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The only power that Dolores could have perceived having in the relationship, even at the beginning when she first fell into his control, was her sexuality. If Humbert accurately portrayed her taking an initiative on their first morning in the motel, it is easy to realize that she already understood what he wanted and that it was inevitable. She would feel the need to wrest whatever power she could over her situation.
She would have at least dimly perceived that she would be blamed by much of society for her predicament however she responded to Humbert. Even a respected critic (Robertson Davies) in 1959 wrote that the theme of Lolita is "not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child."
He apparently ignored Humbert's musings of the daughter and then the granddaughter he might have with Dolores and how each would fall into his power as the previous generation aged.
Davies' view was similar to that of Graham Greene when he chillingly wrote in 1937 of 8-year-old Shirley Temple: "Her admirers – middle-aged men and clergymen – respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire." He implied that she deliberately played to an audience of vulnerable men.
Young boys have also been victim, not only of salacious older men and women, but of powerful organizations that protected the adult and not the child. It is only in recent decades that the scarred prey have felt safe enough from further condemnation by the prevailing culture to expose the predators.
So Dolores was on her own. Her mother was dead and she questioned Humbert's part in that death. She surely feared for her own life when Humbert no longer wanted her.
I applaud Nabokov's theme. Nothing changes until it is exposed.
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