By Amanda Quick

On Sunday 12 April 2026, Amanda Quick, prostitution survivor and NMN spokeswoman, attended the World Survivors’ March for the Abolition of the Prostitution System in Paris. It was a powerful and emotional experience and, in this article, Amanda reflects on the consequences of failing to rein in the sexploitation industry.

We put it on classroom walls. We build it into PSHE lessons. We send it home in newsletters. Be kind. Respect others. Your body belongs to you. Consent matters. Then we hand children a screen and within minutes they can access cruelty, sexualised behaviour, and pornography that depicts brutal sexual violence as entertainment.

Children can find platforms that algorithmically serve them content that teaches them that buying and selling sex is a rite of passage, that dominance is the measure of a man and being dominated the measure of a woman. They can watch the sex industry recruit in plain sight, dressed up as empowerment, freedom, and lifestyle. On certain platforms they can even encourage — I say pimp — each other to sell sexual access to their bodies.

And then we wonder why children are filming and sharing their own sexual behaviour. Why boys and girls are replicating what they watch. Why children are disappearing into survival behaviour they do not yet have the language to name.

This is not a mystery. This is what happens when a society teaches contradictory things simultaneously and calls it normal.

Childhood Trauma

The physician and author Gabor Maté has spent decades studying how early experience shapes the developing brain — how trauma, attachment wounds, and the environments we grow up in wire us for the rest of our lives. He is clear: children do not choose their conditioning. They absorb it.

The nervous system of a child is a living system in constant relationship with everything around it, learning moment by moment what the world is, what is safe, what is expected, what they are worth. What we surround children with becomes the architecture of their inner world.

Maté draws a direct line between childhood trauma and adult compulsion, addiction, and relational dysfunction. Not dramatic, obvious trauma alone — but the chronic, low-level messages that tell a child they are not safe, not valued, not whole. The message that their body is for someone else’s use. The message that dominance is strength and vulnerability is weakness. These messages are not being whispered in corners. They are being broadcast at full volume, twenty-four hours a day, through the most powerful delivery systems human beings have ever built.

Connecting the Dots

In Paris, I found myself arguing with a journalist. She had research. She had data. She spoke with the confidence of someone whose understanding of exploitation lives in a spreadsheet. I asked her: what about the children? What about the wives and partners of men who buy sex? The women living in homes where their partner’s use of pornography and prostitution is a secret architecture of betrayal? What about the survivors, the advocates, the people who work daily in the rubble that these systems create?

Here is what the research rarely captures: child sexual abuse, domestic abuse, and entry into the sex industry are not separate phenomena with separate causes and solutions. They are connected. They flow into each other. They share root systems. A child who is sexually abused is far more likely to be exploited as an adolescent. A woman in a domestically abusive relationship experiences the same entrapment as a woman in prostitution — the same erosion of self, the same loss of options, the same question from outsiders: why didn’t you just leave?

And yet our policies treat these as distinct silos. Domestic abuse services over here. Child protection over there. Sexual exploitation somewhere else. Each with its own funding stream, its own language, its own threshold for intervention. And in the gaps between them, children fall. The system is not joined up because we have never been willing to look at the joined-up truth.

The women and men I marched with in Paris were not only survivors. They were social workers, nurses, lawyers, probation officers, doctors, counsellors and psychotherapists. People working daily inside the systems that are meant to protect the people they once were. Some of us carry both lived experience and clinical knowledge — a dual understanding that no research paper can replicate. And still — still — we are not listened to. The academics research us. The journalists interview us. The policy makers consult us and then write us out of the final report.

There were male survivors in Paris too. Men who had been exploited. Men who stood in solidarity, who carried portraits, who marched. Sisterhood and brotherhood in the truest sense — not the performance of it, but the quiet recognition between people who have known the same dark and found their way to the same street, choosing not to be silent.

A Values Problem. A courage problem. A political will problem

We have done something extraordinary as a society. We have sexualised everything and everyone — children’s clothing, advertising, music videos, social media filters, gaming — and then acted surprised when children internalise that sexualisation as normal. We have allowed an industry built on the sexual exploitation of human beings to stream directly into children’s bedrooms and called it free speech.

It is not a technology problem. It is a values problem. It is a courage problem. It is a political will problem. Technology is the delivery mechanism. The content being delivered — the normalisation of violence, the commodification of human beings, the framing of dominance as desire — is a choice. It is what our culture has decided to permit, to profit from, and to call entertainment.

You cannot teach a child that their body is sacred on Tuesday and then allow them to be immersed in a culture that treats bodies as commodities for the other six days of the week. The lesson does not land. It is drowned out.

What Love Actually Looks Like

Maté speaks about the fundamental human need for attachment — the need, from the very beginning of life, to be seen, held, and known. When that need is met, children develop a secure base from which they can explore the world and form genuine connections. When it is not met — when it is disrupted by trauma, by absence, by a culture that teaches disconnection — children adapt. They learn to get their needs met in whatever way the environment makes available. Sometimes that means shutting down. Sometimes it means seeking connection in places that harm them.

The sex industry does not create the need for connection. It exploits a need that already exists, that was never properly met. It offers a counterfeit version of intimacy that costs the buyer nothing and those who are sold everything.

If we want to protect children — truly protect them, not just process them through systems — we need adults who model healthy relationships. We need boys taught that strength is not dominance, that vulnerability is not weakness. We need girls taught that their worth is not located in their body or their compliance. We need the adults in the room to stop sending contradictory messages. To have the courage to name what we are actually doing to children and to choose differently. This is not complicated. But it is uncomfortable.

I was sexually abused. I was raped. I sold sex. I am a psychotherapist and a children’s nurse by background. I am a survivor of prostitution, of domestic abuse, of violence that came within reach of ending my life. I carry all of those identities into the same room at the same time.

What I know from all of this is that the children being harmed today are not a separate problem from the adults who were harmed yesterday. They are the same story, moving through time. The cycle does not break itself. It breaks when enough of us decide to stand together.

In Paris, I stood with survivors from across the world. We walked for two and a half hours through the streets of a city that ten years ago changed its law to say: buying a human being for an orgasm is not acceptable. We walked for the ones who could not be there. For the daughters and sons who did not survive. For the children, right now, of a culture that has not yet found the courage to choose them.

The question is not whether we know enough to act. We know enough.

The question is whether we love our children enough to be uncomfortable.

To look at our own part. To be accountable, courageous, vulnerable.

To dismantle the structures that harm, even when those structures are profitable. To tell the truth even when it is inconvenient.

To stand in the street and say: not on our watch. Not one more child.

We know what love requires.

The question is whether we are brave enough to give it.