Three suspects have appeared in court for the sexual exploitation of young vulnerable women in Alkmaar and Purmerend. They are a couple from Utrecht and a woman from Purmerend. The man was sentenced to four years in prison for human trafficking in April 2023. His 33-year-old wife is on trial today. The Public Prosecution Service is seeking 34 months of imprisonment for her. The third suspect, a 28-year-old woman from Purmerend, was tried earlier this week. The Public Prosecution Service has demanded a 30-month prison sentence for her, half of which is conditional.
Investigation Started
The case began in early 2021 after a report of sexual exploitation by one of the victims. Based on this, the police are investigating a man from Utrecht, who is said to have made broken girls his victims. He was sentenced to four years in prison for human trafficking in April 2023. During the criminal investigation, the role of his wife was also examined. When another report of sexual exploitation was made in November 2023, now against the woman from Purmerend, the investigation also focused on her. Both women were arrested on suspicion of human trafficking.
Division of Roles
The woman from Purmerend was once a victim of forced prostitution by the man from Utrecht before she began recruiting and exploiting other women. This phenomenon is not unusual: victims may wish to rise in status with their exploiter, seek out scapegoats, or act out of trauma. However, according to the Public Prosecution Service, this investigation has shown that this suspect was also able to exploit independently of her exploiter.
The wife of the Utrecht man was not a victim of her husband. In fact, according to the Public Prosecution Service, she encouraged her husband to increase the coercion on one of the victims and to make her work for two years. A target of €2,000 per day was regularly set. Chat messages between the spouses show that they earned a lot of money from the prostitution activities. Money they wanted to use for the renovation of their home.
Method of Operation
Based on the investigation data, it appears that the female suspect from Purmerend acted slyly: first, she befriended vulnerable young women, paid for fun outings or nice things, and offered them shelter. But soon she began to demand this money back. She made sexually suggestive footage of the victims and threatened to post these images online if they did not do what the suspect wanted. If the victims were to leave, they would also lose their roof over their heads. The victims are forced to perform sexual acts with multiple prostitution clients. Both women managed the sex advertisements, payments, and client mediation. The woman from Utrecht also helped her husband make one victim more attractive by editing photos, which were then posted on websites.
Disgusting
One of the victims stated that she worked for the couple for two years, earning between €1,500 and €2,000 per day. “I had one day off a week, so do the math. In total, thats €720,000. Thats almost a million. Its disgusting. I worked the most of all the girls.” Chat messages between the Utrecht couple show that they maximized the workload on this victim. For example, the woman texted that the victim just needed to keep working even if she was menstruating: “just keep planning and ignore it, give her no space.”
Vulnerable
There is no question of voluntary work in prostitution. The victims are vulnerable young women who from the start thought they had no other way and choice to keep their heads above water. The suspect deliberately chose them. The prosecutor stated: “The fact that the victims have a quick tongue or assertive communication style says nothing about whether they can assert what they do and do not want in front of their exploiter. These women may come across as streetwise, for example, in client contact, but that mainly indicates that they wanted to earn money to meet imposed targets. But for whom and why they had to do that, under what conditions, and what coercion preceded it, is not made clear. On the contrary: a loud mouth can very well conceal a big secret. In my opinion, it is more an expression of their survival strategy.”
Sentencing Demands
The Public Prosecution Service finds the complicity in human trafficking proven. The prosecutor stated: “Such human trafficking cases are characterized by the great dependency of a victim, the gross violations of physical and mental integrity, and the fact that the perpetrators consider the desire for financial gain more important than the fact that the victims life unfolds more and more into a horror scenario.” The time elapsed plays a mitigating role for both defendants.
Against the woman from Utrecht, the Public Prosecution Service demanded 34 months of imprisonment. The prosecutor: “I have no other words than that it is clear that the defendants saw the victim as a cash cow and exploited her for the renovation of their home.” The prosecutor also requested the approval of the claimed compensation by the victim for an amount of €482,000. “A huge amount, but given the evidence, there is no doubt about it. It is even a conservative estimate of €1,000 per day, text messages show that they often earned more. The long duration and intensity also justify the high immaterial compensation.”
With this demand, the prosecutor wants to show that reporting such facts pays off: “With this, the Public Prosecution Service wants to express that we as a society stand behind victims of exploitation and that reporting makes sense. A low sentence is fatal for the willingness to report and can leave such facts as these as great invisible suffering.”
In the case against the woman from Purmerend, the Public Prosecution Service considers her partly a victim of a situation in which she, partly under pressure from the now convicted man from Utrecht, came to sexual exploitation. “But when the man who exploited her was arrested and imprisoned, the suspect continued to exploit,” said the prosecutor. The Public Prosecution Service demanded 30 months of imprisonment for her, half of which is conditional with a probation period of two years. The prosecutor has attached several conditions to that probation period, including that the suspect undergo treatment for her traumas, which she has also suffered.