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There are crimes that shock the conscience and then there are crimes that reveal it.
What has been most unsettling in recent weeks is not only what the Epstein files have disclosed, but how quickly we are being encouraged to move past it.
This isn’t just an invitation to scroll, minimize, or change the channel. It’s an invitation to treat the exposure of systemic sexual abuse—much of it involving children—as just another uncomfortable news cycle, rather than a moral rupture that demands our immediate attention.
The truth, once revealed, does not only test our justice systems. It tests us.
Public conversation often frames sexual violence in extremes: outrage or indifference, spectacle or silence. What’s missing is sustained witnessing, or the willingness to stay present without turning suffering into entertainment or reducing abuse to a political talking point.
When powerful abuse is exposed, the initial horror is often followed by something quieter and more corrosive: dismissal. Victims are scrutinized while their credibility is questioned. Their pain is mocked and negotiated away through language suggesting they benefited from being sex trafficked and even enjoyed it. Sick, I know. Others question why we are still talking about the biggest pedophile ring cover-up in history at all. This is commonly referred to as secondary violence.
Especially when the victims are children, these narratives reveal something deeply disturbing about our culture’s relationship with innocence. Consent cannot be retroactively manufactured. Harm does not become acceptable because money changed hands. Childhood is not a commodity that can be priced, purchased, or rationalized away after the fact.
And yet, repeatedly, we see the same pattern: accountability becomes inconvenient, and so empathy is quietly withdrawn.
What makes this moment particularly destabilizing is not just the scale of what has been uncovered, but the collective discomfort with feeling it. Trauma, when it implicates people in power, is often treated as something we should acknowledge briefly and then stop talking about for the sake of social cohesion. But cohesion built on denial is fragility, not stability.
For survivors of sexual violence, this public minimization reopens old wounds. It reinforces the message many of us were given privately: Your pain makes others uncomfortable. Your truth is negotiable. Silence would be easier for everyone.
That message does not stay contained. It seeps into families, institutions, and public life. It teaches people—often on an unconscious level—that morality is conditional, that abuse is tolerable when it benefits the powerful, and that looking away is a reasonable response to discomfort.
This is how abuse persists long after the act itself.
Cultural Reckoning
We often ask why these stories are “still” being told, as if time alone absolves trauma. But the better question is why our tolerance for injustice remains so high once it stops shocking us.
The real issue is desensitization, not oversaturation.
When exposure is followed by indifference, the signal is clear: truth may surface, but it will not be protected. And when truth is not protected, silence becomes the safer choice—not just for victims, but for anyone who fears being made uncomfortable, ostracized, or dismissed for caring too much.
This is what I call a failure of conscience.
What happens next matters. While justice is far from guaranteed, we are not powerless. At a pivotal moment in history, we get to choose who we become once the truth is no longer deniable. History is shaped not only by those who commit heinous crimes against humanity, but by those who decide what they are willing to live with afterward.
To remain fully conscious in moments like this takes discipline and courage. It requires resisting the urge to look away, to soften brutality, or to make cruelty more palatable for our own comfort. Innocence does not expire, and silence, however normalized, is never neutral.
In the aftermath of truth, what we allow becomes what we endorse. Choosing silence doesn’t mean the violence ends; it simply changes form.
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