n 2 July, the jury delivered a guilty verdict on some of the charges against the music mogul Sean Combs, accused of horrific sexual abuse of women with the help of his extensive staff and deep pockets. He’s also accused in many civil suits of sexual abuse of adults and minors. It seems like everyone promptly forgot about Combs when the facts about the financier Jeffrey Epstein’s decades of horrific sexual abuse of at least a 100 girls and women, with the help of his extensive staff, deep pockets, banks, and elite connections became the next front-page ruckus.

In June, the movie producer Harvey Weinstein was found guilty in a New York retrial for some of his decades of horrific sexual abuse of women, with the help of his extensive staff, top lawyers, the film industry, some ex-Mossad agents and of course his deep pockets. In February a federal appeals court upheld the convictions and 30-year prison sentence of the singer R Kelly for racketeering and sex trafficking; last year his other 20-year sentence was also upheld, for producing child abuse images and enticement of children for sex. Of course his deep pockets and extensive assistance had also been factors in how he too was able to abuse girls for so long.

One of the reasons the epidemic of violence against women is so unacknowledged is because cases like these are talked about individually, and often treated as though they are shocking aberrations rather than part of a pervasive pattern that operates at all levels of society. Another is that it is in the most literal sense not news – there are tides of hatred and violence against other groups that ebb and flow, but violence against women is global and enduring, a constant rather than an event. Another is that law enforcement and the legal system have often been more interested in protecting perpetrators and society has often normalized and even celebrated violence against women.

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But in another sense the whole society is hiding something: that this violence is everywhere and it deeply shapes – or misshapes – our society. The statistics I cited above address the victims of specific crimes. But all girls and women are impacted by the reality that so many men want to harm us and these crimes could happen to any one of us. This violence affects the choices we make about where to go and when, what jobs to take, when to speak up, what to wear. The threat of violence and actual violence by some men against some women and girls establishes female vulnerability and fear and disempowerment far more broadly. Society has largely required us to alter our lives to avoid this, rather than society being altered to make us free and equal. This violence is an engine of inequality that benefits all men, insofar as being “more equal than others” in this respect is a benefit.

The piecemeal stories – “here is this one bad man we need to do something about” – don’t address the reality that the problem is systemic and the solution isn’t police and prison. It’s social change, and societies will have changed enough when violence against women ceases to be a pandemic that stretches across continents and centuries. Systemic problems require systemic responses, and while I’m all for releasing the Epstein files, I want a broader conversation and deeper change.