In the early hours of 20 August, a 17-year-old girl set off on her bicycle, making the journey from central Amsterdam to the nearby village of Abcoude after a carefree evening out. What followed was any parent’s worst nightmare. In distress, the girl dialled emergency services, reporting that she was being chased and assaulted by an unknown man. Police rushed to the scene. The girl, known only to the public as Lisa, was found brutally murdered on a notorious stretch of unlit road near the Amsterdam Arena football stadium.
The authorities strive to manage the danger as best they can – and continue to avoid naming, let alone addressing, its root causes
Within 24 hours, police detained a 22-year-old illegal immigrant at a nearby asylum shelter, a suspect in several sexual assaults in the same area earlier that month. A day later, he was also charged with Lisa’s murder. The man, thought to be Nigerian, had entered the Netherlands just two months earlier without identification.
Initially, Dutch media reported the facts in full, including the suspect’s immigration status. But only days later, the nature of the public conversation changed. Politicians and commentators began to redirect the narrative away from discussing asylum policy towards a broader – and perhaps more ideologically convenient – concern: men. Not this man, not men from particular regions with disturbingly high levels of gender-based violence, but men in general.
Feminist groups seized the moment. ‘We reclaim the night’ banners sprang up across Dutch cities. Protests, marches and night-time bicycle tours were organised to spotlight unsafe public spaces for women. A recently launched national campaign against femicide was reinvigorated. Sadly, all for good reason. Forty-four women were murdered in the Netherlands last year — roughly half by partners or former partners. While the country still enjoys one of Europe’s lowest homicide rates, anxiety among women is rising. One survey found that 68 per cent of Dutch women feel unsafe walking alone at night. Another initiative mapped no less than 13,000 public spaces throughout the country that women identified as threatening.
Yet, the one fact that refused to fit into this narrative – the elephant in the room, as some conservative commentators put it – was largely ignored. And that is this: not all men are equally represented among perpetrators of street harassment and sex crime. Dutch government statistics show that of the roughly 3,000 men suspected of sexual offences in 2022, about one-third were of non-Western migrant origin. In relative terms, they are on average four times more likely to commit a sex crime than native Dutch men.
These are not comfortable figures. Nor are they allowed to be discussed in polite society. Even mentioning them risks accusations of racism or xenophobia – the left’s favourite moral anaesthetic for avoiding real debate. So, instead, the narrative was broadened, generalised, and decontextualised. Feminists blamed the patriarchy, the left worked to avoid discussing immigration, and the state was put to work fixing street lights.
Positive and practical changes have followed in Lisa’s wake. Several Dutch municipalities have made funding available to improve safety in dimly lit areas – Amsterdam alone has pledged six million euros. A new app allows women to communicate discreetly with the police, while sharing their exact location. Another tool maps high-risk areas, based on reports by women.
All good and useful, no doubt. But is this a tacit admission that the Dutch state is no longer interested in prevention? It must be. The authorities strive to manage the danger as best they can – and continue to avoid naming, let alone addressing, its root causes. What would help, for instance, is preventing illegal, undocumented and unvetted recent arrivals from freely roaming the streets and committing crimes.
Remarkably, Lisa’s murder has not led to anti-immigration protests or riots. No one stormed the asylum shelter. But the electorate is neither deaf nor forgetful. A snap general election is scheduled for 29 October. Many Dutch voters – not only supporters of the ever immigration critical Geert Wilders – believe that the consequences of mass immigration have been ignored for too long. Wilders himself has repeatedly warned of the risks of accepting migrants without proper vetting. So did he benefit from this tragedy politically? Hardly – he received a modest 1 to 2 per cent bump in the polls, possibly within the margin of error of pollsters. But Wilders has a history of outperforming the polls on election day. Smouldering anger may yet boil over in the ballot box.
Mind you, this is not about Wilders. The deeper issue is the persistent refusal among many mainstream politicians to address what has become an open secret: that a significant share of public anxiety about immigration is not rooted in xenophobia, but in real and measurable problems.
Lisa’s story has meanwhile quietly disappeared from the front pages, absorbed into a national atmosphere of practical fatalism. More apps, maps and lampposts. A specialised police unit. Another awareness campaign. That, it seems, is all we’re going to get. The political class, meanwhile, will continue to insist that everything is fine.
Dutch women – like their counterparts across Western-Europe – will be told to stick to well-lit routes, keep their phones charged, and travel in groups. Indeed, if you are a girl or a woman, all you need to do is learn to live with a problem no one will name.
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