Just Believe Women
History is defined by pivotal moments, outstanding segments of time delineated by a shift, a movement so subtle yet powerful, you know it when you’ve felt it. Such was the day of the press conference in Washington D.C. by and for the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein & Ghislane Maxwell’s sexual violence. While the far too much of the general population argues back and forth about hoax vs. legitimacy, and our FBI ‘director’ states an absence of credible evidence, we culturally all live within a communal blindspot that in actuality should be glaringly obvious: when you have the firsthand testimony of countless witnesses, you no longer require a burden of proof in terms of evidence to move forward.Survivor stories should be more than damning enough.
If this is what these women had to live through, they have more than earned the right to be heard, for us to believe them. No woman wants to come forward as a survivor of sexual violence, we do so out of our place in own personal journeys; some carry it for decades, some speak out immediately (but not often). There is nothing to be gained by survivors when identifying their abusers, the burden of having to prove the validity of their stories is a drain only those who’ve shared the weight of it understand. We already know we won’t be believed. We already know we’ll be dismissed or gaslit. We already know we will be blamed and shamed and told how it was really on us (because they will always find a way to blame the woman for the violence inflicted upon her by unfortunately, most frequently men).
We as a society always poke and prod, failing to realize or recognize that exposing the most painful parts of life, the most raw and vulnerable aspects, is not some picnic or walk in the park, and while there may be a release in speaking to what happened to you, it also never fully goes away. If that’s the weight women are too frequently forced to carry, the least we can do is give them the dignity of believing them, of honoring their bravery in the face of so much frightening adversity.