We owe it to every victim of Jeffrey Epstein to better protect women and girls in Britain. And we will | Jess Phillips

. UK edition

Million Women Rise vigil outside New Scotland Yard, central London, in memory of women and girls killed and harmed by male violence, 25 November 2021.
Million Women Rise vigil outside New Scotland Yard, central London, in memory of women and girls killed and harmed by male violence, 25 November 2021. Photograph: James Manning/PA

I am furious that women and children have to endure a crisis like this for progress to become politically possible. But I will seize this moment, says minister for violence against women and girls Jess Phillips

It always takes a calamity – a dreadful murder that reaches every front page, a mass paedophile ring being uncovered, or a political scandal unfolding – to make institutions sit up and act on violence against women and children. These windows of potential energy are never wasted by women’s rights activists. Historically, they have used them to build the #MeToo movement, to fight for legislation change and to push for greater resources for victims.

I’ve done it, many times – “never waste a crisis” is my mantra. In the past few weeks, while the nation’s attention has been on the political fallout from the Epstein files, I have seen the opportunity to push for more, for better. To move beyond the throwaway line about the victims being the most important thing – and to actually make them just that. Deeds not words are what matter. If repentance and sorrow is all we achieve out of the courage of the Epstein victims, we will have failed; change is all that will suffice.

That said, I am weary, tired and frankly downright furious that women and children must wait for a crisis to get progress. I wish that systems and institutions didn’t need us to bleed first and act second. Women ask for this at times of calm, we shouldn’t have to scream.

When we were writing Labour’s violence against women and girls strategy, this was always at the forefront of my mind. The fact that we couldn’t once again just have some nice prepackaged policy that we could pull off a shelf when the going got tough. It had to be long-term, systemic change in our police, in our courts, in our health services, our armed forces, our housing, our schools. We had to start really focusing on preventing the terrible harm from happening in the first place, not just trying to make nicer plasters to cover up the cuts and bruises. We had to get other government departments to realise that the safety, security and wellbeing of half the population wasn’t just a Home Office issue.

I have worked on this issue under many governments – it always felt a bit one note, and investment in prevention has never been made. We had to change that, we had to write a strategy that would actually deliver on our commitment to halve violence against women and children. Of course, I want to end all violence against women and girls, just like I want world peace, but committing to that would be nothing more than a throwaway line, an aspiration, a pipe dream. Our aim had to be actually achievable and practically measurable.

No UK government has ever dared or cared to put a number on the problem before, because this issue has always been seen as too big to deal with or too likely to fail. Our target of halving violence against women and girls within a decade matters to me – it holds us to account, it focuses the minds of those with levers of power and demands that they pull them. Long-term, persistent, consistent, backaching and heartbreaking work is the only thing that is even going to remotely shift the dial on this issue.

The NHS has to take responsibility for the consequences of this abuse just as it would with diabetes. Schools must be given the tools to deal with how these incidents affect their pupils. If children grow up to be perpetrators of abuse or end up as victims, that will ruin their life chances and ability to function in the workplace more completely than not being good at maths. It’s no good having an engineering degree if you end up on the sex offender register – and the growing number of young people becoming perpetrators of these crimes should frighten us all.

Want to tackle growth and productivity? Well, the annual socioeconomic cost for domestic abuse alone is estimated to be £89bn, without even including, rape, sexual harassment, stalking and other abuses. I could go on and cover every area of policy in every government department that would fail if it didn’t stop and think about how this issue will undermine its progress. This is what this government is seeking to do, to really change this thing once and for all – to change the system, not just react.

Epstein’s victims don’t just need me to make sure no UK airport could ever be used to traffic them again. That loophole has been closed, and we will, of course, close any others we need to – but that isn’t enough. They need me to make sure that those who abused them are actually held accountable so they can’t do it again. They need me to make it so there is less likely to be a future Epstein in a UK classroom today; they need me to make sure legislation stops abusers who use naked images and online hideaways to groom them in the first place. They need me to make sure that when they say that they have suffered, not only do they have recourse in the law – but also that their mental health is cared for with therapeutic and social support so that they can recover and live prosperous lives.

I will use the momentum of the current political attention on this subject to get more; I always do and always will. It’s how I have been trained to operate over decades, like the scrappy kid at the dinner table of a large family that I am. But I am damned if I will let these pinch-point moments be the only time those calls are heard. The long-term strategy of the government must be exactly that – long term.

I am proud of the challenge we have tried to rise to, of the strategy with investment and system change at its heart; but even that we must stretch to meet our ambitions, and it must never only be cared about when it is politically expedient to do so. Epstein’s victims deserve better.