Member

As I set out last week, Jeffrey Epstein was a despicable criminal who committed disgusting crimes. The Epstein scandal is another awful example of a culture that did not value the lives, let alone the voices, of women and girls. The series and sequencing of events across the last week have made it clear to us all, rightly, that for too long, and too often, influential people in positions of power—overwhelmingly men—have been able to avoid proper and just scrutiny because of the perverse power structures that incentivise their belief that rules do not apply to them. If I may say so, Members who are chuntering from the Conservative Benches while I am talking about the victims of sexual abuse and the abuse of power should know better and recognise that they should be quiet and listen when we are talking about victims and the justice that they deserve to seek.