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 Dagbladreports.
“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...