“I’m just content to them”: 

Children living through sexual exploitation in Aotearoa New Zealand 

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 teenagers, safety is not found in a single disclosure, or in well-meaning advice. It is built, or broken, by how people respond.

This research centres the voices of people who were groomed, coerced, filmed, touched, used, raped, and lied about — often repeatedly, and often in plain sight, here in Aotearoa. The violence described in these accounts was not incidental, and was seldom disrupted swiftly or without inducing different kinds of distress for victims.

When participants disclosed their experiences of victimisation, many were disbelieved, blamed for not being self-protective, 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. This dynamic, as they described it, was typically 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 identified as system failure, and, even more vitally, what they identified as the opportunities for system repair and the protection of future victims.

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 exploitative abusers.

This research sought to better understand how sexual exploitation is experienced, recognised, and responded to in Aotearoa, from the perspective of those most directly affected. Specifically, it aimed to:

• Document the lived realities of people who experienced sexual exploitation as children or adolescents,
• Examine how and where systemic responses supported or failed them,
• Identify patterns in help-seeking, disclosure, recognition, and misrecognition across institutional and relational contexts, and
• Inform prevention, intervention, and recovery frameworks by centring survivor knowledge.

The research also aimed to help fill a major definitional and conceptual gap in Aotearoa’s understanding of child sexual exploitation, where the absence of a national framework contributes to fragmented practice, weak recognition, and inconsistent responses.

While practitioners expressed a commitment to supporting young people experiencing exploitation, their accounts revealed ongoing discomfort with specifically sexual forms of online abuse. Some described genuine attempts to upskill and respond appropriately. Yet many also disclosed uncertainty about recognising forms of exploitation that mimic intimacy.

Practitioners identified common risk factors but diverged in how they interpreted these. Some recognised structural drivers of vulnerability; others focused on parents’ limited digital awareness. A number of practitioners appeared to attribute vulnerability to youth-specific cultures, suggesting a “blasé” attitude or the influence of “instant gratification culture,” describing how some students “just sort of normalised it”. Others implied the sexual abuse had altered young people’s views of themselves and their bodies.

Risk is not an inherent quality of youth. Risk is socially created, cumulative, and relational, stemming from perpetrators who actively create opportunities to abuse young people, and social systems whose failures to genuinely serve the interests and safety of children and young people enable exploitation to occur. The two groups of participants – those abused primarily in-person, and those targeted and exploited online – had drastically different stories of victimisation.

In-person exploitation was often scaffolded by structural vulnerability; i.e., the way in which young people are put at risk by abuse, neglect, upheaval, or instability, without rapid access to recourse. In these stories, abusers targeted their victims from close by; usually children and young people whose lives were marked by social precarity, unstable caregiving, family violence, or institutional neglect.

Online exploitation, on the other hand, was scaffolded by the private and lack of adult arbiters of acceptable behaviour in online spaces, and by the weaponizing of young people’s developmentally normative openness: trust in others, curiosity about relationships and identity, and the desire for connection.

These two forms of exploitation did, however, share a common feature. Abusers, not their victims, were responsible for the violence, abuse, manipulation, blackmail, use of sexual abuse imagery, commodification of abuse, networked enabling of perpetration, concealment, silencing, fear, and violations of all kinds of personal and social boundaries.

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.

Dr Natalie Thorburn, Senior Advisor

Anna Britz, Engagement Facilitator

Eleanor Parkes, National Director

Suggested citation: Thorburn, N., Britz, A., & Parkes, E. (2025). “I’m Just Content To Them”: Children living through sexual exploitation in Aotearoa New Zealand. ECPAT Child Alert Trust. Released July 2025 © ECPAT Child Alert Trust