…you get
the picture.
Second
disclosure—one thing nobody has ever been able to call me is a pedophile. There
are highbrow and lowbrow reasons for this; the high being that I’m in a
monogamous relationship, the low being that I’m not into kids.
A further
disclosure: I visited the famous red light district of Amsterdam thirty-odd
years ago, nor was it a visit that gave me any pleasure. Why? Well, I was in my
late teens, and very much in the dark night of wondering about my sexuality.
Nor did it help that I was with two couples—my parents, who had a ferocious
Midwestern sense of sexual decorum, and a Dutch couple, who were just a bit
rubbing their European sophistication in. So we strolled along, my parents
rigidly looking straight ahead, the Dutch couple casually looking into the
windows and commenting on the virtues or—perhaps more likely—vices of the women
displayed there. It was a walk of perhaps three blocks that lasted seemingly
hours.
For those
of you with insufficiently lurid imagination here’s a photo:
The
thinking at that time was that prostitution was an age-old vice; better to
legalize it and regulate it and—presumably—make a little money off it. And what
are we thinking now? Well, here’s a quote from Wikipedia’s article
on prostitution in the Netherlands:
The
Netherlands is listed by the UNODC
as a top destination for victims of human trafficking.[22] Countries that are major sources of
trafficked persons include Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria,
Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine,[22] Sierra Leone,
and Romania.
Or how
about this, from the same source?
When the
Dutch government legalized prostitution in 2000, it was to protect the women by
giving them work permits, but authorities now fear that this business is out of
control: "We've realized this is no longer about small-scale
entrepreneurs, but that big crime organizations are involved here in
trafficking women, drugs, killings and other criminal activities", said Job Cohen, the former
mayor of Amsterdam.[
Well, in a
city where things got a little out of hand, the most out of handedness may be
the case of Joris
Demmink, who was or maybe is (my Dutch being rusty) the Secretary General
of the Ministry of Justice. Oh, and who may have raped boys in Turkey in the
1990’s, as well as trafficked kids in Amsterdam.
Or maybe he
didn’t because, guess what? Despite having six witnesses come forward, despite
four police reports naming Demmink as a suspect, despite the statement of a
Turkish policeman who was supposed to protect Demmink but instead pimped for
him, despite a lawyer—Adele
van der Plas—who has dogged him for most of a decade—well here’s
what she said:
“There has
never been a credible investigation into his behavior.”
She said the
investigations simply are halted.
“The Dutch
Ministry of Justice doesn’t take any child abuse case seriously at all,” she
said. “All the pedophile rings in Europe have been investigated and some have
gone to jail. Not in the Netherlands. The Dutch have been cited by the U.N. as
a center of child trafficking.”
Nor was it
just van der Plas who thinks so: here’s what Representative Chris
Smith of New Jersey said
in a congressional hearing last year:
That
investigation has never happened – the investigations that have taken place
have been a travesty and have done nothing to clear Mr. Demmink’s name. Rather,
they have raised further questions,” he said.
So Demmink
is or isn’t a pedophile. What do we know about him?
He’s the
head of the Dutch judicial system….
