Not another moral panic

On the Epstein files and the inevitable 'it's gone too far now' response

Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in the Royal College of Psychiatry’s Women and Mental Health Special Interest Group Conference. The day ended with an excellent talk by Liz Kelly, under the title ‘First we saw it then we didn’t – how institutions loose sexual violence’.

Towards the start, Kelly mentioned Beatrix Campbell’s book Secrets and Silence, on the Cleveland child sex abuse scandal of the late 80s. It reminded me of the first time I’d heard of the scandal, and how the framing had unnerved me. The broadly accepted narrative was that two paediatricians, Dr Marietta Higgs and Dr Geoffrey Wyatt, had vastly over-diagnosed cases of child sexual abuse in Cleveland. I remembered overhearing a conversation about it between my father and a friend of his, a male social worker. I was struck by how scathing they were of Higgs in particular, how convinced they were of her craziness, taking all those children from ‘decent’ families. I told myself the men must be right, because that was what most people seemed to think – that you would have to be insane to think child abuse was so common. It bothered me, though, and I wasn’t sure why. Some children were abused, weren’t they? It was a thing, wasn’t it? So why were people so much more riled about the idea of a conspiracy against decent parents than abuse itself? In conversations like these and in much of the media reporting, there was a strange degree of pleasure taken in bringing down whistleblowers. It was a restoration of order.

Reading Campbell’s book now, it does not surprise me that things were not quite so one-sided. The first account Campbell gives is that of ‘Minnie’, a ‘Cleveland child’ and survivor of genuine, horrific abuse (of Higgs Minnie says “everyone was demonising her, everyone was saying she is a bad person, a bad person. But to me, she was my saviour”). That Minnie’s stepfather abused her and her brother is not in question; even before her stepfather’s arrival, her mother’s mistreatment of her was being monitored. Nonetheless, at one stage, at her mother’s insistence, a social worker took her to a party hosted by advocates for accused adults (‘Parents Against Injustice’).

There’s something about these stories that is so, so bad, it’s almost fantastical. Freud, as Kelly noted in her talk, backtracked on believing the accounts of sexual abuse given by female patients – recasting them as imaginings – on the basis that there just couldn’t be that many. More so even than adult victims of sexual assault, victims of grooming and child sexual abuse always seem to be on the backfoot precisely because it feels too appalling to be true, but also too close for comfort. Even in a culture which sexualises youth and vilifies female ageing, CSA counts as something absurd – something which must be projected back onto the victim (a ‘troubled’ child, or a ‘fantasist’), or minimised as happening only to a tiny minority (not so many families!), or only within certain groups (not those families!), or as an outcome of certain self-contained attitudes and motivators which don’t apply to ‘ordinary’ men (it’s that religion, or that racial group, or the powerful, or the marginalised – it couldn’t happen here, anyways).

It is not surprising in the least that the Epstein abuse scandal is already being cast by some as drifting towards the realms of ‘moral panic’. Such things always do. We are told that Cleveland became a moral panic; Operation Yewtree became a moral panic; #MeToo became a moral panic; grooming gangs became a moral panic. It’s funny how often that happens. Look, no one’s saying abuse doesn’t happen at all but could it be this widespread, could so many people be implicated, could it be so normalised at a time when people – often the same people who are implicated – know to denounce real abuse? Shouldn’t we focus on the real baddies, who are teeny tiny in number?

In an entirely predictable article (the kind you can imagine being written in template, with examples being shoved in later), Brendan O’Neill wearily concedes that “Epstein was a venal character whose abuse of young women was appalling”:

“But there’s a medieval vibe of finger-pointing and rumor-mongering to this latest stage of the Epstein affair. Innocent people look set to be devoured by the bloodlust of the digital mob that can’t get enough of all the tall tales about a vast pedo ring that secretly runs the world.”

Oh no! Who wants to be part of the mob? Believe in baddies, yes, but don’t go looking like some mental person who thinks it’s any more organised or socially sanctioned than that.

As I wrote in my book Hags, it’s women, usually older women, who take the risk of looking like the crazy people who believe in the terrible thing. Accusations of moral panic and hysteria (a word used by Freud to reframe the suffering of patients and by Noam Chomsky in his correspondence with Epstein) function to shame and discredit, and often they work. In her memoir Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Giuffre tells of multiple experiences of sexual abuse, starting in the home, long before she encounters Epstein. I have seen this used in attempts to discredit Giuffre, on the basis that this shows, not how prevalent abuse is at all social strata, or how abuse victims can be made more vulnerable due to responses to the initial trauma, but that Giuffre was the sort of person who liked to tell these sort of stories (if it were all true, she would have, you know, toned it down). This is not too far from the line – another common one – that abuse is traumatising, yes, but trauma makes women unreliable, and maybe women who have been abused as children become the sort of women who see abuse everywhere, so best not listen to them. If you want to be believed – and what victim doesn’t want to be believed – there is pressure not to see too much or tell too much, and certainly not to implicate too many people. Otherwise you’ll look like a conspiracy theorist. We’ll still feel sorry for you, but not for the reasons you want.

To sound like a conspiracy theorist (I was going to write “at the risk of sounding like”, but what’s the point?) I think most people do not want to acknowledge how widespread grooming and CSA are because they sense just how much the culture around us enables them. By this, I don’t just mean “the culture of the powerful”. There are people who will say the Epstein scandal is not a moral panic, but that other scandals – grooming gangs, for instance – are moral panics. “Look who’s NOT in the Epstein files” can become another way of minimising the ubiquity of abuse, and with it, the credibility of victims who may have abusers whom it is less fashionable or comfortable to denounce. The family of someone like ‘Minnie’ would never appear in the Epstein files, but the beliefs about what women and children are for – and what men should be allowed to do to them while still being seen as ‘good’ – are everywhere. Within the context of the average home, “the powerful”, the one who can act with impunity, is not a billionaire. Usually he just has to be a man.

Like many, I worry that the Epstein scandal will be neatly packaged away as a story of wealth and power. I also worry that in wanting it to be seen in the broader context of how men groom and abuse children with the knowledge, if not approval, of other adults, at all strata of society, I become someone who wishes to de-contextualise, to strip out all the specifics. The financial and political power matters, certainly. Abusive men who come from more marginalised settings aren’t the ones influencing policies, including ones that shape how we even talk about sexual violence. When abuse legitimisation is right at the top, it feels particularly hopeless. Every global effort to ‘empower women and children’ starts to feel like cover. The world is more clearly split into the wealthy who matter, and other humans, reduced to meat.

It’s not just about that sort if power, though. What has been ‘uncovered’ is also something that feminists and other whistleblowers have been trying to expose, in different settings, for decades. When one of my teenage sons said of Epstein, “it’s like a conspiracy theory, but it’s true”, I couldn’t help thinking that’s what feminism has always been up against. Until the madness ends, we’ll be the ones who look mad.