It has been almost 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement laid the foundations for peace in Northern Ireland.
But violence and paramilitarism continue to cast a shadow over the lives of many young people growing up there today.
While police statistics record casualties from shootings and assaults, they do not capture the hidden harms of child criminal exploitation and coercive control.
"There were times I was literally scared to go to sleep at night," says Sarah* (not her real name).
"I was controlled for so many years."
Sarah fell under the influence of paramilitaries after joining a loyalist band. She says there were a lot of "drugs and anti-social behaviour".
"I thought I had to do everything to please them. They just knew how to get me in from a young age. Like they try to get into your head and say you'll do this, you’ll do that."
When Sarah did not follow orders, she says threats were made against her and her family, including her six-year-old brother.
She said: "I tried to get help from the police but then I was told to knock that on the head. I dropped everything I said to the police. And I still had no way out.
"My mental health turned really, really bad. So when I was around 19 or 20, I kept trying to take my own life, because I couldn’t see how I was going to get out of this bad situation."
Eventually, Sarah gathered enough evidence and courage to go back to the police. She says two men in their 50s were arrested for making threats against her life.
"Once these arrests were made, everybody in that community turned against me because obviously these people were high up in the paramilitaries," she said.
Sarah was then effectively banished from the estate she lived in. But she feels it was the "best thing that ever happened" as it removed her from a toxic environment.
She became involved in the Irish Football Association’s 'Fresh Start Through Sport’ programme, and now acts as an ambassador for the organisation. She travelled with them to Qatar for the World Cup in 2022.
"When we talk about paramilitary activity, we need to think about it more widely in terms of coercive control, because if we just think about shootings and physical attacks, we miss a lot of what's going on"
While her story turns out well, she still knows young people living under threats of violence or being expelled from their communities.
The question of why this is still happening decades into a peace agreement is a topic Professor Siobhan McAlister from Queen’s University Belfast has been researching for years.
"We are talking about very particular communities in Northern Ireland," she said.
"Particularly communities which are under resourced, underserviced, economically deprived. So those communities which felt the brunt of the conflict in terms of death, injury, disruption to everyday life, are the communities that are experiencing the legacy of the conflict.
"And one of those legacies is this issue. Within some of those communities, there's a strong sense of coercive control, an undercurrent of unease, a sense of fear, an understanding that violence can ignite at any time.
"So, when we talk about paramilitary activity or paramilitaries, we need to think about it more widely in terms of coercive control, because if we just think about shootings and physical attacks, we actually miss a lot of what’s going on within those communities."
"It's a damning indictment of our society that we have such a situation here, where our children and young people are being targeted and exploited"
The nature of coercive control means it is hard to quantify exactly how pervasive the problem is.
In recent years, there has been a push from civic society groups to reframe the issue, adopting language such as human rights abuse, child exploitation and safeguarding.
"This is absolutely and fundamentally a children's rights issue, because all children and young people have the right to live in safety, free from such intimidation, criminal coercion or exploitation," said Mairead McCafferty, chief executive of the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People.
"The reason that we have been contextualising this in the safeguarding child protection language is very much because the state has a duty to protect its children, and while we hear about high profile assaults or shootings, or episodes of civil unrest here in the media, we rarely hear about the full range of harm and abuse which affects children and young people's daily lives.
"It's a damning indictment of our society that we have such a situation here, where our children and young people are being targeted and exploited.
"It is vital that the statutory agencies and bodies whose job it is to safeguard and protect our children focus on this much more effectively."
