ABSTRACT
Child sexual exploitation (CSE) is a distinct form of sexual, psychological, and emotional abuse against children and young people. Since the late 2000s there has been an increasingly urgent recognition of CSE as a social problem in need of a statutory and policy response which has primarily been led by policy-makers and professionals. This has meant knowledge and understandings of CSE, embedded in dominant discourse and narratives, have not been shaped by, and therefore do not reflect, the experiences of survivors. As a result, survivors of CSE have been largely invisible in much of the literature, resulting in a noticeable lack of an explicit survivor voice, though this is beginning to change. In this chapter, the world of CSE is considered a ubiquitous, dysfunctional, ‘othered’ space which is simultaneously pervasive within, and peripheral to, wider mainstream society. Anzaldúa’s (1987) concept of ‘borderlands’ is utilised and applied to the world of CSE, positioning it as a borderland that young people unwittingly travel to and enter. Adolescence itself is also located as occupying a borderland between being a child and being an adult. This chapter presents the findings of a thematic analysis of the narratives of three female adult survivors of CSE, focussing on their journeys into the world of CSE, with the aim of understanding what factors, events and experiences can position young people onto this particular path; and how survivors made, and make, sense of their experiences and journeys.
