Almost no longitudinal research exists on what happens to former M/NVE participants in the longer term. Research on jihadist deradicalisation provides some methodological precedent, but the comparison may not transfer cleanly given the different pathway in and the different victim/perpetrator overlap.

Female-identifying participants, including those who transition from victim to perpetrator-figure within the Com hierarchy, are underdocumented compared to the male majority of perpetrators. Existing data is fragmented across case studies.

Despite multiple national designations and prosecutions, no comparison exists of how different legal systems are actually handling M/NVE cases in practice. Comparative work would help all jurisdictions learn from each other.

Early observations suggest AI tools are being used for content remixing and translation more than for net-new generation, but the picture changes month by month and the underlying empirical base is thin. Worth tracking systematically rather than anecdotally.

Almost all current M/NVE research, and almost all of the regulatory frameworks that address its component harms, sit in jurisdictions with comparable digital-safety regimes (the EU, the UK, Anglophone Five Eyes, parts of Latin America). The platforms M/NVE participants use are global, but the legal protections those platforms must observe are not. This creates an enforcement gap in regions with weaker frameworks. The Pacific Islands have been flagged by regional safety practitioners as a particular concern, given high digital exposure, low access to reporting infrastructure, a documented history of CSAM- and trafficking-adjacent victimization, and proximity to Australia and New Zealand, where M/NVE activity is documented. There is concern in the field that NVE participants in those countries may be sourcing victims from Pacific neighbors where legal recourse, language coverage, and digital-safety literacy are limited. The empirical base for this concern is currently very thin. Closing the gap would require field-led work with local civil-society partners in Fiji, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Polynesian nations; cross-border coordination between Australian and New Zealand bodies and Pacific equivalents; and platform-level commitments to extend CSAM and grooming-detection regimes to languages and contexts beyond the major regulated jurisdictions.