The flesh is weak, the spirit even weaker clients and trafficked women in the Netherlands

Prostitution and Human Trafficking: Focus on Clients

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages 67-121

  Zaitch, Damián ^a   Staring, Richard ^a  

^a ERASMUS UNIVERSITY ROTTERDAM   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 78650315632     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-73630-3_5     Document Type: Chapter

References (30)

1. See among others Monzini, 2005;
2. Adreijavic, 2004;
3. Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998;
4. Aronowitz, 2001;
5. Vocks and Nijboer, 2000;
6. BNRM, 2007.
7. Rare exceptions are for example the study of Anderson and O'Connell Davidson, 2003.
8. In Dutch 'IJsbeer', 'polar bear' is one of the most common names for the clients of prostitutes which is used and accepted by clients themselves (in reference to the repetitive round walk of polar bears, performed by men in prostitution streets). The more popular notion of 'hoerenloper' (whore-hopper), widely used in media and common speech, has a clear pejorative meaning and is mostly rejected by clients as offensive. These emic categories also establish moral boundaries and are used for 'othering' the disrespectful man. As put by a client interviewed: "You have men who walk around calling the women 'whores' and 'bitches' [⋯], these are literally and figuratively the hoerenlopers. [⋯] Then you have the ijsberen, these men come for a cuddle⋯".
9. Our sincere thanks to Hanna Becx, Vanessa de Bruijn, Mark Griffioen and Mijke van der Linden for their deep commitment to the project during the preparation and data gathering phases. All junior researchers based their master thesis on data and topics related to the research project.
10. However, we did not recruit any respondents from the advertisement we placed in the personal blog. We finally used it to provide information to those who asked about the project.
11. From 2005 onwards, the special project on anonymous crime reporting of trafficked prostitution was an initiative of the Dutch Ministry of Justice. This project was financially supported until January 2007 and it is now at the stage of debating its continuation.
12. See paragraph 5.6.4 for a more detailed presentation of the findings.
13. Loverboys are usually portrayed in police and media reports in the Netherlands as a particular category of pimps: young men from ethnic minorities, more often Moroccan, with a career in petty crime, usually good looking, smartly dressed and behaving as wealthy 'gentlemen', who recruit and exploit young Dutch or Dutch-Moroccan girls by first becoming their boyfriends and then pushing them into prostitution.
14. Early July 2006, all topics were visited over 10.000 times.
15. The WODC is the Dutch Scientific Research and Documentation Centre from the Ministry of Justice.
16. See footnote 14 for a description of the BNRM.
17. It turned out that the majority of the 90 exploited prostitutes worked in the legalised and controlled formal brothels (NRC Handelsblad, February 10, 2007).
18. Among the most important laws that were implemented during the 1990s that had a direct impact on the position of illegal immigrants in Dutch society are the linking of the social-fiscal number to a valid residence status in 1991, which excluded illegal immigrants from participating in the formal labor market, the Compulsory Identification Act of 1994, the Marriage of Convenience Act of 1994, the Linking Act in 1998 and the Aliens Act in 2000 (see Staring, 1998, Engbersen and Van der Leun, 2001).
19. Already in 1904, the Netherlands subscribed to the 'International regulation with respect to the fight of the so-called trafficking in women and girls' and obliged itself to gather information on women trafficking through a separate institution. After the foundation of the first National Office by Dutch government in 1908, the independent Dutch National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings (BNRM) was appointed in 2000. This was done after a meeting of the European Union Member States where a statement on human trafficking was signed (the so-called The Hague Declaration) including the recommendation to install independent national rapporteurs on human trafficking in all EU member states (BNRM, 2002: 50-51, 68).
20. Until 2002 only Belgium and Sweden had a comparable 'national rapporteur on human trafficking'. Other EU member states have not shown similar initiatives (BNRM, 2002: 68).
21. Among the main goals of the National Rapporteur are the collecting information on human trafficking and reporting on this to the Dutch government (BNRM, 2004: 6).
22. This evaluation study (Daalder, 2007) includes three sub-studies carried out in 2006 by different research institutes under the supervision of the WODC on municipal policies, regulation and enforcement, on the social position of prostitutes in the licensed sector, and on the nature and scale of various forms of illegal prostitution.
23. The city of Rotterdam is divided into several districts.
24. Frans Bauer is a popular Dutch singer.
25. See www.prostitutie.nl for a brief summary of the results.
26. With the exception of 'being shy', prominently reported in several other studies, but not mentioned by our clients.
27. This section is to a large extent based on materials from the thesis Clients of prostitutes. A research on the perceptions of the client (Griffioen, 2007)
28. This section is to a large extent based on material form the thesis Forced prostitution and hoerenlopers. A mismatch between governmental policies and the perception of clients (Van der Linden, 2006).
29. Codename used by the online client in the discussion topic, on http/www.hookers.nl.
30. See section 5.4.3. for a list of all objectives.