Are we sure it's not a bot account?

Have they responded at all?

This isn’t defeatism, it’s fucking reality.

It's an insane take, and let me tell you why. For as long as there have been people, there have been sexual crimes against children. For as long as there has been organized crime, there has been organized profiteering off the bodies of children. For as long as there have been individuals with power and means, there have also been groups of them satisfying their sexual tastes as a collective, using their combined means to both acquire and protect whatever it is they are into. For every group of people engaged in this, there are many more individuals acting alone to use and trade the bodies of the young for whatever they can get in return. For every girl or boy stolen by a group or even just malevolent individuals, there is another one sold by his or her own parents, and even more individuals and groups standing in line for the chance to buy and trade their flesh.

THAT is fact. THAT is the way of the world. THAT is societal and historical reality, not your tunnel vision of this one time and this one place and this one set of perps and how one corrupt justice department has thus made it all okay for every offender everywhere for all time. That's just willfully helpless bullshit.

And not only that, your view focuses solely on just one sort of justice, when in fact there are all kinds of justice meted out regularly, some by nature and some by people, some deliberately and some by accident, some by strangers and some by victims, and most of which happens in such a way that no one ever expected to see until it was all right there.

As for the legal system offering "justice" to the offenders and their survivors, I don't think it ever could and I don't think it will now. But that doesn't mean I'm going to bury my head up the ass of corrupt government obstruction and lack of political will to address it and mope for the rest of time.

The survivor I live with has had to grapple with even the concept of justice, and as someone who has had the actual facts explained to me I'll tell you something else you don't know: the survivor I know doesn't even believe justice exists. Even if this were a perfect world, and the perpetrators and their agents and proxies who trafficked them in their youth were all brought to trial today, that would not give a single day, a single hour, of their life back. It would not lift a single burden off the backs of those already dead because of what was done to them, nor how those evil, sick and malign acts irrevocably derailed that young life for the worse. Other survivors do believe in legal justice, but even they would be the first to tell you it won't give them their youth or innocence or time spent in self-destruction back.

Legal justice would vindicate many survivors, certainly, but not much else. Why? Because for as long as there have been people, there have been sexual crimes against children, and if you think it is limited in any way by stringent laws, you think wrong. Every society has members among them who do these things, both the people that have a taste for it and the people who sell it to them, every single society since time began, and to think they don't is to believe in some ethno-perfection fantasy, like the Russian who told me one time, "We do not have such things in Russia!" (Yeah, right. Pull the other one, lol.)

So it's not about the law. It's about society, and changing how we, as world citizens, speak and write and think of such things. That has nothing to do with one country's corrupt legal system, but hits much more closely at the source of the problem: society itself willing to turn a blind eye to the most perverted among us. And the perps can't shut that discussion down, no matter how much money and power they have. Look around: they're trying hard, and getting nowhere. Why? Because the discussion itself has changed. And why has the discussion changed? Because we, the citizens of the world, are talking about it and not buying the bullshit. And how has that happened? Because of survivors who wouldn't shut up and the people who refuse to be silenced. It's not about the law at all. That is entirely out of the law's hands.

And as someone now old who has seen a great deal of shit, I will tell you with absolute certainty that this situation will not end the way you expect it to, and if you weren't so enamored of your own tunnel vision you'd already be noting just how bizarre some of the turns are that this situation has already taken. I have a lot of unfortunate personal knowledge of this subject, but even I didn't think we'd be at war with Iran over it. The bulk of the files were released on Friday, January 30: not because they were trying to fulfill the EFTA law, but because people were literally pouring out of their homes in rebellion against ICE and it was the only thing the administration had that was big enough to take back the narrative. Jeffrey Epstein, believed untouchable, died in a jail cell. Trump ran a third time just to stay out of jail. Bill Gates and Les Wexner, both thought to be untouchable because of their immense wealth, have had to personally sit through Congressional interrogations; same for a president and senator/ex-Secretary of State. My personal money is on something entirely unrelated -- DOGE -- coming back to bite them all in the ass by the end of the year. More and more truths are coming out of the woodwork in ways that could not be foreseen and cannot be prevented, though the entire weight and will of the US presidency is behind doing just that. ALL of them are sweating balls. Nothing about this has been what the perpetrators of it wanted it to be.

You didn't see any of that coming. And I know you didn't because no one did. So who are you to insist that nothing will change?

Yet we are all changing it, now, collectively.

Every time an individual makes the effort to know the truth of what has happened, such as what happens in this online community and others like it, we honor and help survivors. Look around you: from Gisele Pelicot to Virginia Giuffre, the entire world is talking about sexual crimes in a different way. And even more importantly, as Mme. Pelicot noted, from the abused to the abuser, "Shame must switch sides." And it is.

Every time we personally and individually hold space for real truth to come out, in whatever way it comes out, instead of trying to fill it with our own uncomfortable and self-indulgent whine about how nothing ever changes because we don't like how the subject has made us feel, we honor survivors.

Maybe you're interested in being part of that, maybe you're not. But don't fool yourself that you are some kind of seer for the ages by whimpering about government inaction: for as long as this has gone on, society has mostly turned a blind eye, and whatever actions were taken against the offenders were taken by the local community of the offender.

So know that whatever happens, it already wasn't what you thought, and it won't be what you think, and secrets once thought safely submerged can and do pop right back up through the most unexpected means. Meanwhile, the real justice -- of allowing the deluge of revealed truth to change our collective beliefs and understanding of what these crimes really are and how they damage all of us -- is already happening all around us.

But you won't see it because you don't want to. You're laser focused on the one tiny little part of the whole thing that the perps and their proxies still control, and insisting it will be that way forever, as though the US legal system is The Good Ship Lollipop waiting right off shore, never to hove into view. If you're wise, you'll take your eyes off that mirage of legal justice. It's the lie the perps in power want you to believe, and right now, it's the lie you're helping to perpetrate by posting that hopeless and helpless shit.

@kingofras@lemmy.world

In case you needed some help.

Bless you for this.

Does it matter? Human trafficking is shitty no matter what age it is done at.

Actually, not this time. I can only read the first part of the article due to paywalls, but she was 22 when she disappeared (probably she was still either abducted or brought into Epstein's network and then someone disappeared her, but I can't read far enough in the article to see the details about the mentions of her. Anyone here have a Spiegel subscription who's willing to share the relevant excerpts? Article here)

I remember the very moment I realized that republicans were disingenuous, and far too numerous.

Shortly after the Iraq invasion, and the "support the troops" ribbons started showing up.

Me, being logical, thought it meant people wanted the troops out, like, support bringing them home from a pointless war in the desert.

It did not.