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Teachers and parents in the UK need to be brave and discuss Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes with children and young people or risk them looking for answers from dubious or dangerous sources, according to experts who will host the first public seminar for schools on the issue.
Thrive, the education consultancy hosting the online seminar on the convicted child sex offender, said: “Many children and young people are encountering this material often without context, warnings or adult support, leaving educators to manage the emotional and safeguarding impact in real time.”
Adele Gladman, a specialist in child sexual exploitation who will take part in the event, said she was not surprised that children as young as six had been asking about Epstein, given the sustained media coverage and huge public interest.
Gladman said schools and parents needed to get ahead of the curve and prepare to answer questions about Epstein and his involvement with figures such as Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor that would inevitably come from young people.
“The first thing is to be brave, because these are difficult conversations to have but they are also important conversations to have. And make no mistake about it, if you don’t have the conversation, those children will seek information elsewhere, and it’s the elsewhere that isn’t healthy and presents a risk,” Gladman said.
“If children aren’t given the opportunity to talk to trusted adults about it then they are going to go online, they are going to go into forums, they are going to talk to chatbots, and that’s where the risk lies because that’s where the misinformation and disinformation is.”
Viv Trask-Hall, Thrive’s head of theory and practice and one of the speakers, said more than 2,000 educators had already signed up to the webinar on Wednesday, an indication of strong interest from professionals in the sector.
Trask-Hall said the decision to hold the webinar came after hearing about questions and comments coming from pupils, and the difficulties of responding given Epstein’s horrific crimes as a sex offender and exploiter.
“If they are reaching out to an adult or a professional, they obviously trust the adult, so we need to give them a suitable answer,” Trask-Hall said. “You might think that young people will only hear about Epstein if they go out and look for it, but sometimes it is being served up by the algorithm connected to whichever social media they are using.
“That’s what we are finding, that it comes from lots of the social media content that the algorithms are sending to children and young people.”
Gladman, who was one of the first to uncover child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, said the level of exploitation exposed by the Epstein files was a “revelation” for society.
“It’s really highlighted, I think, the need for dialogue around vulnerability, and what is it that draws young women in particular into involvement with things like this,” Gladman said.
“It comes at a time when we’ve almost become desensitised to exploitation. I think some people will talk about child exploitation as only going on with gangs or happening in the past, but when you talk to young people about things like OnlyFans, it’s become very normalised, that it’s OK to sell nudes and images. But we still don’t get what makes people vulnerable to being exploited.”
However schools choose to approach the subject, Gladman urged them to keep parents informed. “A lot of parents and carers will be struggling with how to talk to their children about the Epstein story because it’s too distressing, it’s too big to comprehend. I think it’s good for schools to communicate with parents and carers about what they are saying to children and how they are doing it, to reassure them,” she said.
