The Suffering That Does Not Trend

On the Epstein files, what we are not looking at, and what communal accountability requires of all of us.

Photo courtesy of the author.

For months I have been carrying a quiet horror, not only about the Epstein revelations themselves, but about where we were and were not pointing our attention. Then a [February 7, 2026] Instagram post by Harsha Walia, a visionary organizer and author whose work I respect, moved me to finally put words to screen. I want to be clear: Harsha is not the only one saying these things, and I am certainly not speaking for her. But seeing her words, alongside other conversations happening in my life, is what broke my silence. This is that attempt.

“Libation . . . instead of pouring water on the ground, I pour words on the page. I begin with this libation in honor of all of those unknown and known spirits who surround us. I acknowledge the origins of this land where I am seated while writing this introduction. This land was inhabited by Indigenous people, the very first people to inhabit this land, who lived here for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived and were unfortunately unable to cohabitate without dominating, enslaving, raping, terrorizing, stealing from, relocating, and murdering the millions of members of Indigenous nations throughout Turtle Island, which is now known as North America. I write libation to those millions of Indigenous women, men, and children; and those millions of kidnapped and enslaved African women, men, and children whose genocide, confiscated land, centuries of free labor, forced migration, traumatic memories of rape, and sweat, tears, and blood make up the very fiber and foundation of all of the Americas and the Caribbean.” – Introduction, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press, 2019)

I begin with the opening from my edited anthology because I believe past is prologue, and because it is important for me to situate myself before speaking to what the Epstein files have revealed.

I am personally stunned by the vast, interconnected net of individuals involved in perpetrating these unspeakable horrors for decades. The complicity transcends race, gender, nationality, religion, and the entire political spectrum. What it does not transcend is wealth and power. And yet, the horrors themselves do not surprise me. As a descendant of the Middle Passage and a USian, it’s important for me to name that these types of horrors are foundational in the United States and I would offer all of the Americas and Caribbean. Indigenous and African children have been sexually trafficked for the pleasure of European men and women. And, no, it doesn’t begin with 1492 and it is certainly not limited to the hemisphere where I live. We can look at sacred texts going back for millennia where children and adults were raped.

Past Is Prologue

As a survivor of childhood and adult sexual violence, I spent nearly three decades, from 1994 through 2022/23, as a cultural worker documenting sexual violence and holding space for survivors, beginning with myself. That work took shape across two projects: NO! The Rape Documentary, released in February 2006 after 12 years in the making, and my edited anthology love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press, 2019). Throughout, I worked alongside Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Arab, and anti-racist white survivors; straight, queer, cis, non-binary, and trans survivors, people confronting this harm directly through survival, truth-telling, and the refusal to be silent in societies committed to silencing our voices. For some, not all of us, that work also meant advocating for non-carceral responses to sexual violence, a position I hold with both conviction and complexity.

I am not surprised by the loud, enduring silence for decades around the Epstein files. That silence has always been part of the story. What deeply saddens me now is the global fixation on this one set of revelations while there is not also, both/and, not either/or, sustained attention on what is happening right now, moment to moment to moment, in countless homes and villages around the world. It is exponentially easier to focus on the outsider who commits monstrous acts than on the insider and their bystanders: the parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, siblings, cousins, and caretakers who are harming children every day.

A Global Epidemic

According to the CDC, 1 in 4 cisgender girls and 1 in 13 cisgender boys in the United States are estimated to experience child sexual abuse, and that does not account for non-binary and trans children. Cumulatively, we are talking about tens of millions of survivors. And if there are tens of millions of survivors, then we are also talking about tens of millions of people who commit the harm, enable the harm, or cover up the harm. That doesn’t include the entire world, where the World Health Organization estimates 1 billion (1,000,000,000) children globally experience sexual violence.^¹

That scale is almost unspeakable and yet must be spoken. I am pained that this reality is so rarely situated within the larger public conversation.

I want to be emphatically clear that I am absolutely positively not excusing or minimizing the need for justice for the Epstein survivors connected to these files.

Accountability is necessary and imperative. But even if every single person, without exception, tied to those files were held fully accountable, and they should be, it would not stop the millions of others who are committing harm right now, as I type these words, as you read these words. We are confronting a global epidemic. And I am unequivocal in my belief that we need communal interventions.

Imagine if all of us thought that violence against every human being, regardless of race, gender identity, sexuality, immigration status, physical ability, class, or type of employment, was unthinkable. What might happen?

What if what Ulester Douglas, former Co-Director of Men Stopping Violence and Advisory Board Member of NO HARM: National Organization for Healing and Redefining Manhood calls the “reality definers,” a concept he articulates in NO! The Rape Documentary, were not sexual harm doers, but people who understood, without hesitation, that sexual violence is horrific and unacceptable? The reality definers are educators on college and university campuses, in high schools, junior high schools, and elementary schools; judges; babalawo, shamans, elders, pastors, priests, imams, rabbis, swamis, pundits, nuns, monks, and any other religious or spiritual leader; medical doctors, attorneys, and others who have the power to shape norms. What would it mean if every single one of them used their classrooms, courtrooms, places of worship, and examination rooms to make clear that any form of sexual violence committed against children and adults is not acceptable. Period. With that power comes responsibility.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when we were all sheltering in place, I gave Zoom lectures for State Coalitions Against Sexual Assault, Colleges, Universities, and non-governmental organizations, I would often say:

“Children are always, always sheltering in place, and too many of them are unsafe.”

In homes. In religious spaces. In youth organizations. In the very places and institutions designed to shelter them. Whenever I opened a conversation about childhood sexual violence, people wanted to discuss trafficking, the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, as if naming those institutions absolved them of looking closer to home, at the parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, siblings, cousins, and trusted caretakers who are harming children every day.

And yet, despite everything I have survived and continually witness, I still believe in the innate goodness of newborns. And yet, I still believe in the innate goodness of newborns. Something happens in the process of socialization, through power, conditioning, trauma, silence, entitlement, gender norms, supremacy structures, disconnection, and the modeling of violence, that leads many to commit monstrous acts.

None of this is new. For decades, survivors, advocates, and abolitionists have insisted that it will require more than punishment. It will require more than punishment. It will require community. It will require new forms of collective accountability. It will require all of us, because this is so pervasive that even if you believe in carceral justice, which I do not, you cannot lock up a seismic portion of the world and believe children will be safe.

Turning Toward Suffering

These days, through my Dharma and mindfulness practice and teaching, I spend a lot of time sitting with what the Buddha taught, that we cannot transform suffering by refusing to look at it. I began my Buddhist practice in 2002, and eight years before that I was already in daily contact with this reality, through the survivors I had worked alongside, and through my own survival. Suffering is not abstract. It is lived. It is intimate. It is often hidden in plain sight.

What the Dharma has given me is embodied language for what I was already wrestling with: that the conditions for this harm, greed, delusion, fear, power, and learned patterns of harm, are relational. They are created, sustained, and can be transformed through community.

The greed that built Epstein’s web was not only material, the accumulation of wealth, access, and influence, but ideological: the belief that bodies, especially children’s bodies, are sexually available to those with enough power (be it a parent or a head of state) to take them. Transforming the conditions that allow this harm to continue is not a solitary act. It cannot happen through punishment alone, or through denial and silence. It requires something harder and more communal than both.

In this moment of justifiable global shock and outrage, my practice calls me to look directly at the suffering that does not trend, the suffering that continues in homes and communities every day, whether the world pays attention or not. We do not have to let this moment collapse into spectacle or scapegoating. Nor do we have to remain silent while those on any side of the political spectrum (extreme right, radical left, self-help) seek loopholes that shield their favorites, those who committed, condoned, or were complicit in these monstrous acts, from full accountability. We can expand the conversation beyond high-profile cases to include the ordinary and devastating violence that is far more widespread. We can insist on forms of accountability rooted in truth, boundaries, care, and community. We can work toward conditions where harm is neither hidden nor inevitable. Transforming suffering begins with our willingness to see it. Clearly. Consistently. And together.

For Every Survivor

I close with gratitude and deep reverence for every survivor who has found the courage to break their silence, not only those connected to the Epstein files, but also the countless others whose truth-telling rarely trends, whose names we may never know, and whose courage makes it possible for the rest of us to stop looking away. I know something about that courage. About breaking my silence and not being believed. About persisting anyway as a child, despite the parental denial, shaming, blaming, and the resistance to the truth. And I hold with equal reverence those who cannot speak, those whose silence is not a choice but a consequence of danger, shame imposed upon them, or a world that has not yet made it safe to be believed. You are not forgotten. You are not invisible. You are seen. Those who do speak do so on behalf of all who cannot. It is through the breaking of silence that we are given the opportunity to move from denial to awareness, from awareness to what the Buddha called Right (or Wise) Action, an integral part of the Noble Eightfold Path, the Buddha’s roadmap for the cessation of suffering. To all survivors who have spoken, who are speaking, who are gathering the courage to speak: I see you. I honor you. And I believe you.

From this survivor to every survivor.

1. More information: https://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/media-room/national-statistics-on-child-abuse/