Sexual predators come in every colour, but impunity has a privileged face

The latest revelations about Jeffrey Edward Epstein, the American financier and convicted sex offender, confirm what many suspected: that sexual predation is not confined to the margins, nor to outsiders, but flourishes at the heart of power.

Epstein, first convicted in 2008, continued to move in elite circles for years. He abused under-age girls in plain sight, shielded by his wealth and by the willingness of others to look the other way. The newest disclosures from his estate — hundreds of emails, diaries and photographs — show how deeply he remained enmeshed in the establishment.

Among those caught in his web was Peter Mandelson, disgraced this month as Britain’s ambassador to Washington after emails revealed him calling Epstein his “best pal” and questioning the legitimacy of his conviction. Mandelson’s fall matters. It proves that Epstein was not shunned by Britain’s establishment; he was enabled by it. That a senior British statesman, entrusted with one of the nation’s top diplomatic posts, could maintain such a friendship tells us much about Britain: predators are shielded not just by money, but by networks of respectability.

Indeed, Britain has been quicker to denounce another category of abuser: the South Asian grooming gangs of Yorkshire, a county in northern England. Between 1997 and 2013, an estimated 1,400 girls — most of them white working-class teenagers — were abused in the town of Rotherham. Many perpetrators were of South Asian heritage. Local police and social services failed to act, sometimes out of fear of being branded racist, sometimes out of callous indifference.

The Rotherham scandal became a national obsession. Tabloid headlines screamed of “sex-mad Asians” and “Asian grooming gangs”. Far-right groups such as the English Defence League and Britain First seized on the scandal to argue that multiculturalism had spawned an “Asian rape culture”. The narrative was stark: brown men as predators, white girls as victims, Britain under siege.

But here too, the truth was more complicated. Allegations have since emerged that some of the very police officers assigned to protect the girls were themselves abusers. A handful of white policemen are accused of exploiting the same victims, or of turning a blind eye while their colleagues did. That double betrayal rarely made the front pages. The story was too valuable as a morality tale about “Asians” to admit that white predators were woven through it as well.

This is the central danger: telling only half the story. UK national statistics show that most sexual abuse in Britain is committed by white men, including teachers, clergy, family members, even law enforcement. Group-based grooming cases like Rotherham are only a fraction of the wider problem. But because the perpetrators there were brown and the victims white, the scandal was amplified into a racialised spectacle that obscured how abuse thrives across all communities.

The cost was borne twice over: by the victims themselves, and by British Asians collectively. Entire communities, especially Pakistani Muslims, were placed under suspicion, treated as if they were complicit in crimes committed by a few. Meanwhile, the white establishment — from Epstein’s “best pals” to police forces in Yorkshire — largely escaped the same scrutiny. When authority figures are implicated, society looks away. When brown men are guilty, society shouts.

This pattern is not new. During the Second World War, venereal disease-ridden British soldiers were periodically released from their cantonments in north-east India, where they preyed on local women under the gaze of indifferent colonial authorities. Their whiteness, their uniforms, their rank did not prevent their crimes; they concealed them. The echoes are unmistakable. From the bazaars of colonial Assam to Epstein’s mansions in New York, from Rotherham’s backstreets to Westminster’s embassies, the pattern is one of power and impunity.

If countries like Britain are serious about protecting children, they must strip away the myths. That means better data: police forces must record the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims, rather than leave the figures patchy and politically exploitable. It means independent oversight: allegations of police involvement in abuse must never be investigated internally. And it means victim-centred policy, recognising that working-class girls in northern UK towns were dismissed as “making choices” while elites in London pretended Epstein’s companions were none of their concern.

Predators come in every colour. But it is the white and powerful who have most often enjoyed impunity. Until we face that fact — in Epstein’s America and in Yorkshire’s streets — the cycle of betrayal will continue.