigate.

Build by Centering Survivor Stories

First, we must hear survivors’ stories to understand that the causes of child sexual abuse go far beyond monsters and boogeymen. Until her death by suicide, Virginia Roberts Giuffre was one of the most public and outspoken survivors of Epstein’s abuse. Her memoir, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, is a powerful indictment of the systems of inequality that enabled Epstein and Maxwell to abuse girls in plain sight.

Giuffre begins her story on the day she escaped a juvenile detention facility and was almost immediately raped while hitchhiking. The violence she experienced at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell was made possible by her earlier experiences of sexual abuse, rape, incarceration and poverty.

Facing the realities of domestic and sexual violence requires divesting from the moral panic about mysterious trafficking cabals kidnapping white girls. It requires understanding sexual violence as a systemic problem sustained by our collective acquiescence. This takes bravery.

Build Self-Determination Supports for Survivors

Our experience with survivors of gender-based violence has taught us that domestic and sexual violence are forms of dehumanization and objectification; they turn a person capable of acting powerfully on their own behalf into someone who is acted upon. This understanding points us toward what survivors most need: support for self-determination. Survivors need to be in charge of their own stories and lives.

But the criminal legal approach to child sexual abuse perpetuates dehumanization. Survivors are treated not as agents but as objects — useful only if they further legitimize the criminal legal system. The state decides whether a crime has occurred. Prosecutors decide whether to bring charges and what consequences abusers will face — not survivors. Despite liberal prosecutors’ “victim-centered” rhetoric, the criminal legal process undermines survivor self-determination.

Jaden Cervantes-Fields of Mirror Memoirs, a national storytelling and organizing project for a world where Black and Indigenous gender-nonconforming children (and all children) are free from sexual violence, described to us his concerns about the way the Epstein case will fuel more criminalization:

“As a survivor of trafficking as a child, pushing for any kind of state response will only cause further harm. It won’t bring any healing to survivors. This is an invitation to survivors to think collectively about rape culture. [Sexual violence] happens to so many people but if the response is organized around what a singular person’s idea of justice looks like, this kind of violence will continue. To eradicate rape culture, [we have to center] the actual resources that help survivors healing long-term like being in community with each other, mental health support rooted in their cultural and spiritual practices and space for folks to envision a world without this kind of violence.”

Survivor Liberation Is Economic Justice

Giuffre’s story, and many others like it, points to a simple truth about sexual violence: Poverty worsens it, and money prevents it. Better resources, higher wages, adequately funded benefits such as SNAP, and policies like rent control lift families and young people out of poverty, reducing vulnerability to manipulation and coercion by wealthy men, partners, landlords, and bosses. Anything that helps meet young people’s economic needs helps prevent sexual violence.

The exclusive fixation on revealing the Epstein list is a red herring. It reinforces a fantasy that we can stop child sexual abuse by punishing individual abusers, while leaving the structures that facilitated and enabled the abuse completely intact. This diverts attention away from the structural sources of children and young people’s vulnerability such as poverty and family policing. What the rich won’t say is that one of the most impactful interventions in a survivor’s life is not calling the police — it’s redistributed wealth, and more broadly, economic and housing security for everyone.

Money gives survivors choices: buying a bus ticket, renting a hotel room, replacing a phone, or leaving a violent partner. Money means survivors don’t have to beg, hitchhike, stay with unsafe adults, or participate in criminalized street economies like selling sex or drugs. Money provides access to mental health support and the ability to take time off work for healing. Sexual assault is the most costly form of violence; survivors incur an average of more than $100,000 in costs from lost schooling, lost work, medical bills, and mental health care. Give survivors money.

As Cervantes-Fields told us:

“This is an opportunity for the left, survivors, and people who care about survivors to expand their political imagination and dream bigger about the vast kinds of things survivors need to support their wellness. The financial burden it takes to heal from sexual violence means an intentional investment in mutual aid for survivors. But when these moments happen, there’s such a focus on the immediate response of carcerality. It doesn’t do anything or interrupt the cycles of violence.”

Be the Visionaries We Need

We know a great deal about what causes childhood sexual abuse and what prevents it. Even without a perfect road map, our movements constantly ask us to think big and imagine a world that may feel out of reach — a world without borders, prisons, or capitalism. We do this because we know such a world is possible. As Mariame Kaba reminds us, “hope is a discipline.” We must be disciplined and strategic about creating the future we know is possible. So where is the organized left strategy offering a vision and a concrete path toward a world without child rape?

In Washington state we are building Survivors for Liberation, a network of survivors of gender-based violence working toward collective liberation outside of the criminal legal system. In Chicago, Just Practice Collaborative is building a community of practitioners that provide community-based accountability and support structures for all parties involved with patterns of sexual, domestic, relationship, and intimate community violence. In Toronto, Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network is a network of migrant sex workers building community and political power. They run ​​a 24/7 multilingual crisis support hotline that provides information, resources, and referrals by and for migrant sex workers in their own language, on how to increase their power to end violence and exploitative working conditions.

These groups are survivor-led projects working outside of the traditional nonprofit and direct-service model, engaging in mutual aid, working to build survivors’ leadership, and illuminating the harms of the criminal legal system.

Amita Swadhin, co-founder and co-director of Mirror Memoirs, reminds us that child sexual abuse is deeply rooted in U.S. culture. But turning to face it and healing it is the pathway to transformation:

“From the very beginning, the project of creating this nation-state called the United States was about specifically targeting gender-nonconforming Black and Indigenous children as a starting point. And if we can start to root that out and rewire society, heal from that, do reparations, and make new ways of living together, then we can create a society here on Turtle Island that is a place of healing for everybody — in which we don’t leave people behind.”