Dutch Justice

Full disclosure—in the sixties I would have been called a practicing homosexual. I since progressed through the decades from being gay activist to a radical queer to a militant gay radical to….

…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….

Men's Issues

OK, Iguana readers—time to get to work! Get out there and harvest those thistles!

“Marc,” I can hear you saying, “Mondays are hard enough! Please—just cut to the chase and tell us what today’s nonsense is….”

Right—I came upon it by Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times, who writes frequently about human and sexual trafficking. So today, he was writing about Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest who over ten years ago started Magdalene, a program to help women get off the streets, get clean, get a job, and get on their feet. Here, taken from the program’s website, are highlights of the program:

▪                For two years, we offer housing, food, medical and dental needs, therapy, education and job training without charging the residents or receiving government funding.

▪                Our six homes function without 24-hour live-in staff, relying on residents to create a supportive community, maintain recovery, and share household tasks.

▪                Women come to Magdalene from prison, the streets and from across the Southeast and the country.

▪                The women of Magdalene/Thistle Farms range in age from 20-50, and many have been sexually abused between the ages of 7-11, began using alcohol or drugs by 13, have been arrested on average a hundred times, or have spent about 12 years on the street prostituting.

▪                72% percent of the women who join Magdalene are clean and sober 2 1/2 years after beginning the program.

 “OK,” you’re saying, “what’s this about thistles?”

Well, how many employers are going to give a job to a person with a hundred arrests? So Stevens hit on the idea of making a little business—it would give the women something to do, teach them skills, and give them a sense of purpose. And she chose the thistle because it grows everywhere—very often it was the only flower in the sites where the women plied their trade.

Which may be a misnomer, suggesting as it does that these women have any control in what they do, or that they do it willingly. The reality is that we have slaves on the streets of America. Consider, as Kristof wrote, the woman in the Magdalene program who came in with 14 tattoos with which her pimp had branded her.

And how did she get onto the streets? Very often, by being abused as a child. And then it’s the familiar story. Suffering, she leaves home, and meets a charming guy, who’s got money. Best of all, he loves her; he treats her like a queen. And then something happens, he becomes enraged, and then he puts her out on the street. Here’s what Kristof says about one woman:

When her pimp was shot dead, she was recruited by another, Kenny, who ran a “stable” of four women and assigned each of them a daily quota of $1,000. Anyone who didn’t earn that risked a beating.

This, of course, assumes that the pimp is operating in the traditional fashion. Increasingly, pimps are going electronic, and using websites to offer women for sale. I’m sitting in a café as I write this, but I have to just go online to view the most common of these sites—basically a “Craiglist” that has everything including humans for sale. I typed in “Madison, Wisconsin” and discovered that there are 25 entries for today alone. Oh, and it’s not even 1PM there.

Still wondering about those thistles? Well, you can support Becca Stevens and her work in a variety of ways. You can grow lavender in your garden (Becca doesn’t say it, but presumably she wants you to send it to her….). You can buy products like body oils, soaps, and candles. You can collect old white clothing for making paper; and yes, you can harvest thistles. Oh, and you can also, of course, just send money.

I can’t help thinking that if you’re a man—there are some other, very simple but very necessary things that you can do. You can stay off the streets, and refuse to hire these women. You can speak out and against those who do. You can stop making jokes about prostitutes, as well as stopping people who do.

I saw a YouTube clip of a trainer who does sensitivity awareness at institutions that have had situations of abuse. He made several—one of which is that as important as it is to empower women (or rather for them to empower themselves), we have to stop defining issues such as prostitution and domestic violence as “women’s issues.” Why? Because guys automatically tune out when they hear the term. And secondly, all of these women have brothers, fathers, uncles. In short, us—men.

So maybe it’s time for men to act. Look, everybody has a smart phone—there are cameras in everyone’s pocket or purse. Why not photograph those men who are out there soliciting sex, and put them on a website—perhaps called predators.com. That way, every mother, sister or wife could check it out every morning over coffee.

Oh, and for any pimp caught?

Time to bring back public stonings?

A staircase to…?

Let me write a sentence that will stir no excitement in you.

I woke up this morning and walked to the beach.

Let me write a sentence that would cause elation for a score of women two blocks away, were they able to write the sentence.

I woke up this morning and went to the beach.

Sometime in the 1990’s a coworker and I were walking past a Chinese Restaurant where—now that I think about it—I’ve never seen anybody eat.

Clue number one?

“It a whorehouse upstairs,” said my coworker. “Oriental girls. Service the guys who work the cruise ships.”

Two.

I tucked the fact away, mildly repulsed. In those days, I had maybe 500 bucks to my name, a few cellos, some rugs and art. Nothing else—I was busy getting by.

(Hmm—defensive, Marc?)

I took a cruise, and did notice that the guys in the engine room were all Oriental, and wearing grey jumpsuits. And I see them from time to time in the grocery store, buying 40 or 50 packages of—what else?—Ramen noodle soup.

Then I started to work at Wal-Mart, which meant that I passed the building every morning at 5AM. And yes, the doors to the staircase leading to the upper floors were open. Music, on occasion, would be blaring out.

Clue number three?

Odd time for a legitimate business to be open, I’d think, and then remember.

Then Franny broke a hip. I went to hang with her in the nursing home. And met, on one of those occasions, a woman whose son had written a book.

An excellent book, in fact, on an abominable crime.

Slavery.

“Scholars estimate the total number of modern-day slaves is greater than at any point in history.”

That’s what E. Benjamin Skinner wrote.

Well, you read a fact like that and you’re pretty much compelled to find out more. So I bought two copies of the book. Read them several times. Went to look for a copy just now, and realized that I had likely thrown them out. No, not on literary or factual grounds, but because they had been consumed by others, smaller though more numerous.

Termites.

But as I remember, there are many faces and forms that slavery takes. Yes, sexual slavery is one of them. And gets most of the spotlight. But actually, wage slavery is more common. 

Remember the company store? You worked at the factory, lived in tenements the factory put up, paid rent to the factory, and had to buy in the company store. A variant of the scheme still goes on.

Circle back. A rumored whorehouse, curtains drifting from the windows of the upper floor windows, and a wide, inviting 5AM staircase, leading to…?

Oh, and by the way, I’ve never seen any Oriental women in Viejo San Juan. Tourists, yes. The jumpsuit guys, yes. Where are the ladies, the “sex workers,” if they exist, getting their Ramen noodle soup?

The Internet?

So it was more than likely, I thought, piecing this picture together, that, in fact, there is a whorehouse, there are sex workers / slaves, and guys in jumpsuits are using or abusing them.

Well, I say this with no pride. Did I do what Skinner did—here’s another part of his story:

He had first flown in under enemy radar with an Evangelical group purporting to buy slaves en masse to secure their freedom. Afterwards, on his own, he hitched a ride on a U.N. Cessna to the frontlines of the north-south Sudanese civil war. There he met Muong Nyong. Like Skinner, Nyong was 27 at the time, and pondering what to do with the rest of his life. Unlike Skinner, he had spent the first part of that life in bondage.

In this, he was following family tradition—his great-great-grandfather was a Quaker as well as a fiery abolitionist.

Well, Skinner is a better guy than I am.

For those interested in excuses, I was busy, the last few years, helping my mother die, waiting for Wal-Mart to “realign” me, losing my mind, and writing a book.

Not sure that’s good enough.

Moral proximity. If there’s a slave in your neighborhood, you gotta do something. And in my neighborhood?

Another thought. Virtually every woman student of mine would tell me they planned to visit Chinatown, should they be visiting or traveling to New York.

No, not for the food.

For the handbags.

And where were those bags produced? And by whom? And under what conditions?

Ladies, you may be just a guilty as the Ramen soup guys.

Or as guilty as I. Though doesn’t it seem curious that a gay guy, an English teacher, would know something like where the Oriental guys get “serviced?”

So maybe some others are a little more guilty than I? Like the boys in blue (actually, black) with the guns in their holsters and the handcuffs and bullet-proof vests?

Aren’t open doorways and blaring music and 5AM all facts to stir curiosity in police minds? 

Here’s my last thought.

A flash mob.

Everybody has an intelligent phone, everyone is on Facebook and Twitter. I won’t do it alone, but I’ll sure join a couple hundred women in the plaza and march down the sidewalk, course up the stairs, and fling doors open.

…even bring the chain cutter.

Ben—whaddya think?