Content area
Full Text
Crime Law Soc Change (2013) 60:6780
DOI 10.1007/s10611-013-9436-z
Secret seducers
True tales of pimps in the red light district of Amsterdam
Marion van San & Frank Bovenkerk
Published online: 10 April 2013# The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract At the end of the 1990s, a moral panic erupted in the Netherlands about the phenomenon of what came to be known as loverboys. The suspicion was that a growing number of Dutch girls were being groomed by handsome young men who employed all sorts of devious methods to prepare their girlfriends for life as a prostitute. Stories about a new generation of pimps, often of Moroccan origin, regularly appeared in the Dutch media. In this article, based on ethnographic fieldwork on pimps operating in the red-light district of Amsterdam, we describe the ways in which these young men operate and how they justify their behaviour. On the basis of empirical research we intend to present a more realistic picture of what goes on in the prostitution industry and highlight the discrepancy between what is reported in the media and what is actually happening in the prostitution sector. We also examine the background to the moral panic about loverboys and the ways in which these young men were supposedly able to induce many young girls into becoming prostitutes.
For more than a decade now, the Netherlands has been plagued by the criminal practices of what are referred to as loverboys. This English term has a unique definition in Dutch: loverboys are young men who use their seduction skills with the aim of exploiting young girls as prostitutes. What we are actually dealing with here are ordinary pimps and when we take a closer look at the modus operandi of these young men, we find that there is nothing new under the sun. The story about a new generation of pimps, often of Moroccan origin, who are busy grooming young and innocent girls for prostitution that continues to pop up in the Dutch media, appears to be little more than an urban legend.
M. van San (*)
Faculty of Social Sciences/Rotterdam Institute for Social Policy Research (RISBO), Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlandse-mail: [email protected]
F. Bovenkerk