Instrumentalized Innocence: Child Financial Exploitation, Caregiver Dependency, and the Limits of the U.S. Child Protection Framework
Abstract
Child financial exploitation can occur when a minor’s identity, labor, earnings, assets, economic rights, or economic dependency are used to produce financial or material benefit for another person under circumstances that compromise the child’s interests, agency, or developmental position. Existing U.S. legal and institutional frameworks address components of this conduct through child-protection, consumer, labor, property, criminal, forced-labor, and emerging digital-content law, leaving economically related harms distributed across systems with different jurisdictional and evidentiary requirements.
This article develops child financial exploitation as an analytical category and examines four principal modalities: identity-based financial exploitation; exploitative participation in caregiver- or family-controlled enterprises; extraction of children’s earnings and assets; and psychological coercion associated with economic compliance. It further examines monetized digital content as an expanding setting in which children’s labor, identities, likenesses, and private lives can generate economic value under adult control.
Drawing on primary legal authority and interdisciplinary peer-reviewed scholarship, the analysis considers how developmental dependency, economic control, allocation of benefit and burden, meaningful choice, and coercion distinguish potentially exploitative conduct from ordinary family economic interdependence. It also examines the structural relationship between child financial exploitation and forced-labor law while preserving the statutory requirements necessary to establish a federal trafficking offense.
The article develops a six-dimensional framework for practitioner inquiry encompassing the economic resource involved, control over that resource, allocation of benefit, allocation of burden, meaningful choice and coercion, and developmental and legal context. It maps corresponding responses across child protection, consumer protection, labor regulation, property and trust law, criminal law, and state protections for minors participating in monetized digital content. The analysis concludes that economic harms originating during childhood can persist beyond the jurisdictional boundaries of child-protection systems and proposes a coordinated reform agenda centered on recognition, referral, prevention, economic remedies, and empirical evaluation. Economic autonomy emerges as a significant component of the transition from child protection to independent adulthood.
Keywords: child financial exploitation; child maltreatment; economic abuse; caregiver dependency; identity fraud; parentification; child labor; economic coercion; digital child labor; child influencers; forced labor; child protective services; economic autonomy
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