This is such a powerful and truly essential
message from Harsha Walia.
— Molly
I have been heartbroken at the response to the Epstein files.
Of course, I am disgusted and horrified by what is detailed in the files, but I am also heartbroken by most (not all) responses to the files.
Sexual violence has somehow become the backdrop against which debates about elite rule and empire are being had. I have been (mostly quietly) working in gender-based violence work for 20+ years. And the Epstein files is a heartbreaking reminder about how sexual violence and gender-based violence continues to be largely evaded by even the most progressive leftists.
Survivors themselves have again largely become faceless and nameless - neglected even in most movement discourse. Like: how many have mentioned or read Virginia Roberts Giuffr's memoir Nobody’s Girl? Virginia began speaking out against Epstein in 2011. She died by suicide this past year and her book is a devastating posthumous memoir.
Or, in this week's conversations about Chomsky, for example, people have either defended Chomsky's body of work, or used the latest drop to justify their existing views on why they disagreed with him on a range of issues.
Sexual violence, especially of children, is not an otherwise perverse symptom of elite rule or empire - it is literally at the CENTER of how violence and domination is structured around the world. We cannot keep treating sexual violence as a "private" issue, or as "divisive" to movements, or weaponize it to settle other political scores. It is how power reverberates and is reproduced. And so it must be understood on its own terms. I do believe it is, in part, our collective inability to commit to ending gender-based violence and childhood sexual abuse - as systemic and mass-based issues - that allows the predatory right to present itself as "protecting" children even as they kill and maim and impoverish and kidnap and torture and detain and starve and violate children everywhere.
Those named in the Epstein files should be named and shamed - and the system and elite networks they rely on should be exposed. Absolutely. But beyond the headlines and click bait, we ALSO have to do the actual work of ending gender-based violence and childhood sexual abuse in all its forms, supporting and funding full supports for survivors to end manufactured vulnerability that disproportionately makes some more likely to be targeted, and stop individualizing this violence. One of the most misunderstood slogans is "the personal is political," - which as the Combahee River Collective told us is intended to mean that the indignities that are often "quietly" suffered by working class, queer, Black women are the actual basis of revolutionary politics against sexualized violence and - thus necessarily - to end all interconnected violence.
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