I regularly check my daughter’s phone. She’s 12, and I have to stay up to speed with all her WhatsApps. Their messages are chiefly selfies sent back and forth between her and her mates, but this weekend, I suddenly came across a few photos of Jeffrey Epstein. They were screen grabs taken from one of the video files recently released by the US Department of Justice. One kid had used them multiple times during one of the conversations. I felt my heart racing.
Like everyone, I’ve been sickened and horrified by the revelations about Epstein. While I often speak to my kids about the news, this felt like a story to avoid – my younger daughter is seven. It’s hard to imagine how a child could put any of this into context and not have nightmares. But clearly, I was naive to hope that the details might not seep into their world.
“Why on Earth are you sending one another stickers with his face on it?” I asked my eldest. “It’s just a joke,” she said calmly. “Some of the boys at school have been calling themselves ‘Epstein,’ but it’s not serious, Mum.”
Children have always made obnoxious jokes about things they don’t fully understand, to shock and appal us. I know this, but still, I was silently horrified at her story. I went into a long monologue, unable to help myself – how Epstein is not to be laughed at, how it’s not a joke, how he hurt many people.
I could see my daughter switching off – my boring tone reminds me of one my own mum used, which made me roll my eyes. But how should I speak to her about the unspeakably awful crimes of Epstein and his associates? Should I feel grateful that she seems to be remarkably robust and not impacted by what she’s heard?
I posed the dilemma to some parent friends – we all have girls. One told me her husband had spoken to their child about the files, and she worried he’d said too much.
Another said she just wants “the whole thing to go away,” and that there’s “no way the kids would be interested so I’m not going to talk about it.” That’s where I tend to disagree. Kids are often – quite naturally – particularly interested in the things that adults talk about. The things that are said in hushed whispers in the front seat of the car, or the conversations that go silent as they enter a room. Before Epstein, my eldest was interested in P Diddy, because she’d heard some of the allegations against him. My younger girl recently asked me what “murder”, meant – a word she’d perhaps heard on the radio.
Jokes are also an attempt to make sense of fear and trauma. When I was at school in the 80s, I remember boys pretending to be the “Yorkshire Ripper,” and chasing us. I wince at the memory, in the same way I do at the thought of boys today calling themselves “Epstein”. But it was a way of talking about something we couldn’t face up to.
Mothers with sons feel scared too – including that their child could end up in trouble. “I don’t know how to open up a conversation with my 11-year-old,” one of them told me. “At least with girls they talk more, but I worry that he’s holding on to all this upsetting information, and possibly being told fed total lies about it from other boys. He could easily be egged on to say something offensive without knowing what it means. I encourage his dad to try and start conversations about it.”
As parents, we all pin our hopes of a better world on our children, believing that they’ll not repeat our mistakes – not endure the darknesses we had to – solve all the problems, be kinder, smarter, and safer. As women, who’ve spent our lives enduring sexual harassment and misogyny, we all thought our daughters would have a better life. But right now, in the era of Andrew Tate, Russell Brand, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Donald Trump, it’s hard not to despair for their future.
But we must walk with them and do what we can to explain the rights and wrongs – now more than ever. When we were children, horrifying crimes were in the newspapers and the late-night news. Our parents had a chance to modify the information we received. But the Epstein story comes to our kids unfiltered. It is on TikTok. Just because we don’t think it’s appropriate doesn’t mean they aren’t talking about it. If they don’t have phones then kids are shouting about it in the playground.
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We must find ways to talk about them – and perhaps use such conversations for the greater good.
One mother tells me she’s using Epstein to teach her kids about boundaries, about consent, self-determination and, of course, stranger danger. “How could those girls have gone with him in the first place?” her daughter asked, incredulous that the girls hadn’t run a mile. “Surely they knew about stranger danger?!” It felt too much for my friend to explain that Epstein preyed on vulnerable, traumatised women, but also that all too often we are locked into a cycle of victim blaming – the idea that the victims could have saved themselves if they’d acted differently.
“It was not their fault,” my friend said clearly. “He was an evil man. We should never blame the victims for what happened to them.”
Within this terrible story, there is perhaps a lesson we can teach our kids. Trust your instincts. Don’t blame the innocent. And sometimes it’s safer to assume the worst about people.
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