"If You Build It They Will"...??? #EpsteinClass #NobodysGirl

                  Audio book playing for me this week is Virginia Giuffre’s “Nobody’s Girl”. For those who don’t recall or don’t know, she is an Epstein (among other rapists) survivor who has recently ended her life. Twenty-five percent into the content so far and I am overwhelmed by the depiction of the relentlessness of cruelty in her upbringing and the betrayal and manipulation of those she’d run to for safety. Ultimately, it seems she’d never found that place of safety, at least not on this side of eternity.

                  She was just a little kid when the assaults began. A little kid. In elementary school. Grooming. Hands where they shouldn’t be. Manipulation. Then full-blown rape.

With impunity.

                  The worst of it for me, in my personal experience, is that starting at age 9, old men could not keep their hands off my backside. I’m in my sixties and it still happens—thankfully not often-- and every time it does, I freeze. That’s a lot of decades of accumulated rage-fodder. Might seem like a small thing, particularly with the perspective regarding what happened to Virginia, but it’s still assault. I am trying to train my brain not to freeze, to be prepared and have a plan. Odds are, someone is going to find out what that plan is, eventually. I will keep you posted.

                  In the meantime, is the impunity that is astonishing to me, in the worst way. Particularly with regard to the Epstein situation. The lack of justice, the hope of consequences that have not materialized while the world watches and waits is most disturbing. I feel a global culture of impunity looming, and it is a terribly oppressive thing. Meanwhile, right wing “Christian” Nationalists are stumping for teen pregnancies and for Americans to have “more babies than you can afford”, when it is poverty that creates more vulnerable children like Virginia. Does it surprise anyone that the Epstein class would convince the “religious” right to propagandize increasing the “domestic supply” of vulnerable children to harm? (I believe Covid flight restrictions really unnerved the Epstein class—that the domestic supply of children would not meet their insatiable demand. “More babies than you can afford” would solve that for them, right?)

                  I don’t want to leave this post on a hopeless note though. I trust that many reading this are safe people. This last paragraph is for you. I appeal to you to keep your eyes open. To wake up every morning with a fresh commitment to help the helpless and to do something good (Romans 12:21). Be prayerful—however that looks in your faith tradition—for the safety of our children. And practically speaking, maybe training up our children in the way they should go may require some self-defense training. Cultivate trustworthiness in all your relationships. The space you occupy may be the only safe place for a young somebody who thinks they’re a nobody, who has been convinced they are only an object for extraction and abuse rather than a beautiful, unique individual made in the image of their Creator. May Divinity bless your faithfulness.

How diabolical must one be to see someONE so small as someTHING to violate?