Recently, I had a conversation with my husband about the Epstein revelations and Trump connections to which he responded, “What’s it going to take for white people to get angry enough? I don’t get it.”
He grew up primarily around his black father’s family, civil rights activists and educators, not his white mother’s working-to-middle class family. His perspective of “normal” is completely different from what mine used to be.
So I sat with his question. Why aren’t white people angry? Because we should be. We should be outraged by what’s happening with our children in America. Billionaires abusing children in heinous ways. Complaints ignored for decades. Whistleblowers dying—usually ruled suicide. The string of celebrities who had “strokes,” fell out of windows or down flights of stairs, died of “pneumonia,” or “hung themselves” in recent years. Politicians speaking out now who feel compelled to publicly state they’re not suicidal—the same thing Epstein himself said before he died.
The math doesn’t math.
Yet many Americans, white Americans in particular, still deny foul play. Some insist the Epstein files are a hoax. You have to be fucking kidding me.
What I realized from growing up in a white working class home, surrounded by white working class people is how much our “normal” is derivative of patriarchy. We weren’t living on dirt floors poor, but definitely paycheck to paycheck poor, comfortable, stress free life just beyond our fingertips. So close, it tormented us. Because of patriarchy culture, older men pursuing younger girls wasn’t just normal—it was encouraged. Girls were taught to accept it. Men were encouraged to pursue it. It was simply how things were. My own mother dated and married older men, both my grandmothers did too.
However, research confirms this isn’t just my experience. Studies on age-gap relationships consistently show that adolescent girls with older male partners face heightened risks including decreased relationship power, fear of negotiating boundaries, and increased vulnerability to domestic violence. One study published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence found that partner age differences were significantly associated with reduced consistent condom use and diminished relationship power—indicators of unhealthy dynamics.
My first husband was five years older than me. I was 18 when we married after three years of dating. You do the math. My second husband was almost eleven years older. Nobody batted an eye.
Over the last decade, I’ve deconstructed and rebuilt my understanding of the world. I now see how vile and dangerous the culture I grew up in was for children.
Today I’m married to a man my own age, and I’ve never been happier or more grounded.
But don’t quote me wrong, I’m not saying this is only a white problem. Child sexual abuse happens in every culture. Globally, one in five young women were married before their 18th birthday, with the highest levels in sub-Saharan Africa. Niger has the highest child marriage rate in the world, where more than three-quarters of girls aged under 18 were married, with nearly 30 percent younger than 15. At least one in four girls and one in 20 boys in the United States experience child sexual abuse. This is a global crisis attached to power.
What’s specific to wealthy, predominantly white Western nations like the United States is the sophisticated systems that protect elite abusers. Child sexual exploitation and abuse has become a multibillion-dollar global trade, with financial institutions, tech companies and online payment platforms facilitating the flow of profits—sometimes unknowingly, sometimes by omission. Research on institutional abuse shows that abuse flourishes in organizations where adult power and influence over children is unchecked, there is a culture of complicity, and institutions are relatively closed to external monitoring or influence.
What makes the American elite abuse crisis distinct isn’t that it happens—it’s the infrastructure of protection around it. Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, allowed him to serve minimal time while continuing his abuse, described as elite deviance in action where networks of impunity see elite circles close ranks to shield one another and protect reputations and wealth. Charisma, status and popularity are often highly valued within institutions and may be used to build an image and reputation that places individuals beyond question, with a perception of individuals or organizations as prestigious being a risk factor for abuse.
The normalization runs deeper than individual relationships. Research on cultural factors in child sexual abuse reveals how cultural norms profoundly affect disclosure, reporting, and even recognition of abuse. Studies show that in communities where certain behaviors are normalized, victims may not even recognize abuse as abuse—they’ve been conditioned to see it as normal. This is particularly true when there are ingrained beliefs about gender roles and when traditional or rigid gender norms dominate. Again, patriarchy culture.
White American culture has a particular blindness here. As scholars studying whiteness note, white people often fail to recognize their own cultural practices because whiteness positions itself as the “normal” or “natural” baseline. This means problematic behaviors get coded as “just how things are” rather than as culturally specific patterns that protect predatory behavior.
In poorer nations with high child marriage rates, the abuse is often visible, documented, and condemned by international organizations. The UN has made ending child marriage by 2030 a target embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals . But when wealthy, powerful Americans do it? We get decades of silence, NDAs, sealed settlements, and mysterious deaths. The difference isn’t whether abuse happens—it’s whether the system is designed to expose it or hide it.
Maybe we’re not angry enough because it’s hard to summon rage against something we’ve been taught to see as normal. White culture has protected this. White patriarchy culture has normalized predatory age gaps, grooming, the pursuit of youth and inexperience. And uniquely in America, wealth and power have built an infrastructure—legal, financial, institutional—that keeps these crimes in the shadows.
That’s why we aren’t angry enough.
But, we need to be. We should be outraged.