Claire Wilmot

So I think when you look at the ways that women continue to be disbelieved in these kind of small, minute ways, whether it's police exercising their discretionary power about what cases to take on, whether it's a social worker who's deciding whether or not to refer someone to additional supports, those sorts of ways that women are doubted speak

speak to how much work we still need to do at that structural level to disrupt these forms of power, like race, like gender, like class, that shape who has to prove what to who.

And so, you know, I don't want to position Me Too as a total failure.

I think Me Too did bring a lot of really much needed reforms, but my work is interested in the aftermath of those.

How do we take those

and actually make them do the structural work that manifests in our systems of belief.

And that's, in some ways, quite a bit harder than changing laws because there's no clear targets.

I think, you know, for a long time,

There was an expectation that we just kind of shut up and don't talk about sexual violence and don't demand accountability.

And I think the Me Too movement raised expectations about what legal systems could do for people.

And then, you know, these reports were running up against different sorts of constraints that the legal systems in these jurisdictions are governed by.

For me, and I don't want to say that a high conviction rate is a measure of justice.

I think a lot of the women that I interview aren't actually that interested in convictions.

They're interested in accountability.

They're interested in reparations.

Sometimes they're interested in ways to help get their lives back on track.

But, you know, the fact that so many of these cases are falling off at later stages in the criminal legal system suggests that women and girls and men and boys as well who've survived sexual violence are demanding more from systems that are not able to meet those demands.

And so I think addressing that justice gap is going to be really key moving forward.

Yeah, I have no idea if there will ever be a full accounting or frankly, even what accountability would look like.

The Epstein files show us that there's such a wide range of forms of complicity in this kind of sexual violence, trafficking and exploitation of underage girls in the case of Jeffrey Epstein himself.