National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children

For the first time I write a piece in English. I am Dutch, my blog is in Dutch, and English is a bit harder for me to write. I do it for one time, because I have seen that when you take my blog into Google Translate, it looks like I am writing it on drugs. I have written a lot of stuff about prostitution from my perspective as a prostitute. I try to explain that prostitution is not bad, and it should be treated the same as all other sorts of work. I give my opinion about many things from prostitution, and I try to give people an idea about how it is to be a prostitute.

Dutch people can easily read my whole blog, and they can read all the normal things of my life. I am very open when it doesn't show my identity some way. The translation of my blog is really bad, but I hope you will find some new view at least. I hope that people will understand better when they can see that I am a real person, and my job is a real job.

I have seen in the analytics for my website that there are a lot of English speaking people that come on my blog because they are looking for the National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children, mrs Dettmeijer. I know that her reports and opinion are very important when people talk about Dutch prostitution politics in the Netherlands. So it is important that I explain that this woman is very wrong.

This woman has been the subject of some earlier things I wrote here. She was a judge earlier, and she knows the handyness of not saying things that you can be caught with. She says a lot of things that are hard to show the total picture of what she is doing. But when she writes documents, she can't hide what she is doing. So I have had pieces before where I wrote reviews of these documents, showing that she is only after maximum convictions, and puts the interests of prostitutes in the last place.

She likes to put the emphasis on that she is independent. She doesn't have anyone to make decisions over her. That is true, but it doesn't mean that she is neutral. The title she has makes you think she is a neutral observer, but the documents she brings out show that that is not true. She is one of the people who think it is right to treat prostitutes as different from normal people. She attacks the prostitution business, and does not think once about what we have to live with. She just wants convictions for trafficking.

Exploitation is the core of human trafficking. When it comes to prostitution, you speak always of trafficking. Referring to other economic sectors, then it is about finding the line between real wrongs and being a bad employer. Then it must be an excess.

But she also states, without acknowledging the contradiction:

An example then, with concrete numbers, about the penalty provision that prohibits to recruit people in country A to country B for prostitution. Dettmeijer: "Nowhere is there that it matters whether a suspect is coerced, or that a victim joins voluntarily." She leafs through her report, citing a judgment of the court of Amsterdam of February 4, 2010 on two suspects who both took a victim over from Bulgaria to the Netherlands: "Of coercion,(threat of) violence and / or abuse of a vulnerable position was no question, therefore acquittal."

An exception? Dettmeijer: "In eight of the nineteen acquittals on this provision has the absence of coercion or exploitation wrongly been the reason for acquittal. That's almost half. "

These are the best representative statements published in writing. In speech, and indeed in deed, she is much more partisan. She is skilled in the art of avoiding to state the contentious parts of her intentions in one statement. It is a tired trick that lawyers use to give their opponents no other option than to paraphrase their position. It is psychologically much stronger to quote your opponent admitting they accept the contentious point, than to show they imply it. She has been a judge for a time, but it looks like she has learned lawyer tricks. In the public debate, she knows nobody will look up references, and she knows long quotes will be ignored.

Dettmeijer is an activist. Not a good activist, who is there to make people get more rights, but a bad activist, who stigmatises. She wants people who do nothing that hurts someone else to go to prison. She is very happy with laws in the Netherlands, that make it possible to put people in the prostitution industry in prison easier then people that work in other businesses.

The lifting of the ban on brothels was logical at the time that the image was that prostitution is an independent profession could be possible. That this is not always the case, the case Sneep showed where we saw that prostitution was part of a network of human trafficking and organized crime. The image of the emancipated Dutch prostitute no longer exists; women come from many different countries: Bulgaria, Romania, South America, Nigeria, Thailand, etc. - the countries of origin are numerous.

I don't exist, she thinks. The case Sneep is a court case where there was a report written by some people who make really ungrounded guesses of how much criminality there is in the prostitution. It is used a lot by Dutch politics because it is so dramatic, but it is very bad and not science at all. She should know that but she still uses it. It shows that she is completely not neutral.

Now she has also had a TED talk. I think that is something she doesn't deserve.



The whole story is only making an emotional drama. She doesn't help you understand anything. She doesn't give insight that is something you can only get from working in her job. What she says can be said by any anti-prostitution activist. She also goes into other forms of trafficking, but I am not going to talk about that. I have no voice to talk with there.

The misleading starts right at the beginning, when she makes it sound like a sweet teenager girl turns into an obstinate teenager because of being with a loverboy. It is so obviously the other way! She wants to force the girl back with her parents, but that doesn't work. The girl gets forced back into a situation she doesn't want, and for Dettmeijer the reason is that the boyfriend has some kind of grip on her. Think about that for a time. If you ever knew a difficult teenager, you know that she should not be so stupid if she was a child judge.

The story is supposed to make us feel ashamed. That is why with the kroepoek bakers, she mentions the police came because there was complaints about the smell, not about the people. How could the neighbours know there was something wrong being done to the people? Do you know all about what is going on in the house of your neighbour? She makes it sound like those neighbours didn't care about the people, only about the stinking.

Of course I most want to fight against what she says about prostitution. Olga the A-student, who comes from Bulgaria and makes almost two million Euro in eight years by being a forced prostitute. Like Dettmeijer says, can you imagine how many men this would take? I'm a successfull Dutch whore, I know exactly. This is more then twice the turnover I have made during the best time in the economy, every day for eight years. Two million is not realistic at all. If she was really forced, she would not make the normal money even. Forced girls are not happy girls, and the customers don't go there again.

Olga the A-student is not a stupid vulnerable girl with a mental handicap. In eight years, and thousands of men, she never attempted to get away from who forced her? She never told a customer things were wrong? Because that is not hard. People like Dettmeijer want to make it sound like it's hard. It is not in reality. There are no special things about pimps that give them more power. People would not accept the same story about people being emotionally so dependant on their employer if this wasn't about prostitution.

The reason that Olga is in this position, is that we look away. The reason is that we have a romantic view of prostitution. Independent women there are, but many are being forced. That is what Dettmeijer says. Realistically, there are many independent women, many who are forced by the rules of the government into the hands of people that take advantage of them, and a very small group of girls who are actually forced.

She says Olga is such a strong woman for telling that story. Why is that so? Olga is just telling people that she isn't responsible for anything, and that she's a victim who should be advanced two million Euros by the government before her pimp pays it back to them. It's never strong or brave to tell people what they want to hear when it is going to make them feel love for you. Above all when it's just cheap lying.

A romantic idea of prostitution is something I would love to see. The idea people have now is that it is dirty, sad, and sick. That is not true. The media constantly, only, give stories about prostitution is trafficking, prostitution is abuse, prostitution is violence, prostitution is slavery, prostitution is rape. Not romantic at all, and the only people opposing them don't get listened to by the main stream media.

Dettmeijer claims there are twelve hundred victims of trafficking identified in the Netherlands. That is not true. She uses the number of recorded claims of signals of trafficking that are kept by an activist organisation. This is the number of rumors about people. What it really is, is the number of gut feelings. Dettmeijer knows this very well, she works with that club.

She doesn't stop after only using that number. She says it's the "tip of the iceberg." She says it's easily ten times so much. There is no reason for this. She has no proof, and she has nothing to make me believe that. She doesn't try. It is just something she says. I wonder often why this lie is told.

A friend said: The activists like to expand the number of purported cases as much as they can. If the number of cases seems manageable, the public opinion might be swayed toward treating the cases separately, through the usual channels. To get support to change the rules of society, and declare a jihad against the perceived ills, it is necessary to convince the general public that this is a broad social problem, that is endemic in society, and beyond individual help.

The Rapporteur wants us to "lose our illusions about prostitution." She wants to replace them with her lies. I call it lies, because she is in a fine position to know that the things she says are bullshit. She is normally very quiet about that she is a activist, but now you hear about how she was involved with Journey.

Journey is a hysterical exposition about something that exists in the head of Helen Bamber. Here I don't use hysterical in the way it means "funny." They made up how the life of a forced prostitute would look, and made it extra unrealistic, with stinking beds and dirty noises. I've been to it and I didn't know if I should laugh or cry. That people believe it, made me really scared. How can you believe so stupid things!

Dettmeijer calls the prostitution business a world of violence and deception. She claims that the girl turned over up to forty men a day. She calls it selling her body. Bamber claims even, never less then forty men a day. That is simply impossible. You can't fit so many guys in your day. You can't do that with your body, it will not work.

Customers are mostly sweethearts, and if they think they can help you they will do it. If you just whisper one guy in his ear that he should call the police, he will do it, but anonymous. Customers don't want to come into working rooms where there is so much dirt and stinking. They care about you, not like their girlfriend or their child, but more then about other people in the street, I say it's like they care about their neighbour.

If you want to know the tone of Journey, that our "independent" Rapporteur worked along with, you can look at this movie. This is what Dettmeijer wants the people to believe that the prostitution is. They took the worst excesses, and they took the worst things about them together, and left away all the things that were good for those girls, and then made it into a show. That show they call realistic.

Do you still believe Dettmeijer is a sweet lady, who wants the best for us, who is looking for truth, and neutral? Go to Journey, and trust me, your romantic ideas will evaporate.

Two times she says we should look at prostitutes, and see victims for what they are, not whores, but real people. Do I have to quit before I can be a real person then? I wish she wasn't in charge of the information going to the government about us.

EDIT: There is an article about case-law in the Netherlands by her here. If you know how to read the legal stuff, it shows how focused she is on convicting even when it doesn't have a use.