The Lost Daughters: A Myth of Our Time.

There are many threads to unpick in the Epstein scandal. As others have mentioned, this is the tip of the iceberg, the front of a much wider, much deeper, global operation.

Today I am thinking about the girls who were brought into the ring, many of whom are described as coming from “vulnerable backgrounds”. Girls escaping from abusive and broken homes are easy prey.

According to an article published in the Independent last December, more than 40,000 women and girls go missing in the UK every year. In many cases, abuse at home led to their disappearance. What is less known and is insufficiently investigated is what happened to them while they were missing. Often girls and women are wary of disclosing information to the authorities due to a mistrust of police and fear of repercussions from their abusers.

In the States, the annual figure for missing girls and women is upward of an astonishing 270,000. In 2024 198,680 women and girls under the age of 21 were reported missing.

Lost or stolen children appear to have been a popular musical and theatrical theme at the end of the 19^th century. In Ireland “The Stolen Child “by W.B. Yeats was published in 1889.

In the States, Edward Marks and Joseph Stern published the song “The Little Lost Child” in 1894. The song tells the story of a lost girl found by a passing policeman. The policeman then finds the girl’s mother, who turns out to be his estranged wife. The family are happily reunited. The Little Lost Child became an illustrated song, a show where images were projected alongside the performance for the entertainment of the audience. Sheet music of “The Passing Policeman,” sold more than two million copies. This painting is from one of the song’s illustrations.

Performer Allen May brought “The Little Lost Girl” to Cleveland in January 1895 where “many members of the Cleveland police department witnessed and appreciated the performance”.

In December 1899, a mysterious donor gifted a painting to the Cleveland police department. Depicting a scene from the musical, it was known as “The Little Lost Girl”.

It was later discovered that the donor was a character of the redlight district, a male who was well known in the area. The painting however was not made by him and was apparently the work of a female “demimonde”, by all accounts a sex worker. It is reported that while she was clearly endowed with some talent, preferred a “life of shame” to an artistic career.

The painting hung on the walls of the police department for many years as a token of pride, illustrating the protective and caring nature of the force. I think the little girl looks terrified.

As the hidden underworld of Epstein and his guests begins to unfold, there will be many questions and threads to follow to the rotten roots. In this moment, my thoughts are with the girls who for whatever reason became tangled in a dark web of exploitation and abuse at the hands of an entitled elite.  They are the lost daughters and there are many of them. Evidence of the lost daughter in our culture is apparent in a thousand ways, some subtle, some not so. Behind the lost daughters are broken mothers, and wounded mother-lines.  The lost, betrayed, and abused daughter is an archetypal trope that appears in many myths and fairytales; it is a myth of our time.

The pyramid of society not only rewards the top tier with money, status, and power; the bounty harvested is more than material, it is psychological and spiritual.