The discharge of details about the tough cadre of fellows related to convicted intercourse wrongdoer and accused intercourse trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – referred to as the Epstein information – has been a very long time coming.
Underneath the Epstein Information Transparency Act, which President Donald Trump signed into regulation in November 2025, the Justice Division will have to unencumber its paperwork associated with Epstein by means of Dec. 19, 2025.
Within the firestorm of reactions that adopted, conservative media determine Megyn Kelly made feedback that minimized the victimization of youngsters.
According to her remarks, a brand new hashtag, #iwasfifteen, went viral, as celebrities and others took to social media to proportion pictures of themselves as youngsters.
I’m a medical psychologist who research intimate violence – from kid abuse to home violence and sexual attack. After greater than 20 years on this box, I wasn’t shocked to listen to anyone decrease the abuse of youngsters. My analysis and the paintings of alternative researchers around the nation have proven that sufferers who reveal their abuse are ceaselessly met with disbelief and blame.
What did marvel me was once how the viral #iwasfifteen hashtag make clear the dynamics of abuse, pointing to the vulnerabilities that traffickers exploit and the harms they motive.
Abusive techniques in intercourse trafficking of minors
Not like stereotypes of teenagers being abducted out of parking quite a bit, individuals who site visitors minors use a variety of techniques and construct relationships with the kids and tweens they’re focused on. Getting younger other folks to accept as true with and rely at the traffickers is a part of entrapping them.
One in-depth 2014 research published those methods in motion. Researchers checked out greater than 40 social carrier case information of minors who had been trafficked and interviewed social carrier employees.
The researchers discovered it was once commonplace for traffickers to make use of flattery or romance to entrap youngsters. Some constructed accept as true with with the kids by means of serving to them out of inauspicious scenarios. In the meantime, the traffickers normalized intercourse and prostitution as they remoted their sufferers from their family and friends – all of which echoes the grooming described by means of sufferers of Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
The analysis additionally confirmed that traffickers saved tight regulate over the kids, the usage of financial and emotional manipulation. They took their cash, blackmailed and shamed them, and threatened hurt in the event that they had been to depart. As within the Epstein case, many traffickers forced sufferers to participate within the trafficking itself, akin to by means of recruiting their buddies.
The similar varieties of manipulation display up in different research nationally. A 2019 learn about discovered that throughout greater than 1,400 circumstances, a 3rd of traffickers used threats and mental coercion to regulate sufferers.
Some other analysis staff appeared throughout 23 research of minors who had been intercourse trafficked in the US and Canada. They discovered that the formative years, who had been most commonly ladies, had been entrapped by means of traffickers who pretended to like or maintain them, best to govern and abuse them.
The techniques recognized by means of researchers and the experiences of ways Epstein trapped sufferers on his island expose that all of the methods utilized by traffickers have something in commonplace: They devise ever extra dependence of the sufferer at the trafficker.
Dependence and betrayal
Early life is a time of fast exchange – exchange that traffickers exploit. From the tween in the course of the youngster years, younger persons are forming their identities and studying about romantic relationships, all whilst their brains are nonetheless growing.
All through this era of fast exchange, they’re beginning to differentiate and search autonomy. But they continue to be dependent at the adults of their lives for the whole thing from their mental wishes, akin to love, to elementary bodily wishes, akin to meals and housing.
When sufferers of trafficking rely – financially, psychologically or bodily – at the very particular person abusing them, it’s a betrayal trauma. In those situations, sufferers rely at the abuser, in order that they can not merely depart the location. As a substitute, they’ve to evolve psychologically.
One solution to adapt is to attenuate consciousness of the abuse – or what psychologists name betrayal blindness. Within the quick time period, minimizing consciousness of the abuse is helping the sufferer bear the abuse. This might be the adaptation between lifestyles and loss of life for a sufferer whose abuser may hurt them if they are attempting to depart or record the abuse – or for a teenager who doesn’t have anyplace else to show for elementary survival.
In the long run, despite the fact that, betrayal traumas are related with a bunch of harms that can have an effect on how sufferers see themselves and the arena round them. When compared with different varieties of traumas, betrayal traumas are related to extra critical mental and bodily well being issues.
Betrayal trauma ceaselessly results in disgrace, self-blame and worry and will depart survivors alienated from and distrusting of others. Survivors can be much less prone to reveal abuse perpetrated by means of anyone they depended on. They can even have issue remembering what came about to them, which will irritate self-doubt and self-blame.
Making sense of the far-reaching affects of betrayal trauma will also be tough for survivors – and others who pay attention their tales later.
Photographs of alleged Epstein survivors conserving images in their teenage selves had been projected onto the FBI development in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 17, 2025.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Photographs Leisure by way of Getty Photographs
Myths and public opinion of sufferers
When intercourse traffickers goal minors, they use methods that give others explanation why to doubt sufferers. The general public are often uncovered to incorrect information about sexual violence and trafficking via in style media, and that incorrect information performs within the perpetrators’ want.
Researchers began documenting myths about intimate violence many years in the past. Since then, analysis displays that faulty perspectives of rape, kid abuse and intercourse trafficking persist in media – with penalties for sufferers.
Those myths and misconceptions ceaselessly seep into the dialog omitted, akin to when even well-intentioned reporting refers back to the ladies trafficked by means of Epstein as “underaged women.” However calling tweens and youths “women” minimizes the age distinction with the perpetrators. It additionally mask the vulnerability of kids and youngsters who had been victimized by means of adults.
Myths can come with ideals that intimate violence is uncommon and at all times bodily violent, and that sufferers all reply the similar means. Myths additionally have a tendency to attenuate the wrongdoer’s position whilst moving blame to sufferers for what was once performed to them, in particular if sufferers had psychological well being issues or used components.
Converting the dialog
With such a lot of myths available in the market, #iwasfifteen confirmed one solution to exchange the standard dialog from blaming sufferers to exposing the ways in which abusers exploit tweens and youths. Assembly myths about intercourse trafficking with analysis is an important to placing accountability the place it belongs, on those that site visitors formative years and perpetrate abuse.
Analysis displays that the extra other folks purchase into myths, the much more likely they’re accountable sufferers or no longer imagine them within the first position, together with in intercourse trafficking.
And it’s no longer best the unsuspecting public that falls for this incorrect information. When sufferers don’t agree to commonplace myths, even regulation enforcement officials, who’re skilled to analyze intimate violence, are much less prone to imagine them.
On this means, the mental penalties of betrayal trauma – from minimizing the abuse to mental misery – can feed into myths that folks have about intimate violence. All at once, it’s more uncomplicated for buddies, circle of relatives, juries and others accountable sufferers or no longer imagine them in any respect.
And, in fact, that’s what perpetrators have ceaselessly advised sufferers all alongside: Nobody will imagine you. It’s no longer unexpected, then, that sufferers would possibly take years yet to come ahead, if ever.
