When Violence Is Reframed as Preference
Every so often, someone says something so casually harmful that it stops you in your tracks. Recently, I heard the statement: “Epstein wasn’t into eight-year-olds, he was into fifteen-year-olds.” It stayed with me, not because the sentiment was new, but because it revealed such a familiar and deeply troubling logic. It is the logic that reframes abuse as a matter of preference and turns the exploitation of children into something negotiable depending on age.
This is the cultural rot I keep writing about. A worldview that has spent generations sexualising girls, rationalising violence, and inventing new ways to make harm sound less harmful. When someone claims the abuse of a fifteen-year-old is less disturbing than the abuse of an eight-year-old, they are drawing from a long history of minimising violence, softening its language, and making exploitation easier for society to digest.
The sexualisation of teenage girls is not an accident. It is a structural feature of the world we live in. Film, media, music, and everyday social attitudes all contribute to the idea that teenage girls are almost women. This narrative makes them hyper-visible as sexual beings while stripping them of their right to be protected as children. It is the same logic that tells us a fifteen-year-old “knows what she is doing,” a fourteen-year-old is “grown,” or a sixteen-year-old looks “mature for her age.” These phrases are never neutral. They are cultural tools that make certain girls, especially Black and Brown girls, appear older and less innocent in the eyes of the public. And once innocence is removed, protection follows soon after.
This is why so many people instinctively believe that the exploitation of a teenager is less severe. The boundaries of childhood have already been blurred by a society that insists on seeing some girls as adults long before they become one.
Rape culture thrives on technicalities. When someone says “it wasn’t eight-year-olds, it was fifteen-year-olds,” they shift the focus away from the violence and onto a superficial detail. This redirection softens the discomfort. It allows people to distance themselves from the gravity of the harm. It is the same pattern that excuses teachers who develop relationships with students, men who claim they did not know a girl was underage, or older predators who wait until a child hits the legal age of consent by a matter of days. None of these scenarios become less exploitative just because the language surrounding them is manipulated.
Power makes true consent impossible. A child cannot meaningfully consent to an adult who holds wealth, influence, status, or any form of authority. Not at eight. Not at fifteen. Not at seventeen. The presence of overwhelming power collapses the possibility of autonomy. Coercion does not need to be loud to be coercive. Compliance does not equal consent.
The practice of comparing ages also erases the lived experiences of survivors. It suggests that a fifteen-year-old should somehow have known better. It implies that her trauma is less legitimate, that she is closer to adulthood, and therefore less harmed. That kind of thinking is violent. It shifts empathy away from the child and toward the perpetrator’s supposed preferences. It encourages society to debate harm as though it has a gradient, as though some children are more deserving of protection than others.
We cannot allow this logic to continue unchecked. The moment we start negotiating which children count as victims is the moment we align ourselves with systems that protect abusers and silence survivors. Minimising harm creates apathy. It conditions people to overlook violence. It trains communities to accept exploitation when it is packaged neatly enough.
There is no acceptable age for abuse. There is no softer version of exploitation. There is no universe where harming a child becomes justified based on how close she is to adulthood. Harm is harm. A child is a child. And our language should reflect the seriousness of what is being done to them.
