In Epstein's Shadows of Sexual Abuse: The Grooming of Women and Girls

Each day during NO MORE Week, we’re highlighting how communities around the world are taking action to end abuse. Today, join us on the KNOW MORE Blog and NO MORE’s social channels as we spotlight efforts throughout North America.

This guest post by Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women reflects on the necessity of ongoing efforts to prevent and end sex trafficking.

In 1978, Mechelle Vinson, a Black bank employee in Washington D.C., sued her company for sexual harassment and unwelcome sexual demands by her supervisor. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which recognized for the first time in the U.S. that the hostile work environment her boss created was a form of  sex discrimination. The Court also noted that apparent voluntary participation in sexual activity does not mean consent when power and coercion are involved.

While this landmark case revolutionized workplace sexual harassment policies, a public reckoning of the devastating impact of such crimes in the lives of women and calls for accountability did not occur until the #MeToo movement ignited almost 30 years later.

Laws are key tools in holding perpetrators accountable and protecting survivors but upending the harmful societal practices that paralyze women and girls from reaching their full potential proceeds at a snail’s pace.

For centuries, courts, policymakers, institutions, and prevailing judgement generally concluded that if a woman suffered abuse at home, at work, or in the community, the presumption of consent negated the harm done.

For instance, in marriage, as property of her husband, a wife was bound to a contract of immovable consent to whatever he did to her. Courts found that husbands could discipline their wives as they pleased, as long as the violence wasn’t excessive – laws that remain in place in many countries today. It took until the 20th century for marital rape to be recognized as a crime in the U.S.

Outside of the home, rape was often treated as theft of a father’s or spouse’s honor, and in war, as inevitable. Today, international law recognizes sexual violence as a crime against humanity and rape as a weapon of war. 

The cultural and legal shifts from viewing domestic violence as a private family matter and sexual violence as bad luck was the result of hard-fought battles waged by the global women’s rights movement that peaked between the 1970s and 1990s.

Slowly, once survivors and frontline advocates took to the streets,  gathered the data, and sued their governments, society began to understand domestic violence and sex crimes as an epidemic and public health crisis. Corporations joined the conversation after calculating their financial losses when intimate partner abuse and sexual harassment affected their workforce. 

This revolution around naming  the mechanics and root causes of violence against women and girls was long overdue. Today, we need the same sort of cultural shift around our understanding of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. 

The high-profile sex trafficking cases of Jeffrey Epstein and hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs underline that the justification of a woman’s consent in abuse remains a dangerous misconception that denies survivors’ lived experience and their access to justice.

The United Nations describes human trafficking as a gendered crime, noting that over 90%  people trafficked for purposes of prostitution are women and girls, who are overwhelmingly of color.

Sex trafficking is the vehicle through which exploiters bring their prey to the sex trade, which includes street prostitution and escort services, strip clubs and “Only Fans,” illicit massage parlors, pornography, and “sugar dating.”  

Tragically, our courts only understand sex trafficking when force is involved, proven without a doubt by the victim. 

In the Combs trial, the jury failed to grasp that the victims’ testimonies mapping Combs’ patterns of unfathomable abuse of power and psychological coercion was textbook sex trafficking. 

Similarly, the Epstein case reveals that he often paid the young women he lured into his prostitution ring with money or gifts. As he trafficked women and girls for decades with impunity to some of the most powerful men in the world - and to himself - the institutions designed to protect the vulnerable dismissed the rapes and sexual exploitation as compensated consent.

The myth of  consent  in the context of the sex trade goes beyond the ethos of our legal institutions; the media, academia, and the commercial sex industry have also drilled this message into our collective psyche. 

In her 2025 book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, the journalist Sophie Gilbert examines how pornography became the tastemaker of the early aughts’ mainstream culture. 

Gilbert argues that the pornification of women and girls in all aspects of our media, from fashion magazines to Hollywood movies, exacerbated by the growth of the unregulated internet, created a toxic environment in which women were unquestioningly  transformed into objects designed for male consumption.  

Today, millennial and Gen Z women are taking to social media to share their  horror in realizing that their experiences of girlhood lived in the shadows of Jeffrey Epstein and his merry band of elite friends. 

The sexualization of girls was not only baked into the marketing plans of companies like Victoria’s Secret and The Limited (whose owners are linked to Epstein) but also taught generations of girls that their value is dependent on the male gaze and tolerance for sexual domination. 

“They weren’t just grooming girls on [Epstein’s] island,” said one woman on Instagram. “They were grooming all of us.”

Indeed, the leaders in the Epstein files shape policies and laws, fund civil rights movements, develop technology, and teach in universities that promote the ideology that prostitution is empowering work and women are for sale.

They created a culture of misogyny in which sex is the currency, commodification is rousing, and the dehumanization of women is trite. They camouflage the atrocities that sex buyers, like Epstein and Combs, inflict on human beings, and protect men’s purported right to unfettered sexual entitlement. 

Just as we changed laws and culture to stop weaving the narrative of consent in marital rape, partner abuse, and sexual harassment, so too must we reach the same understanding for survivors of the sex trade, online and off. 

Mechelle Venson and countless other brave women took daring steps to help us understand what equality for women truly means. 

We must continue building those stairs that reach it.

Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women

March 6, 2026