However, they were not the 76 men from the album. Later, without the police accompanying us or via the television circuit at the police station, we got to see young men ducking into the dark alleyways of Amsterdam when they saw the police coming, including plainclothesmen. We never got to see the pimps themselves this way. It was difficult for the police to develop a relation of trust with the women, they said, because the pimps told their girls the police were all corrupt and collaborated with the brothel owners. You could also recognize them by the tattoos they had done, with the name of their first pimp. They were young white girls who sat at the windows looking glum and obviously did not want to be there. These policemen knew which girls were the victims of loverboys. We sometimes walked around with the policemen patrolling the neighbourhood and chatted with the women. In the course of our field work on the streets of the Red Light District, we started to see and recognize more and more of them. All of them had police records to demonstrate their violent tendencies. Footnote 1 They were men the police team had the impression were playing a leading role in the world of pimps. The fact remains though that the team compiled what they called a rogues’ gallery of 76 faces for their own use, without the police authorities knowing about it. With such a small police team, there was no way the contacts with the prostitutes could be anything but superficial. Some of the businesses were run by one owner, but a large portion of the prostitution and other vices were predominantly organized by sixteen criminal organizations that were already identified in 1995. At the time of the study, the Red Light District had 200 prostitution businesses and 350 prostitution windows, which were rented out in three daily shifts of 8 h. In principle, they had contact with all the women who worked there and checked their age and residence permits. A district team of eight police officers monitored the daily course of affairs at the brothels and the prostitution windows. No girls were recruited as prostitutes there, but prostitutes did work there and the district was teeming with pimps. We first turned to the police precinct where the Red Light District was located. The boys themselves had never been given an opportunity to present their side of the story and nothing was known about their version of events. The pimps were usually portrayed as handsome young men, often of Moroccan descent, who appeared to be able to win over ‘weak’ girls, shower them with gifts and then trick them into becoming prostitutes. The stories of victims of loverboys had been given wide publicity and the popular image of loverboys was therefore mostly based on statements made by young girls and on social workers’ interpretations of these statements. 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.īetween 20, we carried out ethnographic research on pimps operating in the red-light district of Amsterdam. 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. 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. Stories about a new generation of pimps, often of Moroccan origin, regularly appeared in the Dutch media. 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. At the end of the 1990s, a moral panic erupted in the Netherlands about the phenomenon of what came to be known as ‘loverboys’.
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