trafficking too often ignore Black women

Rabid media coverage of the Epstein files has breathlessly focused on political gossip at the expense of centring victims and survivors. As such, public discussion of elite sexual abuse often gravitates towards spectacle: powerful men, hidden networks and institutional failure. Of course, coverage from mainstream media is complicit in upholding power structures that decide who counts as a victim – and who doesn’t.

Instead, the newly released Epstein files point to an uncomfortable reality. It has been noted from FBI interview records and grand jury testimony that Epstein’s “preference was short, little, white girls.” Crucially, Epstein’s operation did not rely on chance or opportunism. Instead, Epstein paid girls to recruit other minors and enforced his preferences through discipline and reward. When recruiters failed to comply, the system reprimanded them. In practice, race did not sit in the background. Rather, it structured how the trafficking itself operated.

When recruiters violated those expectations, Epstein reprimanded them. In one instance, he refused to allow a Black girl to massage him, telling the recruiter that he “was not interested in black girls.” As a result, racial selection operated not as personal taste but as an enforced rule within the trafficking system.

This is not simply evidence of personal bias. It is evidence of racialised trafficking.

Epstein files: trafficking as selection, not chaos

A 2019 prosecution memorandum from the Southern District of New York reinforces this pattern. Drawing on multiple victims’ accounts, the memo describes how Epstein’s operation recruited, paid, recycled, and excluded girls. Epstein “expressed displeasure” when certain girls were brought to him and “did not like dark-skinned girls”.

This language confirms that race operated as a selection criterion within the abuse economy. The operation expected recruiters to internalise Epstein’s preferences and adjust their behaviour accordingly. When recruiters failed, the system punished them through loss of payment, emotional reprimand, or exclusion from favour. Trafficking here did not operate opportunistically or chaotically. It functioned as a regulated system, with whiteness operating as currency and Blackness marking disposability.

Black women-led anti-trafficking advocates have long warned that sexual exploitation cannot be understood outside race. As survivor-leader Vednita Carter, founder of Breaking Free, has stated:

Prostitution is a racial justice issue..you can’t just take race out of it.

The Epstein files bear this out.

Institutions frame misogynoir solely as hypersexualisation, with Black women and girls rendered excessively visible and exposed to violence. The Epstein material reveals a quieter but equally damaging mechanism. Black girls were not hypervisible. Institutions filtered them out. Their exclusion did not signal safety. It signalled erasure.

Exclusion from the pipeline meant exclusion from testimony, from media coverage, and from public memory. It also reinforced a persistent myth: that elite sexual exploitation primarily harms white girls.

Who counts as the “real” victim?

This is how racialised sexual violence hides. Black girls are routinely denied access to the category of the “ideal victim”: young, innocent, credible and deserving of sympathy. Research on adultification bias shows that Black girls are routinely denied the presumption of innocence and vulnerability afforded to white girls.

That category was never built to include them. When Black girls are missing from abuse narratives, it is not because they were protected, but because institutions are structured to look past them.

This omission is not politically neutral. Silence here is not an oversight. It is an organising strategy. When Black girls are written out of sexual abuse narratives, institutions are spared the obligation to protect them, fund services for them or confront the racialised nature of exploitation.

How institutions fail Black survivors

The National Black Women’s Justice Institute has noted that Black women and girls face “intersecting challenges rooted in racism, sexism and systemic oppression”, which not only heighten vulnerability to trafficking but also create barriers to recognition, justice, and healing once harm occurs.

Elite abuse narratives often rely on a narrow feminist crime that centres white girlhood as the default site of innocence. This framing does not merely overlook Black girls. It depends on their absence. It allows institutions to perform concern while leaving intact the racial hierarchies that decide whose suffering is legible.

Eugenics as context, not spectacle

It is within this framework that Epstein’s documented interests in eugenics becomes relevant. As the Canary has previously reported, Epstein repeatedly expressed “Nazi-like” eugenic obsessions around intelligence, breeding, and hierarchy. These views are disturbing, but they are not the story on their own.

What matters is how this ideology aligns with the trafficking practices documented in the files.

Eugenics did not create Epstein’s abuse, but it helped rationalise the sorting, ranking, and exclusion that defined it. Belief systems rooted in hierarchy sustain racialised trafficking by framing inequality as natural and exclusion as reasonable.

In that sense, Epstein’s eugenic thinking functions as context rather than cause. It helps explain how institutions normalised racial selection, enforced it through practice, and largely refused to interrogate it.

Misogynoir as subtraction

Understanding misogynoir only through sexualisation misses how it operates in elite abuse systems. Here, misogynoir functions through subtraction. Black girls disappear twice: first from protection, then memory -trafficking organisations working with Black survivors have warned that this has material consequences. This leads to gaps in accountability, long-term support, and prevention. Absence from the record becomes absence from remedy.

When abuse narratives centre those only deemed recognisable victims, accountability remains partial. Power survives by narrowing the field of concern.

The Epstein files show how institutions produce that acknowledgement: through recruitment rules, racialised preferences, reprimand, reward, and silence.

Why this matters now

Public outrage around sexual exploitation often peaks around individual villains, then dissipates. Structural analysis demands more and offers less comfort. Without it, the same hierarchies persist.

Institutions continue to under-identify Black girls as victims of sexual violence, under-protect them, and write them out of high-profile cases. When commentators read that absence as evidence of safety rather than exclusion, misogynoir does its quiet work.

The Epstein files do not simply expose an individual abuser. They show how systems of power decide whose suffering they record in the first place. As long as racialised trafficking remains peripheral to how institutions understand sexual exploitation, they will continue to frame abuse as exceptional rather than structural.

This is not a failure of evidence. It is a failure of political will.

Featured image via the Canary