• Virginia Giuffre’s pain ‘too much to carry’ says sister-in-law

After escaping the “cages and chains”, she remained anonymous for two decades, known simply as “Jane Doe 102” when Epstein was finally indicted for sexual abuse, but then bravely decided to speak out and fight back when she had her own daughter.

The allegations she made against influential, wealthy men including the Duke of York prompted a legal battle that culminated in a multimillion-pound out-of-court settlement after she said she was left alone with the sweaty royal “for the longest ten minutes of my life”, which he denies.

She wasn’t looking for fame, merely closure, and her testimony was crucial in jailing Maxwell for sex trafficking. But the pain of being in the spotlight, constantly judged, obviously became unbearable.

As a teenager, Giuffre was a victim of an era in which girls were told at school they could be anything, yet the cultural message was clear: a young woman’s greatest asset was her looks. It was the age of Viagra, of films like American Beauty, in which a middle-aged man had wild sexual fantasies about his teenage daughter’s best friend, and of magazine spreads such as the one in Rolling Stone picturing Britney Spears wearing polka-dot frilly pants.

Gail Porter had her naked body beamed on to the Houses of Parliament without her consent by the magazine FHM. The rapper Snoop Dogg turned up at music awards with “bitches” attached to leads, wearing dog collars.

• Once again, no one talks about the girls

Girls knew the drill. Men were using women’s sexuality for their own entertainment, while they were told to feel grateful if they could commercialise their physical assets. It was the era of the ladette, push-up bras and downing pints. Don’t be prudish, it’s all a joke.

Young women were expected to compete on this sexual stage. A new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, by Sophie Gilbert, shows how teenage girls were bombarded with the message that they were lucky to be men’s playthings. Giuffre wasn’t the only victim. Spears, Porter and Monica Lewinsky all suffered breakdowns but were labelled as on-the-make, attention-seeking drama queens when they complained.

The past is another country. Young women, we hope, are better protected from older men in 2025. Everyone has surely learnt their lesson; it couldn’t happen again.

And yet it has. Take the grooming gangs: older men handing around teenage girls to be abused; or the 56 MPs accused of sexual misconduct in the last parliament. Sexual predators still abound and the victims continue to be seen as problematic. When I interviewed one Rotherham survivor, Sammy Woodhouse, she was clearly deeply traumatised after being gang-raped while wearing her school uniform, but “I’m viewed as a slut and self-publicist”, she told me.

Too often, the victim is derided because they can’t seem to cope with the aftermath and may sometimes sound unhinged or vengeful. But these are damaged women. Of course they are complicated — many have taken drugs or alcohol to numb the nightmares.

The focus has now shifted to the next generation. The country has become fixated on the Netflix drama Adolescence, about a secondary school pupil killing a female classmate. We worry that young men’s addiction to online porn is leading them astray with increasingly violent content such as gagging, spitting and choking; that toxic influencers such as Andrew Tate are corrupting teenage boys, teaching them about male aggression and female submission.

Meanwhile, young women’s bodies are still too often seen as commercial commodities — just look at OnlyFans and the performer Lily Phillips, cheered on for sleeping with 101 men in a day.

We, their parents’ generation, need to do better. We should learn to support the abused rather than dismissing them as imperfect victims. We must become better role models for young men and women.

Giuffre set up the charity Soar (Speak Out, Act, Reclaim) to give better support to survivors of rape and trafficking. She tried her best to help other women and donated part of her £12 million settlement to the cause. Her family have described her as “a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse”. But, in the end, the toll became too great.

Let’s not wait for another woman to die before we step up. The best way of honouring her memory is to continue her work.