Jeffrey Epstein’s victims have shown incredible courage and doggedness. And though the women who are still fighting for justice – filing lawsuits against the FBI, campaigning for full disclosure – may never get the transparency they deserve, their relentless pursuit of it is having an impact.
Busts of Great Men are being lifted from plinths. Names are being erased from over doors. There has been a flood of embarrassed denials by the men and women who were in Epstein’s orbit and his inbox, and a few resignations. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor may finally be discovering his sweat glands after he was forced to move out of the Royal Lodge in Windsor for a life in exile in Sandringham, Norfolk, where he will be roughing it on the family’s estate with its 60 acres of unfortunately-named pleasure gardens.
Ireland, like the rest of the world, is convulsed by the allegations that are still coming six years after Epstein’s death. And yet, the revelation of a more far reaching and consequential sex abuse scandal closer to home went virtually unremarked upon this week.
The Justice Indicators report, published by the Law Society’s Centre for Justice and Law Reform, found Ireland has a 43 per cent higher rate of recorded sexual violence – incidents reported to the gardaí and officially entered into the criminal justice system – than other EU countries.
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Read that again, and then imagine that 43 per cent figure refers to something else. Ireland has a 43 per cent higher rate of joblessness. Ireland has a 43 per cent worse rate of flooding. A 43 per cent higher rate of drug deaths. It is impossible to imagine any one of those statements not making headlines, not leading to a clamour for answers and for aggressive Government action. Or, at the very least, for demands for some sort of explanation as to how we got here.
But when the outlier in question is sexual violence, we greet it with a collective shrug. Because, while we might not have had that precise figure to hand before, we have always known. A survey by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in 2022 found one in three Irish adults has experienced sexual violence, with women more than twice as likely to experience it as men. If we’re one of the lucky ones who has not directly experienced sexual violence, we almost certainly know someone who has. Sexual violence hasn’t been hiding in plain sight – it hasn’t been hiding at all.
In Ireland, we’ll talk about Epstein all day long, but nobody is talking about the countless, nameless victims of the culture of sexual violence that has permeated Irish society for decades. Nobody is talking about the Great and not-so-Great Irish Men whose names will never make headlines, whose lives and reputations are unblemished, but whose actions continue to destroy the lives of their victims.
There are several possible partial explanations for Ireland’s shockingly high rate of recorded sexual violence – some optimistic (there is more awareness of sexual violence now than at any time in the past) and some too bleak to contemplate (since reporting rates are far lower than the actual level of perpetrated sexual violence, this is only the tip of the iceberg). But none are very satisfying.
[ Newly released Jeffrey Epstein files: 10 key takeaways so farOpens in new window ]
Even if you take the most optimistic scenario – that Ireland’s rate is so high because we are finally coming to terms with past wrongs, and because our data collates so-called “historic” incidents with current ones – it’s clear that we have always, and still are, turning a blind eye to what amounts to a tsunami.
Noeline Blackwell, who is on the board of the centre which produced the report, points out that Ireland’s figure of one in three victims of sexual violence isn’t out of line with global figures cited by the World Health Organisation. So maybe a better question is why reporting rates in other European countries are so low.
“We are getting a lot more reports in the last five years than in the previous years, and that has to be down to more people prepared to report it. That’s not to say,” she adds, “that it is not a most depressing figure”.
In some ways, the point about the Justice Indicators report wasn’t what it told us; it was what it can’t tell us. We can make educated guesses about why the figure is so high – are Irish people more likely to report sexual violence? Did #MeToo have more of an impact here? Has our history of institutional abuse helped remove the blinkers?
Does the fact that our data sources do not disaggregate current and past cases inflate the figure? Perhaps. But even if you were to take out the historic cases, it is probable Ireland’s rates of recorded sexual violence would still be far ahead of the European averages.
CSO figures for 2024 found that 30 per cent of victims of sexual offences reported the incident more than 10 years after it occurred. In 2023, it was 22 per cent. This is likely to go some way to explaining our very low detection rates, but it doesn’t satisfactorily explain why our overall rate is so high. “Probable” and “likely” are not satisfactory words in this context but in the vast, echoing silence surrounding sexual violence, they’re all we have.
The lack of curiosity surrounding this – or perhaps the reluctant acceptance of sexual violence as a non-negotiable part of the landscape, as much a feature of Irish life as endless rainfall – is a stain on our national character.
What Epstein’s victims have succeeded in doing is narrowing the gap between what a society knows to be true about power, accountability and sexual violence, and what it is willing to acknowledge. But in Ireland, that gap continues to be a vast, untraversed chasm.
