Every year more than one thousand underage Dutch girls are groomed and then blackmailed into sex slavery by young pimps with migrant backgrounds, an investigation has revealed.
With gifts, drink, and drugs, so-called ‘loverboys’ will seduce a girl into agreeing to become his sex partner before taking pictures or video footage of the encounter which will then be used as leverage to force her into prostitution, Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad reports.
“These men are mostly Moroccans, Turks, Caribbeans, and Roma. The lion’s share of them have a migrant background,” said Gideon van Aartsen from Watch Nederland, an initiative which coordinates with the nation’s police on efforts to fight child sexual exploitation (CSE).
He told the newspaper that selling sex with schoolgirls is a “lucrative trade” that can earn “up to 800 euros a day on a girl” for ‘loverboys’, most of whom are part of larger networks that are also involved in trafficking illegal drugs and weapons.
Annually around 1,400 Dutch minors fall victim to ‘loverboys’ — a term used in the country to refer to young men who lure underage teens into relationships then force them into the sex industry — according to police human trafficking experts Marijke van Overveld and Esmee Huijps.
They said that with the advent of video smartphones it is no longer necessary for the men to have to convince victims that they’re in a relationship as used to be the case when grooming girls into sexual slavery.
“The seduction process takes only between a week and a fortnight now, when it used to take months,” said Huijps, explaining that girls are told they must either agree to work as a prostitute or else footage of them having sex will be uploaded to social media.
“Once they have a compromising video of you, that is enough for blackmail. Especially for young girls, whose parents do not know anything.”
Lamenting the cruelty and abuse to which trafficked girls are subjected, van Aartsen told Algemeen Dagblad: “These girls, who are just minors, are given orders like ‘make sure you bring three [female] friends, and I’ll let you get away with f***ing five men fewer each day.’”
So-called loverboys have also been known to make their victims roll a die, and then force her to see that many customers before the end of the day, he added.
As is the case with many victims of the predominantly Muslim grooming gangs who prey on underage girls in towns including Rotherham and Oxford across the UK, girls who fall victim to ‘loverboys’ in the Netherlands are “largely, but not always, vulnerable women from a lower social class and who have an unstable home life”, according to the report.
Before the massive scale of CSE in Britain came to light, Times journalist Alice Thomson asked what UK authorities could learn from the Dutch approach to the problem after attending a sex education lesson at a high school there in which a former victim of the phenomenon told “horrified” pupils about her experiences.
“In Britain it has been hard to get anyone to listen,” she noted in 2011, stating that establishment attitudes on race relations are “part of the problem”, as “police, social workers and charities don’t want to pin such a disgusting crime on even a tiny minority in a particular ethnic community”.
By contrast, she writes that in the Netherlands, “where they have been debating the issue for a decade”, authorities “confronted the issue of race, admitting that the majority, though not all of those who have been involved in grooming girls, have been of Moroccan and Turkish descent”.
The Labour MP for Rotherham, where organised sex abuse, rape, and trafficking of girls went unchallenged by authorities for three decades, was forced to resign from her position in the party last year after writing a piece pointing out that the majority of perpetrators in the town are from Pakistani backgrounds and almost all their victims white.
And Breitbart London reported earlier this year how controversial campaigner Tommy Robinson was suspended from Twitter for citing research published by the Quilliam Foundation in December which showed that 84 per cent of convicted grooming gang members are from Muslim backgrounds.