Jeffrey Epstein Coverage Missed the Real Story of Child Sexual Abuse

Jeffrey Epstein's crimes were partly crimes against children. However, that is not how the country talked about them. The coverage went to the celebrity angle, the money angle and the political angle, and the one conversation the case never started was a national conversation about child sexual abuse.

Elizabeth J. Letourneau, PhD, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who leads the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, does not mince words about it. "I am outraged," she told Newsweek’s Parting Shot podcast while discussing her new book, One in Five: Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis and What We Can Do to Stop It, co-authored by journalist Luke Malone. "There is almost nothing about [it in] the coverage of this case, and not just the coverage but the law enforcement aspect of it, that treats it as child sexual abuse."

Letourneau and Malone spent years working on a book to highlight the thing that the Epstein case could have potentially started a conversation about: child sexual abuse.

The title comes from a sobering statistic: One in five kids will experience sexual abuse before they turn 18. Numbers like that are why the authors treat this as a public health crisis rather than a crime story, and why Malone keeps returning to how ordinary it is. "It affects one in five kids," he said. "It is so prevalent."

Here is the part that tends to surprise people:. The person causing the harm is very often another kid.

"Up to 70 percent of child sexual abuse is at the hands of other kids," Malone said. "A lot of the time it's child- on- child or teen on- teen."

Letourneau is quick to note a bit of context to the complicated nuances of this child-on-child abuse.

"I would not ever use predator language with children," Letourneau said. "The most common reasons kids engage in these behaviors are absolute ignorance. They do not know better. They do not know what consent is. They don't know what's okay." The follow-up statistic makes Letourneau’s case: Among kids under 18 convicted or adjudicated of a sex crime, "less than 3 percent ever go on to have another sex crime adjudication or conviction."

Which means most of these are both first and last offenses. That is the argument the book is built on, and the line the authors keep returning to. Child sexual abuse is preventable, not inevitable. It’s about education.

For parents, the book is less a warning and more of a conversation starter.

"We really believe that we could do a lot to prevent child sexual abuse by having these conversations," Malone said.

Editor's Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication.

Newsweek: One of the things that really stood out to me when I dived into the book was the role that social media and the internet play in how we communicate about this issue, in the ways people become victims of these crimes, and also in the way some predators use these tools. Did you expect, when you were writing the book, for social media to be such a big part of the problem?

Elizabeth J. Letourneau: When Luke and I got started, social media was already really beginning to reveal itself as a place where kids could find a lot of important things online and find their own people online. It brings a lot of good to the world, and it was also a place where children were going to get harmed in many different ways. I don't think any of us is too surprised at this point that we built the internet, and then we built social media, and now of course you're building and launching AI without making those places safe by design. Every time we do that, it's an enormous missed opportunity, and we're left retrofitting what we already have instead of keeping children safe in the first place. It's maddening to see it happen again and again.

Luke Malone: I think it's replicating what exists in the real world, because there are certainly adult predators who go after children in a very deliberate way. But then there's another layer that we maybe don't think of as harmful, which is peer-on-peer abuse. A good example is a young couple, teenagers who are together, and they maybe share nudes with each other. Then there's a breakup, and the person who feels slighted might share the nudes of their former partner in a way that can be very damaging. There's a lot of sexual education around digital spaces that I'm not sure schools are really tackling.

I met my boyfriend on Instagram. That is where that communication started. And there's no literacy or education around it. I learned a lot about how a baby was made in health class, but I didn't learn a lot about what was right and wrong in terms of the communications I should be having in my Instagram DMs. When do you think it's appropriate for parents and educators to start having conversations around social media literacy?

Letourneau: We're fond of saying you can't start too early with conversations, but you can mistime conversations. That is actually something that happens right now in schools in the United States, where kids are more likely to hear child sexual abuse prevention messaging in first through sixth grade. But then, as they are actually becoming more sexual with other people and more oriented toward relationships and sex, we stop having those conversations, because they get harder. Schools often back away right when it's pretty critical. In terms of teaching kids how to act and behave responsibly online, you want to do that when they're just on the cusp of engaging in those behaviors. Not so far before that they forget it and it's not relevant, and not so far later that you've missed the window of opportunity.

So how do parents have these conversations, when there's a whole cultural system built around the appeal of activities that might put kids in danger?

Malone: It needs to be age appropriate, of course. One key aspect of that is not telling kids don't share nudes, because kids are going to share nudes. So the one thing you could say is just talk to them about what that means: the gravity of it, the trust in the other person, that it's out there in the world. And maybe very pragmatically, don't show your face. It can sound uncomfortable to have that conversation with a 16-year-old, but I would much rather have my 16-year-old sharing a nude without a face than a nude with a face.

One of the things I wrote down from reading the book is a line, that these situations are preventable, not inevitable. I loved that phrasing, because it gives parents a lot of hope. So, within the social media space and the cultural space, how do you make some of these dangers preventable?

Malone: The first thing is realizing it's not always an individual-level thing, it's a systems and social thing. When we look at social media companies, we're repeating some of the mistakes we made with stranger danger back in the ’80s and ’90s. These companies could be doing a lot more to make these spaces safer for kids from the get-go. But parents also need to recognize that kids aren't only at risk of being victimized. There's also the chance that they may intentionally or unintentionally victimize somebody. Just to pull a stat from the book, up to 70 percent of child sexual abuse is at the hands of other kids. A lot of the time it's child- on- child or teen- on- teen. So being cognizant of the reality, and then how we can intervene based on reality versus this idea of what we think child sexual abuse is, is really crucial.

Anyone who hears that stat is going to have a lot of questions. How much of it is actually them just not understanding what's going on and what's happening? I don't want people to hear that stat and necessarily think children are predators.

Letourneau: Much more so. In the U.S., about 70 percent of in-person offending against kids is caused by other kids, usually a few years older [than the other child], but under the age of 18 themselves. Even online, 60 percent of cases involve somebody who knows the kid. I want to be really explicit, this harm can be very, very serious. I do not want to excuse this. But we know that kids are not adults. The most common reasons kids engage in these behaviors are absolute ignorance. They do not know better. They do not know what consent is. They don't know what's okay online. Kids are impulsive, and they're more influenced by the other kids around them. Many kids who engage in inappropriate or harmful sexual behaviors have seen that themselves. Either they were exposed to developmentally inappropriate content, and we know that happens all the time online, or they have been harmed and are modeling what happened to them.

I would not ever use predator language with children, because even the kids that cause harm are very unlikely to do so again. Among kids under the age of 18 who are adjudicated or convicted of a sex crime, less than 3 percent ever go on to have another sex crime adjudication or conviction. We've known it for decades. It just never seems to penetrate. And if 97 percent of kids who do this once don't go on to new charges or convictions, then probably we could have prevented all or most of those first offenses. This is not something this kid is destined to do and to repeat again and again throughout the rest of his or her life.

With the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, we focused on the celebrity angle and the money angle and the political angle. But the victims have not been front and center. Are you disappointed that the conversation went in the direction it did?

Letourneau: I am outraged. I don't spend a lot of my life outraged, but I am absolutely outraged that there is almost nothing about [it in] the coverage of this case, and not just the coverage but the law enforcement aspect of it, that treats it as child sexual abuse. It is just mind-boggling to me that nobody else has been charged in this case besides Epstein. The other thing that is common among people who are wealthy and well connected is impunity. He knew he had impunity when he was given a very, very light sentence and light conviction the first time around. So he kept doing it. And what is just so maddening about this case is the focus on Epstein as if he were the only offender, when he was aided and abetted by all kinds of institutions and all kinds of individuals.

Malone: I share Elizabeth's outrage in terms of accountability. The lack of accountability directly or inadvertently communicates that it's not worth coming forward, because nothing's going to happen. But there's another piece of it that I find troubling. This is still the main coverage we've gotten about sexual abuse of minors in recent times, and it again communicates that maybe this is a stranger- danger situation, when most kids who are abused are abused by somebody they know. There's the yacht, the jet, the island. And in reality, the vast majority of sexual abuse is happening at home and at school. It's the coach, it's the uncle, it's the dad, it's the mom.

We look at young girls going through their puberty experience and, because of the way they dress or the way they act online, we decide they're somehow luring sexual attention. The way we communicate about young women is at the heart of so much of this problem. How do we change that?

Letourneau: For girls going through puberty, getting older, looking more and more like young women, many cultures sexualize that, and we could be doing a lot more not to sexualize young girls. It's a normative aspect of the United States to sexualize teenage girls. That doesn't happen in every culture. It's very difficult for us to think of kids, teenagers, and particularly girls, as having sexual agency and sexual desire. And if they do seem to overtly have those things, then it's easy to blame them for anything bad that happens to them. What were you doing out at night? What were you doing drinking? What were you doing wearing that? Why are you DMing with that guy?

For boys, what we say is, man, if you have sex with an older person, you're lucky. It's not victimization, you're lucky. And also, you're not supposed to cry or ever act like a victim or say you were hurt or scared or confused. That is, I would say, an equally harmful norm. And boys are at higher risk in some scenarios, like in sports, like in some religious settings. So to really start wrapping our heads around how do we end child sexual abuse, how do we drive it down to zero, is to grapple with some of these difficult norms and figure out where they come from and how we get to a better place.

Malone: The flip side to that is how adults, specifically men in this case, act. We have this idea of what men are owed, that they're sexual beings and they can't control themselves. Men have the ability to control themselves, the vast majority do, and men have the ability to police each other in a way that we don't necessarily do all the time. If you're with friends and someone makes an inappropriate comment about a barely legal or just legal teen, speak up. If you know it's gross, tell your friend to knock it off. People respond to that kind of social shame in a way that's instructive. We need to be holding each other accountable as adults, as men, as peers, as friends, when people say inappropriate things.

Malone: We really believe that we could do a lot to prevent child sexual abuse by having these conversations. It affects one in five kids. It is so prevalent. So, talk to your friends about it. Buy the book, share the book. We're not in it for the money. Just have these conversations. I think it's really crucial.

Letourneau: I lead the Moore Center [Johns Hopkins Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse], which is a center focused on the prevention of child sexual abuse. We have a couple of different websites and newsletters and other avenues for really trying to disseminate very broadly the understanding and the reality that child sexual abuse is preventable, not inevitable. We hope that it will get more people, more policymakers, more parents, more everybody working toward preventing harm from occurring in the first place.

Listen or watch the Parting Shot podcast to get the full conversation. Available wherever you get podcasts.