Long before I had ever heard of Jeffrey Epstein, before Donald Trump had declared intentions to run for President, before the trafficking and sexual abuse of teen girls was in the news 24/7 in connection with the highest seat of power in the country, I had spent years teaching children and youth about their rights to their bodies and safety in classrooms as an educator for a rape crisis center.
Later, while working for my state’s Tribal health system, I spent years traveling to the small Indigenous villages accessible only by small plane and to cities and to youth detention facilities and homeless shelters to meet with teens, conducting focus groups so that young people could shape educational and prevention materials on sexual violence. This was a project to modify a national evidence-based intervention called the “patient safety card” so it would really speak to young Alaskans.
The two wallet-sized, fold-out cards we created, called “We Are Worthy” and “Getting Together,” reflected not only the language used by young people in villages, towns, and cities across Alaska, but also reflected their lived experiences of familial abuse, trafficking and survival sex, assault at parties, and teen dating violence—and reflected the ways they wanted to receive help from their peers and from adults. I also conducted focus groups in the past few years to understand what teens wanted from the adults in their lives to support their health and safety more broadly, both at home and in schools and programs.
As the trafficking, abuse and commercial sexual exploitation of teen girls is front and center in the news right now, I want to share some of what these young people taught me and what I learned through years of work with healthcare, education and other youth-serving staff. I believe we all have a role and can build on this moment in politics and news to prepare and empower the young people in our lives and create greater safety for them.
Youth Want to Talk. There Are Tools to Help You Do That
Although young people may squirm or roll their eyes when adults bring up hard topics like healthy versus unhealthy relationships, consent, sexual abuse, online misogyny and the manosphere, on the whole, young people share that they do want honest conversations with caring and compassionate adults about these topics.
However, they do not just want to be lectured. There are many ways adults and teens can learn and share dialogue together about what’s happening in schools, communities and even in the news right now. There are many resources that can make this job easier for family members, educators, coaches and others who work with youth. For example, the “Getting Together” card we created with input from youth across the state was later adopted by Alaska’s Department of Education as part of a toolkit for classroom teachers to address teen dating violence. Likewise, we worked with youth to make skits that go along with each segment of the card to help young people see the application of these ideas in real-life scenarios and to serve as a jumping off point for dialogue. Nationally, many tools are available for youth and the adults who support them, such as Love Is Respect, Planned Parenthood’s Teen Resources page (a fantastic jumping-off point for many resources) and programs for schools such as Green Dot bystander education.
Adults don’t need to know everything, but they can explore resources like those along with youth and talk about them. These tools can also help youth break down what they are hearing about in the news right now, and help them make sense of, for example, Megyn Kelly’s comments downplaying the sexual abuse of 15-year-olds, or how a man who bragged publicly about barging in on naked teen girls at his pageant was elected president twice.
As much as it seems that youth want to ignore the adults around them, the research shows—and the youth I have spoken with over the course of my career have all shared—that they need us. They need us to listen to them, to share accurate information with them and to engage in respectful dialogue to help them navigate the world around them. Because believe me, they are taking in the world around them.
Youth Want to Understand What Is Healthy Versus Unhealthy
I want to preface this section by saying that we cannot lump girls, boys and non-binary or trans youth together because their experiences of these issues are dramatically different. CDC data from 2022 revealed that queer, non-binary and trans youth and teen girls experience dating violence, harassment, depression and suicidal ideation at much higher rates than boys do. Boys are aggressively recruited by the misogynist online manosphere and told to blame girls for their problems and behave in aggressive, entitled ways towards girls, increasing this disparity. Therefore, some of this education needs to be tailored to those different experiences.
However, boys also experience alarmingly high rates of abuse, depression, and suicidal ideation, and need resources to help them. Furthermore, young people of all genders need to learn how to be healthy friends, healthy bystanders, and healthy romantic and sexual partners—and indeed are capable of learning this when given the right tools and support. Research has shown that medically-accurate, inclusive and culturally-appropriate healthy relationships and sexual health education yield significant positive results, reducing health and social problems. (And more recently, education on digital literacy is proving important and effective as well.) Young people can and do learn when given the right opportunities and modeling.
I remember the focus group I held to develop the language for the “Getting Together” card with boys in a youth detention facility. During the group discussion, one boy disclosed his own victimization. Another shared that he had done many of the negative behaviors on the “unhealthy relationships” panel but this card was making him see that his behavior was wrong and he wanted to learn and do better—with other boys piling on and giving him grief about his past misbehavior. Another boy disclosed afterwards to me about a man in his community who was preying on his sister, asking me for help to report it. They all thanked me for the chance to talk about something “real.”
Similarly, in my sexual violence education classes, high-school and middle-school boys seemed eager to learn, eager for unflinching conversation about what consent really means and how to be a safe partner. When developing the “Getting Together” card for youth, we chose to write it to speak both to potential victims and potential perpetrators, because all youth, regardless of where they’re at, deserve healthy relationship modeling upfront and deserve the chance to learn and grow.
Safety and Accountability
Education needs to go hand-in-hand with safety and accountability. While we need to treat all young people as capable of learning and growth, we also need to be attentive about who may be harming who in schools and other settings and prioritize safety for the young people being harmed. Part of learning includes accountability for youth who are engaging in demeaning, sexist, violent behavior.
Accountability also requires youth-serving institutions and settings—from schools to churches to sports teams to families—to prioritize youth safety over anything else when there is an unsafe adult. In 2024, I was so heartbroken to hear youth complaining to me that leadership in these institutions don’t listen when the youth report that a teacher, coach or pastor is creepy or has done inappropriate things. I was heartbroken that it sounded so similar to my own adolescence in the 90s when we all knew about the physical education teacher and the English teacher and the swim coaches who had done sexually abusive or “creepy” things, and yet the adults in power overlooked this because of staffing shortages or because of previous championship wins.
The fact that Epstein and his network of powerful abusers were able to get away with their crimes for as long as they did perhaps should not surprise us when we listen to any group of youth talk about which dangerous adults are in their communities and institutions, not facing any consequences. As adults, we have to be willing to upset the apple cart and attend to what young people share with us and create real cultures and systems of accountability in order to keep them safe and model safety.
Prioritizing the Health and Safety of Young People
This current political moment of the Epstein files could be a reckoning—not only for the MAGA movement and President Donald Trump, but for the cultures and institutions that have failed to prioritize and protect young people and young girls especially.
I believe we have a responsibility to catalyze this moment and equip young people with the understanding of what is going on and what their rights and responsibilities are. I believe we must meet this moment to ensure that our schools and other institutions are offering appropriate education on these topics and to ensure that we are creating safe environments for young people. We have tools to do this. We are not alone in figuring it out, and we cannot wait any longer. The young people in our lives need us.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.