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.
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 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.
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