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In 2013, when Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake first aired, I tried but failed to watch it In the first episode, detective Robin Griffin is visiting her hometown in New Zealand, and begins investigating the case of a pregnant twelve-year-old girl, Tui, who has tried to end her own life Robin visits the girl’s father in his remote hilltop house, suspecting him, amongst others, of having raped Tui When she started to talk to the intimidating, unpleasant man, I had to turn it off I couldn’t stomach another TV programme about brutalised girls I couldn’t bear holding out to see if the sexual abuse might be treated in a way that wasn’t titillating or voyeuristic   I was wrong to switch off Watching the series properly this year, I was struck by how Campion confronted such painful possibilities — the systematically orchestrated abuse of teenage girls, horribly familiar in recent months from the Jeffrey Epstein case — without colluding in the girls’ mistreatment, without indulging in false, salivating piety Tui’s sufferings are conveyed without robbing her of her dignity, and the legacy of Robin’s own sexual trauma at the hands of brutal young men is compassionately and respectfully portrayed too   It’s a tricky thing to pull off Part of what we invoke when we rail against the exploitation of women and girls is their vulnerability; their vulnerability to those with greater physical, social, cultural power — usually men But that vulnerability is also what is fetishised in the sexual predation of girls itself; innocence, pliability and breakability are alluring to abusers, and not for nothing is the virgin trope so ubiquitous The association of youth with vulnerability and cuteness is fraught Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has argued, in her analysis of ‘cute’ aesthetics in the context of toys and art objects, that ‘cuteness’ —  associated with frailty, roundness, softness — can provoke ‘ugly or aggressive feelings, as well as the expected tender or maternal ones’; the cute object, she writes, ‘is as often intended to excite a consumer’s sadistic desires for mastery and control as