​Introduction 

Every single possible person that’s in the little tree of the young person’s network needs to be educated.
– Kate (Participant) 

Safety and recovery are, like victimisation, often cumulative. They accrue, or are eroded, incrementally over time, by institutions, interactions, and absences. For victims of sexual exploitation, especially those harmed as children or teens, safety is not found in a single disclosure, a well-worded campaign, or the quiet offer of counselling. It is built, or broken, by how people respond. This research centres the voices of women and non-binary people who were groomed, coerced, filmed, touched, used, raped, and lied about — often repeatedly, and often in plain sight. The violence described in these accounts was not incidental. It was calculated and patterned, and seldom disrupted swiftly or without inducing different kinds of distress for victims.  

The report gives form and detail to what victims already know: that telling someone is not the same as being helped. The first disclosure can be disbelieved, the second punished, and the third ignored. Even when they reach out to someone they trust, the system behind that person may still retraumatise, surveil, silence, or shame them. They learn from each of these interactions: that people will hear them, or not; that services are motivated by genuine interest in their safety and healing, or not; that they are worth protecting, supporting, and seeking justice for, or not. Accordingly, some of the most powerful findings are not about the presence or absence of help, but about how that help was delivered.  

When they disclosed their experiences of victimisation, many were disbelieved, blamed, or subjected to intrusive, shaming, or endangering actions by the people and services they told. Some were left carrying the emotional labour of protecting adults from discomfort, or defending their own credibility in the face of institutional doubt. Others described services as ‘pointless’ — able to hear their words, but unable to fully comprehend the dynamic of exploitation – a calculated, targeted pattern of abuse, sustained by the gaps in knowledge evident amongst many of the potentially protective adults in young people’s social ecologies.   

However, the immense value of participants’ contributions lies principally in the specificity of what they identify as system failure – and, even more vitally, what they identify as the opportunities for system repair.  

Victims know what they need. They spoke not only of hurt, but of what must be done differently: the need for adults to catch up to how digital coercion works, for police and counsellors and schools to stop waiting for physical violence before they define something as abusive or exploitative, and for systems to respond to young people being filmed, pressured, blackmailed, and blamed with the urgency and seriousness these violations demand. They spoke of their hopes for improvement, because the kinds of responses that helped are achievable, teachable, and real – and there is no reason why these safe, just, and supportive responses should not be extended to every young person facing the spectre of threat induced by exploitation abusers.  

Participants in this study are simply asking for services and systems to follow through on their insights and ideas to make that happen.  

Background 

This research was carried out with the generous support of the Ministry of Justice. Each of the people featured within this report are from Aotearoa New Zealand, living in our communities, being victimised in a multitude of ways—almost always with no recourse and no possibility of genuine safety until the perpetrator tired of it. The abuse and exploitation they suffered was rarely fleeting and often spanned years (usually, the years most pivotal in young people’s life trajectories) when they are navigating the transitional demands of crossing from childhood to adulthood. For most of them, the ‘first opportunities’ for intervention never led to sustained gains in safety, and often made it worse. However, their input gives valuable insight into what could work better for all of the victims who come after them. It is vital that we act on their insights and use them to make young people safer—and safer faster—from sexual exploitation 

Young people are disproportionately at risk of sexual exploitation, yet there is little general awareness of the reality of their experiences or, correspondingly, adequate pathways to help victims of, safeguard against, or intervene in exploitation targeting children and adolescents in Aotearoa. Many young people who experience child sexual exploitation (CSE) are hesitant to report the abuse and seek support for various and very valid reasons. Feelings of shame, guilt, or complicity are common, particularly where a young person’s needs for affection, housing, money, or affirmation are being met by the person exploiting them (Alaggia et al., 2017; Reid, 2016). Victims may internalise blame or minimisation narratives, experience fear of retaliation, or face social isolation if disclosure results in further destabilisation of their living arrangements (Coy, 2009; Thorburn & Beddoe, 2020).  

There is no age bracket exempt from the risks of CSE. However, risk is greatest for young people over 12 years old (Jay, 2014), particularly for those facing cumulative forms of adversity such as unstable home environments, homelessness, or being in state care (Berelowitz, Firmin, Edwards, & Gulyurtlu, 2013). The perpetrators of CSE are often people embedded in the child’s life—boyfriends, family friends, or family members (Jordan, Patel, & Rapp, 2013; Reid, 2016; 2024).). These forms of exploitation are relational and often enmeshed with the provision of other needs—housing, food, belonging, validation, safety (Cobbina & Oselin, 2011). This makes them less visible, harder to name, and significantly more difficult for young people to safely or clearly disclose. It also complicates recovery, as many victims struggle to disentangle the perceived emotional or material benefits of the relationship from the harm it caused (Thorburn & Beddoe, 2020). Young people in such circumstances are often exposed to cumulative adversities that amplify their susceptibility to targeted exploitation. 

Defining child sexual exploitation 

There is no universally agreed definition of what constitutes (or does not constitute) child sexual exploitation. However, several authors consistently describe its common features. According to Pearce (2009), CSE involves the victimisation of a child or young person, typically through a grooming process that fosters a perpetrator’s power and control over them, and is subsequently used to facilitate sexual abuse. 

The key ingredients for CSE are coercion—often involving manipulation, fear, or control—and a transactional dynamic between the victim and perpetrator (Beckett, Holmes, & Walker, 2017). While the terms used vary—child prostitution, child trafficking, underage sex work, online exploitation—it is widely agreed that sexual exploitation of minors involves three key elements: the involvement of someone under the age of 18, the provision of some kind of sexual act or service, and the use of power by someone older or more resourced to induce participation (Gerassi, 2015; Jordan, Patel, & Rapp, 2013). 

Aotearoa New Zealand policy context 

The sexual exploitation of children and young people for financial gain became an international policy priority following the 1996 World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, joined by the governments of 119 countries and resulting in the Stockholm Declaration. The declaration denounced the sexual exploitation of minors and called for coordinated action to end it (Alexander, Meuwese, & Wolthuis, 2000).  

In line with this, Aotearoa New Zealand has ratified the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (United Nations OHCHR, 2002), and Convention 182 of the International Labour Organisation, which identifies commercial sexual exploitation as one of the worst forms of child labour (International Labour Organization, 1999). Aotearoa is also a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCROC) and its Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography. Article 19 of the Convention emphasises the duty of the state to protect all children from all forms of abuse, maltreatment, and exploitation (Ministry of Justice, 2002). 

Despite such international momentum, New Zealand’s legal and policy frameworks remain ill-equipped to address the nuances of sexual exploitation in practice. Exploitation through forced participation in the sex industry is encompassed within New Zealand’s human trafficking legislation under section 98D of the Crimes Act (1961). However, the law does not currently differentiate between the threshold of coercion required to constitute exploitation of adults and that required to constitute exploitation of children (Thorburn, 2016). Until 2015, trafficking in New Zealand law was defined only in terms of movement across international borders (New Zealand Parliamentary Counsel Office, 2015). While this has since changed, prosecutions under section 98D remain rare, especially in relation to children. Lesser penalties apply for related acts under sections like 98AA and the Prostitution Reform Act 2003, and the burden of proving coercion remains high (U.S Department of State, 2024). These legal barriers make prosecution difficult and often fail to reflect the reality of power imbalance and manipulation involved in the exploitation of minors. 

As a result, CSE in Aotearoa is often perceived as rare, and where it is acknowledged, it is frequently misclassified. Exploitation that occurs within a domestic setting is commonly categorised as family violence, generic child abuse, or even mischaracterised as consensual underage sex work (U.S Department of State, 2024). This misclassification minimises the structural and coercive dynamics unique to exploitation and impairs efforts to develop specific, effective responses. No government department currently publishes annual data on the number, type, or outcomes of CSE cases. The only regular reporting on the issue is conducted through the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, which compiles anecdotal evidence to rate countries’ efforts on a four-tier scale. For many years, Aotearoa held a Tier One rating, but in 2021, it was downgraded to Tier Two for the first time, indicating that “serious and sustained” effort was still lacking (United States Department of State, 2021). 

Data and research gaps 

There is currently no national data collection system in Aotearoa specifically tracking CSE, nor any reliable prevalence data. While anecdotal evidence (e.g., from ECPAT NZ) indicates higher levels of exploitation than official prosecutions suggest, the true scale of the issue remains obscured. Cases of informal trafficking—where young people are exploited by acquaintances, relatives, or boyfriends—are seldom recognised or prosecuted as CSE (Thorburn, 2018). 

Although Oranga Tamariki released specialist guidelines to address CSE in 2021 (Oranga Tamariki, 2021), national implementation has been inconsistent, and political momentum has yet to follow. Many recent national action plans related to trafficking or violence focus almost exclusively on adult labour exploitation or abuse image offences, leaving the broader continuum of youth exploitation under-addressed. Gaps or ambiguity in legislation addressing CSE as a distinct form of child abuse are widely acknowledged as contributing factors to its ongoing under-recognition. As the latest Trafficking in Persons report notes, exploitation cannot be fully addressed unless the legal system not only defines it clearly, but also offers effective protections for its victims (United States Department of State, 2024). This lack of legal clarity, coupled with limited investment in prevention or specialised services, has kept CSE on the margins of national policy and public awareness. 

Compounding this invisibility is the lack of domestic research. To date, only two New Zealand-based studies have directly examined sexual exploitation involving young people. One focused on young women’s experiences of forced involvement in sex work (Thorburn, 2018); the other explored how Police perceive and respond to domestic sex trafficking (Haines, 2023). Both studies underscore the diversity of CSE experiences and the need for definitions, interventions, and professional practice to be much more attuned to young people’s lived realities. 

Understanding risk and child sexual exploitation 

Where ‘risk of exploitation’ comes from is often misunderstood. The literature continues to reflect an implicit, if unintended, preoccupation with individual vulnerability—as though exploitation were an outcome of poor choices, rather than of coercive dynamics and structural conditions. Conditions associated with increased risk of CSE include:  

• Housing or caregiver instability (Anderson, Coyle, Johnson, & Denner, 2014; Franchino-Olsen, 2021),  

• Financial desperation (Hodge & Lietz, 2007; Kennedy et al., 2007), 

• Substance use or addiction (O’Brien et al., 2017; Reid & Piquero, 2016; Laird et al., 2020) 

• Desire for safety and security (Hodge & Lietz, 2007; Franchino-Olsen, 2021), 

• Unsafe living environments (Cobbina & Oselin, 2011; Coy, 2009; Svensson, Fredlund, Sörensson, Priebe, & Wadsby, 2012), 

• Poor socio-economic prospects or social exclusion (Pearce, 2009; Ministry of Justice, 2002), 

• Avoidance of state care systems (Ahrens et al., 2012; Coy, 2009; Shephard & Lewis, 2017), 

• Inability to recognise coercion or abuse (Dorais & Corriveau, 2009; Schmidt et al., 2013), 

• Mental health vulnerabilities such as depressive or self-harming tendencies (Saphira & Oliver, 2002; Jordan, Patel, & Rapp, 2013), 

• Histories of abandonment and disrupted attachment (Chase & Statham, 2005; O’Brien et al., 2017; Reid & Piquero, 2016), 

• Conditioning to and acceptance of abusive dynamics (Holger-Ambrose et al., 2013; Ahrens et al., 2012; Franchino-Olsen, 2021), and 

• A desire to bond with protective or nurturing figures (Hoyle, Bosworth, & Dempsey, 2011; Dorais & Corriveau, 2009). 

The transactional nature of CSE can also preclude its recognition. Victims may appear to be willingly engaging in sexual exchanges, but these are nearly always shaped by coercion, fear, or a calculated effort to survive (Pearce, 2014). Accordingly, research repeatedly underscores that risk is shaped by people and systems—not by victims’ own choices (Franchino-Olsen, 2021). Once a young person is at risk of immediate homelessness, violence, or isolation, the offer of security—whether emotional, physical, or material—becomes an overwhelmingly powerful mechanism of control (Reid & Piquero, 2016). The exploitation that follows often appears to be consented to, but it is not freely chosen (Countryman-Roswurm & Bolin, 2014; Thorburn & Beddoe, 2020). 

The dynamics of exploitation are complex. Children and adolescents may be drawn into exploitative situations through a range of tactics, from emotional manipulation and deception to financial dependence and coercive control (Cobbina & Oselin, 2011; Ennew, 1986). Often, exploiters operate as intermediaries—whether posing as boyfriends, family members, or gang affiliates—who use affection and dependence to entrap their victims. This dynamic complicates both recognition of victimisation by the young person themselves and validation of their experiences by external actors, such as police, social workers, or courts (Shephard & Lewis, 2017).  

Grooming processes are well-documented, but their relational and contextual expressions are not always well understood. For example, love-bombing, isolation, threats, and promises of protection are often used in combination to create both a sense of belonging and a perception of inescapability (Dorais & Corriveau, 2009; O’Brien et al., 2017), while some exploiters actively frame themselves as protectors or allies against an uncaring system. These tactics undermine external relationships and increase the victim’s sense of dependence (Reid, 2016; Kennedy et al., 2007). This strategy mirrors dynamics of coercive control widely observed in domestic and sexual violence contexts, where perpetrators exert dominance through financial manipulation, isolation, threats, and the erosion of victims’ self-perception (Stark, 2007) – underscoring how exploitation can be deeply relational, rather than solely situational.  

Purpose of this study 

While international literature has begun to acknowledge the role of the State in both enabling and failing to prevent exploitation, this lens is rarely applied in Aotearoa. The absence of timely, comprehensive, and effective state intervention in situations of abuse, precarity, and social abandonment leaves many young people vulnerable to grooming and exploitation. Given how often sexual exploitation follows from prior victimisation and unmet needs, early and responsive state intervention must be considered a frontline form of prevention. 

The purpose of this study is therefore to explore the ways that self-identified victims experienced sexual exploitation in childhood and adolescence, and to identify what pathways to safety, support, and healing were available to—and effective for—them. Without a clearer understanding of these experiences, Aotearoa will remain in the infancy of its journey toward addressing exploitation meaningfully. We cannot intervene in what we do not see or define. This report seeks to make exploitation visible—on survivors’ terms—so that the failures of the past need not be repeated for tomorrow’s young people.  

Method 

Epistemological positioning 

How we understand ‘knowledge’ and its creation orients how we understand different forms of exploitation and different groups’ experiences of it. As a specialist organisation established in opposition to the exploitation of children, our understanding of exploitation as a violent enactment and abuse of structural power informs our approach to knowledge creation. 

Sexual exploitation is neither passively perpetrated nor passively experienced. If it is passively researched, both the research process and its outcomes risk perpetuating and reinforcing inequitable divisions of power, rather than deconstructing them (hooks, 2000; Ramazanoglu & Holland, 2002; Yegidis, Weinbach, & Myers, 2018). An applied understanding of systemic power and privilege, as well as the interpersonal dynamics of violence and exploitation, is therefore arguably a prerequisite for ethical research in this field. Giving voice and visibility to experiences shaped by social inequities begins with challenging notions of neutrality and non-bias (Darlington & Scott, 2002; Shaw, 2023). 

Accordingly, we approached this study as a collaborative endeavour that is contextually and relationally bound (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), repositioning authority over knowledge creation to be mutually held by researchers and researched (Forrow & Cook, 1992). Our epistemological approach draws from social constructionist, feminist, and anti-oppressive theories, enabling a dual (and at times conflicting) emphasis on ‘truth’ as the construction of meaning through intersubjective experience (Smith, Taylor, & Gollop, 2000) and the role of intersecting structures of power in constituting those experiences (Costley & Gibbs, 2006; Yegidis, Weinbach, & Myers, 2018). 

Ethical considerations 

Ethical frameworks for research often prioritise the physical safety of participants and the avoidance of bias, conflicted interest, or harm to credibility. However, just as the harm caused by exploitation often stems more from the erosion of victims’ dignity, autonomy, and relational safety than from physical assault alone, the ethical obligations associated with research into child exploitation extend far beyond concerns of physical risk, rigour, or transparency (Thorburn, 2019). 

Sexual exploitation is increasingly recognised as a form of social entrapment; one that traverses every dimension of a young person’s life and can continue to shape future opportunities even after exploitation ends. Accordingly, we adopted an approach that sought to maximise participants’ control over the nature of their participation and prioritise direct benefit and emotional safety. Our approach was guided by best practice standards for research with survivors of gendered violence (Hartmann & Krishnan, 2014; WHO, 2016). 

All participants were provided with detailed information about the study aims, methods, risks, benefits, and their right to withdraw at any time. A full ethics proposal was developed prior to beginning, which set out the steps taken to ensure consent was explicit and continuous for all participants, privacy and anonymity was protected, and data was judiciously handled to reduce and address risks of harm to participants and communities.  

This includes a substantive risk matrix, in which parameters were set in advance for managing difficult situations (for instance, how to facilitate someone leaving if they needed to and were seen by someone they knew; at what point ‘distress’ might impede full consent; and management of disclosed and ongoing risk of harm, including both suicide risk and interpersonal violence). Interviewers were trained to respond to people in crisis, including youth, and in how to facilitate access to support and provide comprehensive aftercare.  

Participant recruitment, sampling, and interviewing 

Participants were recruited through convenience sampling, primarily utilising social media to circulate an invitation to participate. Prospective participants made contact with the research team and were subsequently screened for both eligibility and safety (Överlien & Holt, 2021). Eligibility was contingent on participants being physically and emotionally safe from the situation of exploitation they would be discussing, and on an assessment of whether participation might escalate any risk of harm. Additional support needs were identified during screening, and access to appropriate support was facilitated prior to proceeding with participation. These support measures were implemented to ensure that recruitment processes did not inadvertently exacerbate participants’ vulnerabilities (WHO, 2016). 

14 participants took part in the study: two male and 12 females. Five identified as Māori, one as Cambodian, and the remainder as Pākehā. All were presently aged over 17. Interviews were conducted individually and lasted between 45 and 70 minutes. 

Interviews were conducted using a ‘teller-focused’ narrative approach (Hydén, 2014) at a time and place convenient to them (for instance, local community rooms), which positioned participants as leaders of the content and depth of the discussion. Interviews were semi-structured; participants were told the general questions in advance and discussions evolved from the original question only. They principally focused on how the exploitation came about, who was involved, what happened, and what participants would have liked to have seen happen. This approach was selected to strengthen participants’ sense of control and emotional safety. Interviews were audio-recorded with participants’ verbal consent and subsequently transcribed for analysis. 

Participants were offered the opportunity to review and approve any quotes used in the final report, ensuring that their narratives were represented accurately and respectfully. Each participant was provided with a voucher incentive in recognition of their contribution. 

In addition to the interviews with victims, two focus groups were conducted with key informants, consisting of practitioners in fields such as social work, youth services, and health, each with experience supporting young people experiencing sexual exploitation. Each focus group included five participants and lasted approximately one hour. The conversations were focused on the sharing of direct experiences working with youth experiencing exploitation, and what complicates their role as support people.  

Focus groups explored practitioners’ observations of exploitation dynamics, perceived barriers to and facilitators of safety and support, and their insights into what constitutes effective recovery and long-term safety. These sessions were also audio-recorded, transcribed, and anonymised.  

Data analysis 

Once the audio recordings of both interviews and focus groups were transcribed, thematic analysis was conducted following the phases outlined by Braun and Clarke (2019). This included repeated immersion in the data through listening to recordings and reading transcripts, inductive and deductive coding (King, Horrocks, & Brooks, 2019), and the development of thematic maps. 

Coding was both descriptive—identifying surface-level patterns—and interpretive—exploring deeper meanings and underlying social processes. Themes were iteratively refined and organised around the following focal areas: transactional components of abuse, origins of risk, initiation of abuse, victims’ awareness of harm, presence of additional victims, barriers to disclosure, others’ responses, impacts, and strategies for changing the narrative. To enhance trustworthiness, multiple researchers were involved in cross-checking emerging themes, and participants’ own words were used wherever possible to illustrate findings. 

Language use and terminology 

Throughout the findings, the terms ‘victim’, ‘survivor’, and ‘participant’ are used interchangeably, reflecting participants’ own language choices. Participants variously invoked both victimhood and survivorship to capture the dual realities of being harmed by others’ actions and surviving those harms. Correspondingly, those responsible for exploitation are referred to as ‘abusers’ or ‘perpetrators’, consistent with participants’ framing. 

Structure of findings 

The findings are divided into two main sections to recognise the distinctions between experiences of in-person exploitation and digitally-facilitated exploitation. This structure reflects participants’ narratives and supports a clearer exploration of the different pathways into harm and safety associated with each form of exploitation. While this report separates in-person and digitally facilitated exploitation for clarity, participants’ experiences often defy such a binary. Several described victimisation that began in person and later moved online, or vice versa; others were abused by perpetrators who used digital tools to extend, escalate, or conceal in-person abuse. The technologies of abuse may differ, but the underlying dynamics (such as coercion, inducement, control, and betrayal) remain fundamentally relational and patterned. Separately presenting the findings relating to exploitation that was principally mechanised through digital spaces is therefore not intended to imply a difference in the depth of either victimisation or impact, but rather to foreground the evolving environments in which exploitation occurs and the additional layers of complexity they introduce. 

Limitations 

As with all qualitative research, this study has several limitations. The small sample size and use of convenience sampling limit the generalisability of findings beyond the participant group. Participants were self-selecting and may therefore represent individuals more willing or able to speak about their experiences, potentially excluding those with more acute vulnerabilities or barriers to disclosure. Additionally, while our teller-focused interview approach privileged participants’ narratives, this method relies on participants’ retrospective sense-making and may be influenced by evolving interpretations of their experiences over time. Despite these limitations, the rich and detailed accounts offered by participants provide valuable insight into the lived realities of exploitation and its systemic contexts.

Introducing the participants 

Table 1 

Pseudonym	Age began	Relationship to abuser	Duration of abuse	First disclosure to service/ system	Need from services	Nature of transaction/coercion
Kyle	12	Older man – met on Facebook	1–2 years	Police	Accountability for abuser; information about age gaps and coercion	Emotional coercion; perceived obligation to prove care; made complicit in secrecy
Jamie	12	Older teen (age 15) – added her on Snapchat	Approx. 1.5 years	School in Year 11	Stop image circulation; support for social fallout	Emotional manipulation; blackmail/threats to share images; forced exchange of images
Chloe	14	Adult associated with family’s church	1–2 years	Teacher	Belief and physical safety from abuser	Buyers paid abuser; abuser gave Chloe money and alcohol (initially) ; threats to kill
Bec	4 or 5	Mother’s boyfriend	10 years	Police	Make sense of abuse and intervene with family	Money, gifts, adult force/authority
Maia	3 or 4	Father and father’s fiends	Nearly 10 years	Church at 8, Police in her twenties	Make him stop; safety for other children he was around	Small gifts but mostly used adult authority as coercion
Kasey	7	Friend of the family	>10 years	Sexual violence crisis worker	Relational support without invoking unwanted safety mechanisms; trauma therapy	Small gifts but mostly used adult authority/force
Eiliah Sharn	7	Grandfather	5+ years	Police	Timely counselling; social support	Alcohol, treats, adult authority; physical violence
Ata	Primary school	Uncle	5+ years	Child protection/police	Keep other children in the family safe	Adult authority/force; physical violence
Rachel	6	Friend of uncle	Until early teens	Police	Be transparent; hold him accountable but prevent him dying by suicide	Clothes, gifts, transport, adult force; adult authority
Kate	15	Online stranger [aged 21, male]	<1 year	Counsellor	Understand coercion; tell her it was not her fault; non-judgement	Circulated nudes
Briar	17	Online strangers [aged 25, 28, 32, all male]	<1 year	—	—	Threat of rejection/embarrassment;
Alex	18	‘Boyfriend’ figure [met online]	<1 year	—	—	‘Love illusion’; implicit threat to share images

 

Table of participants, the context of their exploitation, and their need for (and attempts to obtain) formal support 

Part 1: In-person abuse and exploitation 

Preface 

Participants who suffered in-person abuse described extreme, sustained, and severe forms of abuse. They often attempted to tell other adults they perceived as potentially protective, and these efforts did not always lead to increased safety.  

All of their experiences involved some form of transaction. However, some of these experiences did not differ (or not substantively) from the token gift-giving and reward patterns consistent with the phenomenon of ‘grooming’ associated with child sexual abuse, ultimately highlighted a universal lack of clarity about the distinction between abuse involving initial inducements and abuse involving transactions with a material benefit, which is key to the phenomenon of exploitation. The implications of such definitional and discursive ambiguity is covered in greater depth in the discussion.  

This section of the findings therefore begins by setting out the nature of the transactional component of participants’ stories. It then explores the contexts in which abuse began, and how abuse or exploitation was first established and then progressed by perpetrators, and how far their reach extended over victims. Next, it looks at the barriers to disclosing it, how people responded when it was disclosed, and what safety or recovery was possible, accessible, facilitated, and effective. Finally, it sets out participants’ views on what might strengthen opportunities for safety and wellbeing for people in similar situations.  

Transactional components of exploitation 

Three participants referred to money changing hands. The transaction of money was seldom explicit, but rather became an insidiously embedded part of their abusers’ manipulation of them. Chloe, for instance, mentioned that when more men were involved, “I would get more”, and alluded to her abuser “getting paid by them,” while Bec said her realisation that she “made money just from doing this” led her to see it as a “means to an end” even after the coercion came to an end.  

Eiliah Sharn, who was exploited by an intimate partner after her initial experience of abuse, explained that her partner “was making me fuck him to even have money.” Giving alcohol, drugs, or other things of monetary value functioned in much the same way as actual money in facilitating victim compliance, and was only disclosed in relation to the very beginning of exploitation. For Ata, for example, one ‘reward’ came in the form of food, usually from Georgie Pie or McDonald’s, while for Eiliah Sharn the inducement sometimes came in the form of gin. 

“And then there was the promise of alcohol if I had done [sexual] things, especially if I had done things with others, like a group of people. – Chloe 

It is, however, important to note that victims’ use of substances was not always voluntary.  

“It was like… he would drug me, or bribe me with chocolates and stuff, to do [sexual] stuff. – Eiliah Sharn 

Interestingly, the monetary reward was never the focal or most influential means through which victims’ compliance was ensured by their abusers. Chloe stated that the money given to her was “not even a lot… five or ten dollars,” and Bec listed multiple other ‘pull’ factors the abuser capitalised on before mentioning the monetary reward: 

I thought to myself, I’m getting validation. You know? Because as a young girl with no father, no father figure, I didn’t really talk to my dad, we’d moved houses heaps, I didn’t really have many friends, my mum, I didn’t have a good relationship with my mum. I was like ‘oh I’m getting attention. Someone sees me. You know. And then I’m getting money sometimes.’ – Bec 

In addition to being nominal amounts, the monetary reward did not appear static, but rather featured predominately as a means of establishing the exploitation. Once the exploitation was underway, abusers used fewer inducements while expecting sustained cooperation from their victims. 

“He then moved away from giving me alcohol and stuff, and sometimes money, over to [a time when] there was none of that.” – Chloe 

Instead of these inducements, abusers relied on maintaining a sense of threat. Victims were made to believe they would be harmed, that their loved ones would be harmed, or that they would be made to face immense social consequences if they dared to refuse to cooperate.  

It turned into, ‘if you tell anyone, I’m going to kill your family’ and stuff, and it turned into a real control [dynamic]. Like that’s when I realised there was a big control thing going on – Chloe 

Participants primarily focused on the provision of love, acceptance, and affection as the most powerful rewards the abuser offered them. Bec, for instance, reflected that she was “getting validation,” and Eiliah Sharn commented that her abuser “showed a form of love and acceptance for me.”  

I wasn’t getting the love that I needed at home, so I went searching for it everywhere else. If someone, regardless of how they treat me, if someone’s gonna give me the attention that I need, I’m gonna be like ‘oh yeah, this is great.’ … So I let them treat me this way, because as a young girl without a , and a mother that doesn’t care, we have no self-esteem, no confidence, no self-love because we have never been taught any of these things. So yeah. Thats what we go for.” – Bec 

He would use us, objectifying ourselves, and him seeing things that he wants and buying us stuff in return and to taking us out for dinner. This meant this then, yeah, it was very to his terms, where we would get rewards… He would get us lollies, toys, whatever we wanted. But he would also, like, we’d show up, sometimes we’d see him, and he’d just have full outfits for us laid on the bed. And he would just buy us, like, full outfits of clothes. But that came with him wanting to take photos of us. So go and would have a photo shoot where he would take photos of us and the outfits, yeah, that he would pick, yeah… a lot of the stuff was like, well, majority of it was in person. But then, like, with the camera, there was an incident where he wanted us to take photos of ourselves naked. – Rachel 

They acknowledged the complexities and contradictions they experienced alongside this love, acceptance, and affection, such as the difficulty reconciling it with the nature of the abuse and exploitation, but nevertheless signalled its power in sustaining their fulfilment of abusers’ expectations of them.  

The origins of risk (and others’ perceptions of it) 

Intra-familial abuse was a common feature of participants’ stories. Ata was sexually abused by her stepfather, Bec was sexually abused by her Mum’s boyfriend, Maia was sexually abused by her father, and Eiliah Sharn was sexually abused by her grandfather.  

“[I was] quite, like, very young. All of my mum’s boyfriends were quite creepy… so she would get a boyfriend and he would take a shine to us. And so our whole childhood, all of her boyfriends would be quite sexual towards us, and make sexual jokes and all that kind of stuff… “It was a lot of grooming over those years and a lot of, um, over that time you kind of feel like you need them in your life because they’ve groomed you to be a specific way and so they’ll make you feel guilty for things.” – Bec 

Eiliah Sharn’s perpetrator had also abused her mother, but she had to spend time with him regularly anyway.  

“So for me personally, I started getting sexually abused by my grandfather… It was just me and my mum at the time. And she worked, so obviously I’d go to school, and then after school I’d have to go to grandpas. Nearly every day, I guess.” – Eiliah Sharn 

Her stepfather, on the other hand, was sufficiently protective of her to step in when the abuse was suspected. At the same time, he was also a source of violence and fear for her.  

“So even though they stopped me from seeing [grandfather] he was brought up really, well his generation, really tough. And like, I only had a younger sister who’s like five years younger than me, so anyway, my mum moved us over there, and his family and the way they were brought up was real tough. And because I wasn’t blood, I was treated different by cousins, sisters, his parents, everything. I’d have to line up, be the last one to eat the dinners, because the family goes first, even though I was only fucking nine years old. Just a kid. But yeah, he was just very, very strict. Very fucking strict. Like if he caught my little sister crying and I pushed her or something, boom, I’d get the mean boot. Or the black pipe and he used to whip me with that. But yeah, he was just very physical. You’d hear his feet stomping down that hallway a mile away before he’s come to you. Like he had methods to his madness and he did apologise when I was a teenager for the way he raised me. And he knows it was wrong, and he knows it’s because I wasn’t his real daughter. But he did apologise in the end so. I forgive him for that but yeah. It was just trauma after fucking trauma.” – Eiliah Sharn 

Maia identified the impacts of prior abuse as the perpetuator of risk in her life, laying the foundations for further harm. 

“When you’re a child and you’re raised like this, you can’t sleep. You don’t eat properly because you’re always in fear factor, in fear mode. Your whole self-esteem is damaged, your whole way of thinking is damaged, your belief system is damaged. So, you’re sort of flying by seat of your pants, you know?” – Maia 

I don’t know, maybe that domino effect is just from childhood looking and yearning for acceptance and someone to love me for me. And I just kept looking or taking what was offered. So maybe that’s what put me in my positions. Because I looked for it in the wrong areas or in the wrong ways. I just thought oh, someone’s giving me attention or affection, hi! Yay! And it just became nature.” – Eiliah Sharn 

Many had also lived through and witnessed domestic violence in their homes and against their mothers. 

When mum married a second time, she married a physical abuser. So we went from that, to alcohol and violence. Well [I did], because I was the youngest one…. My dad woke me up to watch him confronting her [my mum], and he pinned her against the wall by her neck and strangled her…  And the police were called when we got a restraining order. And then after that, my dad would always come knock on the door when nobody was home, and tried to, like, persuade me to let him in. And I felt really guilty. I was like, he’s my dad. And they’re like, ‘no, don’t let him in.’ – Alex 

I know that domestic abuse is a common thing and quite often the children sit there and cry but for some reason, and its probably because I didn’t really grow up in a household with violence, I couldn’t just stand there. I would jump in and defend my mum and get knocked over too… So I grew up in a multigenerational household. So it was my grandparents’ house. They had moved from up north where our whenua is, where our land is. And they had started a life down here with their children. My mum being one of them. So they had 3 children and I was living in the house with my nana and my papa. My mum had actually been molested and raped prior to my birth, and had already turned to addiction prior to my birth…  So my mum was quite absent, and I was mainly raised by grandparents. – Ata 

Ata further explained how the backdrop of harm in her whānau impacted the children’s safety.  

[My sister] ended up running away which drew attention to them again right, through [child protection agency]. And then she testified [about] what my mum was doing. And then I backed her up, saying ‘actually I did see that,’ my mum was still smacking them, still yelling at them, still staying in the garage smoking weed all day. Not really being a present parent, and you can’t when you’re broken and not healing, not healed, can you? – Ata 

Finally, Bec suggested that abuse experienced by parents (such as by their own parents) may be the catalyst for risk that perpetuates beyond a single generation; for instance, a lack of parental love combined with domestic violence. When discussing what she felt the main cause of risk and harm in her life was, she concluded: 

I think the relationship with my mother. And maybe the relationship my mother had with her mother because that actually paves the way for the way she’s gonna treat her children… She saw a lot of abuse. She never really saw love… My mum put so much emphasis on having relationships with these men because she had no validation from her father, like me. So she was searching for love in all the wrong places. Her love for that man, whether it be real or traumatic bond or whatever, was definitely a barrier in that experience. And I actually ended up in an abusive relationship with my ex-husband, and I put him first before my children, because that’s what I saw my mum do. Thats what seemed natural to me. – Bec 

The beginning of exploitation 

Participants described sexual abuse that began in childhood or early adolescence; for some, this was while they were under five years old. While this abuse had a transactional component from the outset of the abuse, for others the abuse preceded subsequent transactional exploitation.  

“He would start with like. It will be like, he started off with just touching [ at age seven]. Like I’d have a bath for example and then he’d come in and have to check that I was clean down there. Like with his face and all kinds of shit. And then I guess as I got that little bit older and I noticed it started hurting. Him touching. He would then either try and bribe me by saying if I didn’t let him touch me he was going to tell on me to my mum or my teachers [about some contrived misbehaviour] … And then like yeah, waking up without my undies on and shit like that afterwards. 

I had this table at grandads that I could put all my art stuff on. All my coloured papers, pens and stuff that I’d get. He’d tell on me or he’d bribe me as well with chocolate because I was lactose intolerant and I wasn’t allowed dairy products. So he’d come down to the primary school, sneak down during breaks and lunch times and give me chocolate bars and shit. And bribe me like that to come round to his house, because my mum started stopping me from seeing him once she started picking up on stuff. But it didn’t stop him.” – Eiliah Sharn 

Rachel’s auntie was close in age to Rachel. They were both targeted by a family friend, who groomed them simultaneously, sexually abused them, and also recorded photos and videos of them on occasion.  

He was my Auntie’s dad’s best friend. It was me and my auntie and [him], and he was 54 at the time, and we were, I was six and she was eight when it started… He would like, show us photos of him naked, because it was like a camera, like a kind of, like an old school camera, and he would show us photos of him, like, in the mirror, naked, and then, kind of like, talk to us, like, about it [his naked photographs]. – Rachel 

He bought me my first phone when I was, like, six years old. It was a button phone so that he could, like, text me, yeah. Like, he bought me the phone, topped me up and would just text me on it. So it was like, yeah. Now looking back at it, having, like, being a six year old with a phone, like, it was just a button phone, but, like, yeah, the intent behind it was crazy. – Rachel 

Bec outlined the sequence of abuse that started in early childhood and laid the foundations for exploitation by multiple perpetrators.  

“I was probably like four or five when it first started with… one of my mum’s boyfriends, and then he went on to rape me until I was 15 years old. 

I was probably like four or five when it first started with my mums, one of my mum boyfriends and then he went on to rape me until I was 15 years old… You know and you kind of pander to them and stuff, and you’re just little and you have no idea that that’s not okay, you think it’s normal.  

I thought to myself, I’m getting validation. You know? Because as a young girl with no father, no father figure, I didn’t really talk to my dad, we’d moved houses heaps, I didn’t really have many friends, my mum, I didn’t have a good relationship with my mum. I was like oh I’m getting attention. Someone sees me. You know. And then I’m getting money sometimes.” – Bec 

Kasey was seven, nearly eight, when a friend of the family began abusing her. Maia’s story similarly linked the abuse she suffered from her father with the exploitation she experienced throughout her childhood from a variety of her father’s friends. 

“I don’t know how [my father’s best friend] knew when I was on my own. I don’t know how that ever happened. Sometimes in the bathroom, sometimes in the bedroom. And I shared my bedroom with my siblings, so I don’t know how he always knew when I was on my own. A few times out in the barn, one time on a tractor for God’s sake. Yeah but mostly it was [in] his home, he would fabricate a reason for me to be there.  

And this started when I was really, really young right up to when I was about 13. He would fabricate something, [like] because he had children he would say – even though his children didn’t live with him – he would say his daughter is going to be there and could he take me to be her friend. That sort of thing.  

They [the different perpetrators] were all my father’s friends. And I used to think that they were all like a club, so I didn’t know who to trust really…– Maia 

Chloe’s story paralleled this in that she was initially exploited by one abuser, and later by several of his associates who established an organised and collective pattern of exploitation, predicated on identifying and capitalising on the periods she was alone in her family’s home.  

“My parents were church leaders [when I was 14] and there was a guy who was kind of coming along to the church, and then, one day he just like came to our house, tried to ask if my parents were home and they weren’t and I thought he was gonna go, but he didn’t. And things happened and then there was the promise of alcohol if I had done things, especially if I had done things with others, like a group of people… all my friends had started drinking but I was never allowed to because of my parents….  And so maybe I thought it would be a once off thing… [but] it wasn’t a once off thing. I had no idea what I was doing.  

It would sometimes be just him, [but] it would sometimes be five or six people… Like they’d come to my bedroom, and they’d all be around. Like sometimes it was, they’d take me out to like a dingy old like, lot. It’s hard to explain, it’s kind of like there was a house there, like an empty lot… I would get more [on those times].  

So I assume that he was probably getting paid by them… [Later it] moved away from giving me alcohol and stuff and sometimes money, over to, there was none of that, and sometimes it would be just him and sometimes it would be other people. And it’s like, wow, I’m actually trapped in this.  

Like they’d come to my bedroom, and they’d all be around. Like sometimes it was, they’d take me out to like a dingy old, like, lot. It’s hard to explain, it’s kind of like there was a house there, like an empty lot.” – Chloe 

Their narratives underline the spectrum of acts that could amount to coercion. For some, their epistemic power as children precluded any defiance of a powerful adult abuser, on whom they were dependent. For others, their age-related restriction of social power relative to that of their perpetrator, and their conviction that disclosure would bring threatening consequences, forestalled any opportunity to refuse to participate.  

Initial awareness that something was wrong 

Participants consistently articulated a paradoxical awareness of the abuse: they intuited a sense of something feeling wrong or unwanted while simultaneously internalising messages of acceptability from more powerful proximal adults.   

“Sometimes we would play, the kids would, we’d shut all the doors into the hallway and be like ‘raaaa!’ You know? Scare each other. And so he played a game where [when] it was dark… He had chocolate bars and he’d stuck them all over the walls and we were gonna go in there to try and find them. But while we were in there, he was touching me inappropriately, and I thought it was weird. [It had] never happened before, [so] I was like ‘this is weird’.”  – Ata 

Maia even found a way to casually ask a friend about her father’s goodnight ritual to try to gauge whether what her father did to her was a common experience or one specific to her.  

“I remember I was eight. I had a couple of very good friends. But one of my friends, I said to her in a roundabout way ‘does you dad come into your room at night?’ And she goes, ‘yup.’ And I said ‘does he get in the bed with you?’ And she said ‘no he just pulls the blankets up and kisses my head and I go to sleep.’ And I said ‘oh, does he do anything else?’ And she said ‘no.’ And I went ‘oh okay.’ And then i started to think, hang on a minute. Why does everything happen in secret? Why? If this was the right thing to do, why is it always hidden?… So when I was around about eight and starting to ask questions, that when I was told to keep it secret. Up until then I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. I couldn’t put it into language that I understood. All I knew was that I was afraid and I was hurt. I didn’t really understand it.”- Maia 

So my auntie, when we were younger, the roles have kind of switched now, like after everything, but when we were younger she was always the the bite, like the bark, and I would just sit there and just shut down like, I wouldn’t say anything, I wouldn’t clap back, I wouldn’t stand up for myself. I wouldn’t do anything. And it was like, around that time where my auntie had gotten into like, a massive argument with him, and she yelled at him, and she goes, you fucking pedophile, like, yelled at him. And then those moments I was like, she just, like, confirmed it for me that something wasn’t right. And because when we were, like, real young and it was happening, we would talk about it, but we’d be like, oh, we can’t tell anyone. Like, it’s fine. We just like, can’t tell anyone. But as we started to get older, we stopped talking about it as much together, yeah, and we didn’t talk about it for years – Rachel 

Ata explained that when she was eight, the abuser gave “weird energy” and she felt that he was “very creepy” and she “just felt it.” Chloe similarly described “having doubts” about what her abuser was doing to her, but felt she had to follow the lead of what adults had normalised to her in the past.  

“I still had my doubts, [but] I was always- I had been abused as a six year old before that, and so, I thought that’s what people wanted… I would expose myself [to the highway] because that’s what I thought adults wanted when I was like six, seven, eight years old.” – Chloe 

Eiliah Sharn shared a similar perspective of struggling to reconcile what had been modelled as normal elsewhere with how her grandfather abused her.  

“And I must admit I felt uncomfortable bathing with him too. It felt uncomfortable him having to check me because I didn’t understand. Because when I went to my stepdads parents place, they didn’t come in and do that shit to me. My mum didn’t do that shit to me. So I kind of just felt it was weird. But then I just kind of got used to it being grandpa’s way with me.” 

“I remember feeling like it was really wrong when it was sore and he wouldn’t stop. I remember being in bed and I just woke up in the middle of the night and his face was down under the blankets down there and his fingers and whatever. And I remember it being really painful and thinking ‘it’s wrong.’ Yeah and I just thought you know, ‘Grandpa loves me. He shouldn’t be hurting me.’ You know? Like it just didn’t feel right” – Eiliah Sharn 

“It’s hard to label that because it’s only when you’re a lot older that you can look back and see how wrong it was. So, I don’t know, the worst part is the on-going trauma from it. And you know, how wrong it is. But as a kid and in the moment, the worst part is that you don’t know when it’s going to happen. It’s like a waiting game, you’re sitting there waiting to hurry up and get over that horrid. You know it’s going to happen. You’re biting your tongue, you know, waiting for him to have his drink. It’s a waiting game, you know it’s coming so. The fear of waiting, just having that happen, wanting it over and done with.” – Eiliah Sharn 

Additional victims 

Several participants identified additional victims who had been abused or exploited by the same perpetrator.  

Years later I found out he was still doing what he was doing and that he had kidnapped kids… That he had kidnapped an eight-year-old little girl. – Maia 

And like when I had left [home town where exploitation happened], I got a message from one of my old friends that someone else from that group had been abusing another person in town. So it’s like, they had gone from me onto somebody else. So, a lot of that shit still sticks with me as I go through. – Chloe 

I just spent a lot of my time just kind of trying to shelter my little sister… So yeah just trying to keep her safe. Eventually, it didn’t work. – Bec 

Ata later discovered he had similarly exploited another of her sisters when she was only four; his niece, which was not disclosed until the niece reached adulthood; and another of his daughters. Eventually it became “public knowledge”, and “it was quite messy.”  

I did not realise he would go for my little sister. Who was really a baby, she was maybe five, six? … One day she actually told me that he’s touching her. And I regret to say that I was not brave, and I was not a good sister. – Ata  

Rachel had always known her auntie was victimised alongside her, and also suspected that other female family members had been equivalently targeted by the perpetrator who exploited her.  

Um, two years, two years. Um, so we found out [perpetrator] had made comments about my aunities other niece, and she’s she’s 10 now, so she would have been eight, and she’s autistic. And he was like saying, because he made the comments to my auntie, not to me, but he was saying that [the other niece] likes to masturbate in front of him. And he was talking to [my auntie] about that. And we were like, she’s eight? we’re like, what, like, ‘what are you talking about?’ And we noticed the same, like, kind of, like, deflecting it, yeah, like, what he did with us. Like he would be, like, it’s just, it’s just natural. It’s just this, like, it’s just that, like, you know, so years later we noticed that same kind of pattern [with another 8-year-old girl in the family], and we were like, yeah, nah. – Rachel  

Her awareness of the familiar abusive behaviours being enacted against younger family members ultimately acted as the catalyst for her to speak up beyond her immediate family. 

Barriers to disclosing it to others  

Maia and Chloe faced a seemingly insurmountable barrier to disclosure: neither were certain of which people (and how many people) were already involved in or complicit in the exploitation of them. The pervasive sense of threat that accompanied their awareness of some form of network rendered opportunities for disclosure and support too dangerous.  

“They [four abusers] were all my father’s friends. And I used to think that they were all like a club, so I didn’t know who to trust really.” – Maia 

I’d just go with her there, and I just would feel so sick because I knew that there was something I needed to tell my family but I couldn’t. And like, being with them [family members and perpetrator] all around I would, in my head, I will genuinely be an excruciating pain and I will have to go home. Like, it physically took a toll on my body. I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t go, I couldn’t go to family functions because I knew that something was needed to be said. – Rachel 

Rachel did eventually tell her father, and he allowed it to continue.  

My dad started becoming friends with him. Yeah, my dad got the benefits of it. So he got the free the free weed and the drives, the food, the money. Like, he started getting the benefits of it [the relationship], yeah. Yeah. He [perpetrator] started hanging around my dad, and, like, befriended him, made him as like, best friend. I told my dad what had happened with [the perpetrator], like, three years ago, yeah, and it took two years until I told the rest of the family, but my dad did nothing when I told him. He really, yeah, he continued to hang out with him [perpetrator]. He continued to be friends with him. He continued it all. – Rachel 

She also alluded to other proximal adults who witnessed some of the predatory behaviour and occasionally referred to it explicitly – albeit without putting an end to it.  

I don’t think so. I don’t think so. But also I feel that he [another adult] knew something was going on, and he probably, out of all the parents, had the deepest understanding of what was going on, because my mum had no idea. My Nana had no idea. And like, they would make comments and be like, oh, like, creepy [Rob], like, and we would be like, no, no. What do you mean? Like, no. And like, completely play it off. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But so they like, kind of went out of the loop, but [my auntie’s] dad saw it all firsthand, like saw the amount of time we were spending with him, he saw all of it – Rachel 

Most participants said they would have liked someone to know and intervene, but felt unable to tell their families at the time it happened. Some were deterred by fear that the abuser would hurt or kill them or their families, as Chloe’s and Eiliah Sharn’s abusers threatened to do. For both, the escalation in abuse tactics was so rapid and alarming, they had little chance to make sense of it or discern where relative ‘safety’ might lie within such a threatening environment, especially when faced with abusers that purposefully carved out time, opportunities, and spaces solely to abuse them.  

“I couldn’t tell my parents because he said he was going to kill them.” – Chloe 

“He was grooming me… and then threatening me all the time to participate, [saying] or I would never see my parents again, it really scared me…that’s when he’d threaten me. If I was complaining that it was sore or that I don’t like what’s going on, I don’t want to come back here, I wanna go see mum, I want mum. I remember crying for mum heaps. Heaps. But yeah I wasn’t yeah, he just would find another way to keep my quiet.” –Eiliah Sharn 

However, this was compounded by a gripping fear of shame, judgement, ostracization, and rejection, and the (perceived and actual) unavailability of people who could be trusted to respond well to it. Maia, for example, shared that “by that time I was scared of everyone. I was scared that they would take my child away from me if I said anything.” 

The only person I would have told would have been my nana when I was younger. But then I was scared she’d die. Cause when you’re eight, and it’s your nana, you think they’re gonna die [if you tell them], because they’re old…. So you’ve got the feeling of being dirty, and you’ve got the feeling of being unlovable, and responsible for what’s going on. Then you’ve got the church telling you that God doesn’t even love you… So it’s kind of like, where do you go, and who do you go to? – Maia 

There was often a police car sat outside our house doing like road patrols and stuff. And pretty much every day, I would get off the bus and think I just want to have the guts to tell them. But I never did. – Chloe 

 I didn’t have any support, I didn’t have any friends, I didn’t have any family or anything life that.” – Bec 

Several referred to their limited power of children to name and convey the abuse to others.  

I was like this is probably a little bit wrong, but it’s also what adults want. – Chloe 

But the problem was, at that young age… I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what a pedaphile was. It did not exist, I was just like, ‘that’s weird, that’s strange.’ – Ata  

You’re just little and you have no idea that that’s not okay, you think it’s normal. – Bec 

I didn’t want to make my parents sad, so I was like, maybe it’s better to not disclose it. And I wasn’t too sure about child’s Protective Services and stuff, because it’s quite because, you know, like, when you’re younger, or, you know, it’s like, oh, something happens. They take it from their parents, which is not true. But like, I think that should be a bit clarified, because kids don’t, they don’t know until they’re like, everything’s like, very clarified, because everything’s new to them. So even like simple words, like safe a safe person, like, who is a safe person? I guess I could say, like, a police or something, but then, but then, I feel like his wouldn’t really go to a police officer and it’s not that accessible. – Kasey 

And of course, you didn’t see anything wrong with it at the time. Like, of course, that’s the point. It’s that you’re six and your auntie’s eight, like, yeah, you are so, so vulnerable, and you’re right. Like, people like that, you know, now you can look at them and say, Oh, it was just a nasty man. But like, you are so you like, you’re fresh in the world at six years old, like, you literally don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong, just figuring it out. And if an adult, who you’re like, looking up, you know, adults look after kids, their supposed to protect children. They feed them. They, you know, they’re the ones with the knowledge. So when you look up to an adult and then normalizing this stuff, of course you’re going to think it’s okay. – Rachel 

Ata also conveyed her concern that when she made her family aware of the abuse, her Uncle may seek revenge with dire consequences. She highlighted other instances of this happening.  

“Yeah so when it all came out, we were living in one place then we moved not long after that and then not long after that we moved again. Trying to hide. I mean I can only guess I don’t actually know. And then my uncle turned up one day at the last house, with a baseball bat, and she told us to hide. I really wanted to, but I knew that my uncle wouldn’t stop until he was dead. And then my uncle would be in jail.”- Ata 

“I think there must have been some processing in the [child protection service] network or something but while we were in the school holiday period, they actually asked my aunty if they could hold onto us. So we effectively got taken off my mum at that point because she was still actively with him… And I told again, I’m the whistle blower. I have, to be honest with you, I’ve gotten so much flack because I’m the whistle blower. I’m the one who doesn’t keep the peace. I mean, I have no choice really, I would not like myself if I just didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything. But it is very lonely, because in reality, it feels like – and to a degree, it’s probably true – that my mum hates me because I take everything away from her. Cause not only that time, but I ended up taking her youngest five children off her after that.” – Ata 

Self-blame further discouraged participants from feeling they could tell others about it.  

And he would, your body responds to stimulation, I always felt guilty about those body responses… When your body reacts to their either oral sex or their hands or their fingers, my body would react like it would normally be. I got to feel that I was dirty because of that. So then the blame started to come in from them. Like ‘I see you like it’ comments. Like that. – Maia 

Domestic violence (usually against their mothers) was a common facet of their experiences at the time, and their parents or other adults in caregiving roles were often deemed unsafe, already stressed, or in precarious social positions that victims considered to preclude their potential responsiveness. Their descriptions of domestic violence underline the constraints that perpetrator simultaneously placed on their mothers’ opportunities and capacity to protect them, thus undermining household structures that may have otherwise proven protective. 

“The sad thing was though, and see this is what I think was our vulnerability, is that our mum did not actually have a relationship with us. We did not feel safe to talk to her. And he was physically abusive to her as well. And then eventually to us. So, it felt almost impossible to be able to talk to my mum about it. … My mum and the man, he, they, were so volatile, that we would wake up to screaming. So much abuse. My mum got thrown through glass kitchen doors. I would always jump in.” – Ata 

“It’s because my mum didn’t know how to be a parent. She had no maternal instincts at all. She had a rough relationship with my dad and so he was crazy, and yeah so she was pretty much alone after my nana died.” – Bec 

Several pointed out that perhaps they may have spoken about it if anyone had asked – but no one did.  

“Like we’d done lots of family group conferences with all the aunties and uncles and stuff, but no one ever asked, ‘what actually is wrong?’” – Bec 

I know now as an older woman and gone through other things, that probably all abused people feel like that. Like they’re stuck. No one’s gonna be able to save you, like what are you gonna do? Like go live somewhere else while this person gets in trouble? But yeah, it was really difficult to be, I felt like I could not tell anybody. – Ata 

The sad thing was though, and see this is what I think was our vulnerability, is that our mum did not actually have a relationship with us. We did not feel safe to talk to her. And he was physically abusive to her as well. And then eventually to us. So it felt almost impossible to be able to talk to my mum about it. – Ata 

Finally, as Ata explained, some participants, at times, simply did not believe there was any end to the abuse, and felt that attempts to disclose it to others would therefore be futile. Participants also referred back to the enmeshed and familial nature of their perpetrators’ role in their households, families, and early lives, pointing out that by disclosing, they also had something to lose. Eiliah Sharn explained that: 

“I was relieved that that shit wasn’t happening to me but then it twisted me in the head because unless that shit that was happening to me with my grandfather he still showed a form of love and acceptance for me. Whereas I felt like I was just unwanted and just got beaten all the time. It’s hard, I don’t know how to say, or how to cope or how I felt afterwards.” 

Several said they needed someone to notice, rather than having to say it themselves and make it an explicit disclosure. They felt it should have been identified by the people in positions to do something about it.  

In primary school, like the police would come in for, like, the video talks [about keeping safe] and I would run away. I would break down and cry. I would leave. I would run away. And, like, that wasn’t that wasn’t noticed by any adults… In [high] school, I had a teacher, like, there was the counselor, and I didn’t really know she was a counselor, because no one called her, like, that’s the counselor. Just called her [name]. And they all go, people go to [name]. They get their nails done, they go out for food, like, there’s just, like, little things. And I was like, ‘I want to go with [name].’ And, like, I had a teacher go, like, ‘[she] only sees people with issues, like, you’re fine.’ Looking back at it that, I feel like, if those signs back then were noticed by adults, I feel like it would have been very, very different. – Rachel 

Other people’s responses and interventions 

Despite these significant deterrents to speaking up, most participants did try to disclose – and the responses of the people they told about the abuse often entrenched their perceptions that doing so was unsafe. They recalled telling both people within their families, sometimes in indirect ways, and also telling organisations about it in the hope of bringing about an end to abusers’ patterns of harm. They all spoke first about their family contexts, and how their perceptions of the likelihood of a supportive or protective response oriented how much they were willing to say.  

“I wrote a little, it must have been just a little angry diary and it said something like I’m being abused or something like that. And my aunty found it, who’s like my mum today. She found it and she’s like- her reaction was the worst, now that I look back I’m like man, I need to learn from that, I will not react like that. She was like what is this? What does it mean? Are you being abused? And I was like what? Oh nah it means nothing. I brushed it off because of the way that she reacted. And not only that, I thought, in my mind, I was stuck. Who was gonna save me? I’d probably get a hiding. Who would save me?” – Ata 

Kasey was seven when the abuse started, but was 16 when she told her 15-year-old sister about the abuse, which was the first time she had told anyone. Her sister was “was supportive” and made excuses for her when she did not want to be in the room with her perpetrator.  

Eiliah Sharn did not remember exactly what she said to her mother at the time, but knew she must have made some kind of disclosure. Her stepfather responded protectively once he was aware of the abuse and exploitation her grandfather was subjecting her to. 

“And I must have said something to mum cause that’s when she, when my step dad started trying to step in and stop visits and I think I went through [child protection] interviews and shit… And then I think yeah, when he started hurting me, I started speaking up more about it to them. And it was my step-dad who was like nah, she ain’t fucking going back there again blah blah blah. Cause he obviously had known what had happened to my mum.” – Eiliah Sharn 

However, when he and her mother separated for brief periods of time, her mother continued to allow the abuser to spend time alone with her.  

“But mum like agreed with him but then when they’d fight and separate, she would just kind of keep allowing me. Like she refused to believe it because, for her the grooming and stuff like didn’t start until she was 16. So she struggled to believe it.” – Eiliah Sharn 

Bec, on the other hand, believed her mother had identified indicators of abuse without her explicitly naming it as such, and attempted to limit the abuser’s access to her as a result.  

“My mum started stopping me from seeing him once she started picking up on stuff. But it didn’t stop him. – Bec  

At the same time, she also believes her mother’s awareness of potential abuse did not lead to any further protective actions despite her mother’s partner embedding a pay-per-touch pattern with Bec. She reflected that: 

“I think even my mum might have been involved. You know how sometimes the parent can tell when something is happening and then they don’t do anything? … Yeah, well when we told her what had happened, we waited so long. Well, I told my father, because my mum didn’t want me obviously. She sent me out there to live. And I told my father, and he sent me back on the bus to go ring the police, and then sent me back on the bus to deal with it. And then my sister told [our mother] what happened, and she was like ‘oh nah I don’t believe you, you lie about everything.’ But when both of your children are telling you the same thing, you would think ‘oh hey, something’s wrong here.’” – Bec 

She also reported it to the police, and proceeded with an in-person interview with police despite the backlash from her mother. However, her mother’s denial of the abuse and forceful disapproval of Bec’s decision to report it eventually led to Bec declining to sign the statement she had given police.  

“So I was 15 and my sister was 12 and this man had been living on and off for us for many years. And I just got sick of it. I was like ‘I’m not doing this anymore’ … We were at the police station, and I remember. It’s weird that you remember certain things, but other things you block them out. Traumatic things. So this was quite a traumatic day, we went to the police station and I told them what had happened…My mum was in the room with me and she just kept saying ‘oh no she lies all the time, this isn’t true, this isn’t true.’ … I didn’t sign the statement, because my mum just made this big song and dance, so nothing ever happened to him… Mum kicked me out a couple of times but I actually had to live with my mum and this guy after that happened.” – Bec 

Bec then had little choice but to return home with her mother and the perpetrator. Maia described being similarly let down, and her feeling that she had been considered unworthy of love, support, intervention, or protection.  

She [sister] lived in [city] with my grandparents. Being the eldest, that usually happens. She had a different life to me. But I do know that one time, when she was a lot older, [the abuser] had tried to touch her up and she grabbed the steering wheel and crashed his car. Sooo, she told me that years later. But she did tell me about [father/father figure], that he had done something to her once, and that she had gone home and told grandad. And she must have been 16 then because all of a sudden, we were called to [this city] to our grandad’s, and there was a big meeting. And I knew. Because my sister was eight years older than me. So I was eight years old. And I was in the bedroom and I just knew what it was about. I don’t know if I was just intuitive or what it was, but I knew. Because my grandad looked at my father and just told him to get out. That he never wanted to see him again. That he wasn’t allowed in their house. That he was never allowed to go near my sister again. And I wondered to myself, why isn’t anyone taking care of me? They knew about [my sister] when I was eight. Why did they not do anything about me? So that kind of added onto that whole ‘you’re not worthy’ factor. You know?– Maia  

Rachel’s family did not invoke a protective response, so she (with another victim) had to keep trying to tell other people until someone acted on their disclosure.  

I think the next day, we told my Auntie’s dad, yeah, we told him what he had done to us, and he said that God was going to save us. that’s how he responded. He said that God was going to save us, and didn’t want us to tell [my aunties] mum, yeah. But we were like, actually, yeah. We are going to tell her – Rachel  

Rachel did however receive a supportive response from a sexual violence support worker, which helped her manage the mental burden of coping with the aftermath of abuse.  

Yeah, being able to, like, recognize it now is like, crazy, because, like, for so many years, I was in such a weird stage where I was, like, around him, so I ignored it, like it took us 10 years, more than 10 years, to speak up about what he did to us. I have [support worker], yeah. She was helping me, yeah, since March with all the police stuff that I was doing. The amount of rants that lovely woman has heard is like, yeah. Well, it’s always lovely when I go in there. – Rachel 

Several expressed that they felt talking about it was unwelcome. Ata reflected on her family’s tendency to look away from harm caused by someone they viewed as holding greater power than them, saying: 

I mean, he was the king of the kingdom, and they were, he was a tyrant, and they were just happy to get the crumbs of what was beneath his feet. – Ata 

But I think it was a bit hard for me after that thought, because she had done a lot of healing and every time I said to her you know I really want to talk about it she’s like no, I’m healed from it, I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to think about it – Bec 

We don’t speak about it [the abuse]. We don’t talk about that sort of stuff. I don’t even know if my brothers know. Apart from [name] only because he saw what he saw. – Maia 

Maia was forced to keep going to the abuser’s house every weekend afterwards, referring to it as “absolutely frightening” every time. Like Bec, Maia did eventually report the abuse and exploitation to the police. Her mother also signalled her distrust of Maia’s story, arguing she would have been too young to remember it anyway.  

So, I went to the police, gave them my, started my statement, and my mother said that can’t have happened to you, you were only three when, those clothes, you know. So, I asked my mum to leave the interview. – Maia 

Maia reported the exploitation to the police when she was in her early twenties – 17 years after the abuse had started. However, this was not the first time she had attempted to invoke an organisational response to stop the perpetrator’s abuse. When she was about eight years old, she approached the minister at her family’s church.   

He excommunicated me from the church. And so, then I decided I’m going to go to the other church that I went to, the Catholic church, and they excommunicated me as well. So, then I thought, right, well what was the point of that.” – Maia 

The response from two different churches taught Maia that supportive and protective responses were unlikely to be forthcoming after making disclosures about someone with considerable social and epistemic power. She reflected that: 

It was really difficult… very, very difficult. Even, you know, 20 years later, 30 years later, it was difficult for anybody to take you seriously or to do anything about it.  - Maia 

Rachel reported similarly disaffected responses from Police.  

I met [the detective] once, and that was after [perpetrator] had passed. He would message my auntie about all the details from our case and just be, oh, you tell Rachel. I was never informed directly. I wasn’t told anything. I didn’t even know my file number. I didn’t know so many things that I should have received, I just didn’t have them. As well when we went in [to police] and before we had our interviews and gave our statements, we told them, like, because he also made like, threats, and he’s like, if you tell anyone, you know what I’m going to do [gesture to suicide] – Rachel 

Chloe’s attempt to disclose the abuse was met with similar hostility. She enlisted the help of a friend, who supported her to tell a teacher at the school she attended. The teacher then called the police. The police turned up, took her back to the police station and interviewed her, and took her to hospital for a medical assessment. They asked her for the name of the abuser, and she provided the name of the person who had first abused her, rather than the person responsible for the recent exploitation. She stated “they did not believe me,” and recounted some of the comments they had made to her at the time. 

And then, a couple of days later, I went to call them like, I made a mistake, I’m really sorry but here’s the real details. But… as I was dialling the number into my phone they called me, and were like, you’re in so much trouble. And they ended up telling me that if I got pregnant I’d be the ‘next virgin Mary’… And they [police] told my parents. And we lived like 30 kms out from where my school was and my dad walked home because he didn’t want to be in the same space as me. So my parents didn’t believe me either. And it wasn’t until, I tried to tell them what had happened, but it wasn’t until a letter from ACC came, like a week later. Back in those days, in your acceptance on the ACC form, it lists your injuries. And they were injuries I only could have gotten from the abuse. And so, then my parents believed me. But like, youth aid came to my house to try and like, get me in trouble and stuff.” – Chloe 

After months went by with no further police action while the abuse continued, Chloe’s family moved away. Her story underlines the effort that she put into a frightening, emotionally fraught disclosure, not one single time, but to at least seven different people or organisations: her close friend, her teacher, the police, a detective, her parents, ACC, and Youth Aid. None, with the possible exception of ACC, which stipulated the abuse as factual and funded counselling, led to meaningful support, unconditional belief, or substantive support.  

Chloe was not alone in her experience of unresponsive or uncaring systems. Maia similarly expressed that “there was no help.” Eiliah eventually got support, but not until long after it would have been most useful at stemming the tide of harm from the impacts of abuse.  

You know, I needed help when shit was fresh, raw. I need help when I need help. Not one year two years down the track. By the time you can get around to helping it’s like, well now I’m really fucked. And then now you like don’t want to see me because I’m on drugs or I’m drinking so now you want me to go and see an alcohol person first, or a drug person first and then come back to you. Like, yeah. – Eiliah Sharn 

Equally importantly, only one participant (Ata, whose perpetrator “went to jail through mine and my sister’s testimonies”) was afforded the opportunity for genuine justice – accountability from the perpetrator and acknowledgement from helping systems. The myths and misconceptions held by first responders in some cases precluded this opportunity for justice; for example, Chloe’s example of the police telling her “it’s a he-said, she-said, you’re not a credible witness.” In other cases, participants simply were not given the help and intervention that would enable their participation in justice processes. They therefore had to cope and attempt to rebuild their lives in the absence of any meaningful resolution.  

Impacts and living with those impacts later 

Participants spoke about a range of impacts, both immediate and years (or even decades) later. Several are in long-term treatment for addiction.  

The only reason I would want to alter my mind or reality [with substances] is because I am avoiding the pain and of course that’s cool temporarily but sometimes you have to go, oh what’s actually wrong, and pull the splinter out of whatever. So that’s where I’m at today, is healing… I don’t want to just keep smoking marijuana, that was the only thing that would just take my brain away, like instantaneous. I would feel tears coming and I’d be like oh, just roll and joint and be like phew. I don’t care anymore. It was the only thing I found to cut the emotional string to my heart. But I didn’t want that. It felt like half living, and I knew, and I still know now that I have so much potential but I wasn’t and still am kind of not, living to my full potential because of the emotional damage. – Ata 

I did start smoking meth from 16 years old with my friends and stuff. And it was just occasionally. Well, it was a lot but occasionally. Back then it was a lot. As I got older it felt occasionally. So yeah I did a lot of that. And I was never home and I would just latch onto a boy and go and live with them or. You know? Move around the country and things like that. But it wasn’t constant until like a year later. But I always said to myself I’m not addicted, I’m not addicted but you definitely are. – Bec  

Thoughts of suicide were equivalently common. A loss of dignity, hope, faith in other people, and parenting capacity were also frequently mentioned by participants.  

I just lost all dignity in myself after that. Like I really did, I lost all dignity, got hooked on drugs, went down that road, for a good few years. And then I realised fuck, I need to wake up, I’ve got a kid now, and then another kid and my other two, and I don’t wanna lose them, and they need me. Wake the fuck up, and yeah. That’s when I did wake the fuck up. But yeah still. I nearly lost, yeah. When you get treated like that you just lose all your dignity. – Eiliah Sharn 

[After] I was so depressed and I did not know why. And some of my friends would get mad at me. I was so blessed, you know? I was good at sport, I had always been clever, that was my safe haven. If home was hell, of course school was going to be heaven. So I was very, very clever. Top of my class at pretty much everything. But socially, I struggled. I struggled with boyfriend relationships, even girl relationships with my friends to be honest. – Ata 

Eiliah Sharn’s quote below captures the enormity of the sense of defeat she and others experienced after first being abused and exploited for years, and then trying with every resource available to them to seek help so they could build a better life for themselves – to no avail. Eventually, she capitulated to addiction, feeling a desperate need for comfort, connection, and a reprieve from the hopelessness and worthlessness she felt.  

I had a group of friends but I was so sad and empty and I never knew why. – Ata 

I always had really bad dreams. But they were dreams about me. When I had my daughter I started dreaming. Same dream, same horrific dreams, but instead of my face, it was my girls. I started losing. I started to unravel then. I just, my daughter would have been about 9 months old, she wasn’t a year anyway. And I knew I needed to get help. Like real serious help. – Maia 

We don’t speak about it [the abuse]. We don’t talk about that sort of stuff. I don’t even know if my brothers know. Apart from [name] only because he saw what he saw. – Maia 

Getting into intimate relationships with another abuser was a shared experience for several participants.  

And that’s how I ended up going back, I will like man, there’s something wrong with me, I hate this guy, I despise him, but I don’t stop letting him back into my house. I keep letting him in and sleeping with him and like, he disgusts me. There’s something wrong. – Ata 

Eiliah Sharn’s perpetrator died after she left the household, and she described having mixed feelings: relief that she no longer lived with fear of him, and anger at the lack of accountability and collective disgust at his actions.  

“Sad because he was never ever held accountable. But yeah there was just a sense of relief too, of… out of sight out of mind, just gone. I never had to worry about having to have to see him. That was probably a big thing. That was probably why the relief. I was just kind of pissed off that he didn’t get held accountable. And pissed off with mum. Cause she was all like, oh my god I forgive him for everything.” – Eiliah Sharn 

In addition to living with the impacts of the abuse itself, they also had to cope with the implications of how others responded to it once they were made aware that it was happening. Chloe, for instance, talked about the thing that made the biggest difference to her being “my parents finally believing me. Which took my parents needing to know the goriest details and the list of all the injuries that I had received [from ACC].”  She went on to explain that: 

I’m honestly almost more traumatized by the police response than what happened. It was horrible what happened, but the police is what gets me the most. To the point where I still remember the ringtone that he had on his phone. And its a song. And I cannot hear that song. – Chloe 

The non-response they received from systems, despite repeatedly putting in the work, time, effort, and turmoil of asking for help, amplified the impacts of abuse and their feelings of being disposable and helpless.  

I mean you don’t know what else to do because you’ve reached out for help every way you can think of and no one’s fucking helping. It’s like fuck. Oh well, these guys will talk to me… The only ones who are gonna hear you is drug addicts because they’ve been through similar trauma. And then you just start smoking, you know? You kind of got a line of comfort being able to relate to someone or someone hearing you, you know? Which is really fucking sad to show that the system fails like that. Cause I’ve gone to them all for help first. – Eiliah Sharn 

In addition, even though the original abuse and exploitation eventually ended for these participants, the impacts of this abuse on their social stability and life trajectories meant many remained unsafe. These participants were again subjected to violence, this time from perpetrators that capitalised on their abuse-related social precarity. As Eiliah Sharn explains, starting over meant “a relief that I wasn’t waiting for that shit to happen but I was also scared in the new habitat… I kind of went from one form of abuse to another.” Chloe similarly reflected that: 

More abuse followed from other people because I think, there’s the idea that once you’ve been abused once, It’s not like you’re damaged goods but you’re more vulnerable to having things happen again. And especially with my mindset of [thinking] people just, that’s all they want, is to abuse people. I kind of got myself in situations. I had this other weird thought – as a young person where I had already been damaged so I will damage myself further if it means that other people don’t have to deal with it. And so, I would walk around sketchy parts of town late at night because if there was anyone looking to do something on the street, it would meant someone else wouldn’t. Which is such a fucked up thing. Like [laughs] but my logic. – Chloe 

These subsequent abusive relationships often spanned years, inflicted further physical and emotional wounds, and further destabilised victims’ prospects for viable recoveries.  

Changing the story 

Many participants spoke about the importance of early prevention initiatives. School-based learning featured prominently in these accounts, but not always positively. While participants saw the value in consent and safety education, they also highlighted the limitations of current programmes. Kasey, for instance, described the disconnect between what is taught and what children are actually able to act on when their real-life environments are unsafe. Her reflections speak to a core flaw in many prevention efforts: they presume that children have access to “safe adults” without acknowledging that these adults are often absent, uncaring, or abusive themselves. 

And I feel like, you know, what’s you’ve learned about it, like, Oh, and, you know, oh, it’s something bad. And, but then people say, can find a safe adult to go and talk to. But they don’t really clarify who is a safe adult, and what if the safe someone should have been a safe adult is the one that like sexually abused you. [Or] People say, ‘go to your teacher.’ But if your teacher doesn’t care about you, they’re not going to be a safe person for you. So I think that is a big thing as well. – Kasey 

This sense of ambivalence towards school-based responses was not limited to curriculum. Although some schools offered counselling, participants did not always view these services as safe. Kasey, for example, explained that she had avoided seeking support through her school counsellor out of fear that doing so would trigger an unwanted child protection response. Her preference was for help that moved “nice and slow” — a form of support more relational and less punitive than many statutory pathways allow. 

Participants placed greater faith in other forms of prevention. They repeatedly called for the education of parents, particularly those raising children alone, about how predators target families. In their view, this would help prevent abuse by recognising and disrupting grooming tactics before they could escalate. 

He targeted my mum. She had little girls and he targeted [her]. You know, [it was] calculated. Single women need to be educated because they’re out there. – Ata 

Others focused on the need for education to begin earlier in life, at a developmental stage appropriate to children’s actual exposure to risk. They advocated for clear, direct language about consent, boundaries, and touch — concepts that many said had never been explicitly discussed with them as children. 

I mean, it really should be at like, yes, six years old. Just like, [teaching that] if somebody wants to do this, it’s not okay. This is good. This is bad. Yeah, yeah. Like, good touch, bad touch – Rachel 

This emphasis on “breaking the cycle” — ending intergenerational violence through education, intervention, and support — was echoed across participants’ narratives. But they also warned against individualising responsibility for change. In their view, mothers cannot be left to manage structural violence alone. Instead, they called for greater investment in community-based supports for parents, particularly solo mothers navigating post-violence recovery. 

I think we have the ability to break the cycle. It’s just unfortunate it’s so fucking hard to get help to break the cycles. – Eiliah Sharn
After ending up at women’s refuge, I was like I’m not doing that again. I refuse to let him around my children at any time. So I’ve only had a couple of men around my kids, long term relationships, but I definitely feel like we need more support as solo mums to be able to get through these kinds of things. – Bec 

Unlike other forms of help-seeking, participants overwhelmingly described counselling and therapy as meaningful, healing, and often life-changing. These services were generally portrayed as a turning point in participants’ wellbeing — even if their access was delayed by years, or had previously been denied. Many participants had their first encounter with a trauma-informed therapist as adults, sometimes more than a decade after the abuse took place. 

The help that I got was in my later twenties. I had still been searching for help and I met a psychologist named [name]. I can’t remember her last name. And the first thing she said to me was, if I can’t help you, it’s not because of you, it’s because I’m the wrong person for you and I will do my very best to find the right person for you. And it was like… Wow. – Maia 

Where counselling did work, it was often because practitioners took a relational, validating, and skill-based approach. Several participants highlighted specific therapeutic modalities — like EMDR — that helped them process traumatic memories and access emotional regulation tools. 

[Therapy was] absolutely incredible. We did EMDR. And I’ve only done it three times, but it’s actually changed my whole life. It’s amazing how much it trickles down through so many different memories and makes such a big difference. And you don’t even realise, it’s just small subtle changes. Yeah it was definitely worth it – Bec 

At the same time, access to counselling was fraught. Participants described having to go through multiple assessments, retell trauma in painful detail, or meet strict eligibility requirements. Some said they were not ready to benefit from therapy until later in their healing journey, particularly if they were still unsafe or unstable at the time they were first referred. 

I think I wasn’t actually developed enough or something to actually be able to work in therapy, if that makes sense? It did not work. [But later] I went to therapy cause I was like, man, I don’t like feeling like this. I don’t want to be an addict. Not everybody has that [therapy] and doesn’t even see that as an option sadly, I don’t know what else I would have done. – Ata
I had to do an ACC assessment and that’s when they ask you about every single thing. And to depict every single thing that happened. I ended up an alcoholic and it wasn’t a very nice time. But you know what? That had to happen. You have to go right down to the bottom to be able to pick yourself back up. – Bec 

Participants also reflected on the value of peer-based or group therapy environments, where those who had experienced similar forms of abuse could connect, reflect, and support each other. 

I would love to facilitate group counselling. I would like to facilitator groups for women that empower them, build their confidence, help them deal with their trauma. But together because you know a lot of the time you find yourself alone in these things, and it’s so nice to have that support as well with like minded people who have been through the same thing. – Bec 

Kasey described a powerful journey from initial crisis contact to sustained therapeutic support. Her reflections underscore how critical it is that first-line responses — including phone counselling services — are trauma-informed, non-judgemental, and able to connect victims to affordable, long-term care. 

It was good, because I think I was just like, cause I had like a flashback… and I was like, I need someone to talk to. So with Safe to Talk, I just talked about stuff from when I was younger, just get rid of the feelings in like, a confidential place, and they recommended me to be a [support service]. And it was free, like oh okay, like, that’s better like, financially. And then I got a call at first from a [support service] and I think that was okay. I did, like, cry a bit, because I think at first I wasn’t planning on disclosing in the call. I was just talking about other stuff, but after building that connection, I felt more comfortable, then I talked about it. And her voice was, like, quite gentle as well. The first time I met her, I did, like, break down a bit and got a hug. And I think that was what I needed. And, well, that’s what, like, the seven-year-old in me needed, like, like, a hug from an adult and like, support… And then we worked through some emotional regulation techniques and stuff, which was good because I have, like, major and minor triggers, which would be good to deal with. It does leave a big impact. – Kasey 

Across these stories, it is clear that while therapy alone could not guarantee stability or safety, it played a crucial role in helping survivors navigate the emotional and psychological consequences of abuse. 

Despite the severity of the harm they experienced, many participants concluded their interviews with hope. This hope was grounded not in false optimism, but in hard-won experiences of growth, healing, and change. Participants shared stories of progress through sobriety, therapy, parenting, education, and community. Their words reflect the possibility of a future that is not defined by violence — but by agency, strength, and care. 

But there’s always hope. There’s always hope. Can change and you can do anything. Man there’s just hope. No matter how fucking long it takes. – Eiliah Sharn
So were working through that [in therapy]. And the thing that I know is that I am healing. I am healing. It’s been a long time coming. And I know that I am fortunate to be on this path of healing. Sobriety I think is the best thing. For me anyway. – Ata
I’ve accepted what has happened, and moving forward. You know just learned not to dwell… And I think studying this year has been a big, big change and a big help for me because it’s something that I thought I would never be capable of doing again. So, I think just setting myself goals and challenges that are positive and proactive and actually doing them is like the best, self-rewarding thing ever. The more I’m going and striving and doing, the stronger I’m getting, so the more determined I’m getting. – Eiliah Sharn 

These narratives are not stories of erasure or forgetting. They are stories of living with pain and choosing, over and over again, to move forward anyway. 

Part 2: Online abuse and exploitation 

Preface 

Exploitation that was enacted online or through digital means rarely featured the exchange of money or other material benefits. Notably, participants for whom exploitation occurred primarily online shared very different stories to those mainly abused or exploited in person. They tended to have protective parents, who had safeguarded them from in-person abuse, and who responded with concern if disclosed to. For them, exploitation was characterised by older perpetrators’ weaponizing of exchanges that otherwise paralleled adolescents’ normal in-person forays into emerging intimacy with prospective partners. ‘Risk’, for this group, was attributable to perpetrators’ intentional targeting of normative age-related interests and desires: for connection, for novelty, for validation, and for confirmation of desirability. In short, instead of relying on material inducements, it seemed that perpetrators utilised online spaces in which they could be digitally alone and unsupervised with young teenagers and create affectionate attachments they could then leverage to exploit them.  

This section of the findings therefore begins by setting out the nature of the transactional component of participants’ stories, and how these relate to or feature themes of exploitation. It then explores the contexts in which abuse began, and how abuse or exploitation was first established and then progressed by perpetrators, and how far their reach extended over victims. Next, it looks at the barriers to disclosing it, how people responded when it was disclosed, and what safety or recovery was possible, accessible, facilitated, and effective. Finally, it sets out participants’ views on what might strengthen opportunities for safety and wellbeing for people in similar situations.  

Initial contact 

Kate was 15 when she began talking online with a man who was six years older than her, and who persuaded her to send him intimate photos.  

I just started talking to people online, and that would move to Snapchat. And then I knew, I remember being aware of what I was doing. I just didn’t think it was as wrong as it should have been, like it, it felt bad, but in a good way, like it felt naughty and like I was actually having fun for once, my getting away with it was like a big rush. And I ended up talking to a guy who was 21 at the time, I believe. And I just remember it gave us something to talk about at school, like it made people at school want to talk to me, to ask questions about it. And I didn’t want it to stop, really… I’m pretty sure in my Tinder bio head that I was 16, which now looking back, is disgusting, that people are still like, oh, I don’t care about her age – Kate 

Briar’s story is similar, but involved multiple different men who had befriended her online, made her feel special and wanted, and initiated sexual conversations. 

So, [at 17], I ended up speaking to three people, three men who were all in actually different countries and different countries. They were in different countries. So there was one who was in London, he was about 28 there was one in Australia who was about 25 and there was one in Tennessee, America, who was 32… These guys [perpetrators] must have known it was wrong, because when I was meeting other people on Omegle, they would call me jailbait. And so I’m like, yeah, like, if these guys knew it was wrong, yeah, they were like, ‘yo, we’re staying away from that.’ Then the ones who were like, ‘yes, please, must have’, must also have been aware or were seeking that out. And the very fact that this guy, who was 25, wasn’t fearful [of the consequences] suggests a level of confidence, which is kind of, yeah, awful. – Briar 

She recalled her initial belief that their conversations were fuelled by genuine connections, and her subsequent realisation that they had targeted her on the basis of age – something other men online had flagged as problematic and avoided.  

We’ve got this ridiculous age gap, and that, I think, really reinforce this idea of like, these men weren’t meeting me because we were going to have some deep, intense relationship that was going to involve us being on the same level. And it really highlighted it like, Briar, you were 17, like you couldn’t have consented to these things. And most like, men must know that. – Briar  

Alex experienced similar tactics of deception that engendered her willingness to send images; she was a young adult manipulated into sharing sexualised content that she believed was exchanged in the context of a loving relationship, but which could then be shared with others online.  

“He [online boyfriend/perpetrator] would say Oh my god, you’re so gorgeous, and would like, asked me about my day, and like, he would say, he said that he was gonna fly me to Canada to live with him, like he was gonna fly me over to Canada.” – Alex 

Both Kyle and Jamie were 12 when they were targeted by older abusers on social media platforms (Facebook and Snapchat respectively). Kyle was in the first year of high school, and Jamie was in her final year of intermediate. 

There was nothing like overtly sexual about any of it at first. That was kind of just one of those things that, yeah, we were just talking, and so I was like, oh, cool. You know, I’ve got this person, someone that’s always there to talk to me, and someone that’s always replying and stuff, which, you know, obviously, again, one of those things that you don’t always get from friends, because that’s not actually reasonable… But after that, I think it started sort of immediately, being like, oh, I don’t really like this part quite so much, yeah, the stuff where, you know, conversations were getting more sexual, and stuff like that. – Kyle 

He was two years older than us. So he was like 15 at the time… One day, I, like, saw that had, like, added me on Snapchat, and so I was like, oh, well, I met him, like, you know, I’m just gonna add him back… the conversation was fine, like, for a couple weeks, whatever, we’d just Snapchat and, like, we were 12, you know. – Jamie 

The progression from contact to exploitation 

They described an initially innocuous-seeming relationship that rapidly became characterised by coercion into sexual activity, online or otherwise.  

And then he was like, very coercive. I told him I was 16, and then I we talked for a bit, and then I let him know it was I was 15, and he did not care at all. It almost seemed to make him more like into it, like he also got off on the fact that it was wrong, yeah. And then we’d just send photos back and forth on Snapchat. And then I went to his house. I snuck out and went to his house once. – Kate 

He’d send like the DVDs in the mail. Yeah, because we had no personal safety, I guess so he knew our address. Yeah, not ideal looking back on it, but yeah, one of those things where [there was also exposure to] like adult pornography, occasionally… it would just be, like an extra random disc in there. He’d sort of be like, ‘oh, and there’s another movie in there.’ But then sort of more pressure stuff started, it got a bit less fun. But it was one of those things where at first it was like, like, at first he’d always just want me to, like, look at him while he had sort of jerk off. And that was kind of one of those things where I could just have a little window and not really, yeah, look too closely at it. So that was, yeah, fine, it was just something that I’d ignore while it happened. And then yeah, after that, it was yeah, one of those things where it sort of slowly, you know, [turned into] like, ‘oh, you looked really cute in that thing’, yeah. And then sort of a, ‘can you take off the [clothes].’ Yeah. And then sort of got more and more, I guess, explicit over time. – Kyle 

Jamie and Kate both touched on their fear that images would be shared, and that their decisions to share their own images with someone they trusted at such a young age would impact them in unknown ways much later on.  

And then it kind of digressed the conversation kind of digressed to, like talking about puberty, in a way, I think it was. And he made a comment that my friend that introduced them had, like, taken photos and sent them to him. And I kind of blew it off when he initially brought it up to me, but then every time we would talk, the conversation would would, like, go to that… And then it became a case of him, like threatening to show other people [my photos] if I didn’t send him the Snapchats of our other friends. And [friend] was experiencing the same thing, but we were just, we didn’t really talk about that. We just kind of knew that that was the case. And I kind of expressed my concern, like, oh, you’re going to show other people. You’re going to he’s like, no, no, I wouldn’t, like, I haven’t shown any of your friends. And I was just like, oh no, no, no. And then he kind of got to the point where he was just like, verbally making me feel bad for not doing that. Like, oh, we’re friends, so why wouldn’t you, you know like, and obviously, if you get that enough times, well, obviously, but enough times you end up doing it… [and then] it was always just the threatening of like, ‘I’m just going to show your friends [the sexual images] unless you send more or share usernames of other friends’. – Jamie 

It was nothing at start, like at the start, it was just very flirty. And then it moved to photos, yeah. And then, like, he would be shirtless, and then I would send one in, like my underwear, and then it would move like it slowly, very slowly progressed or didn’t actually feel like anything crazy was happening. So it was like baby steps towards it… But I know for a fact that, like, my 15-year-old nudes, nudes from when I was 15 years old, like, were probably circulated from that. – Kate 

Several participants later reflected that by positioning them as somehow complicit in the need to conceal the online sexual activity, their abusers had effectively forestalled their perceived opportunities to disclose it to others. 

She ended up giving one of our friends snapchats, and I gave another one our friends Snapchats. And that continued and continued until we kind of just like had a collection, until there was one girl who he was asking for, and she brought it up to a teacher – Jamie 

It’s one of those things that looking back on, I’m like, how do we fall for that? But then yeah, in the moment, I guess it’s one of those things that you just sort of, yeah, kind of go with it, you know, it’s, you don’t know enough about anything to be like, oh, this is actually really weird. And so, you know, someone’s confidently telling you these things that you know you’ve your friends will sort of like, really hate you if they find out what you’ve done, kind of thing that you’re like, okay, yeah, no, that does make sense. Because, you know, yeah, yeah, I’ve done something horrible…  the circumstances of it, it was always, from the start, this big secret that I was in on. Yeah, I’d sort of, you know, betrayed my friend, kind of thing, and so we couldn’t tell her, so I couldn’t sort of talk to anyone about it. – Kyle  

They later pinpointed the beginning of sexual exchanges as the time that they started “being really secretive” (Kyle) and being told “you can’t tell anyone about this” (Kate).  

The ‘pull factor’ 

Participants seldom received any tangible material gain in exchange for their sharing of sexual content with the people exploiting them. Participants’ perceptions of the precursors to online exploitation paint a very different picture than those described by participants exploited primarily in person. Only one referenced their early experiences of witnessing domestic violence.  

When mum married a second time, she married a physical abuser. So we went from that, to alcohol and violence.– Alex 

One attributed his interest in seeking online connections in part to the (temporary) unavailability of parents.  

Mum was sick at the time, she well, they thought it would be terminal cancer, but she ended up sort of pulling through. So she’s been unwell for, you know, 15 years, but at the time it was, yeah, quite bad. And then that sort of had, you know, Dad distracted and busy with that… And then also, I guess, just the, yeah, like it was just one of those things where I actively sought out attention from people online. – Kyle 

In general, participants all attributed their initial interest in making those connections with strangers to the normative developmental desires to adolescence: for attention, affection, novelty, affirmation of desirability, and relational gratification or fulfilment.  

If you think of the classic like American teen comedy, about a girl meeting a guy at high school, he’s really nice to her. He calls her pretty. And then the end of the movie, they get together and, like, life’s amazing. And I was like, where’s my like, you know? I went to my school ball by myself. Like, where’s my Prince Charming?  – Briar 

I feel like that point in my life was quite tumultuous, just nothing major was actually going on. It was more just being at high school, not really enjoying anything that much, like not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life, just kind of being in the thick of it during high school, like it was right in when I wasn’t starting, I wasn’t finishing. I was just kind of there, and I was a bit bored. – Kate 

Yeah. I mean, well, you’re in this context where you’re right, you’re, you’re going to, if not, you need to high school for the first time. You’re becoming a teenager. You’re, you’re being exposed to the seniors at the school who do have partners and boyfriends and girlfriends and going to parties and drinking, and you just can’t wait to be, you know, a part of the world, and you’re pushing those boundaries, and you’re not sure what’s just part of being an adult, and actually what’s, yeah, not part of being an adult, and you’re actually being, you know, groomed. – Kyle 

Briar perfectly articulates this distinction between the idea of childhood trauma catalysing ‘risk’ in young people’s lives and her own experience of simply seeking validation from other people. Being online, to her, provided a means of expanding her interpersonal horizon to meet others who could provide her with this kind of gratification.  

100% there was a connection between my poor self-esteem and experience of exploitation. I think I was very eager to meet people and to be, you know, and just like, it was interesting. So we talked about, like, transactions. I didn’t need money because I had money, but I never had someone tell me, Hey, you’re really pretty Yeah. And don’t get me wrong, like I come from a very good family, like, growing up, my parents, you know, have affirmed me, and I don’t come from any history of, like, childhood trauma, nothing like that. I was just, I had low self-esteem, and was looking for validation… And I suppose the simple, crazy thing is that I come from a white, middle class immigrant family. I don’t know like I’m interested to see your research and look at people who grew up in a different position to me, because you wouldn’t look at me and go, you’re the risk factor. – Briar 

Kate also reflected on the distinction between the exchange of sexual content for material gain, and her experience of someone manipulating her into sharing sexual content by capitalising on her normative adolescent desire for novelty and affirmation. Like Briar, online spaces represented greater potential for her to fulfil these desires than her in-person social setting did.  

I feel like, while it was strictly online, I was just getting entertainment, like I never got given anything material, but I just, yeah, I just remember being so, so bored and, like, just wanting something more. And it kind of, it gave me that rush, yeah, about, sort of like a drug. Like, every time you get that notification, it’s like, ‘oh, I’m special’, and I guess I wasn’t. I don’t think I was really getting that attention that some of my other friends were from guys like in school. So I then found out I was able to get it online. And it wasn’t as good, but at least it was something. – Kate 

It is however important to note that these adolescent desires, and participants’ attempts to fulfil them through exploration of and relationship-building within online spaces, did not cause their exploitation. Rather, these were subsequently targeted and weaponised by the older men who then (knowingly) exploited them for their own gratification, and who, it appears, used well-established and well-practised tactics to do so.  

Impacts 

The impacts participants talked about centred on the social implications of the exploitation being discovered by others, their realisation of how calculated the abuse was, and the feeling of powerlessness about preventing abusers from continuing their behaviour. Kyle, for instance, felt everything else in his life would have “been easier to deal with” if he had not been “carrying this massive secret through this whole time.”  

He also reflected that while at the time he had seen it as a “sad old man”, rather than as intentionally predatory behaviour, as he grew into later adolescence he began to see it as problematic. Briar voiced similar shifts in her perception of online behaviour, saying: 

Even looking back on it now, I think, wow. How did you miss that he wasn’t talking to you for your deep psychological opinions, or, you know, philosophy of life that you’ve achieved by 17? – Briar 

Kate and Alex, on the other hand, described still feeling frustrated at the lack of resolution, and consequent potential for their abusers to continue exploiting others in the same way.  

He never got any repercussions… For him to just walk away like and go do it to someone else really frustrates me now. – Kate 

I felt just kind of like defeated and kind of angry. – Alex 

They also described how their wellbeing suffered as a result.  

But I just went around, like, arguing and arguing, and then after that, like my family calls it, my difficult years, straight after that, I kind of cracked mentally. And then once that happened, I actually got support, but… it wasn’t centred on [online exploitation], even though, like, looking back now, that’s, that’s when everything fell to pieces… I mean, I remember not wanting to go to school, but also not wanting to be at home. And just it just felt like this really exciting happy thing had been snatched, and then I had nothing, and now everyone was more angry at me than they would have, like they weren’t angry with me before, but now I had that frustration and boredom mixed with like all these other emotions from other people. – Kate 

Briar, interestingly, felt a sense of ambiguous loss and rejection when the person exploiting her was no longer in contact. 

It felt like the rug had been pulled out [when the online relationship ended]. It gave me those feelings of like abandonment, you know, I’d been ghosted like, I’m not good enough, like, and those feelings I’d gone into it with of, like, poor self-esteem, I feel less than [other people]… I have these intense feelings of like, abandonment and shame and humiliation. – Briar 

She and Jamie both referred to the guilt and shame they felt about their perceived role in ‘allowing’ the exploitation to happen.  

I think that’s what I find crazy, and it has taken me to be the age or older than these men [perpetrators] were, is that, when I look back on it, I think there was this guilt and shame that I sought it out. And I think, yeah, I find myself thinking like, wow, I went searching for this, so therefore I wasn’t a victim. – Briar 

It was just a very stressy, panicky situation, constantly, like I was always thinking that I was gonna wake up and like, he’s posted it on Facebook or something, you know? … I think the whole experience for myself was way easier to deal with because I knew others going through it, and I felt like there’s just us an overall sense of like, shame associated with being in a situation like that. – Jamie 

Others’ responses to victimisation 

Participants overwhelmingly reported blaming and ineffective responses from those they disclosed the online exploitation to.  

At the time, it felt really complex, like I’d never been through anything like that. I just remember like I would go to the counsellor every now and then, and she was lovely, but it didn’t really help… Honestly, I think I just needed to be told that it wasn’t my fault, like someone to actually just sit there and let me talk about it, and then, like, just no judgment. It felt like no matter where I was turning, it was like a ‘oh yeah, no, that’s bad, but you did [participate], you know, like, there was always that victim blaming. Even from, like, the professional places. – Kate 

Kate and Jamie both felt that their parents’ responses lacked insight into whose behaviour was problematic, and that by seeing them as mutual participants instead of as victims, they were attributed the blame for how they were impacted.  

That’s how my parents found out. I mean, I can’t say I would have handled it the way they did, which was, like, very blame orientated toward me, they made out that I was the problem when obviously, like, yeah, I wasn’t…. And I think the conversation could have been more compassionate rather than blame orientated, because I’d be far more likely to tell them things and open up if I knew like I was gonna not be yelled at, yeah – Kate 

Just like my mum, for example, never, like, asked me specifically about like, to explain the situation. You know, she kind of just understood what happened through what the teachers and in school were saying. And yeah, they never really asked us. It was kind of just all like, ‘oh, these girls were sending explicit images to this boy, and all of them were in contact with him’ without kind of giving further background, further detail. – Jamie 

Kate also pointed out the distinction between professionals who generally wanted to help, and those with sufficient training and awareness about specific issues (like exploitation) to be equipped enough to be able to actually help.  

I just remember thinking like, these people have not trained enough to be able to deal with this type of thing. Like, I think, I don’t know if they took, like, counselling courses or something, but I remember like, being a little shit about it… like, I understand that you’re an empathetic person, and you want to, like, make me get better, but you don’t know how to help me get better… But it just felt like the certain interventions that were there and like were accessible, weren’t, like, actual fixes. … I don’t think my school would have the resources to react in any way, though, other than to say to me ‘just don’t do that’ or ‘go to the school counsellor’. – Kate 

Some reported it to the police, usually after a significant time delay, as it was during this period that their perception of acceptability changed.  

It doesn’t feel like as much of a big deal [at the time]… and like, looking at, like, photos of ourselves at the time and stuff like that, we’re like, ‘oh, we were literal children.’ But at the time, you’re like, ‘no, I’m 13. I am at high school now, I’m basically an adult.’ I think we’ were about 18 or 19 when we sort of really realized, ‘oh, that was actually, like, really fucked up.; And so we made like a police report, but they didn’t really go anywhere, because it was like, we’ve got, you know, no, logs or anything, of anything that happened, and stuff like that was all gone years ago. – Kyle 

Those who did not report it to police gave similar accounts of gradual realisation that the behaviour was predatory, and that they were not old enough to have been equal participants in it.  

I, yeah, I blamed myself for a long time, and only in the past year or so, I finally realized that I was actually blaming myself and that that wasn’t okay because my little like, the only reason I realized that was I have a little cousin who’s almost, she’s about 13 now, and the thought of that happening to her and like, what I would do in that situation, I was like, maybe I should give that grace to myself. – Kate 

Changing the story 

The primary mechanism participants wished had been in place was better prevention messaging — specifically, prevention that accounted for the nature and dynamics of technology-facilitated abuse, rather than focusing solely on physical-world threats. They described growing up with outdated or incomplete messaging that left them unprepared for how abuse actually occurred. As Kyle explained, much of the education he received framed danger as something that would arrive in the form of a stranger in a van — a narrative that bore little resemblance to the ways he was targeted online. 

I remember, you know, you get sort of taught that, you know, ‘don’t get into a van with a stranger,’ kind of safety talk. But I don’t really remember anything about, like, also, ‘people online might you’re your clothes off,’ I don’t remember any of that… You know, that kind of [message], I guess, like, ‘oh yeah, it’s not just going to be some guy trying to snatch you into his van.’ – Kyle 

Jamie’s experience reinforced this concern. She reflected on how online safety education in school — while well-intentioned — failed to account for the complexity of digital relationships. Messaging focused on “strangers” left her with a false sense of safety when her abuser was someone she had met in person, even if briefly. The narrow framing of danger meant she was less likely to interpret his behaviour as exploitative, and more likely to believe she was safe.   

I feel like at that point in time, like, a big, a big thing at school was, like, talking about cyber safety and cyber security and everything, and the issue with that was, like, because I’d met him in person. You can be friends with them on this and this. And so at the time, cyber safety talks at school and whatever and online. We were just like, if you don’t know them, don’t add them, but I had met him. But, you know, I just, yeah, I just met him. So in my mind, I was like, I do know him. So that [sextortion] can’t happen. Like, in my mind, I was like, we know each other. So I’m safe. – Jamie 

Participants also drew attention to the disjuncture between the ages at which prevention education typically begins, and the much younger age at which children now engage with digital spaces. Jamie emphasised that by the time she was formally taught about online safety, it was already too late for many. She also reflected on how earlier discussions — even if not fully understood at the time — could still better equip young people by giving them language and frameworks to recognise what was happening.  

I think there needs to be more of a focus on young girls, because in our day and age, there’s the whole, you know, men talk about the loneliness epidemic and whatnot, because girls are now finding the ability to say, like, ‘I don’t have to serve you. I don’t have to, you know, meet whatever expectations you have for women’ and like, that’s understood for me now, because I’m older, but I feel like the same ways in which I’m realizing and understanding that can be expressed and taught to younger girls… I just feel like, even if it’s not completely understood, it kind of empowers, in a way. But yeah, I wouldn’t know how you’d go about doing that, or what age group or who that would cater to initially, you know, because I remember being in year nine, so 14… But obviously people were way younger than that who now have access to every form of social media ever, now, it’s like, I have my seven year old cousin who has an Instagram and Snapchat now. – Jamie 

Several participants emphasised the need for comprehensive sexual health and relationship education — education that would not only support children to understand healthy dynamics, but also explicitly address online abuse, image-based sexual violence, and consent in the digital sphere. This needed to go far beyond anatomical or safety-focused lessons. Kate described an ideal curriculum that tackled the social realities of online abuse directly and seriously. 

I feel like prevention would have to start with teaching young people about sex and about their how their bodies work and what healthy relationships look like… If I had unlimited money, I would focus a curriculum around sexual health, and that would also include, like, stuff about the digital space, because, I mean, it’s so easy to get information online now, which can be good, but it’s also a lot of misinformation… like, I’ve seen stuff around the uni about, like, getting your nudes back, or something like that for online help. But it needs to be like ‘this is happening,’ like ‘everyone needs to know about it.’  – Kate 

Participants also emphasised that prevention needed to account for power, manipulation, and intent — not just physicality or legality. Kyle highlighted the importance of explaining why age gaps matter and why “friendships” with much older people are often a sign of grooming, even if they initially feel emotionally genuine.   

I guess it’s that like, yeah, just that education around the fact like it can really feel like they are your, genuinely your friend, and that but there is essentially no reason that someone over the age of like 15 should want to be friends with a 12 year old… when you’ve got that kind of age gap at, like, such a young age and stuff like that, that, you know, it’s one of those things where, even if it, I guess, just that providing children with that knowledge that, like, you know, it’s probably predatory, even if it doesn’t feel like it – Kyle 

Finally, participants stressed that prevention messaging must not be limited to children and teenagers. Kate reflected that the adults in her life — including parents and teachers — often didn’t understand the mechanics of online grooming or the seriousness of digitally facilitated abuse. This lack of adult awareness not only left her without support, but also led to blame and disbelief when she eventually disclosed. 

For my parents, I think hearing someone else’s story about how it can go wrong, or, like, how to put in place safety precautions would be really important, and then also having safe places for like children or anyone to go to actually discuss these things with people who understand…. I think not growing up with that sort of technology and having an understanding of it would have been pretty hard to, like, how did this happen so easily? Like, to then blame it on me, saying, like, ‘you must have done something,’ like ‘this cannot be normal.’ Yeah. I just think, like, if parents had also had education on it, it would have been helpful… And then it would also be good to have something of that, like education for parents as well, or like caregivers and teachers.  

She sums this up perfectly by saying: 

Every single possible person that’s in the little tree of the young person’s network needs to be educated. – Kate 

Part 3: Practitioners’ perceptions of exploitation 

Preface 

Practitioners consistently expressed a desire to understand and support victims of online sexual exploitation. Many had made purposeful efforts to build their knowledge and skills. At the same time, some discomfort remained, particularly in relation to sexually explicit forms of abuse facilitated through digital platforms. In several cases, practitioners’ language reflected persistent social narratives that minimise the seriousness of online exploitation or frame victims as unstable, attention-seeking, or complicit in their own victimisation. 

There was also a tendency to rely on thresholds for action. Some practitioners waited for confirmation or escalation before intervening. Others depended on behavioural scripts and lacked concrete tools for identifying coercion or grooming within relationships. 

Recollections of exploitative exchanges 

In contrast to participants’ accounts of exploitation they endured in the physical world, key informants (practitioners working with or for young people) were principally preoccupied with online forms of exploitation, particularly the exchanging of sexualised content for money or other benefits. These benefits included the meeting of emotional needs (such as affirmation, attention, and affection) as well as money (up to $500 per image) and goods (such as a new iPhone). They describe the emotional ‘pull’ as: 

It was more an exchange for emotional needs. 

Just really all of that affirming stuff that this young person probably really, really wanted to hear.” 

The sending the explicit images in exchange for that affirmation, that attention, that perceived love. 

Being really, really, really kind to her and so lovely and so affirming. 

There’s one that particularly comes to mind from here, where the young person is trans and a member of the rainbow community, and as such, has faced ostracism from family. And so actually what the person provided was a form of relationship. 

Several framed exploitation as the end result of a process whereby an abuser harnesses the emotional vulnerabilities of the young victim, offering affection, attention, or perceived love in exchange for sexual content. These key informants proposed that such relationships mimic intimacy, making harm hard to identify. However, they also detailed numerous examples of exploitation involving the exchange of something of value in return for online content featuring young people.  

Students come and say… I’ve been approached to send pictures for iPhones or $500 cash per picture… A lot of them did actually send one picture to test if it was true. 

Gaming cards or gaming money being given as a transaction for photos or sexual favours. 

Throughout my 16 years of working in schools, I’ve had many so many students come and say, Oh, I’ve been approached by this person to send pictures. These would all be under 16-year-olds send pictures for iPhones, or $500 cash per picture, which is quite lucrative, but you know, that’s not okay at any point. So a lot of students just sort of normalized it and said, Oh yeah, we all get these requests off random things, off Tiktok or discord or different discords – [which is] definitely like the haven of all the horrible chats at the moment. And yeah, they just, a lot of them did actually send one picture to test if it was true. They got the money, and then they decided if they were going to send more or not. But a lot of them were like, ‘oh, I just want the new iPhone, so I’ll just send like, four pictures. That’s fine. That’ll pay for that.’ 

Vapes is the other really strong reason why they want to do this. It’s phones, money or vapes. 

[It is] alcohol, drugs, transportation. Of you know, moving children, well, young people from one place to another. Offers of lifts, those types of things, use of phones…  facilitating the use of things that parents are not allowing them to use. So do you know, like, if a phone’s taken off [them], there’ll be another phone given… if parents say you’re not going out, then it will be picking them up, that, that type of thing. 

Their perception of it being ‘normalized’, with an implied set amount per image that appeared widely consistent, indicates the prevalence of this form of exploitation that targets young people. In addition, the specific case examples they shared suggested perpetrators are often organised in their approach to exploitation, and that they are part of a larger network of perpetrators who collectively derive benefit from victimising young people.  

She [14 year old high school student] actually received a package of instructions and sex toys and outfits and a book of just very detailed instructions on how to what to do each video, the name, like what to call this person, how to interact. And it was in exchange for money…they were just sort of in exchange for money, but it was very detailed and very disturbing.  

 Yeah, it makes me think that that was not the first time that they’ve done that [mailed instructions and props to a child for CSAM], because it was very, very detailed. 

A lot of the ones [online exploitative relationships/contact] that I can remember were international, coming from America specifically…the online ones [cases of exploitation] definitely from overseas. 

Examples such as the case where a young person received a package with “detailed instructions on what to do in each video” signal the premeditated and manualised nature of this kind of online sexual exploitation. The ‘detailed instructions’ arguably imply that it is not opportunistic abuse, but rather a systematic and industrialised form of grooming with physical props; pointing to a repeatable model of exploitation, likely orchestrated by offenders with prior experience and intent to replicate abuse across multiple victims. 

Conflicting perspectives on ‘risk’  

Key informants perceived the origin of risk to be a lack of support structures around young people, family breakdowns, and previous experiences of child sexual abuse. Less commonly, they also attributed risk to family poverty and to parents’ limited technological capability.  

A lot of the ones [cases of exploitation] that I mentioned the families, were the ones where they were happy to exchange one or two pictures. Um, were for families that didn’t have a lot of money. They were often working to support their families, and found it a lot quicker to sort of send one to two pics and earn $250 or $500, there was some sort of family breakdown as well, so combined with that. 

 I think nine out of 10 times they have a history of sexual abuse and total disconnection from family, so [they have] that real emotional need. 

A lot of the time, we actually found that the parents that were working long hours that weren’t emotionally available to their kids. Those were the targets. Those kids were quite a target, but also the parents that were computer illiterate, so they didn’t know how to set up firewalls. They didn’t know how to set up protective measures to block these sites on their kids phones. They didn’t know to even have those conversations with those students, those were definitely more vulnerable. I mean, we saw it in covid lockdown, when parents were even struggling just to connect these students to the learning, let alone, you know, trying to understand their their online world. And a lot of the time when we have Netsafe in to talk to the parents. A lot of them don’t even know what Discord is and that it’s so vile. So I can only imagine the parents where the students are completely disconnected. They don’t even know what the kids are doing online. 

Some felt strongly that sexual abuse and sexual exploitation impact victims’ relationships with their bodies and their assertions of sexual integrity. These perceptions are similar to Chloe’s reflection on her self-perception as a walking mark for sexual violence as a result of her earlier abuse.  

I think it’s actually sort of teens, young people that have been sexually abused themselves as children [that are most vulnerable to sexual exploitation]. What I’ve found, generally speaking, is, if they’ve been sexually abused as a child, they already don’t see their bodies as sort of worthy, or, you know, of value. And so, yeah, I suppose I think someone touched on it before. It’s about that, you know, they then become more and more promiscuous, because now they’re in control of doing it instead of it being done to them.  

Then their idea of their future, they wanted to be a prostitute because they knew that ‘I could just sell my body that I don’t actually care about to get rewarded.’ So it was like that ongoing effect of what happened. 

Others attributed it to youth-specific cultural norms.  

For the cases that I’ve come across, [what causes vulnerability] is, is that support system breakdown so that they seek out that emotion. You know, if their if their support system is their peer group, then and they’re like going out with their peers… that culture can normalize those sexual acts. And I think these, the ones that I’ve experienced, their family system has completely broken down. 

Key informants perceived that this youth culture as predicated on instant gratification, and associated this with a presumed normalisation to the quick exchange of images for money, alcohol, or phones without assigning positive or negative moral value to these transactions. They described students as “blasé” and “fine with it.”  

When I hit on certain topics like online safety, it’s almost you can read the room and you can go, oh, I’ve touched on a nerve here, because for them, the abuse they experience online is so normalized.  

They just sort of normalized it and said, ‘Oh yeah, we all get these requests… 

They’re so good at compartmentalizing and just going, Oh, well, I can just, I’ll just block them and onto the next one. It’s literally like this instant gratification culture, rather than actually thinking about where their content is going. 

Underlying many of the discussions was a concern about the persistent framing of young people as “risky” rather than “at risk”, especially regarding their digital engagement. When exploitation is discussed primarily in terms of risky youth behaviours (e.g., sexting, online chatting), responsibility shifts subtly from the perpetrator to the victim.  

Participants’ accounts, on the other hand, dispute this perception of exploitation as attributable to youth-specific norms, and highlight instead how adults’ choices, adults’ norms, and adults’ abuse endows younger generations with severe and sustained adverse impacts. The exceptions to this were typically participants whose exploitation had occurred only or predominately online, as these participants tended not to locate the origin of risk within their households or as resulting from forms of marginalisation they had experienced.  

Perceptions of ‘grooming’, ‘abuse’, and ‘exploitation’ 

Interesting, key informants perceived the ‘giving’ aspect of grooming to only occur prior to the abuse (and for abuse to only occur after the grooming ‘stage’). Participants shared the opposite; grooming was continuous, intertwined with abuse itself, and involved ‘giving’ aspects alongside much more threatening tactics.  

I’ve always thought that the difference or the separation, when I think about grooming is the preparation so the young person or the child might get the toys or the lollies or the gifts or the whatever, and the perpetrator doesn’t get anything at that point. They’re in a grooming they’re in a preparation process leading up or that creates that space for them to take advantage. And so once they receive the goods, the photos, or the sexual acts, or then that that becomes the transaction they then receive, is the way that I would kind of see how that, how that that separation or the difference, potentially, the gift is part of the control mechanism for the groomer, right? 

Talking purely in terms of transaction, yeah, where the young person is receiving, the perpetrator isn’t necessarily receiving that. It’s the preparation state in order to then receive. 

The perpetrator is building up to being perceived as a safe, or, you know, a safe person to be with, and then you’re building up. And then once that, once the event occurs, then it becomes that transaction. The perpetrator receives what they were building up to. So the intention is there. 

Making sense of disclosure potential 

Key informants perceived the barriers as twofold: first that they simply do not see most victims of exploitation because disclosures are both rare and delayed, and second that young people do not have the developmental capacity to name it for what it is and therefore seek help.  

We are one of the agencies that will take on those referrals. So we have both the contracts for family violence and sexual violence for the [north island city] area, so we cover any kind of sexual harm of all ages. But I guess the problem that I’ve noticed that we would be coming across is that it only gets referred to us once there’s been a disclosure, and so we’re already aware that the sexual harm and the sexual exploitation and all that has been happening, and then we work from that basis onward, but actually getting it to a point where it’s being disclosed or people are actually identifying it in order to refer to us. That’s where the difficulty lies, I think, in my perspective. 

Young people are not, you know, they don’t have the mental capacity and cognition to actually understand the transaction that they’re making. 

One key informant echoed the sentiment of our participant, Kasey, who expressed that telling children to go their ‘safe people’ if harmed was not safety-promoting unless they were also supported to think about what constituted a genuine ‘safe person’ in their lives.  

One of my clients actually said that, you know, we always talk about going to a safe person, and to her, that was very confusing, because, you know, what happened to her was, this is another case. What happened to her was from a safe person. And then, like, when you think about it with children and young people like they, you know, people don’t actually click to think, oh, go talk to the school counsellor. Maybe that’s a safe person. 

Other key informants commented on the lack of infrastructure that would enable safe, effective responses to young people’s disclosures of online abuse and exploitation.  

There’s definitely a gap with 16 or 17-year-olds… they don’t fit neatly into child or adult services. 

Legislation hasn’t kept up with the advances in technology… there is inadequate recognition within the Crimes Act.” 

Just their own policies and procedures are not… reflective of the modern lives that children and young people live. 

Practitioners felt that the design of helping and safety systems had not kept pace with young people’s now digitally mediated lives, especially in relation to the intersections between their introductions to sexual activity, the normalisation of online relationships, and the nuanced risks of digital harm: in other words, a disconnect between adult-authored policies and young people’s lived realities. 

Discussion 

Situating and making sense of ‘exploitation’ 

Nobody chooses to become a victim. The concept of ‘risk’ of exploitation must therefore be understood as socially constructed and relational. It arises not from any attribute of the victim, but from two primary sources: perpetrators who deliberately seek out opportunities to harm, and systems that fail to intervene, prevent, or protect. This reframing shifts the focus away from supposedly ‘high risk’ individuals and towards the way perpetrators exploit gaps in care, supervision, accountability, and adult responsibility (Reid, 2024; Stark, 2007). 

Participants’ accounts of in-person exploitation reflect this structure. Perpetrators did not act randomly or impulsively; they systematically exploited relationships of trust in order to gain access to young people. The tactics described (assault, threat, manipulation, stupefaction, bribery, emotional coercion, and more) are intentional strategies of entrapment. Those behaviours did not occur in isolation. They were embedded within broader socio-cultural environments that normalised male authority, de-prioritised the perspectives of children and youth, and discouraged critical attention to dynamics within families (Beckett, Holmes, & Walker, 2017). The silence or disbelief of bystanders, fragmentation of child protection systems, and widespread acceptance of patriarchal authority within households further sustained abusers’ patterns of coercion and, ultimately, their exploitation of their victims.  

Distinguishing sexual exploitation from or within other forms of sexual abuse remains both important and underdeveloped. However, the need to do so is underscored by the fact that many participants struggled to name what had happened to them, while professionals often failed to recognise the signs. The result is both conceptual confusion and practical failure. Participants’ uncertainty about whether they had been exploited highlights how easily these experiences are overlooked, particularly when the harm occurs in relationships that appear consensual, familiar, or emotionally entangled. 

To intervene, the exploitation has to be identified. It can be perpetrated within romantic or sexual relationships, within friendships, within family networks, and through ongoing contact with adults who appear trustworthy. Not all of these situations are what professionals expect to see as the context of exploitation, but their comparative lack of visibility does not correspond to a comparative absence of violence or absence of harm.  

Attribution of responsibility – avoiding individualised blame 

As in all forms of abuse, understanding exploitation requires careful, accurate attribution of agency: who is doing what to whom, and under what conditions. Language plays a vital role in this process; as Wilson, Smith, Tolmie, and de Haan (2015) argue, language can either expose or obscure perpetrators’ actions. Participants whose exploitation occurred in person consistently began their narratives by describing ruptures in family protection. These were often linked to caregiver stress, trauma histories, mental health challenges, substance use, or socio-economic hardship. While these conditions were significant and painful, they were not the source of abuse. Perpetrators targeted these vulnerabilities and deliberately positioned themselves as sources of safety, affection, or relief in order to disguise their predatory intent (Hodge & Lietz, 2007). 

They did so by occupying roles that carried status, authority, or trust: fathers, stepfathers, grandfathers, religious leaders, or partners of women with children. They worked to create environments where disclosures could be ignored, where children’s words could be disbelieved, and where caregivers’ credibility could be undermined. In several cases, victims’ mothers were also being abused, either by the same perpetrator or by others. Existing literature describes how maternal victimisation, mental illness, substance use, and social marginalisation can elevate children’s vulnerability to harm (Laird et al., 2020; Anderson et al., 2014; Ministry of Justice, 2002). But viewing these struggles in isolation misses the point. What participants described were patterns of coercion shaped by perpetrators who actively destabilised caregiving environments and deliberately weakened mothers’ capacity to protect. 

Participants gave examples of perpetrators using violence, financial control, social isolation, and emotional abuse to constrain their mothers’ ability to intervene. When systems fail to see these intergenerational dynamics, and when they overlook the deliberate tactics used to fracture maternal care, the result is misplaced blame. Looking at abuse as a pattern, rather than the result of a perceived deficits of mothers who are also victims of systemic and interpersonal harm, is arguably more conducive to effective intervention.  

Victims themselves were also misread: adolescents who were sexually exploited were often treated as though they had chosen the abuse. These assumptions ignored the realities of coercion, power, and survival (Hanna, 2009). As Macy and Graham (2012) note, the failure to correctly name exploitation creates a barrier to both recognition and recovery. Participants’ coping strategies; for instance, secrecy, compliance, appeasement, and emotional withdrawal, were often ways of surviving within unsafe conditions (Reid, 2016), not signs of agreement or liberty..  

In many cases, perpetrators controlled not just the abuse itself but the broader environment around it. Participants described perpetrators limiting access to school, healthcare, friends, and family. Their choices were shaped by control and constraint, not autonomy. Understanding their survival means therefore compels consideration of the (presence or absence of) forms of protection, safety, nurturance, and social capital that were available to them as children, adolescents, and young adults. 

The changing landscape of exploitation: online abuse  

Participants who were primarily exploited through digital means experienced victimisation that, while physically remote, was no less coercive or harmful. In fact, for many, the psychological entrapment they experienced online was even more isolating, compounded by societal misunderstanding of digital abuse. The commercial availability of smartphones and internet-connected devices has transformed the landscape of child sexual exploitation (Bursztein et al., 2019; Ibrahim, 2022). Perpetrators can now easily solicit, capture, and distribute images without requiring third-party developers or risking detection. The sheer scale, speed, and anonymity offered by the internet has exponentially increased opportunities for abuse, while simultaneously decreasing opportunities for oversight. 

The proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online has reached crisis proportions, with frontline organisations warning of an “explosion” in its production and distribution (Shiau, 2024). As reporting and detection technologies improve, so too do perpetrators’ tactics for evading them, creating a technological arms race with devastating human costs (Stanley et al., 2018). Despite this, mainstream narratives often portray online abuse as stemming from youth inexperience, naivety, or poor decision-making—implicitly blaming victims rather than interrogating perpetrator strategies (Quayle, 2021). Some of these studies associate the ‘risk’ of being abused online with youth and/or women and assume that this risk is due to social immaturity or poor technological proficiency, thereby positioning the blame or perceived ‘cause’, even if inadvertently, on youth themselves and their use of everyday technology.  

Much of the literature on digitally-enacted abuse and exploitation focuses on the sexual grooming of young people and online equivalents of ‘stranger danger’ (Woodley, 2024; Green et al., 2024). Accordingly, abuse online is frequently portrayed as new, novel, and distinctly separate from in-person perpetration. It is seen as a consequence of a ‘big bad internet’ that represents endless risk and harm.  Yet a very different picture emerges from the narratives of participants whose exploitation primarily or solely occurred online. The weapons of choice, used by their abusers, were normative adolescent needs. However, without the adult supervision, guidance, and oversight in online spaces that may ordinarily be present in the physical world (Gezinski, 2024), abusers were able to easily target, manipulate, and capitalise on their comparatively constrained social competence to elicit sexual imagery from them. Arguably, rather than representing a fundamentally new threat, online exploitation represents an extension and amplification of existing exploitative patterns into new technological spaces (Hamilton-Giachritsis et al., 2021). 

The primary tools used against them online were not technological sophistication, but relational grooming: the exploitation of normative adolescent needs for validation, belonging, intimacy, and excitement. Fear of judgment, shame, and potential criminalisation deterred many from seeking help or disclosing abuse. This represented a significant barrier to safety for them, as they were victimised by someone with greater social power (on the basis of age) and were positioned as somehow complicit, precluding disclosure and corresponding accountability for those harming them.  

Accurately identifying perpetrators—not merely as individuals who solicit sexual images, but as architects of exploitative relational dynamics—is essential for meaningful prevention. Too often, public discourse and safety messaging centre on generic warnings to young people about online risk, reinforcing the idea of danger as ambient or self-generated—part of the digital “weather”—rather than naming the deliberate, patterned strategies of adult perpetrators who target, groom, and manipulate (Chiu & Quayle, 2022). This framing obscures the reality that exploitation is not an accident of youth inexperience, but a consequence of predatory intent and social power imbalances (Bloxsom, 2024). 

Portraying online sexual harm as the result of naïve choices positions young people as inherently vulnerable and implicitly blameworthy. This not only misattributes responsibility, but undermines the design of effective prevention: we cannot prevent what we refuse to name. Prevention that relies on vague behavioural scripts—such as “don’t share nudes” or “be careful online”—fails to equip young people with the tools to understand or resist coercive dynamics. More importantly, it fails to hold abusers accountable, by supporting the continuation of public narratives that implicitly position victims as accountable. Shifting public narratives to emphasise perpetrator accountability instead may lay the groundwork for addressing evolving forms of exploitation as technology continues to advance (Hamilton-Giachritsis et al., 2021; Whittle et al., 2013).  

Definitional ambiguity in understanding sexual exploitation  

Overview of definitional complexity 

Defining commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) remains a complex and contested task within academic, legal, and policy contexts. While widely referenced international frameworks—such as the United Nations’ Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography—define CSEC as involving a child in sexual activity in exchange for remuneration or any other form of consideration (United Nations, 2000), the requirement of a material or transactional component has generated significant debate. 

Critics argue that the emphasis on tangible exchanges—such as money, goods, or services—risks excluding forms of exploitation where the “benefit” to the perpetrator or the exploited child is emotional, relational, or symbolic. This concern is particularly salient in the grooming of minors, where perceived affection, validation, or relational belonging may constitute the primary “consideration” (Bloxsom, 2024). Moreover, definitions that implicitly hinge on concepts of “consent” or “choice” risk fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of exploitation when applied to children and adolescents, whose developmental capacities and legal statuses preclude genuine informed consent in exploitative contexts (Beckett, Holmes, & Walker, 2017; Bloxsom, 2024). 

This definitional fragmentation has serious implications. It can result in the under-recognition of victimisation, create gaps in protection policies, and complicate pathways to justice for victims (Macy & Graham, 2012). It is therefore paramount that definitions be clarified to account for coercion, power imbalance, and the structural vulnerabilities of minors, rather than relying narrowly on the presence of an explicit transactional element. 

Sexual exploitation (of any kind, but especially in-person exploitation) may involve the provision of goods, protection from other forms of harm, services, substances, or, for children and young people in particular, forms of family and day-to-day belonging that may otherwise be withheld (Mitchell, Jones, Finkelhor, & Wolak, 2011). 

 Amongst this sample, exploitation took all of these forms. Participants’ stories underscore why exploitation does not always involve money changing hands. Equally, their stories highlight the complexity of delineating ‘abuse’ from ‘exploitation’, especially in the absence of a coherent and shared societal narrative about what elements definitively constitute exploitation, rather than grooming, abuse, or coercion more broadly. This section therefore looks first at the unique context of online exploitation as a challenge to conventional definitions, and then takes stock of the challenge of categorisation when abuse involves any kind of transaction. It then sets out a continuum of exploitation, and maps participants’ experiences across it, before discussing the difficulties with self-identification in light of widespread ambiguity of terms. Finally, it concludes with a summary of differentiating characteristics found in participants’ narratives of organised exploitation.  

Online exploitation as a unique challenge to conventional definitions 

Online manifestations of exploitation appear more difficult to discern participant volume from than in-person forms, yet featured heavily in the narratives of participants whose victimisation was recent, occurred without apparent pre-existing ‘vulnerability’, and offered (and relied upon) greater initial social/emotional benefit and sustained use of affection. At the same time, these experiences were less likely to evoke social outrage or intervention, calling into question the availability of safeguarding responses equivalent to in-person forms of exploitation.  

While not all in-person child sexual abuse involves exploitation in a strict definitional sense—some abuse may occur impulsively or without ongoing benefit to the abuser—online grooming for sexual content is inherently instrumental: the perpetrator seeks to obtain images or videos that can be (even though they are not always) stored, shared, traded, or monetised (Chiu & Quayle, 2022; Giles, 2024; Whittle et al., 2013). The potential perpetuity, transmissibility, and commodification of victimisation after the fact (Whittle et al., 2013; Choi & Lee, 2023) makes exploitation a sustained possibility. Participants’ reflections accounted for these risks; the ‘unknown’ of where their content is now, and where it may show up in the future, is testament to the continuity of exploitation risk online.  

Regardless of initial intentions, once a sexual image is procured, the child or young person loses control over its circulation. Even if the material is not immediately commercialised, its digital permanence and replicability mean it always carries the potential to enter broader exploitative networks (Chiu & Quayle, 2022). This shifts online grooming beyond spontaneous abuse toward a model of ongoing exploitation. Key informants confirmed the existence and relative prevalence of organised, networked, pre-planned, and targeted sexual exploitation online, often using familiar grooming tactics transposed into digital environments. Even more concerningly, they alluded to the manualised nature of these tactics, suggesting the sharing of strategies and repetition of tactics between perpetrators and against multiple victims.  

Transactional elements and the challenge of categorisation 

Sexual exploitation (of any kind) may involve the provision of goods, services, protection, substances, or, for children and young people especially, social belonging and day-to-day relational needs that may otherwise be withheld (Mitchell et al., 2011). Among this sample, exploitation took all of these forms. However, the complexity of delineating ‘abuse’ from ‘exploitation’ is compounded by the lack of a coherent societal narrative defining these categories.  

While many of the dynamics of sexual exploitation described by participants mirrored those seen in child sexual abuse more broadly, the key distinction between sexual exploitation and CSA is usually framed around the presence of a transactional relationship, i.e., the young person being coerced into sexual activity in exchange for something valuable—money, goods, affection, status, or protection (Beckett, Holmes, & Walker, 2017; Greenbaum et al., 2014). 

Most formal definitions do not explicitly require the presence of an intermediary—i.e., a third party facilitating or benefiting from the transaction—nor do they specify that the transaction must involve a defined minimum value (Finkelhor, 2022). Definitions are broad enough to encompass situations like ‘survival sex’, where very little tangible benefit is derived, yet exploitation persists due to the presence of transactional dynamics under duress. However, the absence of specificity about value thresholds (i.e. the exchange of something of material value) or intermediary roles further muddies the distinction between ‘exploitation’ and ‘abuse’. This definitional ambiguity leaves practitioners, researchers, and victims themselves struggling to name their experiences accurately, often leading to either under-labelling or over-labelling victimisation events as exploitation. 

Self-identification and the consequences of definitional gaps 

While this study focused on sexual exploitation, not all participants’ experiences met a strict definitional threshold for CSE. Several described abuse that was clearly coercive and harmful — such as grooming by a family member — but did not involve material exchange, facilitation by a third party, or repeated transactional use. These were instances of child sexual abuse rather than sexual exploitation, as the term is currently understood. However, many of these participants nonetheless identified their experiences as exploitative, often citing the receipt of gifts, food, or attention. In the absence of clear public or institutional definitions, many had internalised the idea that if something was “given,” it must have constituted a transaction that represented exploitation — even when that “something” was emotionally manipulative or symbolically loaded, rather than materially significant. 

However, these blurred or threshold experiences signal an important barrier to truly combating exploitation in Aotearoa: our inability to name it coherently. Their presence in the sample speaks to the broader conceptual confusion surrounding what constitutes exploitation in Aotearoa. It also highlights how survivors may interpret their own experiences through the limited frameworks currently available to them. The implication is not that participants were “wrong,” but that our systems remain underdeveloped in how they distinguish between grooming, inducement, and exploitation. Grounding responses in definitions that are accessible, widely used, and which communities are aware of may better reflect the continuum of exploitative abuse, within obscuring the unique needs associated with exploitation or flattening victim experience into a single overarching category of ‘sexual abuse’.  

Participant narratives across the exploitation continuum 

Participants’ experiences in this study spanned this continuum, from overt and easily recognisable exploitation (e.g., organised transactional abuse involving multiple perpetrators) to abuse featuring elements that technically meet some definitional thresholds for exploitation (e.g., being given treats in exchange for compliance) but are more typically associated with grooming patterns in CSA. 

For example, in-person sexual abuse or violence was experienced by every participant. For Kasey, Eiliah Sharn, and Ata, this abuse followed a grooming trajectory well-documented in CSA literature: perpetrators capitalising on opportunities to be alone with the child, forming ‘special’ relationships, and using a combination of inducements (treats, food, gifts) and implied threats to ensure compliance (Jülich & Oak, 2016). 

Such patterns are widespread in Aotearoa New Zealand. Recent national surveys found that more than one in four girls and one in nine boys experience sexual abuse before the age of 15 (Fanslow et al., 2021). Māori girls are disproportionately affected, being twice as likely to experience CSA compared to non-Māori girls (Fanslow et al., 2007; Ministry of Justice, 2022). Transgender and non-binary youth, as well as those with diverse sexualities, are at even higher risk of multiple-perpetrator victimisation (Veale et al., 2019; Dickson, 2017). 

Most CSA offences are never reported to police, and even fewer lead to prosecution (Ministry of Justice, 2019). Critically, most CSA—though often involving grooming tactics—does not meet formal definitions of sexual exploitation. Perpetrators often exploit children’s dependency, need for belonging, and lack of social power without orchestrating transactional or commodified abuse. 

Opportunistic and commercial exploitation: distinguishing features 

Some participants described abuse that exhibited characteristics of exploitation but lacked commercial aspects. For example, Bec was abused by her stepfather, who occasionally gave her small sums of money and gifts. Similarly, Eiliah Sharn’s partner provided money in exchange for sexual access. However, these relationships, while abusive and coercive, did not involve networked offending or third-party facilitation. Despite superficial appearances of ‘transactionality’, these patterns aligned more closely with classic CSA dynamics characterised by power asymmetry, grooming, and coercive dependency (Greenbaum et al., 2014; Stanley et al., 2018). Key informants, however, cautioned that networked exploitation structures may be invisible to victims at the time, underscoring the need for nuanced, vigilant assessment of each case. 

Of all the participants in this study, only two described experiences that reflect the core components of organised exploitation, such as the involvement of multiple perpetrators, the role of an intermediary or network facilitating the exploitation (usually for personal benefit), and the exchange of something of value. Maia was given cash, goods, and other favours in exchange for her participation and silence about the abuse. The perpetrators were all friends of her father, and represented an informal network. Chloe, meanwhile, was targeted by one main perpetrator, who then facilitated other men’s access for her and who profited from performing this intermediary role. To incentivise her cooperation and ensure her concealment of the abuse, she was given money and alcohol.  

Both main perpetrators were organised. They sought out their family schedules and identified opportunities for them to approach their victims away from the oversight of their families. Both expanded the scope of the abuse beyond a single-victim, single-perpetrator pattern, and both involved the exchange of something ‘of value’ to facilitate their exploitation. These cases demonstrate classical features of commercial sexual exploitation: networked offending, commodification of abuse, and third-party benefit (Finkelhor, 2022; Mitchell et al., 2011; Hamilton-Giachritsis, 2021). 

The impacts and aftermath of exploitation 

The impacts of the abuse and exploitation experienced by participants (especially those abused in person rather than online) were profound, far-reaching, and almost uniformly characterised by an absence of effective, early, or appropriate intervention. These harms were not confined to emotional or psychological distress but reverberated across every domain of participants’ lives, disrupting physical health, social functioning, and economic security. The absence of timely recognition or support not only prolonged immediate suffering but also compounded participants’ vulnerability to further harm over time, consistent with broader findings on cumulative adversity following trauma exposure (Finkelhor et al., 2022). 

Participants themselves drew explicit causal links between the abuse they experienced and subsequent outcomes such as substance use, homelessness, exposure to intimate partner violence, deteriorating physical health, and long-term mental health challenges, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and suicidality. These findings align with broader evidence that links child sexual exploitation (CSE) to enduring adversity across the life course (Berelowitz et al., 2013; Greenbaum, 2014). These early disruptions have cascading effects: survivors often experience fragmented social support networks, heightened sensitivity to threat, and difficulties forming secure attachments in adulthood. In addition, the associated abuse, especially when cumulative, can lead to many victims experiencing complex trauma, a form of psychological injury characterised by persistent dysregulation of affect, cognition, and self-concept, which, when left unaddressed, significantly increases the likelihood of later social and health vulnerabilities (Greenbaum, 2014; Dufour, 2024). 

The personal costs borne by participants as a result of another person’s abuse of power were immense. While this is, unfortunately, anticipated (given that young people subjected to sexual exploitation often endure layers of trauma, instability, and systemic neglect) the severity and complexity of the outcomes described by participants reflected a clear relationship between the intensity, duration, and multiplicity of exploitation and the depth of harm sustained (Cole et al., 2016). 

Participants who had been targeted by multiple perpetrators, experienced sustained coercion or physical violence, or endured prolonged exploitation without positive intervention reported some of the most debilitating and enduring impacts. The chronicity of exploitation, in particular, appears to intensify risk for complex PTSD, substance dependence, suicidality, and chronic health conditions (Khadr et al., 2018). 

Their narratives highlighted years, sometimes decades, of compromised mental health, interrupted education, and economic exclusion. Substance use, described by many participants as a coping strategy to manage psychological distress, was not merely incidental but often an entrenched, survival-oriented behaviour—a mechanism for numbing intrusive trauma memories, regulating emotional dysregulation, or managing overwhelming feelings of fear and shame (Cole et al., 2016). These findings reflect well-documented patterns linking childhood victimisation to later substance use disorders, particularly when experiences of trauma cannot be met with supportive and restorative responses or are compounded by poverty, marginalisation, and social disconnection (Campbell, 2001; Khadr et al., 2018).  

Furthermore, many participants spoke to the long-term relational consequences of their abuse, noting a pervasive mistrust of intimate partners, disrupted parenting identities, and hypervigilant or avoidant responses to perceived risks. Relational mistrust is a core feature of complex trauma and is particularly pronounced among individuals who experienced betrayal by trusted caregivers or authority figures in childhood (Dufour, 2024). 

For some, parenthood itself intensified unresolved trauma, evoking deep fears around their own children’s safety and triggering re-experiences of past victimisation. These reactions can profoundly shape parenting practices and family dynamics (Hooper & Koprowska, 2004). Correspondingly, participants’ narratives highlight how early experiences of exploitation can contribute to cycles of intergenerational trauma, where unresolved pain and survival strategies are transmitted across familial and relational contexts (Pearce, 2009). These relational and intergenerational impacts underscore how the adversity experienced through abuse and exploitation is not only personal but also profoundly social and structural. Survivors navigate their roles within families, communities, and institutions in ways shaped by trauma histories, systemic marginalisation, and cultural silences around sexual victimisation (Herman, 1992).  

The profound, multi-domain impacts experienced by participants who experienced in-person abuse illustrate the extensive and enduring nature of harm caused by child sexual exploitation or violence. These impacts are neither isolated to the psychological realm nor spontaneously resolved; rather, they reverberate across health, housing, relationships, education, and future opportunities. Survivors’ narratives highlight that recovery requires more than therapeutic interventions alone: it necessitates structural changes that recognise the complex interplay between trauma, social marginalisation, and systemic failures (Dufour, 2024; Herman, 1992; Khadr et al., 2018). Without responsive, trauma-informed, and long-term supports, survivors are left to shoulder the consequences of violence largely alone, reinforcing cycles of disadvantage and cumulative harm.  

Improving the landscape of intervention 

System responses to exploitation 

The systems designed to support survivors of abuse did not often achieve safe outcomes for participants in this study. Participants identified several key gaps in practitioners’ understanding of their experiences, often differentiating between support that was merely well-intentioned and support that meaningfully contributed to their safety and wellbeing. While many services demonstrated a theoretical commitment to supporting victims, they also (understandably) showed gaps in their understanding of newer forms of exploitation. They are also unlikely to represent the commitment more generally amongst their workforces; their motivation for participating signals an interest that differentiates them from their peers. In short, their colleagues may have much more harmful beliefs than those explored here.  

For participants, meaningful support included responses that actively acknowledged and addressed the digital dimensions of victimisation, avoided assumptions about the universal presence of ‘safe people,’ met their immediate and material needs, and placed a clear emphasis on the need for young people to be able to assess the trustworthiness of adults or professionals prior to disclosing abuse (Hamilton-Giachritsis et al., 2021; Gezinski, 2024; Stoilova et al., 2021). 

Support was only experienced as effective when it not only affirmed the harm done but also correctly contextualised culpability—focusing on perpetrator behaviour rather than young people’s choices or digital activity. In doing so, services countered the dominant cultural narratives that often individualise responsibility for victimisation, especially in cases involving online behaviour or adolescent agency (Alaggia et al., 2017). Conversely, unhelpful support was characterised by inaccessible or delayed services, unsuitable professional interventions, or subtle and overt forms of victim-blaming—a theme that emerged with concerning frequency in participants’ accounts. 

This distinction is crucial, as the way in which professionals respond to disclosures—particularly in how they attribute responsibility—has a direct impact on whether young people feel safe to speak about their experiences (Campbell et al., 2001). Trauma theory suggests that negative or blaming reactions during disclosure can re-traumatise survivors, leading to withdrawal, internalised shame, and further entrenchment of psychological distress (Dorahy & Clearwater, 2012; Dufour, 2024). Participants’ decisions regarding when, where, and to whom to disclose were deeply influenced by whether they believed they would be met with understanding or judgment. 

The variability in the responses participants received suggest that national and local systems therefore require significant investment in capability-building—ensuring professionals across health, education, social care, and justice systems are equipped to respond appropriately to digitally-facilitated exploitation. This includes developing the language, frameworks, and ethical reflexivity to avoid replicating harmful social narratives around adolescent culpability in exploitative dynamics (Alaggia et al., 2017; Stanley et al., 2018). It also demands critical interrogation of dominant safeguarding assumptions, such as the presumption of the home as a safe space, which is increasingly challenged by evidence on intra-familial abuse and exploitation (Firmin, 2020). 

In turn, such capacity-building would provide the structural scaffolding needed to foster young people’s own capability to name, resist, and seek support for exploitation. For example, some participants’ narratives suggested that feelings of responsibility or complicity in their own abuse were connected to their perception of having initially consented to digital communication or relationships—highlighting the need for professionals to distinguish between developmental autonomy and exploitative manipulation (Green et al., 2024; Reid, 2016). Failure to make this distinction risks reinforcing self-blame, diminishing resilience, and impeding recovery. 

Barriers to therapeutic support and compensation 

Participants’ access to therapeutic support was inconsistent. While some participants were eventually able to engage with specialist counselling or trauma therapy through New Zealand’s ACC Sensitive Claims pathway, this support was often described as difficult to access, limited in scope, and delayed at critical moments. Participants described encountering long waitlists, regional shortages of qualified counsellors, and a lack of accessible information about how to initiate a claim. These barriers are not unique to this study; they reflect persistent systemic issues within trauma service provision internationally (Dworkin, Menon, Bystrynski, & Allen, 2017). 

National data confirms that demand for ACC-funded therapy under the Sensitive Claims scheme has increased by approximately 19% annually (ACC, 2024), with average wait times of nine weeks and significantly longer delays in rural or under-resourced regions (Abuse in Care, 2024). Further compounding these delays are the complex administrative requirements for claim processing, which some participants noted as retraumatising—especially in the absence of advocacy support. This mirrors broader findings that bureaucratic processes can act as secondary sources of trauma for survivors, reinforcing feelings of powerlessness and mistrust (Herman, 1992). 

Most participants never received compensation for the abuse they suffered. They were not offered stable housing, or support with parenting, or residential support for addiction, or additional income to offset the economic implications of their abuse experiences. This is consistent with trends in ACC provision nationally, which show that only one percent of victims ever receive financial compensation and very few ever receive (or are even informed they may be entitled to) social rehabilitation (Bradley, 2021). The lack of holistic, wraparound support post-victimisation represents a major gap in survivor recovery frameworks; one that is increasingly recognised in the sexual violence literature (Macy & Graham, 2012). 

Finally, the ACC framework has not yet formally adapted to reflect the realities of digital victimisation. Because the legislation is grounded in older conceptualisations of physical harm (Laird et al., 2023), young people who were groomed, manipulated, or exploited entirely online may not qualify for—or have the same ease of access to—the same funded therapeutic services as those whose abuse occurred in person. This gap highlights the urgent need for legislative reform that recognises psychological and relational injuries as equally deserving of support as physical injuries. 

The need to build practitioner capability  

Despite increasing visibility of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Aotearoa New Zealand, there remain critical conceptual and practical gaps in frontline understanding that undermine effective prevention, identification, and response. This chapter identifies four interconnected areas of practitioner misunderstanding, drawing on survivor testimony, service provider accounts, and international literature to propose a coherent, capability-building framework. At its core, this framework calls for a fundamental reframing of exploitation—from an individualised problem of risky behaviour or poor choices to a structurally enabled form of abuse defined by coercion, inducement, and sustained relational control (Shephard & Lewis, 2017). 

First, practitioners frequently misidentify what constitutes exploitation. While some progress has been made in recognising the concept of grooming, many professionals continue to conceptualise it narrowly—as a one-off precursor to abuse—rather than as an embedded and ongoing process of coercive control (Quayle, 2021; Laird et al., 2023). In focus group discussions, grooming was often treated as a singular “red flag” event, distinct from the exploitation itself. Yet survivors’ accounts make clear that inducements, threats, secrecy, and dependency-building occur throughout the entirety of the exploitation relationship, shaping victims’ options and responses at every stage.  

Second, risk is often pathologised or misattributed to victims’ individual characteristics, particularly in cases involving sexually assertive behaviour, substance use, or online engagement. This diagnostic framing—where the “risk” is located in the victim rather than in the perpetrator or the social conditions that enable exploitation—diverts attention from structural vulnerabilities and offender strategies. Practitioners in the study repeatedly framed young people’s digital use and “instant gratification” as precipitating risk, overlooking how exploitation is orchestrated by those who deliberately target young people whose needs are unmet elsewhere.  

Third, practitioners display limited capability in recognising online exploitation as both real and relational. While digital abuse is increasingly acknowledged in public discourse, professional responses often fail to conceptualise it as part of the same continuum of grooming, coercion, and inducement that operates offline. Victims disclosed experiences of being blamed or dismissed when reporting online harm, reflecting an enduring perception that harm delivered through screens is less serious or less “real.” However, Chiu and Quayle (2022), among others, demonstrate that adolescents’ online grooming experiences are psychologically and relationally indistinguishable from offline abuse.  

Finally, the fourth gap lies in the lack of clear, operational distinctions between child sexual abuse, underage sex work, and exploitation—especially in legal, judicial, and service provision settings. These were reflected both in key informants’ perspectives and in the lived experiences of participants. Participants in the report described being told their experiences amounted to “bad choices,” “normal teen sex,” or “poor parenting,” with little recognition of the systematic inducement, threat, and control mechanisms that defined their abuse. As Pearce (2009) argues, this failure to distinguish CSE from other forms of harm reflects a deeper reluctance to see young people as victims when their exploitation is facilitated through relational or commercial exchange.  

The most common disjunctions between victims’ lived realities and professionals’ assumptions about those experiences are set out in the below table.   

Table 2 

Practitioner View	Victim Reality
Grooming is a discrete, pre-abuse phase	Grooming was ongoing and interwoven with abuse (e.g. Bec, Chloe, Rachel)
Risk stems from “vulnerable” or digitally “naïve” youth	Victimisation was the result of adult strategy and social abandonment
Exploitation involves money/goods	Most impactful “exchange” was for affection, safety, or validation
“Safe adults” are available if young people reach out	Victims did not know who was safe or had no safe adults at all (e.g. Maia, Kasey)
Digital abuse is less serious or “not real”	Online abuse caused deep trauma, self-blame, and fear of future image circulation
Victims delay disclosure due to immaturity	Disclosure was impeded by calculated threats, trauma, and social/familial control

Table of practitioner views versus participant realities 

This disjuncture between professional assumptions and lived realities reflects not only a knowledge gap, but a systemic misalignment that constrains effective intervention. As is evidenced in participants’ narratives, the conceptual gaps limiting professionals’ responses to sexual exploitation did not just fail to make them safer and provide recourse; they forced them into greater social precarity, with few exceptions. To close these knowledge-to-practice gaps, practitioner capability must be reoriented around a relational, victim-informed understanding of CSE (Radcliffe et al., 2020). This includes shared national definitions that distinguish exploitation from both consensual youth sexuality and generic abuse, specialist-driven tools that recognise coercive dynamics in online and offline spaces, and professional education that is developed with expert or interest-group input and centres perpetrator strategies and the capability to recognise and dismantle structural enablers.  

The need for targeted, exploitation-specific responses 

Collectively, the impacts outlined in the previous section signal the need for intervention that first ensures victims’ safety, and which then accounts for the breadth and spread of the impacts of abuse on every part of their lives—including consequent housing insecurity, mental health challenges, educational disruption, relational difficulties, and economic instability. 

Many of these impacts are consistent with the breadth of adverse outcomes—and corresponding support needs—well established within the literature on sexual violence recovery. However, participants’ accounts revealed that where support was available, it was often more responsive to single-perpetrator abuse scenarios, while system responses to more complex or networked exploitation were frequently fragmented, inaccessible, or retraumatising (Greenbaum, 2014).  

Clearly, sexual exploitation and sexual violence have both overlapping features and distinct dynamics. As such, improving responses to sexual violence may better serve victims of sexual exploitation, but survivors will be best served when these efforts are enacted in tandem with exploitation-specific responses tailored to the relational, networked, and systemic nature of their victimisation (Pearce, 2009). Specialist input—particularly from community-based organisations with expertise in sexual exploitation specifically and its relational, social, and systemic dimensions—may bridge this gap and ensure targeted, context-sensitive responses are embedded within broader service systems. 

The experiences of participants demonstrate that while intentions to support victims are often present, the realisation of safe, effective, and meaningful intervention remains inconsistent and fragmented. Without frameworks that fully account for the relational, digital, and systemic complexities of exploitation, well-intentioned services risk reinforcing harm rather than alleviating it (Radcliffe et al., 2020). Bridging this gap requires not only trauma-informed, youth-centred practice, but also the integration of exploitation-specific expertise at every level of intervention (Shephard & Lewis, 2017; Weston & Mythen, 2019). Victims’ recovery is not simply shaped by the severity of their victimisation, but by the quality and accessibility of the responses they receive—and until these responses are systematically strengthened, many young people will remain underserved, misunderstood, and exposed to ongoing harm. 

Contrast of what worked and outstanding gaps in systems 

Rarely was only one professional made aware of participants’ experiences: they involved (in order of prevalence) police, ACC, counsellors, schoolteachers, sexual violence agencies, family violence agencies, child protection agencies, school principals, church ministers and church leaders, mental health services, and psychiatrists. Yet despite the breadth of professionals involved, many participants experienced both epistemic harm and institutional betrayal.  

Epistemic harm occurs when victims’ knowledge, perceptions, and credibility are systematically dismissed (Laird et al., 2020) or devalued—when they are told they are lying, confused, or to blame for their abuse. Institutional betrayal, meanwhile, describes the violation of trust that occurs when institutions expected to protect (e.g. police, schools, child protection services) instead disbelieve, punish, or retraumatise victims. These had an additive effect, stripping away not only physical safety, but also the social trust, relational agency, and narrative control critical to recovery. As others have argued (Wilson et al., 2015; Alaggia et al., 2017), such responses reproduce power imbalances and silence that are central to abuse itself. 

Table 3 

Role	What Worked Well	What the Gap Was	Recommendations
School Teacher	Sometimes acted as the first disclosure point. In one case, a teacher called police after a disclosure.	Some were dismissive or invalidating (e.g. “She only sees people with issues, like, you’re fine.”). Many lacked awareness or readiness to respond to trauma or abuse disclosures.	Mandate trauma and exploitation training for all teachers. Introduce whole-of-school response protocols for disclosures, focused on listening, validating, and engaging safely without punitive follow-up.
School Counsellor	Presence of a counsellor was comforting. One participant described her school counsellor as “lovely.”	Victims feared child protection escalation. Some counsellors lacked training to address sexual exploitation or trauma. Others were seen as inaccessible or irrelevant at the time.	Train school-based counsellors in sexual exploitation and trauma-informed care. Decouple counselling from automatic reporting pathways to increase trust. Fund adequate staffing to reduce access barriers.
Police	Occasionally engaged after disclosures. For some, their involvement provided validation or marked a turning point in being believed.	Often disbelieved victims, made hostile comments (e.g. “You’re not a credible witness,” “Next Virgin Mary”), or failed to act on reports. Created additional trauma for some victims.	Require specialist training in child sexual abuse, grooming, and exploitation. Fund dedicated victim advocates to accompany survivors. Enforce accountability for harmful or dismissive police conduct.
ACC	ACC letters or injury documentation sometimes provided validation—helping convince others (e.g. parents) that abuse had occurred.	System was complex, retraumatising, and difficult to access. Intake processes were rigid. Digital abuse was poorly understood or addressed.	Redesign ACC sexual abuse pathways to reduce trauma: allow phased disclosure, digital abuse coverage, and flexible engagement. Eliminate redundant assessments and streamline access to support.
ACC Counsellor	Some ACC-funded counsellors were life-changing. Examples included trauma specialists, and crisis phone counsellors who offered compassion and continuity.	Long waitlists, limited regional access, and lack of trained providers blocked or delayed access. Intake often retraumatised victims and didn’t match their needs.	Increase funding for specialist sexual violence therapists. Prioritise access for children and young people. Require training in complex trauma and online exploitation. Fund survivor-chosen continuity of care.
Child Protection Agency	Occasionally protected children by removing them from harm or intervening during custody issues.	Often seen as slow, fragmented, or failing to listen to children. In some cases, engagement with professionals triggered child protection involvement that victims hadn’t sought.	Centre the child’s voice in decision-making. Build systems for safe, voluntary help-seeking that don’t automatically trigger surveillance or removal. Improve cross-agency coordination to prevent re-traumatisation.

Table of support themes, gaps, and recommendations by professional role 

This table summarises what participants said helped or hindered them when they reached out for support. It reflects a key theme in the report: that what matters is not just whether someone told, but how the person or system responded. Many victims did everything “right” — they disclosed, they asked for help, they followed the rules — but still found themselves disbelieved, blamed, or worse off.  

The final two middle columns underscore the relational and systemic conditions that shaped those outcomes: belief versus doubt, support versus punishment, follow-through versus abandonment. It also underscores that even informal supports like friends had a role to play, but needed guidance and backup to respond safely. The contrast between “what worked” and “what didn’t” reveals not only the failures of current systems, but the very real potential for change — when people and institutions respond with steadiness, skill, and victim-centred care. 

Improving the landscape of prevention and education 

Prevention and the changing risk landscape 

Participants’ feedback highlighted the importance of consent education as a core part of school-based prevention, as well as risk-sensitive child welfare processes and curriculum-based identification of “safe people” within the school environment. Consent education, when framed through a developmental and relational lens, equips young people to recognise manipulative dynamics, assert boundaries, and critically evaluate interactions that may otherwise seem innocuous or flattering (Brady & Lowe, 2020; Coy et al., 2016). 

Abuse prevention education must evolve to reflect the realities of contemporary risks, particularly in online contexts, where traditional frameworks such as “stranger danger” prove insufficient. Research consistently shows that most child sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the child, not a stranger, and in online environments, perpetrators often assume peer-like identities to build trust before exploiting children (Brady & Lowe, 2020; Whittle et al., 2013). For instance, the phenomenon of ‘catfishing’, where adults pose as peers to groom minors, has become a key tactic of online perpetrators and highlights the failure of simple stranger-danger narratives to equip young people with appropriate vigilance (Choi & Lee, 2023). 

As such, prevention programmes must emphasise critical indicators such as significant age gaps in relationships—especially those formed online—as potential red flags for grooming or predatory behaviour (Bragg et al., 2020; Gezinski, 2024). Effective digital safety education must move beyond rules such as “don’t talk to strangers online” and focus instead on equipping young people with the cognitive and relational skills to assess behaviours, patterns, and relational dynamics in online interactions (Stanley et al., 2018).  

Moreover, as participants identified, while the concept of identifying “safe people” remains valuable, it must be unpacked more deeply with children to account for the reality that some caregivers or family members may themselves be sources of harm (Alaggia et al., 2017). Without this nuance, children may be left without meaningful guidance in navigating complex relational dynamics or seeking appropriate support. Research shows that teaching children simplistic binaries of ‘safe’ versus ‘unsafe’ adults can actually increase confusion and self-blame when a trusted adult becomes the source of abuse (Plummer, 2006). 

Effective prevention requires developmentally appropriate, trauma-informed education that challenges simplistic binaries of “safe” and “unsafe” and instead equips children with the skills to assess behaviour, power, and context. Such an approach recognises the complex socio-relational webs within which exploitation often occurs and equips young people to critically evaluate relationships without relying solely on adult-sanctioned authority figures (Warrington, 2020). 

Moving beyond individual responsibility in prevention 

Moreover, most prevention education initiatives are premised on the idea that if a young person is taught to see problematic behaviour, they can prevent it happening to them. This framing subtly locates responsibility for prevention on potential victims rather than on perpetrators or structural enablers, risking inadvertent victim-blaming if abuse occurs despite these teachings (Coy et al., 2016; Warrington, 2020). As both participants and key informants pointed out, there is a need for that focus to shift away from surveillance of individual behaviour and toward the social and relational contexts in which abuse occurs. Grooming, particularly online, often involves gradual entanglement into relationships that feel consensual, affectionate, and rewarding, making it difficult for young people to easily recognise themselves as being targeted (Whittle et al., 2013). 

Arguably, responsive prevention initiatives should equip young people not only to recognise red flags in their own relationships, but to sound the alarm on behalf of their peers, supporting peer-based interventions that build collective vigilance and shared safety (Bragg et al., 2020; Beckett, Holmes, & Walker, 2017). Peer-based approaches, when implemented sensitively, leverage young people’s natural attentiveness to social dynamics and can create communities of care that extend protective surveillance beyond adult authority figures (Barter, 2017; Weston & Mythen, 2019). Such models must, however, be trauma-informed and consent-based themselves, ensuring that responsibility for prevention is not transferred onto peers in ways that recreate dynamics of blame or surveillance (Coy et al., 2016). Instead, the goal should be to foster cultures of shared accountability where young people are equipped (and supported continuously and openly) to notice concerning dynamics, support each other, and mobilise trusted adults when necessary (Firmin, 2020). 

Responding to the risk of unsupervised digital spaces 

Participants’ feedback, alongside wider research, also points to a critical and often underacknowledged dimension of contemporary exploitation risk: the pervasive existence of unsupervised digital spaces. The shift toward private, personalised, and largely adult-unmonitored online environments has fundamentally altered the ecology of childhood risk (Gezinski, 2024; Byrne et al., 2016). 

Unlike physical spaces, where adult presence can offer passive guardianship many digital environments young people inhabit—social media platforms, messaging apps, multiplayer gaming spaces—lack built-in, relationally attuned adult oversight. A consequent absence of everyday digital guardianship creates fertile ground for perpetrators to operate with minimal fear of detection, using grooming strategies finely tuned to digital affordances: private messaging, ephemeral communications, image-sharing, and anonymity (Choi & Lee, 2023; Whittle et al., 2013) 

As private digital spaces become more normalised for children and adolescents, without a corresponding cultural adaptation in adult supervision norms, some researchers have termed it a “protection gap” (Barter et al., 2017). They point out that in concealed online spaces, young people may experience grooming, manipulation, and exploitation without any visible signals reaching the adult world. At the same time, social discomfort (Weston & Mythen, 2019) around monitoring young people’s digital lives (linked to fears about overreach, privacy violations, or generational divides in technology literacy) often leaves adults ill-equipped to detect early signs of grooming or distress online (Gezinski, 2024). The resulting asymmetry between perpetrators’ digital sophistication and adults’ limited surveillance means that many young people navigate complex relational risks in isolation. 

These dynamics underline why prevention efforts cannot stop at teaching young people resilience or “safe online practices”; systemic adaptations are urgently needed to close the guardianship gap. This could include embedding trusted adults in digital spaces (e.g., trained moderators), improving platform accountability for child safety, promoting collective norms around open digital communication between young people and adults, and ensuring that digital literacy education is standardised across age groups and social settings.  

Conclusion and recommendations 

No child or young person chooses exploitation. Risk is not an inherent quality of youth; it is created — by perpetrators who purposefully construct opportunities to harm, and by systems and communities that fail to intervene or do so in ways that amplify precarity and harm. The stories participants shared exemplify how sexual exploitation (far from being the end result of youthful recklessness or bad decision-making) ultimately stems from how power is asymmetrically distributed, and how coercion, and the condoning of coercion, is embedded relationally and systemically. Understanding any experience of exploitation must therefore begin not with judging a victim’s behaviour, but with scrutinising the actions, choices, and strategies of perpetrators, and recognising the systemic conditions that allow exploitation to flourish. 

We can begin by: 

• Embedding nuanced, trauma-informed consent education into school curricula, focusing on indicators of grooming and exploitation, awareness of safe helping avenues, and critical assessment of adult/support people’s behaviour rather than simple binaries of “safe” versus “unsafe” individuals. 

• Modernising abuse prevention education to reflect the realities of contemporary online risks, moving beyond “stranger danger” frameworks to include education about online grooming, relational deception, and age-gap red flags. 

• Promoting peer-based prevention strategies, equipping young people to notice red flags in their own and others’ relationships, support one another, and activate safe adult interventions where necessary. 

• Recognising and addressing the vulnerabilities created by unsupervised digital spaces, including supporting parents, teachers, and caregivers to understand and monitor online risks appropriately without relying solely on young people’s self-management. 

• Investing in specialist capability-building across all frontline services (education, healthcare, social care, justice), ensuring practitioners can recognise, contextualise, and respond appropriately to both in-person and digitally-facilitated exploitation. 

• Embedding specialist knowledge from community-based organisations with expertise in sexual exploitation into mainstream service design, policy development, and practice training. 

• Prioritising investment in systemic, collective safety strategies, not just individual resilience models, recognising that safeguarding is a shared societal responsibility. 

• Developing and disseminating clear, consistent definitions that distinguish sexual abuse from sexual exploitation, so that practitioners, survivors, and systems can appropriately categorise and respond to different forms of harm. 

• Centring perpetrator accountability in all professional responses, and resisting narratives that individualise victim behaviour (e.g., “poor online choices”) or attribute blame to survivors. 

• Expanding system responses to recognise relational and networked forms of exploitation, not just isolated, single-perpetrator cases, and ensure that support services are equipped to deal with more complex victimisation patterns. 

• Ensuring that support interventions are culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and meet specific (including functional and material) needs at multiple points across a survivor’s life course, recognising that impacts often emerge or resurface many years after the initial abuse. 

• Reforming the ACC Sensitive Claims pathway to reduce wait times, simplify access processes, ensure compensation is prioritised, and better accommodate survivors of digital exploitation who may not have suffered a physical injury but experience profound psychological harm. 

• Expanding access to holistic recovery supports, including stable housing, parenting support, addiction services, and economic assistance, recognising the broad and multi-domain impacts of exploitation. 

The absence of a national definition of CSE in Aotearoa means that frontline professionals work with fragmented, borrowed, or informal understandings. This research is one of few qualitative studies in Aotearoa New Zealand that centres the lived experiences of people who were sexually exploited as young people, and which provides a conceptual foundation from which to build a survivor-informed and context-specific CSE framework that reflects the realities of local communities. This grounds the analysis in local systemic failures (e.g. Oranga Tamariki responses, police attitudes, and family-level silencing) and cultural nuances (e.g. collective care norms and whānau dynamics), allowing for a deeply contextualised understanding of how CSE is experienced and misrecognised here. 

Given the small sample size, and relative homogeneity of participants, the findings in this report may not capture the breadth and depth of experiences from diverse groups of young people, or be precisely replicable to other young people in similar situations. However, the findings presented throughout illuminate some of the pervasive, multi-dimensional harms caused by child sexual exploitation and abuse, and the systemic shortcomings that too often fail to prevent or mitigate this harm. 

Exploitation of these particular survivors compromised foundational and transitional parts of their lives, like feeling safe as a child in homes with whānau, becoming aware of adults’ expectations, asserting the right to give or withhold consent for sexual activity, developing relationships with trusted peers, sharing details of first intimate experiences with friends, engaging in education, entrusting secrets to someone, leaving school, getting a job, becoming a mother, leaving home, and making a decision for themselves about where to live. All of these irretrievable moments and decades of their youth and emergence into adulthood were touched by the fact and impact of sexually exploitation – up to, and likely beyond, the point at which they again proved the extent of their personal fortitude by taking part in this research.  

They are unlikely to be alone in these experiences of victimisation, or to be the only ones facing the devastating consequences of them. At present, these devastating consequences are, however, borne largely by victim-survivors alone. They are not effectively relieved by support services, and the people exploiting them through multiple and varied means very seldom face any substantive consequences themselves.  

Conceptual ambiguity and embedded inequalities in tandem explain this glaring gap in how safety and justice were (not) enacted on victims’ behalf. Ultimately, systems intended to protect and support survivors fell short—hampered by outdated paradigms, digital illiteracy, structural gaps, and fragmented service delivery. The emergence of unsupervised digital spaces as arenas of grooming and exploitation adds urgency to the need for prevention strategies that are critically attuned to contemporary risks. Justice and prevention (as well as intervention) designs must therefore move beyond simplistic models of ‘risky youth online’, and look toward relational, violence- and trauma-informed, and context-sensitive approaches.  

Without these, solutions are mistargeted; we cannot continue to responsibilise youth to protect themselves from abusers, who invariably are afforded greater epistemic power than their victims. We must instead take collective responsibility for combating a prevalent (and prevailing) threat – not just to young people’s bodies, but to their entire futures.

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