In March 2026, former teacher and Bloc Québécois (Bloc) member of Parliament Pascal-Pierre Paillé was arrested and charged with sexual offences involving two minors, the allegations dating back to 2006 and as recently as August 2024. Paillé, who represented the riding of Louis-Hébert for the Bloc from 2008 to 2011, was released from custody under court-ordered conditions, including a ban on entering parks, playgrounds, and daycare centres, as well as a prohibition on holding any position of authority over individuals under the age of 18.
Cases like Paillé’s no longer shock the public in the way they once did. Instead, they dissolve into a continuous stream of allegations involving high-profile figures where each new case resembles the last. Cases like Jeffrey Epstein’s and the Canadian national hockey team sexual assault scandal are paraded online and eventually fade—but do not disappear entirely from public memory. Instead, what remains is a kind of acceptance—an assumption that elites are capable of perpetrating such violence and are rarely met with real accountability. Over time, that assumption doesn’t only become a belief, but an expectation.
Overexposure to sexual violence and abuses of power have made stories like Paillé’s disturbingly familiar. While individual cases may fade from immediate public attention, their accumulation quietly reshapes what we come to accept as normal in public life. But familiarity is not the same as understanding, and forgetting is not inevitable. One must make the active choice not only to remember survivors but also to place the blame squarely on the perpetrators and continue fighting for justice until it is achieved. This collective memory and persistence offer a counterweight to desensitization. Without that mobilization, memory becomes a passive archive of repeated harm, dulling public response, weakening accountability, and enabling thenormalization of sexual violence.
Social media is a principal enabler of the desensitization of sexual violence. Following the partial release of the Epstein files by the Trump administration, the collections of emails, text exchanges, court documents, and heavily redacted records linked to late financier Jeffrey Epstein offer a fragmented but disturbing glimpse into a network of abuse sustained by wealth and power. Their release demonstrates a troubling paradox: An overabundance of information can obscure rather than clarify the truth. When millions of documents are made public, the sheer volume of material overwhelms the average reader, making it impossible to extract meaning, and even more so, hold aggressors accountable.
At the same time, social media platforms transform these events into consumable content. As allegations circulate, they are reframed through memes, satire, and viral posts, reducing serious crimes to moments of entertainment. In the case of Epstein, a scandal that has swept the world, the proliferation of online jokes and edited content has shifted attention away from victims and toward the spectacle of those allegedly involved, trivializing the severity of sexual violence and reshaping how it is perceived.
More concerning is the role of algorithmic systems in reinforcing this process. Social media platforms are designed to maximize engagement, often by promoting increasingly provocative or emotionally charged content. Repeated exposure to violent or disturbing material—whether actively sought or passively recommended—has been shown to blunt emotional responses, reduce empathy, and normalize harsh or dehumanizing interpretations of others. Over time, this creates a feedback loop in which users not only consume more extreme content, but also become less affected by it. In an environment that prizes reactions over interactions, sexual violence and severe abuses of power become unfortunate but nonetheless ordinary occurrences.
Collective memory, then, is an essential form of resistance against this desensitization. The Epstein case made it clear: These abuses were not isolated but sustained by complex webs of power that run deep through the world’s elite, relying on silence, corruption, and the public’s short attention span to persist. Without an active effort to preserve and organize memory into action, serious crimes risk becoming just another reel on Instagram—scrolled past, shared, laughed at, and buried under the next trending post. To remember, in this context, is not enough. Memory must be mobilized, or we risk forgetting—and in doing so, forcing survivors to forgive.