Instrumentalized Innocence examines child financial exploitation as an interdisciplinary problem spanning child maltreatment, economic abuse, identity misuse, child labor, caregiver dependency, digital monetization, and forced-labor law. Drawing on peer-reviewed scholarship and primary legal authority, Paradise Rodriguez-Bordeaux develops child financial exploitation as an analytical category encompassing 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.
The analysis examines how developmental dependency, economic control, allocation of benefit and burden, meaningful choice, and coercion can distinguish potentially exploitative conduct from ordinary family economic interdependence. It also addresses monetized digital content as an expanding setting in which children’s labor, identities, likenesses, and private lives can generate economic value under adult control.
The work proposes a six-dimensional framework for practitioner inquiry and maps potential responses across child protection, consumer protection, labor regulation, property and trust law, criminal law, and emerging protections for minors participating in monetized digital content. It concludes with a coordinated reform agenda centered on recognition, referral, prevention, economic remedies, and empirical evaluation.