Prince Andrew's demotion: Epstein scandal still not over
The king's latest move against former-Prince Andrew, obliterating his titles and any remaining trace of status, appears dramatic. Yet statistics tell a different story: thirty percent of women have at least one experience of abuse and in most cases, they are not complaining about a celebrity or a prince. Fifty percent of victims are complaining about somebody they know, including family members.
Looking at every other institutional abuse scandal that has come out over the years, there are hardly any cases of a lone predator. Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Abuse took place in parallel with high profile prosecutions in the Catholic Church. The cases are very well documented now and in many of them, we see that when offenders were moved from place to place, the reason for the relocation was always known to multiple people. The recently exposed email from the former prince to Epstein states
we're in this together
Tellingly, the sentence begins with the word "we". It was not a royal "we" either and the "we" probably represents more than the two men party to the email.
On the same day the King demoted his brother, ABC news in Australia published their latest report about abuse in childcare centers. They claim to have spoken to experts across the country and analyzed more than 200,000 pages of reports. Criminology professor Michael Salter is quoted in bold:
"Large scale surveys have found that young Australians these days are more at risk of being sexually abused by another child than they are by an adult.
The article looks at four-year-olds who have identified those parts of the childcare center where there is no surveillance and they have already learnt how to keep their classmates silent with blackmail and threats.
A child was lured into a toilet and threatened with a knife by a boy who threatened to stab her if she didn't ...
According to the regulatory documents the supervisor at the centre deliberately left out serious details of the incident to mislead the parents and regulator.
The ABC report and the experts they interview do not try to clarify whether children are learning these tactics spontaneously, whether it comes from their home or whether it comes from exposure to social control media.
One fact is clear: four-year-olds can't read, so they didn't learn these tactics from reading the reports of the Royal Commission.
If we don't know where they developed these skills, we can't break the cycle of abuse.
In other words, the demotion of former-Prince Andrew may be very prominent but it may be nothing more than symbolic. Abuse is a consequence of secrecy and culture more than it is about the high-profile scapegoat.
Whenever we see any organization claiming they have solved abuse by removing a scapegoat, the first question we need to ask: if there really was wrongdoing, who were the enablers?
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.
