Origin matters, Kyra Hanemaaijer knows from her research and bookcase

We all know the stories of discriminatory treatment of black people in the US judicial system; the fate of George Floyd was broadcast all over the world. White and black people in America cannot necessarily count on equal treatment by the police or in the courtroom, studies show. But what do we actually know about the influence of origin in the Dutch legal system?

“Surprisingly little”, Kyra Hanemaaijer says. “There is a large quantity of detailed data on crimes, court decisions and offenders that are hardly looked at. It’s because within global science, the Netherlands is not given that much attention.” But it was given Hanemaaijer’s attention.

She studied Economics and Law, and at the beginning of this year obtained a doctorate on the economics of crime. During her studies, she was a research assistant at the law faculty and for a long time she thought she would do her doctoral research there, but in the end she chose economics, because of the quantitative research. “In law, we think about standards. From an economic perspective, I can look at the impact of those standards. I have more fun working with numbers, and the conclusions I can draw from my research make more impact than in qualitative research.”

During her doctoral studies, she worked with data from which she could quickly conclude that people in the Netherlands with a migration background are given more and longer prison sentences than people without a migration background. “It is tempting to attribute that to discrimination, but there could be lots of causes for it”, Hanemaaijer says. The adage correlation is not causation applies here. Economics, however, has methods for examining causation.

On 18 September 2019, lawyer Derk Wiersum was murdered. He represented Nabil B., the key witness within the Marengo trial in which Ridouan Taghi, among others, is a suspect. The suspects in the Marengo trial are linked to the Moroccan mafia and in the weeks after Derk Wiersum was murdered, the Moroccan mafia was often featured in the news – with the mostly Moroccan origin of the members of this criminal organisation receiving attention.

And what did Hanemaaijer’s research reveal? Up until four weeks after Derk Wiersum’s murder, people with a Moroccan migration background were given higher sentences than people without such a background who had committed similar offences. This allows her to conclude “that Dutch judges are prone to unequal treatment after such an impactful incident”.

“How people treat you does not necessarily have anything to do with how you should be treated”, Hanemaaijer says. She also read that in Brit Bennett’s book The vanishing half. In it, black twin sisters are born in a village in the United States where black people have a very light skin colour. Both sisters run away. One sister, however, is silent about her origin and from then on goes through life as white, while the other is seen as black. Although the twins are identical, their lives unfold in almost opposite directions. They live in different neighbourhoods, have different career opportunities, marry different partners, and their children attend different schools.

Hanemaaijer read the book while travelling through Colombia after submitting her dissertation. “With my research, I try to make it clear that it’s so arbitrary that you’re treated differently purely because your case comes before the court at a different time, or because of your skin colour or origin.”

After obtaining her doctorate last January, Hanemaaijer left for Sweden for a postdoctoral position at the University of Gothenburg. There she focuses on the willingness of people in the UK to reveal their ethnicity to the police (in the UK, people are not required to identify themselves when stopped on the street, ed.). And that willingness seems to be waning. More on the causes of this will perhaps come at a later date.

In the coming period, Hanemaaijer will mainly be reading in addition to working. Talking to friends, she found out that she thinks reading is perhaps the most important thing in life. Although living in a city without all those friends and family also makes it clear to her how attached she is to them.