Attention has once again narrowed to individual men and their alibis. Googling the latest headlines about Epstein, this headline appears at the top of the search: “Brown urges police probe into whether Andrew used RAF bases to meet Epstein”.
However, as a woman living in Woking, the more relevant headline – not as catchy, I know – would be: why does the society I live in enable such extreme wealth and entitlement (accrued largely by men), by eroding our public services and expecting (largely women) to quietly provide the unpaid and low-paid labour that is essential to care for an aging and increasingly disabled population?
In any case, a week or so ago, I did not expect to have to reply to a WhatsApp from my daughter and her boyfriend, midway through their first formal dinner date in our town’s Pizza Express, asking why references to the restaurant were all over social media.
Yet, as the restaurant resurfaced in headlines about the Epstein network and its British connections, I found myself doing exactly that. And, as they asked about the connection between a prince, a politician, and sex trafficking, I realised I was not explaining a restaurant, but a culture.
What began as an alibi has become shorthand for how power protects itself.
The Epstein Files and the power of wealth
The British media has devoted weeks to the minutiae of who sent which email to whom, on what date, and in what tone. But the real question is not “who knew”? It is why so much could be known and yet ignored in public life – for decades.
For decades, Prince Andrew was nicknamed the “Playboy Prince” and Mandelson became the “Prince of Darkness“. The current Labour government, bedazzled by those with soft power and without vision or moral conviction, enabled them to senior roles, representing Britain abroad.
Unlike the BBC, Dalia Gebrial, on Novara Media, cut through the detail to point out the structural inequality at the heart of these stories. That insulation and protection of extreme wealth and status has enabled the actions of these men to be buffered by deference and proximity; while the child and adult victims within those networks are socially and economically exposed.
You might be thinking this all sounds abstract. It isn’t. I see it in three communities of women in Surrey.
The women of Surrey – an unpaid foundation
First, a network of mainly South East Asian women, who organise mutual support in Woking. Second, a peer network of predominantly mothers, navigating SEND systems and sharing knowledge when schools and councils fail to meet their legal duties. And third, women running a community fridge, redistributing surplus food among those facing food poverty and insecurity.
These women often have multiple roles – as volunteers, parents, carers and employees. Communities depend on them. Yet, in turn, to run these voluntary services, they depend on funding and physical civic space, such as community centres and libraries.
As Woking Borough Council prepares to be abolished and merged into a single unitary authority, access to these spaces and the associated funding is withdrawing – resources thinning at the very moment unpaid female labour is expected to stretch further.
This gendered and structural shift to dependence on unpaid labour and goodwill is seen across our education, social care and voluntary sector, and local government. For example in recent research for IPSEA, the legal charity supporting parents and carers of children and young people with special educational needs, I interviewed many parents, carers, and organisations who provided evidence of systemic failures across England to provide timely, lawful support for children and young people with special educational needs.
What is described administratively by local authorities or educational institutions as delay or pressure becomes something concrete and gendered. (Predominately) mothers reducing hours or stepping out of paid work because statutory duties are not being met. The shortfall is absorbed through women’s time and income.
My investigation into care workers’ experiences in England during the pandemic showed the same pattern in our adult social care. Years of underinvestment and fragmentation mean that it is overwhelmingly women who are in poorly paid, insecure carer jobs with poor working conditions, or who are informal carers, sometimes both at once.
These women sustain families and communities while remaining economically invisible.
The blanket cover of an unjust system
Seen in this light, elite sex trafficking scandals are not aberrations. They are expressions of an extremely unequal and gendered income and wealth distribution, protecting and insulating wealthy men at one extreme, while continuing to erode the security of women at the other end – all through a decline in functioning schools, accessible community space, and adequately funded services.
So, I tell both my teenage children – particularly my son – that social media detailing powerful men’s email chains, flight logs, and visits to restaurants are a distraction from the deeper gendered economic structure that remains intact to protect them, and allows them to inflict harm on the most vulnerable.
This International Women’s Day, when our education, community activities, and social care services are being dismantled, the question should be why it is simply taken for granted that women will pick up the pieces?
