When the Government Looks Away: The Psychological Violence of Institutional Silence

A reflection on the Epstein victims, the Pam Bondi hearing, and what it means when the state chooses not to see us.

There is a particular kind of wound that doesn’t come from the original crime. It comes from what happens after, when you raise your hand in a room full of powerful people, and the woman at the podium keeps talking as if your hand isn’t there.

A few weeks ago, I watched the Pam Bondi hearing. And I have not been able to let it go. The Jeffrey Epstein survivors were in that courtroom. They sat there, visible, present, composed with a kind of dignity that took my breath away, while excuse after excuse was offered for why due diligence had not been done to protect them.

And then came the moment that stopped me cold: the survivors were asked to stand. And then they were asked how many of them had reached out to the Attorney General of the United States and never received a call back.

Every single hand went up.

That image is not something you unsee. Because what happened in that room wasn’t just a bureaucratic failure. It was a message. And we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we did not name exactly what that message was, and who it was directed at.

I. What This Tells Us As a Society

When the highest levels of government publicly ignore survivors of sexual abuse, it does not happen in a vacuum. It sends a signal that ripples outward through every institution, every courtroom, every school hallway, every family dinner table where a survivor is trying to decide whether to speak.

The signal is this: your suffering has a ceiling on how much it matters, and that ceiling is determined by the power of the person who harmed you.

Institutions teach us what is real and what is worthy of response. When a survivor reports abuse and is met with silence, not from one person, but from the apparatus of government itself, we are collectively being taught that certain violations are tolerable. That certain victims are acceptable losses. That justice is not, in fact, blind. It has very specific vision. It sees power clearly and the powerless only when convenient.

This is not a personal failing of any one official. It is systemic. And that is precisely what makes it so damaging. Personal cruelty can be named and confronted. Systemic indifference hides behind process, procedure, and plausible deniability.

When survivors stood in that room with their hands raised and were met with justifications rather than accountability, society received its lesson for the day: we do not protect the already harmed. We protect the institution.

II. What This Tells Men

Let’s say what needs to be said plainly.

When powerful men watch other powerful men face no meaningful consequence for the sexual abuse of women and children, a permission structure is reinforced. Not always consciously. But culturally, psychologically, deeply.

It tells some men that access to victims is something that can be managed, navigated, and ultimately escaped, especially with enough money, enough lawyers, and enough friends in the right offices. It tells them that the system was not ultimately designed to hold them accountable. That women’s testimony has a weight limit. That enough time, enough bureaucracy, enough polite deflection can make even the most egregious harm disappear into paperwork.

For men who already struggle with accountability, this is not a neutral observation. It is an invitation.

And for men of conscience, good men who genuinely want to do right — it sends a demoralizing message too: that speaking up, standing with survivors, demanding accountability from institutions is an uphill battle against something much larger than any individual act of courage. It breeds cynicism where solidarity should grow.

The absence of consequence is never neutral. It is always instruction.

III: What This Tells Us as Women

For those of us who watched that hearing as women, who have our own histories, our own silences, our own calculations about when it is safe to speak, that moment landed somewhere specific in the body.

It told us what many of us already suspected but keep hoping is not true: that we can do everything right and still be ignored.

These women came forward. They survived. They showed up. They sat in a formal hearing before the United States Senate. They stood when asked. They raised their hands when asked. They did not disappear. They did not go quiet. They did everything the system told them to do, and the system looked past them and offered procedural explanations.

The psychological damage of this is not abstract. Research on institutional betrayal, the harm caused when institutions fail to protect people from abuse, or actively cover it up, shows that it compounds the original trauma significantly. It tells survivors that their judgment was wrong: that the world was not safe to trust, and when they trusted it anyway, they were right to have been afraid. It erodes the capacity to believe that justice is possible.

And it teaches younger women watching that silence may, in fact, be the wiser survival strategy.

That is the cruelest lesson of all. Because silence is what allowed this to continue for decades in the first place.

Are We Regressing, Or Finally Seeing Clearly?

I keep sitting with this question. Are we going backward? Or are we in a moment of revelation?

I think it may be both. And I think they are not opposites.

There is a concept worth sitting with: that we are in an era of exposure. That what is being revealed now, the callousness, the institutional protection of predators, the performative concern that evaporates under any real pressure, has always been there. The smoke and mirrors are just thinner now. The cracks are visible. The women in that courtroom are visible.

Perhaps what feels like regression is actually the discomfort of seeing something clearly that we were only half-seeing before. That is not progress in the triumphant sense. But it is truth. And truth, even when it is devastating, is where change begins.

The survivors who stood in that room with their hands raised were not invisible. They were witnessed, by each other, by those of us watching, by history. The institution may have looked away. We do not have to.

What happens to a society that repeatedly teaches its most harmed members that their pain is manageable, processable, and ultimately deniable? We are living in the answer to that question. And we get to decide whether to let that answer stand.

What Do We Do With This? An Honest Answer

I want to be honest about something, because I think it needs to be said out loud.

Watching that hearing, I felt discouraged in a way that was hard to sit with. Not just angry, discouraged. Because when the corruption lives that high up, when the people who are supposed to hold power accountable are the power, it creates a particular kind of despair.

An illusion, almost, that there is nothing left to do. That the machinery is too big. That our hands are too small.

I don’t think that’s weakness. I think that’s an honest response to something genuinely overwhelming.

But I’ve been sitting with where that feeling leads, and I think the trap is this: we imagine that change has to match the scale of the problem. That if the corruption is institutional, the solution has to be institutional too, and if we can’t immediately dismantle the institution, we might as well wait. Or give up. Or just be angry on the internet and move on.

That’s where the disillusionment takes root. And I think it’s worth calling it out for what it is: not the truth, but a trick. A very effective one.

Because change doesn’t start at the top. It never has.

It starts in the conversation you have with your child tonight about what respect looks like. It starts in the classroom where a teacher takes a complaint seriously instead of telling a kid to let it go. It starts in the workplace where someone in a position of even a little bit of power decides that what just happened to their colleague is not going to be swept under the rug — not on their watch. It starts in faith communities that choose accountability over protecting reputation. It starts between neighbors who decide that what happens on their street matters.

None of that feels as dramatic as a Senate hearing. None of it will make the news. But culture is not changed by headlines, it is changed by the slow, unglamorous accumulation of people doing the right thing in small rooms, over and over again, until doing the right thing becomes the expectation rather than the exception.

The survivors who stood in that courtroom were once children. And somewhere along the way, no one in their immediate world stepped in to protect them either. That is where the chain of failure began, long before it reached the highest offices in the land.

We cannot always fix what is broken at the top. But we have far more power than we’re given credit for, right where we are. In our homes. Our schools. Our workplaces. Our communities. Our places of worship.

Start there. Start small. Start now. And trust that it compounds, the same way silence compounded into the catastrophe we watched play out in that courtroom.

The antidote to institutional indifference is not waiting for better institutions. It’s becoming people, and raising people, who refuse to be indifferent.

Written in response to the Pam Bondi Senate confirmation hearing, February 2025.