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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