An aspiring pimp who attempted to create an underage sex trafficking ring with the help of a 14-year-old victim has been sentenced to prison.
But the havoc and trauma that Wiparera Paraire, 27, caused for the girl and her family is likely to last far beyond his time in custody, prosecutors said today.
“Nothing cut deeper than watching her soul shatter in front of us – piece by agonising piece,” the child’s mother wrote in a victim impact statement.
“You dragged her deeper into ruin ... You took advantage of her pain.”
At Auckland High Court, Justice Gerard van Bohemen agreed the offending was “abhorrent and manipulative”.
“The victim was vulnerable and she trusted you,” he said of the exploitation.
The agreed summary of facts for the case states the girl was 14 for most of the time the two illegally dated, between April 2023 and January 2024.
Early on, police made it explicitly clear to the defendant that she was underage. Officers had contacted Paraire after the girl ran away from home in May 2023.
“Despite this, their relationship continued,” authorities noted.
As it continued, he also began to serve as the girl’s pimp – encouraging her to find sex work with other adult males.
“Additionally, throughout their relationship, Mr Paraire entered into an agreement with [the child] where she would recruit her friends, also aged under 16, to prostitute themselves,” court documents state.
Under the agreement, the child was to serve as Paraire’s lieutenant in the ring – supervising her recruits but continuing to report to him as they both took a cut of the profits.
“As part of this effort to recruit [her] friends, Mr Paraire took steps to groom one of them,” police noted.
Authorities were able to piece together many of Paraire’s crimes thanks to social media. The two exchanged voluminous messages via Snapchat.
“Where are you, I have work for you tonight someone’s been calling,” Paraire wrote on July 1 that year after the girl was admitted to North Shore Hospital to be assessed by the mental health team.
“dw [don’t worry] you’ll b paid,” he assured her on another occasion after telling her to be ready to travel somewhere for work.
He gave advice on how to flirt with men and “act cute” while getting clients “as fkd up as possible”.
“Ayy ata girl,” he responded on another occasion after the child reported being at an Auckland Central hotel room with someone who had paid her. He then gave her tips on how to pickpocket the man.
In another Snapchat exchange, the girl offered up a 16-year-old friend as a fresh recruit, sending Paraire a nude photo of the friend as well as screenshots of the other girl’s Snapchat profile.
“just tell her that you have this guy that will help her make money if she’s down,” he responded. “You just gotta make it sound convincing so they don’t fk round n shi you feel me.”
Paraire faced up to 14 years’ imprisonment today for one count each of dealing in a person under 18 for sexual exploitation, agreeing to deal with a person under 18 for sexual exploitation and making an objectionable publication. A fourth charge, sexual conduct with a young person, carried a maximum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment.
It is believed to be the first time the agreeing to deal with a young person charge has been prosecuted, the judge noted.
Paraire told report writers prior to sentencing that he had lived on the streets since childhood and befriended sex workers after his mother dropped him off at a Harley-Davidson motorcycle dealership, told him to pick a new name and abandoned him there.
But his story changed significantly as he repeated it to various people in the justice system, including whether he was aged 9 or 10. Police offered an affidavit noting that there were about 50 interactions with Paraire when he was between the ages of 12 and 15 and there was never an indication he was homeless.
Justice van Bohemen said the accounts were too untrustworthy to give credence, but he accepted Paraire’s childhood appeared to be traumatic regardless – marred by violence, his mother’s mental health issues and an introduction to drugs by age 11.
Prosecutor Henry Steele sought a starting point for all four charges of eight years’ imprisonment while defence lawyer Rasyad Ismail advocated for a five-year starting point.
The judge allowed a starting point of six years, agreeing with the defence that there were many aspects of the case that raised suspicion but couldn’t be considered because they weren’t made clear in the agreed summary of facts. None of the child victims agreed to participate in the investigation and there was no trial, so the summary is vital, he said.
Paraire may very well have groomed the victim for the entire 10 months they knew each other, but it’s not clear there was that level of premeditation, he explained. Likewise, it is not proven that he had more than one sexual interaction with the child or that he encouraged her to have penetrative sex with customers, he said.
The defence described the offending as unsophisticated and not characteristic of the worst cases in which child victims were intimidated or pressured into prostitution.
The judge agreed but emphasised the offending was still “manipulative and exploitive”.
He ordered an end sentence of four years and six months’ imprisonment, after allowing 22% in discounts for Paraire’s guilty pleas and traumatic background.
The teen, who was later taken into Oranga Tamariki care, did not attend today’s hearing. Neither did her mother, who described in her victim impact statement having never felt so desperate and helpless as after her daughter met Paraire.
“You treated her like she wasn’t even human,” she wrote in the statement, which was read aloud in court by prosecutor Sam Meyerhoff.
“You made her walk into danger night after night. Every day I watched her slip further away ...”
The child’s trauma led to trauma for her family as well.
“Rage became her language – violent, desperate, unflagging,” the mother said, adding that it wasn’t her daughter’s fault.
“She was never the villain. She was a child.”
She fears her daughter will never be the same again, she said.
“Your actions have left an unrelenting spiral on our family,” the mother wrote. “You violated trust, shattered innocence and carved a path of destruction through my daughter’s life.
“You may one day walk free. We will never truly be free.”
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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