One of the things that income inequality does to people is make them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Women especially. Girls especially. Children especially. Make the situation desperate enough, keep them at an economic disadvantage great enough and they will become available for exploitation out of sheer survival instinct.
To the wealthy, the poor are mostly cattle. If they're attractive or young though, they can be playthings. The mass of humanity they deem too unattractive to fuck are put to work making money for them and then that money is extracted from them again in the form of consumerism and living expenses. Most of them haven't got much left at the end of the cycle.
The young and pretty, however, are used by them for sport.
Poor women are put in an economic situation which sets them up to fail. Poverty can result in people selling themselves or their children for money. It can result in the children themselves becoming vulnerable to grooming and recruitment, as in the girls Epstein exploited. They came from poor families, single-parent families, broken homes, the foster system. He offered them money and then they were caught in his trap. He may have lured in hundreds of girls in his pyramid scheme of human trafficking. We may never know.
That's because of two things. Jeffrey Epstein had been an investor and testified in a federal financial fraud case and got protection as part of the deal. He also had important people for clients, and I suspect that he may have told them that if he ever went to prison he was going to start naming names from his client list and let the world know that they were paying him for trafficked teenage girls to fuck. The story basically disappeared because people in high places wanted it to disappear.
The thing about it is that his activities are not something new. The wealthy have been exploiting women and children for sex for a long time. In the time of the Enlightenment aristocrats invented the "libertine", men who abandoned all morals and sexual restraint to indulge in pleasure. This was a time of rejecting the strict moral code of religion. Religion was for the peasants. They needed it to give them a sense of right and wrong, but aristocrats made their own rules. The rules for the peasants did not apply to them. They wrote the laws, after all.
The Marquis de Sade introduced degradation and cruelty to the mix and made it seem sophisticated to torture people sexually and dominate their will. That was the right of the nobility. And anyway, peasants weren't people and they couldn't do anything about it. It was their word against the word of a noble if they complained. Judges were always going to side with the nobility. If they themselves were not aristocrats, they depended on the goodwill of the aristocrats to keep their jobs. They knew not to bite the hand that fed them.
The Marquis de Sade introduced degradation and cruelty to the mix and made it seem sophisticated to torture people sexually and dominate their will. That was the right of the nobility. And anyway, peasants weren't people and they couldn't do anything about it. It was their word against the word of a noble if they complained. Judges were always going to side with the nobility. If they themselves were not aristocrats, they depended on the goodwill of the aristocrats to keep their jobs. They knew not to bite the hand that fed them.
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| Libertine |
But the nobility could only indulge so far among their own class because there there were rules and they could get in trouble if they preyed upon their own, and so they turned to the women and children of the peasantry instead. Mostly they used them and discarded them, but sometimes they would reserve one of the especially pretty or clever ones for their own use and keep them in a house to make sure they had exclusivity. Very rarely did it result in marriage, which was done not for romantic reasons among the aristocracy but to form alliances and for profit. They kept these women for their own amusement, and nobody cared what they did to them as long as they kept it quiet and kept up a respectable appearance. They could get away with murder, because they covered for each other.
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| Child Trafficking In Victorian England |
Victorians
This continued into the Victorian era. Victoria came to the throne in 1837. She had grown up in the Enlightenment era, but she had been insulated from the excesses of her own class by her mother, who basically had her under guard. Victorian repression hid a dark side. Victoria was devout and disapproved of sex in general. Her attitudes meant that any sexual activity had to be hidden, creating a shadow world of prostitution and repressed sexuality and perversion, something the wealthy had learned in their previously more open libertine times and never lost their taste for. There was an emerging class of merchants and industrialists who were not noble, but they had money. They felt that their wealth made them gentlemen, almost nobility, and they wanted to share in their privileges like the privilege to use peasants for sport. Since there was also an obsession with purity and virginity thanks to Victorian morals, children became targets because they were seen as more pure than a mature woman. Victorian England was a place where children were bought and sold. The age of consent comes from later backlash against this when it became public knowledge.
In America during the same time frame, the institution of slavery held strong. Instead of preying on the peasantry at large, they preyed upon the native women and slaves. During the period of colonization and immigration, women and children were often trafficked into the new world to meet the demand of male colonists for wives and prostitutes. Later, they were brought in from China and later still young white girls from poor backgrounds started getting lured in. That said, America pretty much refused to acknowledge or legislate on any kind of crime involving sex unless it could be used to further a political agenda. America first became concerned about sexual exploitation and sex trafficking in about 1910 because it was something they could claim foreigners were doing to their nice white girls. They didn't care about the girls, but they wanted to pass a stricter immigration policy and it made a convenient excuse to pretend they cared.
Judging by the sentence Jeffrey Epstein got and several other high-profile sex crime cases involving wealthy men getting no punishment at all when it seemed like an open and shut case, America still doesn't care about sex trafficking or sexual exploitation of minors. Not the leadership. Not the wealthy upper class who write the laws and sit in judgment over those cases. They care much more about the scandal surrounding the wealthy miscreants than they ever did about the women and children they used for their entertainment and bought and sold. The wealthy and powerful protect their own class. It's not even that they sold us out. In order to do that they would have had to have been on our side in the first place. They were never on our side. They are not our friends. If it comes down to a contest between law or the human rights of the poor and what they want, what they want will always win.
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| "White" Slavery |
White Slavery
In America during the same time frame, the institution of slavery held strong. Instead of preying on the peasantry at large, they preyed upon the native women and slaves. During the period of colonization and immigration, women and children were often trafficked into the new world to meet the demand of male colonists for wives and prostitutes. Later, they were brought in from China and later still young white girls from poor backgrounds started getting lured in. That said, America pretty much refused to acknowledge or legislate on any kind of crime involving sex unless it could be used to further a political agenda. America first became concerned about sexual exploitation and sex trafficking in about 1910 because it was something they could claim foreigners were doing to their nice white girls. They didn't care about the girls, but they wanted to pass a stricter immigration policy and it made a convenient excuse to pretend they cared.
Judging by the sentence Jeffrey Epstein got and several other high-profile sex crime cases involving wealthy men getting no punishment at all when it seemed like an open and shut case, America still doesn't care about sex trafficking or sexual exploitation of minors. Not the leadership. Not the wealthy upper class who write the laws and sit in judgment over those cases. They care much more about the scandal surrounding the wealthy miscreants than they ever did about the women and children they used for their entertainment and bought and sold. The wealthy and powerful protect their own class. It's not even that they sold us out. In order to do that they would have had to have been on our side in the first place. They were never on our side. They are not our friends. If it comes down to a contest between law or the human rights of the poor and what they want, what they want will always win.
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