The men were also willing to discuss our real questions on pimping, even if only to convince us they were not loverboys. They were initially suspicious but after some time, once they realized we really were interested in them and not just in confirming the stereotype loverboy story, they opened up. Of course their answers were self-serving and to start with, they had never been pimps themselves. In the criminal hierarchy, pimps occupy a much lower position than drug dealers or bank robbers. ‘But do you know anyone who is a loverboy?’ we asked. ‘Yeah, sure,’ they said, ‘so and so is a real authentic loverboy.’ After we suggested talking about ‘so and so,’ the rest of the conversation was implicitly about themselves. Several indicators revealed that they had personally lived through what they were describing. This was apparent from, among other things, the amount of detail in their stories (for example, how they had seduced a girl, how much the girls earned in a day, etc.)
It is striking that the pimps claimed it was the girls who took the initiative rather than them. The girls offered their services, or a girlfriend they had had for years was so scared of losing her boyfriend that she begged him to let her earn money for him, if only he would not break up with her. The pimps’ stories indicate that prostitutes are not always such passive victims as they are portrayed in the standard version of the loverboy story. ‘They want it themselves, they really do. I just see to it that my girlfriend works in a safe way,’ one respondent said. They emphatically denied ever using any kind of violence. Judging from the cell phone conversations tapped by the police, in a number of cases this was an outright lie. In other cases, the argument seemed convincing, since we have found it is rarely necessary to use violence with girls who are in love.
The men were sly and cunning and knew how to work selectively. They went for unstable girls with low self-esteem. ‘First you look at the girl. How smart is she? Because there are girls who are dangerous. They might go to the police or do something like that. It is better if they are on the stupid side. Really not much more than a body.’ They told us that it was easy to tell whether a girl could be manipulated into prostitution because their victims shared a similar characteristic: they had all sorts of problems at home, as a result of which they were unstable enough to be easily influenced. In the study of victimology circumstances such as these are referred to as victim proneness [7]. Some people run a higher risk of becoming victims of crime than others. It would appear that these young men had developed a sixth sense for detecting vulnerable girls. As one of them told us: ‘Listen, these are mostly problem girls. They have problems with their parents or they have debts; a long-term relationship has recently ended or they just broke up with their boyfriend. They're at an all-time low, and then a loverboy comes along. Someone with a lot of money, who takes her out to all the right places, pays for everything, spoils her or what have you. Eventually, there comes a time when the girl who gets everything from her man is expected to do something for him in return, but they often don't know how. Sooner or later these girls are simply going to be manipulated’.
At bars and clubs, on the street or on the Internet, they kept an eye out for girls with a slutty look. These were girls who behaved in a certain way (‘she talks tough and she smokes dope’), dressed in a certain way (‘she wears a top and you can see half of her tits’), hung around in bars at night, and were easy to get into bed.
Their tactics worked best with white Dutch girls. They had a lot more trouble with the daughters of immigrants, ‘because those families have respect for each other.’ In their view, this was not the case with Dutch girls: ‘Dutch girls really are the easiest. (…) Nowadays, there are girls of thirteen or fourteen years old who have already lost their virginity. They go to clubs and discos and stay away from home for a whole weekend. They want to go out, they want new clothes, but they don’t have the money. When a loverboy comes along and the girl spots him and he seems like a nice boy, things happen… Meeting a loverboy is like hitting the jackpot, you know what I mean?’ One pimp told us that it was not only easier to get Dutch girls into prostitution, but that they were worth less than other girls and therefore deserved to end up as prostitutes. ‘Culturally and religiously, a Dutch girl is little more than a pig to a loverboy. She’s nothing, she’s of no value. When that’s what you’re thinking, you can completely block out your emotions.’ As mentioned, most loverboys were reluctant to manipulate the daughters of immigrants into prostitution, especially when it came to girls leading a pious life. ‘We are obligated to treat Moroccan girls as we would treat our own sisters; we can’t treat them as rags. You can’t just make a Moroccan girl work for you. (…) Listen, when a Moroccan girl wants to do it, that’s different. But if she goes to school and wears a headscarf, it’s just not right’.
In the beginning, they did their best to make the girls fall in love with them so they could manipulate them. They went out with them and made all kinds of promises (‘the two of us are going to open a club together’) and spent a lot of money on them. The next step was to break the girls’ ties with their friends and relatives and schoolmates. ‘What you do is to isolate them and make sure that she only has contact with you. If you treat a girl well and give her the idea that her future is with you, she will abandon her family and everything else for you.’
‘And then you act like you are suddenly broke,’ one of the young men told us. ‘The girls are so in love by then that they are willing to turn tricks just this once if I say I need the money. After a couple of days, it is like the most ordinary thing in the world.’ The boys also told us about the fact that some pimps gave the girls drugs to force them into prostitution and there was also mention of voodoo techniques, but we never came across an actual example of the use of such techniques during our interviews. It seems indeed that voodoo is a somewhat illogical way of manipulating white Dutch girls. It was mentioned by the boys as a possible technique to manipulate girls, but there is no evidence that they had ever actually used it themselves.
The respondents told us that the lifestyle of some pimps in the towns where they lived made it obvious to anyone that they were involved in prostitution. Certain girls were attracted to these young men and they would do anything to curry their favour. ‘Some girls get to know you and then they just call you. They think it’s the ‘tough thing’ to do. They’ll tell you: I need money and I want to be with you. (…) When you’re the one calling the shots, they want to be your girlfriend. ‘The boys would give fate a helping hand by presenting themselves in a way designed to make an impression on the girls. As they saw it, it was important for a pimp to build up status. Status can be acquired by wearing designer clothes, driving fancy cars and spending money like water. When these conditions are met, the girls will flock to them, or so the pimps told us.
The pimps were smart enough to have insight into the girls’ weaknesses and they exhibited considerable self-control in pretending to be madly in love for weeks or sometimes even years before they made their move. Then the hard thing was to have the girls accept sharing their fate with other girls. Well-known techniques in this world (see also the techniques of Black Players in the Secret World of Pimps described in the classical American ethnography by Christina and Richard Milner [14]) are to stimulate the rivalry among the girls and appoint a favourite bottom woman, i.e. the pimp’s most experienced or trusted prostitute. One of them told us: ‘One of the most important things is that you make sure that she is competing with someone else. You have her, but you also have another girl, and then you do little things to keep her thinking for weeks, you know. Or you make sure that she sees you with the other woman. You tell her that the other one works for you, whether that’s true or not, and then she will automatically want to compete. At some point, they will accept anything from you. The girl will be thinking: he is also going out with this girl and that girl, but that’s alright as long as I can also be his girlfriend. It seems he really doesn’t need me anymore. When he wants money, he can also get it from her and her and her. But the thing is, this will only make the girl try harder.’ All of this is strikingly similar to the findings of the physician A. Heijmans more than half a century ago. Heijmans [9] described exactly the phenomenon we encountered in the behaviour of present-day loverboys: a pimp will pit the various women working for him against each other in order to bind them to him. Heijmans concluded that ‘the prostitute can be stimulated to compete with other prostitutes to gain the procurer’s favour. This explains in part the prostitute’s bondage to the procurer, notwithstanding the disdainful characterization of him as a parasite, brute etc.’.
The most striking aspect of our interviews was the great variety in the statements about the pimps’ lives and how they justified their conduct and style of operating. The scientific stage model made by psychologists and used by the courts to recognize the loverboy methods was too general. The fact remains though that these men, even when they were telling their own personal stories, constantly referred to the stereotype media image of loverboys. It was as if they had started to believe in it themselves. This could be the result of the used research methods, mainly talking about pimping with the pimps. It could be the case that these pimps are not only talking about themselves but mentioning everything they have heard about pimping. This could also explain why they referred to voodoo. A link was also repeatedly drawn with the dominant image whenever they talked about girls who left the life of prostitution, sometimes after a lengthy period of animosity. According to these men, the girls followed the fixed pattern so forcefully presented by social workers when speaking to their mothers, the police or their old networks. In reality, their own role in what was now called a violent relationship of exploitation was much larger. As one of the pimps said, ‘After 4 years with me, she suddenly turned around and said I was a loverboy. She must have seen that movie or heard those stories. She wanted to get rid of me and she thought that was a good way to get at me.’
The boys naturally gave us their own version of events and did everything to present themselves in a positive light in the interviews, but at least some girls appear to have played a more active role than we might think at first. A review of the relevant literature (see e.g. [6]) shows that girls working as prostitutes often find it difficult to leave the business because they have trouble distancing themselves from the men who exploit them. It would appear that girls not only play an active role when they enter the world of prostitution, but once they have started also often participate in perpetuating their own exploitative situation. In the end, the prostitution environment – and there comes a point when this is the only environment they know - offers the girls a sense of security and as a result, they cannot or will not break away from their situation. There is no need for a pimp to supervise his girls around the clock, because he knows they are not likely to run away. It became apparent from the interviews that the pimps are rarely in the vicinity of the prostitution windows when the girls are working. They usually spend their time going to coffee shops, visiting relatives, dealing drugs, or working out in the gym. On occasion they take the girls to work or pick them up afterwards, but these chores are usually taken care of by the helpers.
Lastly, it struck us that these men were definitely not handsome boys, in fact they looked more like the older men in the rogues’ gallery the Amsterdam police had compiled. For the first time, we were hearing first-hand information about the social organization of the modern pimping system. It was now finally clear to us what we had observed at night in the Red Light District and at the police station. It turned out that most of them knew each other from small prostitution areas all over Holland. Within these areas, there were clearly two different kinds of pimps. There were the older ones who did not actually come to the prostitution districts that much, and there were the young men, often still teenagers, whom they sponsored and supervised. These young men spent time in the prostitution districts, where they ‘protected’ the prostitutes from the police – in fact, to prevent the girls from reporting them to the police - and even more importantly, to make sure they did not switch to the crew of a different pimping boss. One of the boys told us: ‘Pimps don’t watch their girls’ every move. They have people for that. (…) The worst that can happen to a pimp is that his girl is snatched away by another pimp. Because you lose a source of income? No, because you lose face.’
Rival pimps pose a real danger but according to the boys the girls themselves pose the biggest risk. When a pimp runs off with another girl, his former girlfriend will not hesitate to make false statements against him, or so the boys told us. ‘They turn to prostitution with dreams of a nice future and when they see their prince on his white horse ride off with another princess, they want to get back at him. I for one don’t believe any girl who says she was forced to work somewhere for 2 years. If she says: I was forced to work there for a week, I'll believe her, because you can’t do much in a week. But if she says: I was forced to work for a year, then I'll just laugh in her face and tell her she’s lying’.