The reaction to the America’s Next Top Model documentary has been immediate and visceral, with social media saturated by anger, disbelief and a chorus of the same question: how was this allowed to happen?
Viewers are not struggling to interpret what they are seeing. They are identifying young women placed in environments they did not control, encouraged to drink in circumstances where refusal carried consequences, filmed at moments when meaningful consent was not possible, and then required to relive those experiences as a condition of their continued participation. Distress is reframed as growth. Humiliation becomes professional development. The power imbalance is repackaged as opportunity.
The horror is real and it is justified. The more uncomfortable question is whether any of it is surprising.
There is nothing in the footage that is unfamiliar to those who have spent decades working in violence prevention and response in Australia. Survivor testimony has consistently described the same patterns across workplaces, universities, media, political institutions and the justice system. We have had inquiries, national data and investigative reporting that all point to the same conclusion. Sexual violence does not persist because it is hidden from us. It persists because the structures that enable it haven’t been required to change.
What the documentary offers is not new knowledge but narrative clarity. It compresses the conditions that make meaningful consent impossible into a single visible storyline and removes the bureaucratic language that usually obscures responsibility. For once, the power imbalance is undeniable, and the system cannot easily shift the consequences back onto the individual.
If we can recognise coercion, intoxication and institutional control instantly on screen, then recognition is not the problem in contemporary Australia. The problem is what happens when that recognition requires structural change.
At its core, America’s Next Top Model functioned as a neoliberal workplace in which participation was framed as a privilege, success as a personal brand and harm as a failure to manage opportunity correctly. Structural conditions such as isolation, sleep deprivation, financial precarity and total producer control disappeared, replaced by a language of resilience and professionalism. In that framework, a failure of duty of care becomes a lesson in personal responsibility.
This logic is not confined to reality television. It shapes our response to sexual violence.
Victim survivors are asked to report, to navigate complex and often retraumatising systems, to access services and to heal. Governments measure disclosures and program reach while national plans articulate a commitment to prevention. Yet the institutions in which violence occurs are rarely required to fundamentally alter the conditions that allow it to happen. Safety remains something individuals must secure for themselves rather than a non-negotiable condition of participation in work, education and public life.
In Australia, sexual violence most often occurs in ordinary environments and is perpetrated by someone known to the victim. Reporting has increased, yet attrition remains high and outcomes remain rare. None of this is new. The more relevant question is why decades of knowledge have not produced transformation.
From a sector perspective, the answer is both familiar and exhausting. Prevention is named as a national priority while funding remains short term and competitive. Collaboration is required across jurisdictions within a federation that fragments responsibility and diffuses accountability. Outcomes are expected within funding cycles that are shorter than the time needed to produce population-level change. The result is an implementation gap in which the energy required to prevent violence is repeatedly redirected towards securing the conditions to do so.
Retrospective outrage is powerful because it is politically safe. The events have already occurred; the institution is distant and the moral judgement costs us nothing. We are not required to examine our own workplaces, our own sectors or the policy settings that govern them.
A meaningful response in Australia would look very different. It would involve redistributing power, regulating industries that profit from gender inequality and removing decision-making authority from systems that have repeatedly prioritised reputational protection over safety. It would mean funding prevention as infrastructure and embedding it across the whole of government and the whole of society, as the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children itself envisages.
Most of all, it would require us to stop treating safety as an individual responsibility and start treating it as a structural obligation.
The central lesson of the documentary is not that a group of young women were failed by a television production two decades ago. It is that meaningful consent cannot exist in environments where one party controls the conditions of participation, the economic consequences of refusal and the public narrative of what occurred. That is not a historical anomaly. It is a description of how many of our institutions still function. We do not lack awareness, survivor testimony or evidence about what works, and we have a National Plan that sets out the ambition in clear terms. What we lack is the willingness to require institutions to carry the cost of delivering it. Until prevention is treated as a structural obligation rather than a responsibility shifted onto individuals and an under-resourced sector, the gap between what horrifies us on screen and what we tolerate in our own systems will continue to widen. The shock we are witnessing now does not come from the revelation of something unthinkable. It comes from the sudden visibility of a structure we already live within, and what happens next will show whether we are prepared to change it.