Sexual Exploitation — Why Leaving Is Not So Simple

“I had no voice, no choice.”

These are the words of a woman who was, for more than 30 years, coerced into having sex with multiple men, while the man who controlled her photographed and filmed the encounters. She was threatened if she refused, though precisely how was never fully spelled out in court. The abuse followed a grim routine: cars, hotels, secluded woodland. Several times a week. Year after year. Decade after decade.

This is not a Victorian melodrama or a cautionary tale from a distant culture. It’s a contemporary British case, recently tried, exhaustively evidenced and adjudicated. The man responsible has now been imprisoned for life. The woman, finally free, says she no longer knows who she is.

It’s difficult to read this without a sense of disbelief. Not because such abuse exists; that is depressingly and appallingly beyond dispute. But because of its duration and apparent invisibility. How does one person compel another adult to engage in acts they find abhorrent, repeatedly, for over 30 years, without chains, drugs or physical confinement? How is this possible?

A perverse Stockholm Syndrome

My initial temptation was to reach for explanations that preserve assumptions about human autonomy. Perhaps the woman was dependent on drugs, and her tormentor controlled her supply. Or maybe she suffered from untreated mental illness or severe cognitive impairment. In both scenarios, she was, in some sense, incapable of understanding what was happening to her and thus not inclined to do anything to change it.

These explanations are not frivolous. They reflect an intuitive need to anchor such cases in obvious forms of vulnerability. But, in this instance, they don’t work: No evidence of drug dependency was introduced at trial; no diagnosis of learning disability was advanced. The court proceeded on the basis that this was a woman who, in formal terms, was a sentient adult capable of consent and yet whose consent was somehow rendered meaningless or, at best, ineffectual.

The real force of the case is its apparent ordinariness: Nothing about it depends on extraordinary pathology. The abuse didn’t happen in a basement or a makeshift dungeon. It took place in spaces that were mundane, transient and socially transparent: cars, hotel rooms, countryside lay-bys. The perpetrator didn’t need constant violence or even the threat of violence. He needed time, routine patterns and control over consequences.

This is why this case is so unsettling. It doesn’t even let us reassure ourselves that freedom, once established, is lasting or self-perpetuating. It forces us to confront the possibility that freedom can be taken away, gradually, invisibly and without spectacle. And right under our noses — so we don’t notice it vanishing. 

We hear much of Stockholm Syndrome, in which people who are held captive, over time, become comfortable with their captivity and even identify positively with those who hold them. It’s a perverse development, perhaps, but in the process, the captives surrender what once passed as their power to speak, act or even think as they want; they give up their volition.

Agency

This brings us to the concept of agency, a term that does a great deal of heavy lifting in contemporary discussions of women’s lives. We are frequently reminded that women have agency. They choose. They decide. They act. The insistence on agency has been politically necessary, a corrective to fallacies that portrayed women as passive, dependent or merely responsive to men.

But there’s danger here. When agency is treated as a universal possession rather than a socially conferred capacity, it loses its analytical edge. Worse, it becomes accusatory: If women have agency, then failure to act can begin to look like failure of will, judgment or even courage.

Agency, properly understood, is not an inner resource that individuals carry with them regardless of circumstance. It is a condition created and sometimes withdrawn by cultural, institutional and relational environments. Those environments distribute possibilities unevenly. They make some actions thinkable and others unthinkable; some exits imaginable and others pipedreams.

In the case I’ve outlined, the woman did not simply “fail” to leave. She occupied an insular social world in which resistance carried consequences she believed she could not survive, while compliance became the least damaging option available. Over time, that world was normalized. Her abuse was “normal.” The idea of escape was unthinkable.

If the concept of agency is to remain socially and politically useful, it must be capable of accounting for this. Otherwise, it risks becoming a slogan rather than an analytic tool.

Abuse disguised as intimacy

It would be comforting to treat this case as a grotesque anomaly. But it is not without precedent. Its most fabled case is George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby, in which the controlling and mesmeric manipulator Svengali wields a sinister power over a young Parisian orphan girl. There are more recent, real-life cases.

Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife repeatedly and arranged for strangers to have sex with her, recording and photographing the assaults. Around 70 men were eventually implicated. The case shocked France not just for the abuse, but for how long it was orchestrated without detection (2011–20).

In Aachen, Germany, a man reportedly drugged and filmed his wife over 15 years, using secrecy and routine to sustain his long-term control. South Korea’s notorious Nth Room Case involved victims who were coerced into recording sexual acts, often under threats or blackmail. One of the most harrowing cases took place among a Mennonite colony in Bolivia: In 2009, a group of men were rounded up and convicted of the rape and sexual assault of 151 women and girls, including small children.  

Some of the cases involved drugs and physical assaults; other cases involved women being “shared” in ostensibly intimate relationships, their compliance sustained through intimidation, humiliation and the threat of exposure rather than brute force. What they shared was not violence alone or even its threat, but length of time. The violations were habitually repeated over and over again, so that they became routinized and eventually regular features of the social landscape. The victims probably appeared to outsiders as complicit in their own exploitation, and this is precisely why intervention failed to materialize.

I’m making a deeply uncomfortable observation, and it must be handled carefully. To say that a victim becomes implicated in their captivity is not to say they desire, less still endorse it. It is to recognize that survival in unusually constrained circumstances often requires forms of cooperation that, from the perspective of outsiders, resemble consent.

Indeed, a common rhetorical question directed at victims of domestic violence is the blunt and accusatory: “Why didn’t she leave?” Rape victims are often subjected to a similar, implied blame. Their actions are anatomized after the fact: if she froze, if she didn’t scream or if she refused to fight back, she’s assumed to have somehow induced the assault. Women already face deep-rooted scepticism when reporting sexual violence. Often, that scepticism is loaded with assumptions about consent and by narrow expectations of how a “real” victim ought to behave.

This dynamic is not confined to heterosexual relationships. Comparable patterns can be observed in same-sex relationships, in cults, in abusive workplaces and in situations where women exercise power over men. Even consensual BDSM relationships, when viewed without context, can appear indistinguishable from exploitation to outsiders. The difference lies not in surface behavior, but in the presence or absence of exits.

Some readers may have seen the recent Harry Lighton film Pillion (2025) about a queer relationship in which one man becomes “happy” (his word) to operate not just submissively but servilely, while outsiders, like his mother, recoil at the apparent abuse he’s prepared to take. Abuse does not always announce itself as “abuse.” Sometimes it looks like accommodation or habit. Or even more unfathomably, intimacy.

Captivity and freedom

The final, and perhaps most troubling, implication of the main case is that many similar situations may — no, I should be clearer, will — never come to light at all. The idea that victims eventually realize what’s happening to them and leave is a consoling piece of fiction. After decades of routine coercion, there is usually no epiphany waiting to happen. Just a continuation.

The woman at the center of this case didn’t wake up one morning after 30 years and have a lightbulb moment when it dawned on her that what was happening to her was just plain wrong. The conditions that had shaped her life for so long didn’t disappear. What actually changed was not her clarity of vision, but the collapse of the structure that had contained her.

Sociologists use the term “resocialization” to describe the process by which moralities, norms and identities acquired in childhood and adulthood are displaced, often following a momentous or disorienting experience.

Such replacements are inherently fragile. The conception of reality they sustain can be destabilized by even fleeting encounters with alternative ways of understanding the world. It’s likely that those subjected to long-term exploitation have their casual social contacts quietly restricted. A conversation in a shop, a bar or a workplace may be enough to unsettle a relationship whose assumptions are otherwise rarely questioned. In this case, the woman’s bond with her tormentor was eventually broken, perhaps through just such unguarded encounters that allowed her, for the first time in decades, to see her situation anew.

That’s why these cases should stop us in our tracks. Not because they are shocking or hideous, but because they expose the fragility of assumptions we prefer not to question. Agency is real, but remember: it is also uneven. Freedom exists, but it always has limits. And some forms of captivity are so thoroughly normalized that they persist for a lifetime without ever being known.

The woman now says she is free. Perhaps. It’s a beginning. But the more pressing task is collective: to develop ways of thinking about power, coercion, consent and, most critically, agency that are capable of recognizing such situations before they harden into decades.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson]

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Sexual Exploitation — Why Leaving Is Not So Simple appeared first on Fair Observer.