The Loverboy

Any child growing up in the Netherlands in the 90’s would learn about loverboys. As early as primary school, girls were warned against the dangers of these so called loverboys. They were, in general, Moroccan and Turkish guys that would charm young girls with all the wrong intentions. After an initial period of showering the girl with gifts, and distancing her from friends and family, the loverboy would start with his requests. The requests, always, were sexual. The girls were made to fall in love with these guys, and were then tricked into working as a prostitute.

Everyone knew it happened, and it was an openly discussed topic. What wasn’t so openly discussed, was who the perpetrators were. They were, and have always been, primarily those with ‘migrant backgrounds’.

The Return of the Grooming Gang

Now, these grooming gangs have returned. A Dutch newspaper has exposed the world of the loverboys. They share the search that was done by ‘Watch Nederland’, an organization set up to monitor the activities of these criminal groups. They state that annually in the Netherlands, 1400 underage girls fall into the hands of these human traffickers. That’s right, these are all underage girls.

How does it work? The boys find young, insecure girls, and take them to a ‘cool’, ‘wild’ life. A party with some drinks, some alcohol, and some peer pressure. Before, the process of falling into the hands of a loverboy would take months. Months of the loverboy being sweet, giving gifts, and slowly seducing the girl. However, as attitudes to sex have changed, the process has shortened to one or two weeks.

What’s next? The girl will perform a sexual act, possibly merely oral, of which the guy takes photos or videos. After that the blackmailing starts. The blackmail starts as soon as the footage was taken. The girls are immediately pushed into prostitution.

The Networks

The loverboys are connected to a hard core of criminals. The network is then used to find customers, or the girls are simply advertised online. The organization ‘Watch Nederland’ argues that the term loverboy makes it all sound too soft. They are neither lovers, nor boys, these are veteran human traffickers operating on a large scale.

Similar crimes have taken place in, it seems, all the major cities of the United Kingdom. Now, it becomes apparent the same strategy is present in the Netherlands. What else will come to light in Germany or Sweden?

The police pays little attention to these crimes, and it is Watch Nederland the provides evidence to the police so that they can build a case out of it.

The Ruthlessness

Girls have been told that if they can supply three of their girlfriends to these human traffickers, that they will have to serve five fewer customers that day. In other cases, the girls were told to roll a dice. The number of eyes on the dice would be the number of customers they would have to service that day. These kind of cruel games might tell us something about the type of people involved in these gangs.

The gangs will charge around 50 euro for half an hour, and make as much as 800 euro a day from a single girl. It is easy money, and without police intervention this business will undoubtedly attract others. Keep in mind that this also means that there are hundreds, if not thousands, or tens of thousands, of people in the Netherlands that are paying to have sex with underage girls.

The gangs, as mentioned, consist almost entirely out of Moroccan, Turkish, Antillean and Roma. Note that Roma refers not to Romanians, but specifically to the Roma gypsies. Overall, it appears Muslims are highly over-represented in these groups.