It’s more than 20 years since the government set up a five-year action plan to address the sexual and commercial exploitation of children in New Zealand. But, as Indira Stewart meets teenage sex workers who entered the industry as children, she asks, who monitored that plan and what did it achieve?
“I started selling myself at 10. I started street work when I was 13,” says 17-year-old Melina*. “It was the only way I could financially support me and my siblings and the only way that I could pay for my school stuff.”
The last time Melina attended school was in Year 9 and one of her biggest regrets is missing out on her school ball. “I wish I could’ve gone to my ball but then again, I wouldn’t have had anyone to celebrate it with.
“Life is hard but you eventually get through it.”
Melina is one of several youth we met, aged between 15 to 17, who received money or things like food and shelter in return for performing sexual acts.
There is almost no hard data on the commercial sexual exploitation of children in Aotearoa but ask any sex worker and they’ll likely confirm that it’s happening on our streets and it’s growing online.
But it remains a story hidden in the shadows and a problem government agencies perhaps find too hard to solve.
Some label it “child prostitution” or “child sex work” but those words are seen by others as harmful and misleading because they brush over what is essentially vulnerable children being sexually abused and commercially exploited by adults.
The youth themselves, use different language to describe what they do, often calling it “sneaky-links” or “hook-ups” with the adults who pay for their services.
It is not illegal to be an underage sex worker. It’s the adult who pays for or receives sex services from a child under 18 who commits a crime. Assisting, encouraging or profiting off a child used in sex work is also a crime.
When we first started investigating this story in 2021, we met teens, often under the influence of drugs or alcohol, who told us they were working the street at night and still attending their local high school by day.
Childhood: the entry point to the industry
We spoke to 13 adult sex workers, and 12 of them told us they’d started working the streets between the ages of 13 and 15. The most common entry point into the industry, it seemed, was childhood.
Their stories are not new. In 2001, a survey capturing the only nationwide data on child prostitution to date, found over 195 known cases in New Zealand. Most of those children were 14 and 15 years old. Forty-nine of them were under 13.
The government launched a five-year action plan called “Protecting our Innocence”, led by ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes), an organisation that has spent decades raising awareness of the commercial sexual exploitation of children. Multiple agencies worked together with a goal to put a stop to child pornography, prostitution, sex tourism and trafficking.
But when the five years were almost at an end, it appeared no one had been monitoring or reporting on its progress. ECPAT took the initiative to prepare a stocktake on the work agencies had done and highlighted objectives for the various agencies and stakeholders to monitor moving forward.
Over the past few weeks, we visited several public locations in Auckland, known as hotspots, where young people, especially those under 18, meet for sex work. At different times, I observed young girls getting into cars with older adult males, girls who would have been born after the government’s 2001 action plan “Protecting our Innocence” was launched. I wondered if any of them would be in those cars at all if the plan had been a success.
So, what happened?
We asked the Justice Ministry if it was still monitoring progress from the “Protecting our Innocence” action plan. General Manager Kathy Brightwell said it was not, but the Ministry did continue to monitor relevant laws and provide advice in line with the priorities of the government of the day.
We asked the police whether the Manukau Working Group it was once a part of, which was formed in 2002 to tackle the issue of local children used in sex work, still existed. We also asked police how they responded to young people under 18 involved in sex work. Police did not respond.
Oranga Tamariki said it takes concerns about children engaged in sex work extremely seriously and in any case it was made aware of, it would develop a safety plan of support to prevent further harm to the child from ongoing sexual exploitation. The organisation said it couldn’t provide any figures on how many children in care were involved in commercial sexual exploitation because it is classified as sexual abuse, and they’re not able to distinguish one kind of abuse from another in their data.
The industry migrates to online
Meanwhile, under-age sex workers have grown easier for adults to access, as a growing number of young people sell themselves online on sites like OnlyFans and Feetfinder. Last year OnlyFans recorded half a billion visits to its website while also being investigated for featuring suspected child sex abuse on its platform. It has an 18+ policy but was fined more than NZ$3million last month by the UK government after giving incorrect information about how it checked the ages of its users.
In a recent Reuters article a spokesperson for OnlyFans said the site “recognises the importance of providing Ofcom with accurate and timely information”. Ofcom is Britain’s media and telecommunications regulator.
It’s been 17 years since the Prostitution Reform Act was last reviewed. It was groundbreaking legislation, making New Zealand the first country in the world to fully decriminalise all aspects of sex work. In that 2008 review, government agencies were asked what they do to prevent young people entering sex work. None had specific programmes targeted at under-18 sex workers.
In the years following that last review, almost all the sex workers in our TVNZ+ story entered prostitution as children. Law reform was designed to protect kids from being sexually exploited but did it go far enough?
*Names have been changed.