NETHERLANDS
Law Case Study
Building on the UNODC analysis of court cases, this report looks at case law in two countries – the Netherlands and India – in more detail. These case studies illustrate the apparent prevalence of institution-related trafficking and the overrepresentation of institutionalised children as victims of trafficking.
OVERVIEW
In 2020, Defence for Children – ECPAT researched Dutch case law on sexual exploitation.235 It analysed all the publicly available outcomes of child sexual exploitation cases brought to court during the period 2015-2019.236 A secondary analysis of all 143 outcomes was carried out by Lumos to systematically examine the role institutional care plays in
sexual exploitation cases. Although the data does not represent the true proportion of institution-related trafficking as part of overall child trafficking cases, as not all cases are brought to court, they do provide a lower-bound, proxy indicator of the scale of institution-related trafficking.
CONTEXT
Social care for children in the Netherlands is largely deinstitutionalised, with only 10% of children in the care system living apart from their own families (including foster care).237 Residential services tend to be provided in larger groups of eight or nine children; individualised care services in smaller residential settings are less common.238 2,094 children lived in ‘closed institutions’ with more restrictive measures239 in 2019.240
In recent years, there has been an increased focus on the widespread phenomenon of teenage girls going missing from institutions and being sexually exploited by so-called ‘loverboys’ or ‘teenage pimps’. A similar pattern of institution-related trafficking has been identified in other western European countries and researched in Belgium.241,242
KEY FINDINGS
The main results are depicted in the tables on the following page.
In more than a quarter of cases of sexual exploitation, the victim (and sometimes the offender) had a history of institutionalisation.
This demonstrates the vulnerability of children in residential institutions, particularly those in closed settings. The percentages depicted in the tables only include victims whose history of institutionalisation was explicitly mentioned in the court judgement and are therefore a conservative estimate. Given the fact that only a tiny proportion
of children in the Netherlands live in institutions and that many, if not most, cases of trafficking are not even identified, let alone prosecuted or convicted, this is concerning. The case law data also sheds light on the incidence of the various cycles of institution- related trafficking in the Netherlands.
