Just a one off?
It never is, says Mickey
The message to women and girls is clear: you don’t fucking matter.
Here’s a widely reported headline from this week:
You might understandably be expecting some context here. Surely there’s an explanation, some extenuating circumstances. Nope. A Blackpool doctor found, on the balance of probabilities, to have raped a young woman at his home, avoided being struck off because the tribunal panel decided it was a “one-off” attack. The panel went further, stating Aloaye Foy-Yamah had not “abused his position of trust as a doctor” because the victim was not a patient, the attack did not take place at work, and he’d received a series of glowing testimonials from his colleagues.
I mean, sure, why not take a punt that the rapist in a position of authority over people in vulnerable situations will have learned his lesson and won’t do again what he got away with the first time. It’s only women, right?
Women.
Women as collateral damage.
Women as objects.
Women as chattel.
Women don’t matter.
And so – inevitably – I return to the Epstein Files. I think we should all be returning to the Epstein Files. It should be mandatory to think about the sheer horror of what happened to those women for at least five minutes a day. We know more than 1000 women and girls were trafficked. There are hundreds of Epstein survivors, as well as those who, like Virginia Giuffre, did not survive. And I know as the grim revelations keep on coming there’s a lot of horror to squeeze into a day. It’s overwhelming. It’s too painful. It’s *puffs out cheeks, exhales* A LOT. Tiptoeing the tightrope of being informed about the world while not making ourselves so indescribably sad we cannot properly function has never felt harder. But we must not get off that tightrope. Because women and girls matter.
Already there are noises from certain quarters that maybe all this is being blown out of proportion, or as Brendan O’Neill decrees, that it’s “morphed into a moral panic”. To which I say, in my trademark erudite manner, fuck the fuck off. We should be panicking about this. You can’t blow something like this out of proportion, because the proportion is HUGE. It’s all-consuming. It could and maybe should swallow the world as we know it. These are truths so big they feel like a conspiracy theory. It’s all so appalling we don’t want it to be true. But it isn’t a conspiracy theory. It is true. And these are just the bits we’re currently being allowed to know. We know there’s more.
Because these things are never just a one off. Am I suggesting there’s another nonce island we don’t yet know about? Well, how surprised would you really be if it turned out there was? Like it or not (I’m going with not), we live in a world where it’s deemed acceptable to rape a woman “just the once”. We live in a world where misogyny, where control, where abuse of girls are all embedded in power structures throughout our culture, a world with an obsessive, pervasive interest in making teenage girls sexualised objects, a world where Jeffrey Epstein thrived, a world where a convicted paedophile was never short of friends in the highest of places. What did they get out of it? Well, not their just desserts, that’s for sure. We live in a world where there are victims and victims and more victims and evidence and evidence and more evidence – and just one person in jail.
All of this means my rage is further enraged by some of the smug, virtue-signalling “Look who’s NOT in the Epstein files” on socials. In one, a woman paints then taps signs like she’s Andrew Lincoln’s creep in Love Actually: “drag queens” “trans athletes” “black journalists”. Alright babes, for a start, this is specious nonsense. Wanna know who else isn’t in the Epstein Files: Fred West; Jimmy Savile; Jack the Ripper; the man across the road who sexually abused me starting when I was six, and, go on, let’s do a version of Godwin’s Law, Hitler. None of them on the (incomplete, so many names still REDACTED) list. Yet still, y’know, categorically bad people.
Using these horrors to further whatever the fuck cause you think you’re furthering is a disservice to the very many victims of Epstein and his terrible network of abusers. Moreover, it minimises the ubiquity of abuse. Because we can scale back the old adage ‘power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely’ made so plain by these revelations to too many homes across the entire spectrum of society. People with power can abuse it. A lot do. And do you know what, some of them are drag queens, or librarians, or black journalists, or undocumented migrants – no group of people is immune to this heinous shit. What message do you think their victims are being sent?
So, call me a pearl clutcher, accuse me of moral panic, but I’ve lived it and I matter. My panic was present before I was old enough to own pearls or really understand why what was happening to me was so morally wrong.
We need to keep our focus even when the details make it hard to keep our dinner down. It’s never a one off. So clutch your pearls, raise your voice in moral panic, and say it with me: women and girls DO matter.