Beginning With the Child. What the Epstein Files Reveal About Adulthood and the Protection of Children

A Rainbow Over Us

Could we agree that an adult is simply one who is no longer a child – and that a child fundamentally needs an adult to live, beginning with a mother’s breast for nourishment and a parent’s arms to caress and hold?

Where, then, is the true emphasis on children in Homo sapiens society?

So much of our education appears sexualised from the very start. Even before birth, someone is eager to look between our legs at the shape of our genitalia and categorise us as “male” or “female.” For what purpose? What does this early fixation shape in us?

Many children’s stories teach that the future lies in “the couple.” From Adam and Eve to Cinderella, living alone is portrayed as unthinkable. The message often seems to be that without another adult – or at least a pet, a domesticated form of companionship – one risks death or pain. Better be attractive, better be desirable, or your future is at risk. This is the silent lesson beneath many fairy tales.

The “future.” This is where the emphasis often lies for children, isn’t it? “Independence – quickly, please!” Are children not frequently called “the future of humanity,” as if they did not fully matter in the present? As if their “value” – this cruel human belief in “worth” – were always deferred.

Then the child observes their parents and often senses that the parents’ relationship competes with the relationship to the child: sex or care? Theatre or the sea? With children or without? The couple – and the pleasure expected within it – becomes normalised as the axis around which “the family” turns.

Yet what do we really mean by “the couple”? A sexualised bond does not automatically explore meaning, intention, or change over time. Two adults being together does not inherently answer the question of why they are together.

Perhaps the clearest and most undeniable responsibility an adult has is toward the child they bring into this world – a world shaped by adults who often fear being alone, fear not being attractive, fear death itself, and therefore remain preoccupied with desirability, financial success, and longevity. These values are reinforced culturally through marriage, wildly unequal incomes – why are we not all paid the same hourly? – and economic systems that reward those who can buy and sell, making adults prioritise wealth and status over care for children.

Children embody a form of beauty and intelligence rooted in innocence – something adults often overlook or trample in the pursuit of power, in the pursuit of a validation they rarely question. Where was their own self-esteem lost?

I wonder whether the unthinkable cruelty toward children revealed in the Epstein Files exposes an envy of what power can never possess: innocence and its beauty.

Adults envious of their children.

If we want institutions led by adults who protect rather than harm, then the examination cannot be superficial. It must begin with how each of us understands adulthood itself – how we were made to believe we were not “enough” from the start, and what that belief did to us as children, and then as adults.

 

https://fatoufrancescambow.substack.com/p/beginning-with-the-child