‘Voodoo’ on the Doorstep: Young Nigerian Prostitutes and Magic Policing in the Netherlands

This article deals with the moral panic that emerged in the Netherlands when it became publicly known that under-age Nigerian girls were being smuggled into the country to be put to ‘work’ in the sex industry. A massive police investigation not only found hundreds of cases but also uncovered the fact that certain unknown and occult rituals played a part in how traffickers, ‘madams’ and other sex bosses appeared to keep the girls locked in this exploitative system. Soon an unspecified notion of ‘voodoo’ came to dominate the entire police operation, the public image of what was happening to these girls, and the way in which the girls were treated within the Dutch judicial system and its care. The article deconstructs the moral panic and all the images of Africa and the occult which became so crucial to the way the Dutch state tried to deal with the situation. It sets this analysis in the context of an anthropology of globalisation and a cultural exploration of how issues of morality and identity are affected by what the Comaroffs have called the occult economies of late capitalist relations. It concludes that to a great extent the scale of the moral panic can be understood by pointing at the rigidity of the identity politics of the Dutch nation state in previous years. Its policies were meant to curb some of the effects of globalisation (such as illegal immigration from Africa) in order to preserve its integrity, but it now found them seriously undermined by something the policies were not designed to cope with.