The Stormont Executive has launched a campaign to highlight the control paramilitaries still hold over communities in Northern Ireland.
An event this morning heard that young teenagers were being sexually exploited to clear drug debts.
The campaign will include a poster campaign and advertisements on social media platforms.
The PSNI is actively investigating six crime groups linked to paramilitaries, four within loyalism and two in republicanism.
They include the UDA, the UVF and the INLA.
Stormont Justice Minister Naomi Long said it was crucial to "shine a light on what is not normal but has been normalised".
"The hidden harms highlighted in this new campaign are examples of those which are perpetrated daily by paramilitary criminals.
"They are compounded by drug trafficking, intimidation, coercive control of communities, money lending, physical and mental abuse and undermining the law and criminal justice structures.
"The result is a complex web of control that extends deep into communities."
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She said what was going on in communities was a "largely silent but terrible epidemic".
The event heard that paramilitarism exacerbated problems with domestic abuse, mental health and corrosive toxic masculinity.
The police said paramilitaries remained a "scourge on our societies"
Assistant Chief Constable David Beck said since a special paramilitary task force had been established in 2017 it had significant success in terms of drugs and cash seizures, arrests and convictions and the seizure of property.
However he accepted that many people in those societies were still afraid to report their experiences to the police.
He said they could still do anonymously through the charity Crimestoppers.
The Stormont Executive supports community projects to try and support people and divert them from the arms of paramilitaries.
£16 million a year is available - half from the Executive and half from the UK government.
The launch heard that paramilitaries maintained an "economic stranglehold" through extortion and racketeering.
They were told it was ironic that cash demanded from businesses was called "protection money". They heard the only thing they were protecting was their own pockets.
Northern Ireland's Commissioner for Children and Young People Chris Quinn said he knew of one mother whose child of primary school age was under threat from paramilitaries.
He said children aged as young as nine had been involved in rioting over the summer in which some paramilitaries had also participated.
"This is child abuse," he said.
