As the Jeffrey Epstein case is back in the news, people are shocked by the depraved details and light punishment handed out. The real shock is that anyone is shocked.
This behavior is everywhere. By one Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate, over 33 million American women have been raped at some point in their lives. To put that number into perspective, it’s more than the entire population of Texas. Another 59 million women were subject to what the CDC calls “unwanted sexual contact.” One in every three women in America have experienced “noncontact unwanted sexual experiences,” a euphemism for events such as Epstein luring someone’s teenage daughter into giving him a massage and then, once she was alone with him and felt trapped, forcing her to watch him masturbate in front of her.
Young women are at highest risk of these predators. Nearly half of rape victims were first victimized by age 18; 1 in 7 was victimized by age 10.
The consequences are devastating. Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown explained in a New York Times interview why she wound up doing so much of the reporting on the Epstein case: “I became really interested in the fact that these girls’ lives were essentially ruined, even if they had only gone to his house one time.”
These sorts of men are everywhere. Because other high-profile types of violence such as gun crime are concentrated in high-poverty areas, it’s tempting for families in affluent urban or suburban areas to think they’re safe from all sorts of violence. They are not. Epstein-like predators can be found even in well-off communities like here in Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago.
And these men almost always get away with it. Around half of rapes are reported to the police. (One reason the figure is not higher is how retraumatizing it is for survivors to report and go through the criminal justice process). Only about 1 in 4 rapes that are reported to the police result in an arrest More Top Picks Best Handwriting Tools For Kids With Dysgraphia
Put differently, one of the most unusual things about the Epstein case is not that he got off lightly after his first arrest, but that he got sentenced to any time at all.
The Epstein case itself is now history (setting aside the possibility of an Epstein-related cover-up). What lessons can we take away about how to protect young women in the future?
New Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke should be commended for making the addressing of violence against women and girls a top priority for her office. A recent Tribune op-ed describes some of the many ways in which our current system fails victims: Most civil orders of protection go unserved, survivor services are inadequate and court data systems are so antiquated the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing. It’s long past time to fix this.
But under our criminal justice system, there are, unfortunately, intrinsic limits to holding sexual predators accountable. Most of these crimes happen in the shadows, in private places without witnesses. In a justice system that requires evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, any case that comes down to “he said versus she said” is stacked heavily in favor of the offender.
This has a chilling implication for parents everywhere: The ability of the criminal justice system to protect your daughter largely ends once any man ever gets her anyplace alone.
That means we must take prevention much more seriously than we have to date. We have no alternative but to do much of that prevention work in schools, since that’s one of the few places where we can reach everyone.
What does that look like? It involves, among other things, addressing distorted thinking that, in the wrong setting, can lead to sex offenses. For example, everyone struggles with “mindreading” others. But this is particularly dangerous when men misinterpret nonresponsiveness or distress by others as assent. While everyone is prone to “motivated reasoning” (interpreting events favorably to one’s own interests), this is particularly dangerous when it leads men to minimize the consequences of their actions on others. School-based programs can help men recognize these thought patterns and prevent sex crimes.
We might also revisit the rampant pollution of our culture with misogynistic content. By one estimate, fully 1 in 5 American men have watched “rape porn,” a pernicious normalizing of sexual violence, often premised on the fiction that women who protest are actually “into it.”
The larger lesson we should be taking from the Epstein case, in other words, is: What parent of daughters can possibly feel good about raising them in this society?
Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, Pritzker director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and author of “Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence.”
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