The Jeffrey Epstein cover-up is an affront to US democracy | Rebecca Solnit

"Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known as a nondisclosure agreement and a system too often run by men for men at the expense of women and children."

"That is to say, rapists count on getting away with it because of a system that hands them power and steals it from their victims. They count on a silencing system. On profound inequality. Which is what makes rape such a peculiar crime: it is the ritual enactment of the perpetrator's power and the victim's powerlessness, buttressed by the circumstances that puts and keeps each of them in those roles."

"It's driven by the desire to use sexuality to cause physical and psychic injury, to dominate, to celebrate the rapist's power and the victim's powerlessness, to treat another human being as a person without rights, including the right to set boundaries, to say no and to speak up afterward. A society that perpetuates and protects this desire and arrangement is rape culture, and it's been our culture throughout most of its existence."

Rape constitutes a direct attack on democratic equality and inalienable individual rights. Perpetrators rely on both physical force and social-legal mechanisms to silence victims and evade accountability. Systems that discount victims' voices employ shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, nondisclosure agreements, and male-dominated institutions to protect perpetrators. Rape operates as a ritual enactment of perpetrator power and victim powerlessness, driven by a desire to inflict physical and psychic injury and deny consent and boundaries. A society that sustains these dynamics embodies rape culture. Feminist progress over the past half century and especially the past dozen years has increased equality of voice, legal support, and representation in justice systems.

Read at www.theguardian.com